So I've deleted my Instagram account...now what?

Do you believe in life after likes?

I created my Instagram account in December 2010…

* Looks into the horizon with a “Here comes a flashback” pose...*

I remember it perfectly: I was 20, at my grandparent’s for Christmas. With the fruits of my hard work (lol) as a retail sales assistant that summer, I had just bought my first ever smartphone by accident (all I wanted was to finally afford an iPod but the lady at the counter talked me into this new thing called iPhone 3G…). Boredom got the best of me during that Christmas family gathering, and I decided to look at the App Store and download some of the apps ranking first on the trend list. Instagram was one of them. I was reluctant: I had been fashion-blogging on Blogspot for the last two years - GUYS, REMEMBER THE DAYS?? - and that new Instagram app was a short-form menace getting closer and closer... There was this sort of Video killed the radio star feeling in the air for all of us OG Bloggers, but still, I was curious and excited. Or maybe just tipsy. Who knows. 🦐

That night after getting in bed, unable to sleep due to a food coma that can only be attributed to Spanish Christmas and the Molotov cocktail that is my lack of boundaries with delicious food, I indulged in my first ever doom scroll in bed. I recall going to sleep hours later with an ominous feeling: overwhelmed, insecure about my career✨ iN tHe BlOgOsPhErE ✨, overstimulated with new possibilities but also paralysed by choice.

This was my first ever photo on Instagram!

14 years and 12.6K followers later, that feeling never really left me. Lately, the constant scrolling, comparison, and validation-seeking on Instagram has taken a toll on my mental health. I have found myself spending hours mindlessly scrolling through feeds I wasn’t even following, unable to resist the siren call of the Explore page and questioning my worth, my creativity, and even my physical appearance (!!!) based on likes, comments, and engagement.

I also found myself uploading a photo and checking the likes every five minutes.

Posting a story and deleting it after an hour, feeling I was too vulnerable in front of too many people.

Wondering what trends I should participate in to have a better online presence.

Terrified of having too much online presence. Or not enough?

Feeling guilty because things like making reels, taking outfit photos, documenting my trips…don’t come naturally to me.

Feels like I never worked out how to have a healthy relationship with Instagram, and no break or time limit have ever 100% worked. I would travel or do some cool activity and have the Everything is content mentality, while at the same time feeling bad for forgetting to take photos or hating the way I looked in them. “Make me look thin!” I would say sometimes to the person holding my phone, half joking half dead serious. Cynthia, you are not thin. You are many things - a sexy Mediterranean lady and an expert farter just to mention a few, but you are NOT thin atm (and there’s nothing wrong with that!). The problem is that to me, the right bodies, jobs, clothes, gal squad, and even flat decor to have were the ones I had been seeing since I was 20 on the screen of my phone while waiting for the bus, during my lunch break, or taking a shit. Anything out of it, it would be better for me to improve it, curate it, until I would be able to fit myself on one of those tiny squares and sit there waiting for everyone else’s adoration…and jealousy.

Hours and hours of my time were wasted scrolling. Feelings of not being enough would be triggered just by seeing a post about a writing or a comedy competition, or just a job offer, paralysing me to the point of not even applying. Why would I bother trying when I was bombarded every day with the reminder that there are more talented, ready and popular people than me out there? As many of us do during the course of a day, I saw lots of posts and reels and stories, but I wasn’t really retaining or actioning on anything: everything would go to my IG’s Saved folder, where you never check it again.

The pressure of having to brand myself was also starting to get me.

I write, I do stand-up, and I love cinema and acting. (Am I…a writer/comedian?)

I do crafts like earrings and sometimes I toy with the idea of having some kind of online shop. (Am I…maker?)

I am passionate about second hand and thrifting. (Am I…under consumerism core?)

I have a 9-5 office job. (Am I…very mindful, very demure?)

How would I encapsulate all these different parts of myself in a catchy social media bio and monetise them into bite-size palatable portions of content that would potentially lead me to my Dream Job? What’s even my Dream Job? Shouldn’t I know it by now? Why do I still don’t know? Everyone seems to know! I felt I was wasting too much time thinking about this instead of doing something more meaningful like actively trying to figure out or catching up with the It Ends with Us drama.

We all know by now the bad side of Instagram and social media in general: the constant pressure to perform, the lack of authenticity, the ads everywhere. 80% of the people I talk to about this topic they tell me they wish they could quit. I went to see Aussie comedian Hannah Gadsby last night and she asked the audience: “How many of you love social media?” Not a single soul raised their hand. My point exactly. We are all in this party because we are supposed to, but it peaked a long time ago and we are really not having a lot of fun anymore. And to feel like that, I already have my office Christmas party.

I am pretty sure you've read this before, but the human brain is not designed for the information overload we are exposed to on a daily basis. I know mine isn’t! According to Dunbar’s theory, people can ‘handle’ up to about 150 relationships – whether in early hunter-gatherer societies or the modern workplace. I don't think my brain was designed to experience the whole range of emotions the human brain has to offer in 1-minute reels either. In the course of just one night of insomnia, my Explore page took me on a discombobulated journey, from “I said YES! reels 💍” to “20 kids killed in a school bombing” to “The trick to make the perfect omelette” to “What I learned after my husband cheated on me with my mother". I MEAN.

Sure, Instagram brough some good stuff to my life: I kept in touch with my friends with minimal effort (a blessing for an introvert sometimes), I made new ones based on similar interests, and had the ability to subtly rub in the face of everyone who’s ever been mean to me that my adult life living abroad is actually pretty cool (Are the mean girls from high school in the room with us?). I discovered new places around, and it also helped me to promote my writing. And most surprising to me, people found my stories and talent as meme curator very funny (honoured, will miss ye guys!). So, leaving Instagram hasn’t been an easy decision, but it’s been the right decision. And my brain chemistry agrees.

Deleting is not the same as deactivating, removing the app from your phone or having a member of your PR team updating your feed for you. Deleting is deleting. And that’s a scary word.

When I scheduled my account for deletion, a cheesy montage of all the moments ahead of me that were PURE CONTENT GOLD I was going to waste flashed in front of my eyes: the curated candids of my Hen Do (look world, squad goals!!). A perfectly non-chalant carrousel of photos of my wedding in Edinburgh (look world, a man gave me his seal of approval FOR LIFE!!). Our honeymoon in Japan (look world, I can afford to travel for 3 weeks, no biggie!!!). Ugh. The old "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" by Irish philosopher George Berkeley never sounded scarier, and I braced myself for impact. I was about to stop sharing a life that I had deemed, many years ago, for public consumption, and I experienced something I didn’t expect: relief. Agency. Privacy as the quietest of luxuries.

I know I am not the only one. Since last year, there’s been a wave of creatives leaving the platform, and I have become addicted to read each one of their experiences, because they all resonate in one way or another:

To finish it all off: I've just left Instagram. Take this as my dedication to you here, to my Substack, to writing, to more creativity retreats, to slowing down, to deeper relationships, to finishing up my second novel soon. -

Emma Gannon

Yesterday morning I woke up and knew I needed to log out of Instagram. Not just for a break, not just for a little bit, not until my next book is announced, but forever. I logged out of Instagram forever. -

Cody Cook-Parrott

Never be scared to make the right choice for you. It’s your life and you can mould it exactly as you choose. Be brave and I promise you, it will be worth it. -

Molly Ella

I prepared for my very own GramXit as best as I could: saved all my photos, made notes of all the things in my Saved folder that I wanted to check and imported the inspiration to Pinterest. I sent DMs to the people I wanted to keep in touch giving them my phone number in case they didn’t have it. And I left a message on my bio letting people know that they can find me here and that my account would soon disappear quicker than my will to live every time I say: “I promise I’ll go running tomorrow”. Kate Moss might have said that nothing tastes better than skinny feels (whatever that means hon) but I am here to tell you that nothing tastes better than massively removing your digital footprint from the last 14 years.

It would be a lie to say that these first months off Instagram have been a bliss all the time. As someone who’s been blogging since I was 18, my brain’s default setting is sharing and consuming. Photos, stories, posts, videos, memes. But now that I am away from it, things have been coming more organically to me, instead of being bombarded and overwhelmed. I have other sources of inspiration: Pinterest, Substack, Youtube, printed media, movies, series, and most important, the real world: without going any further, a week ago I saw a girl walking around town with the Uniqlo bag wrapped around her waist and I've been thinking about on a daily basis. It’s taking me time to adjust to this new reality, one that feels quieter and slower, (sometimes even boring, because I am not used to have so many hours free now I’m not scrolling) but I’ve never been more chill and self-confident in my whole life. In my eyes, so far, it’s worth it. 💗

It feels fantastic not having to be OOTD or AMA or BTS-ready all the time. Who is she??? To know that the only people who might see your outfit are the ten people you might interact with today is so fucking freeing. To do things for the sake of doing, not documenting. To not feel like you are in a rat race to make it. To not give a fuck about how I brand myself all the time and just focus on be my weird, gorgeous, unique, funny self. To live my life without the pressure of having to market it as best as I can so I can upgrade to a better one. I already love the one I live!

I do miss the memes though.

And at the bottom of it lies the most disturbing truth: If I started on Instagram at 20 and I am now at the ripe age of 33, that means my whole adult life so far, I’ve spent it developing some sort of addiction to likes and external validation. And this means I will probably suffer from withdrawal syndrome from time to time: sometimes, since being off Instagram, I feel disconnected, isolated and lonely. Last week, some of my friends suggested options to fight this: one suggested that I create a very exclusive Finsta from scratch, just to keep my circle updated (No! A lot has to change for me to get back on the app!). Another one suggested to try WhatsApp stories, which immediately conjured images of a middle-aged woman who has a Live Love Laugh sign in her kitchen and types in caps. Nothing seems to keep me as connected and as chronically online as Instagram and my 12.6K followers did, and so the questions remain:

👽 Am I sabotaging my opportunities?

👽 Are my friends and acquaintances going to forget about me?

👽 Am I becoming the weird friend?

👽 How am I going to stablish contact or keep in touch with people / brands / potential work gigs from now on?

👽 How am I going to share with the world the things I do?

Not to make this my entire personality from now on, but to my own surprise, I want to offer some resistance and explore these uncomfortable feelings for a while. I am low-key excited, and I am certain that with time and space, all these questions will answer themselves.

Just…don’t forget to share this article on your Instagram. ✌🏻

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