My Early Retirement From Social Media

I uninstalled my social media apps while lying in bed under my duvet in an effort to block out the light. I still don't know if it was a migraine brought on by my hormones or by stress, but they're frequent bedfellows anyways, so it could have easily been both. Either way, in that moment I knew the truth: I was done.

This is the beginning of my early retirement from social media.

We don't talk enough about how hard it is to do the job of "social media." People scoff at it being called a job at all, despite it being labor that I do get paid to do.

It's hard because of the way people perceive and treat you. People who know you in real life have difficulty separating the you they get to see in person from the you that strangers see. And vice versa. Strangers online have difficulty accepting that you are indeed a real person, with real problems, or real boundaries. The lines get blurry fast.

In 2012 I watched Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, do something groundbreaking and new: she went from being a blogger online to a published, best-selling author. She burst through the gates of "real world" success on her terms and in a way we hadn't seen before. Today it's very normal for an internet personality to achieve success offline, but back then it was a big deal. And I had a lightbulb moment.

I always wanted to be a writer. I was on my high school's newspaper staff. I'd been blogging since the early 2000's on MySpace and LiveJournal.

Then I taught myself how to make film and edit photos and videos. Then there were the blogs. And then Instagram. And then TikTok. And finally, virality. As of writing I have 350,000 combined followers across four platforms.

And I'm just...done.

Being internet famous was never the goal. And I'm still not internet famous. But, I've experienced just enough of it to know how exhausting and demanding it is. How people treat you both online and in real life.

I've experienced the "switch up" that happens when someone finds out I'm not just a mom at their local games store; I'm also a professional internet person. They either adore me instantly (and then they're disappointed later when it turns out I'm just a normal, messy person), or they resent me immediately because they have this idea of what an internet person is and it's always the most toxic, negative, narcissistic person they can imagine. (Those people rarely change their minds about me because, well, confirmation bias exists.)

Either way, I'm rarely perceived and accepted as the fullness of who I am. There's always this glossy veneer impeding the realities of me, no matter how honest I try to be about my humanity and foibles. And more often than not people want to believe the worst.

Thanks to the rise of social media, billions of people are exposed to semi-celebrities online who feel more accessible than movie stars or rock stars. This creates a strange bond that feels real, but rarely is. The name for this is "parasocial relationship." And it can be downright terrifying.

The reality is this: it is impossible to really know who someone is, no matter how much they post online. And our human brains are struggling to find the middle ground between what is perceived and what is real.

I've been burned by this many times over these last 5 years. I've lost friendships because they felt the person I was in real life isn't the person I was online. It was hard for them to separate my job from me because I have to make myself palatable for potentially hundreds of thousands of people.

I cannot ever be my complete self online. No one can. And those of us who've tried, burn out very quickly. Because while celebrities have public relations people who make them palatable, and tell them what to say and how to say it, most of us who make content online for a living don't have a team of experts helping us human in front of the public at large. We can't afford to. So, we're doing it all ourselves.

And it is simply exhausting.

It is exhausting having to explain to people how this is a job. It's exhausting trying to create boundaries. It's exhausting sitting through aspiring influencers, who pretended to be friends, pitching me their socials and their channels, asking for shout outs and collabs, while I'm trapped in a booth at a coffee shop, frozen in place and deeply uncomfortable. (This has happened.)

It's exhausting listening to people list off all the things they hate about people like me while I sit there pretending it doesn't bother me to hear it. "They're just SO fake." "They only do it for the money." "You can't trust they're who they say they are."

I once had a woman Google me in my presense, while sitting on her couch having what I thought was a normal mom hangout, to fact check a story I told online about my childhood. She literally pulled out her phone and Googled me and Googled the information I was sharing. IN FRONT OF ME.

Do I blame her for not just believing everything she hears online? Not at all. We should all be a little skeptical. But she did it in front of me. While she told me she was doing it.

Please, for just a moment, imagine someone you like invites you over for coffee, and then in the middle of a conversation on traumatizing childhood experiences they take out their phone and fact-check a deeply vulnerable part of your story, without hesitating. And then read off what they found, and smugly declare to you that you are in fact not a liar, as if you should be grateful for their approval?

How would you react?

I reacted by smiling and nodding, then when our coffee hang was over adding her to my mental list of people I never want to hang out with again. That encounter was so uncomfortable and upsetting. I cannot imagine thinking it's okay to act that way in front of someone.

And I am just so F*CKIN' DONE, y'all.

I remember when Jenna Marbles retired. I really admired her for that. I've always respected people who know when to quit. People who walk away when the chips are up because they know it probably won't get better than this, but it could get a WHOLE lot worse. I respect that. And I endeavor to be that.

Which is why I'm retiring early from being a content creator.

I've spent the last 15 years of my life building something I could be proud of, and I think I have. I've told my story and been listened to. I've made friends and connections. I've done things I could have only dreamt about 15 years ago.

But, the dream is over. Or, rather, it's changing.

You know how in dreams you bounce from location to location, scene to scene, point of view or theme to another point of view or theme? And you don't even second-guess it while you're dreaming it because you're in it? And when you're in it, it doesn't seem strange at all to experience change?

My dream is changing scenery. I did what I came to the internet to do. And now my dream is taking me in a new direction. I can't possibly tell you what exactly is IN that direction, but I do know it is my True North. And I have always followed that. Even if it took me a few tries to point my feet the right way, I eventually get there.

Right now my feet are pointed towards a season of volunteerism. It's something I've been mulling over for at least a year. An off-handed comment a friend made sparked an idea in me. An idea that smoldered for a year before finally exploding into a roaring flame a few weeks ago.

The time is now. I'm ready for what's next.

So, this is my early, and maybe only partial, retirement from social media. I won't disappear forever, but I won't be giving it all my focus or attention or energy anymore. And it won't be my job anymore.

It'll just be part of my story. A good part. A really good, important part.

But, just a part. And I have so much peace with that.