When I re-started this blog, I had a lot of hopes. I hoped it would help me leave social media forever, that it would inspire me to go to the land more so I would have something to write about, that it would help me re-find my creative writing voice. Now I’m more than half a year into the experiment.
How has it gone since February?
Leave social media forever
January 2025 I hit a wall. Instagram, while it was a place where I could keep up to date on my friends’ lives, was also a place where I could get lost in the pain of the world. It was broken down into bite sized pieces. Clips, videos, hot takes, calls to action: all short, all intense. I would find myself lost in the scroll, feeling my energy dropping and despair rising. Me spiraling into a pit of sadness wasn’t going to help anyone. It wasn’t going to help my community protect themselves. Or feed themselves.
But Instagram was where I got most of my news (unfortunately). It was where I learned about protests and campaigns to call my representatives. How would I stay plugged into my community if I wasn’t on the platform where people shouted things from the rooftops?
I solved this by going through the organizations and creators I followed and subscribing to their newsletters. I downloaded an app (Meco is the one I chose, I would give it 3/5 stars overall, but it does the thing it’s designed to do) that pulled the newsletters from my email inbox straight into the app. That way they didn’t clutter my inbox AND I had a way where I could still “scroll.”
Important note: the scrolling was no longer through short content. It was reading articles. Clicking through for deeper dives. I was becoming better informed by leaving social media.
Another thing I noticed since fully deleting all of my Meta accounts: I have so much space in my brain for other activities. I wasn’t even a heavy user of Instagram. I would look at it a bit every day, but I didn’t post a lot. I didn’t spend hours scrolling. It was just a habit. The emotional toll my body took every time I opened it? That was immense. Since leaving social media, I’ve read more books. Written more. Worked more in our garden. Gone to the land more. Gone out more. In short: my brain can now get bored because it’s not automatically tapping the app icon and mindlessly scrolling. It’s allowed me to stare out at the clouds and just rest.
I also feel more connected to my close friends. When I spend time with them, I’m taking fewer photos and staying more present in conversations. It also means that WHEN I take a photo, it’s for a specific person. It feels more intimate.
Getting to the land more
A+ on this one. Not only do I want to go down to Now At A so I have something to write about, I want to go down because I’ve fallen in love with it all over again.
Writing about the projects gets me amped to go DO the projects and keeps me dreaming about future projects (not that I need more projects on my list). There’s also a subtle shift in what I notice while I’m down there.
I’m no longer looking for a beautiful shot to take and post to show how nature-y am I. Yes, I admit, that a small percentage of my motivation for taking photos at the land when I was still on social media was so people would think I was super cool about nature. I mean, let’s be honest. That’s the purpose of posting on social media. You want people to think a certain way about you, so you start taking photos and seeing the world through the lens of other people’s perceptions. Inevitably, a part of you gets lost along the way.
Now when I’m hacking a trail through the woods or gazing at a flower, I’m not thinking about what others will think. I’m thinking, “Wow this is beautiful.” Or “Wow, my body is going to be so sore tomorrow after all this machete work.” How I perceive the land is shifted ever so slightly, which makes me want to go down there more. I get the full emotional reset the woods can give you, instead of the half-reset I used to get.
Finding my creative writing voice
This has been the hardest goal. My work is writing. As a strategic copywriter and messaging expert, my job is writing 13,000 words and editing it down to 600. It’s about clear, short, and concise. No prose. Ever.
When I work on my novel, I really struggle. Why describe how a dew drop fell off a flower petal when I could just say, “It was a misty morning”? Why indeed.
Now, this blog post is specifically about how leaving social media has helped me in various ways, so I’ll try to stay true to that topic. I have to admit, I’m hyper aware that it makes it seem like I was horribly addicted to it, and I keep fighting the urge to assure you all that I was not. Which is true. And also, irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how much I used social media in the past. The fact remains that leaving it has opened up way more space than I anticipated, therefore it impacted me more than I care to admit.
Back to writing.
If you post on social media, you agonize over what 1 to 2 sentences to say that sounds cool, thoughtful, and interesting. It’s short. Focused. Much like copywriting. That meant all the writing I was doing was short-form and highly edited.
Previously, I would sit down and try to work on my novel and flame out within ten minutes. It took so much effort to let go of the editing pen. I kept hitting the delete button, instinctively trying to find a more concise way to say something.
Getting off the apps means that there is now only one, not two, places where I have to write in concise short-form: work. When I sit down to my beloved Freewrite Traveler (I should really get an affiliate link for this device, I could wax poetic about it all day), I can switch into prose mode.
It took me about 6 months to start feeling confident in my writing again. Funnily enough, it was while at the land over Fourth of July weekend that I felt like I finally found my voice again. It was the first quiet morning of the camping trip and we were all reading. I decided I wanted to flex my creative muscles, so I pulled out the Freewrite. I asked my friends A and C for a prompt.
“Golden raspberries in the golden hour.”
Now I’m working on a second novel and it’s flowing out of my fingertips. I feel freed.
Conclusion?
I have absolutely zero regrets completely deleting all of my social media accounts and restarting this blog (I still have LinkedIn because I have to be on that dumb platform for work).
It’s not that I’m on my phone less. I’m still on it to read my newsletters and play (a lot of) solitaire. But those activities don’t sap my emotional well dry.
It felt good to sit down to a little retrospective on my experiment and to really notice how well it went.
Maybe this will inspire someone else to take the plunge with me.
Now At A Farm 