🤷‍♀️ How Much Is Enough? — Leaving Instagram & Right-Sizing Your Work with Nicole Antoinette

Amelia [00:00:02]

[Music begins to play, overlapping with the introduction to the episode] Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients.

Amelia [00:00:08]

I'm Amelia Hruby, writer, speaker, and founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio. On this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.

Amelia [00:00:22]

Download your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig and join us as we do it all Off the Grid [music jams and fades out].

Amelia Hruby [00:01:15]:

Hello and welcome back to Off The Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. I am the founder of Softer Sounds Podcast Studio and the co-founder of the Lifestyle Business League. And on this show, I am your fellow explorer in the journey of running a successful, sustainable business with no or minimal social media presence. Those two businesses I just mentioned that I run, neither one of them is hanging out on Instagram or posting TikToks or having a Facebook page. Y'all, we are doing things differently around here as we're diving in today. I want to start by just saying happy October, my friends.

Amelia Hruby [00:01:58]:

This is the final episode of our late summer/early fall interview series. I've got to tell you, when I kicked off season two of Off the Grid in March of this year, I thought we were going to do a quick 20 and wrap it up by August. But I'm so grateful for all of you who have tuned in and shared such amazing feedback about what the show means to you because that's given me so much energy and excitement to keep going. I've also heard from so many amazing guests that we've had on the show in this interview series, and I just felt like their stories and those conversations really needed to be shared in this moment. And so thanks for listening. Thanks for writing to me. I hope that you will download the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit and then reply to the email. They land in my inbox. There is no assistant reading them over here, my friends.

Amelia Hruby [00:02:52]:

It is just me over at hi@softersounds.studio receiving your thoughts and ideas and pitches, so send them my way. I love hearing from you, and I'm feeling so pumped for what is yet to come for Off the Grid. Later this week on Friday the 13th, I am going to be launching something really exciting for all of you. If you want a sneak peek, you can head to our new website offthegrid.fun. That's F-U-N. Yes. Off the Grid is fun. Offthegrid.fun.

Amelia Hruby [00:03:27]:

You can head there and there's a little sneak preview for you, internet sleuth out there. And on Friday, there will be a sales page so you can sign up to be the very first people to join our new membership. That's what's coming. It's going to be amazing. You're going to love it. I am so excited.

Amelia Hruby [00:03:49]:

So bookmark it, save it, check your emails, keep your eye on the pod feed so you can be one of the first folks to sign up at a ridiculously affordable price when I launch things on Friday morning. Okay, now let me tell you all about the wonderful, amazing person who's joining me for today's episode. Nicole Antoinette is an author, a long distance hiker, and the host of a few fun and supportive gathering spaces for folks who crave honest conversations and digital togetherness. She writes the Substack newsletter Wild Letters, and this fall she's also hosting her fun and supportive co-working group, Get Shit Done Club, which I will be joining. I first encountered Nicole's work many moons ago online, and I have followed her journey as I think a truly inspiring creator and community gatherer who is also really radically open about her explorations of questions like what does it mean to be self employed? When is it time to let our beloved creations end? And how do we cultivate a sense of enoughness in our work, our finances and our lives? I'm so excited to have her on the podcast to talk about all of these things and about the fact that she left Instagram just about a month ago now. We have such an amazing conversation and I want to go ahead and dive right into it. Welcome to Off the Grid. I'm so happy to have you here, Nicole.

Nicole Antoinette [00:05:28]:

I'm so happy to be here. Whenever I listen to your episodes, I'm sure I'm not the only one that thinks this, but I'm like, man, we could be pals. So what a treat to get to chat.

Amelia Hruby [00:05:38]:

I love making friends through my podcast, but I think of you as someone who has been doing that for years, through Real Talk Radio, through the Pop-Up Pod. You've had so many different iterations of great conversations and we all feel like your friend. I'm sure most people listening here already feel like your friend, or they will soon. So I'm really happy to have you.

Nicole Antoinette [00:05:58]:

A podcast is a great secret weapon for making friends with amazing people. So that's my hot take.

Amelia Hruby [00:06:04]:

Absolutely.

Nicole Antoinette [00:06:04]:

As you know, I am in a period of, let's say, business ecosystem rethinking and rearranging, which is basically a fancy way of saying shrug emoji. What is work? After a sabbatical, we can say not a full break from work, but a much lighter workload the last couple of months, which I'm sure we'll get into, but I'm currently unsure if I'm ever going to properly podcast again. Is that a project I want to go back to? And even that feels really interesting to just sort of think about the different iterations of one's work life when you've been doing creative work online for well over a decade, there's so many different phases and some things stay consistent. Some methods of creating or methods of art carry a through line and sometimes something was great for just a season or a handful of years and you're ready to iterate and move on to the next thing. And that process of transformation in front of other people is always a really interesting, sometimes challenging, and also sometimes really beautiful.

Amelia Hruby [00:07:00]:

Yeah, I often think of it since you used the ecosystem metaphor. I will often think of it like a forest fire period. People will use the sort of like burn it all down language, which I understand. And I know forest fires are very close to many people right now and they're very destructive of our material lives. But I think within our creative businesses as well, sometimes we do need that period of fire is destructive, very cleansing, and the forest is still there even after the fire. It may just look very different.

Nicole Antoinette [00:07:31]:

Yeah, I mean, there's a difference between having a controlled burn, right, and actually an entire forest burning down when that's not what you wanted. So I am no stranger to doing many controlled burns in my creative life and tiny business over many, many years to the point that I feel like that's probably the thing that I'm best known for is change, is being willing to be like this thing, I don't want to make this thing anymore, so I'm not going to. And I'm definitely in the most acute phase of that that I think I've ever been in right now. So it's an interesting time to be having this conversation both about social media and just work in general and how those things change. The longer you do something, you're going to fall out of love with certain aspects of your business or you're going to have new curiosities or you're going to want to take breaks, or you're going to be stuck in a liminal space where you know what's not working but you don't know what comes next. And that can feel really vulnerable when we're told to have a very clear put together brand that's easily understandable and bite size digestible. And what happens when you've been in this period of just disintegration where you're like, I don't know.

Nicole Antoinette [00:08:31]:

And so I feel like sort of starting to think about coming out of that phase right now is how I would cross it.

Amelia Hruby [00:08:40]:

Yeah. And I'm so grateful to you for joining me in this conversation right in the midst of things. I think it can be for all the reasons you're talking about, sometimes easier to wait until you can confidently return with “here's the new vision” to actually share. Like we don't want to come to it from this space you're describing of I don't know what might be next or what is even happening right now or where it's headed. And I think that's a hallmark of your work in general. You're always taking people into the middle of it all, and it's why we appreciate your books, your communities, the spaces you hold, the podcasts you have hosted. I'd love to maybe catch listeners up a bit as we've been diving into the deep end already, or at least referencing these things that have been going on. So from my perspective as a fan of your work, I know that at the start of this year, you launched a book.

Amelia Hruby [00:09:39]:

You had a thriving Patreon community, you shifted that to Substack, and then you were sharing your book How to Be Alone on Instagram. And you were definitely thinking about, what's the role of social media in my work? How am I going to be sharing on the Internet in the upcoming seasons? But it seemed like it kind of went from those being big picture questions to realizing that there was actually a much deeper mental health crisis that surfaced or you realized was like, wait, this has been happening and I actually need to go into recovery right now. Would you mind sharing a little bit of your experience of that? What has your life been like for the past few months and how has that played out in your work?

Nicole Antoinette [00:10:24]:

Yeah, sure. The very short version is that I realized in early June that I hesitate with mental health related stuff to categorize things as a crisis or a collapse or it can sound really dramatic. And all of that is on a spectrum, but I'll just say I was having a really hard time with my depression and was in a really kind of scary, depressive episode, and I think I had been for a while, and I just wasn't letting myself acknowledge that it was true. And this is not the first time that this has happened. I've had depression and anxiety kind of flare ups throughout pretty much my entire adult life. But I want to say a bunch of things happened at once, but I don't even know that that was true. I think I just sort of woke up to how bad that I felt or was able to have a moment of clarity where I was like, okay, this isn't just a couple of hard days or a couple of hard weeks.

Nicole Antoinette [00:11:17]:

I'm waking up every day feeling just this really deep despair. And once I was able to admit that to myself and then say it out loud to my partner and to a couple of other people, I found and I don't know if you've had this experience, sometimes when you admit something, then almost like all comes crashing down. That you're able to fully feel actually how low your capacity is, how poorly you've been feeling, how unwell you are. And that's what happened to me. And I really felt it as a Venn diagram. Overlap between work related burnout, some specific aspects of my work, and mental health stuff, depression. So there was definitely an overlap where those two things were related to each other.

Nicole Antoinette [00:11:57]:

But then there's part of the burnout that has nothing to do with the depression and then there was part of the depression that just is my brain, right? That had nothing to do with the work burnout. But because those two things were so intensely overlapped, it became really clear to me that I had to take a massive step back from work in order to focus on getting to a point of mental wellness where I could even start to look at some of the burnout and make some of those changes or I had no idea what it was that I needed. All I knew was I feel awful and I'm not willing to feel like this anymore. And so that looked like getting on antidepressants for the first time, which I had, I'd been on anxiety meds in the past, but working with a doctor, having to go through a couple of different types of meds to find the right one, and I don't know if it was intuition or what, but it just became very clear to me that in order to give myself the space that I needed to recover and to feel better, that I had to take really quick, decisive, big action with work stuff. So a break from Instagram at that point I put up one post and then logged out and didn't log back in for months. And you mentioned that I had a thriving Patreon community that was my biggest source of income for six and a half years, was running a membership community on Patreon. And I shut it down at that time and I had been thinking about shutting it down.

Nicole Antoinette [00:13:11]:

That wasn't a brand new decision, but it was something that I had planned on rolling out a lot more slowly and doing towards the end of the year, potentially once I was more clear on how I was going to replace that $30,000 of income. It was like the bulk of my income. I decided for my Substack newsletter to only write for paid subscribers. So basically to take a break from writing for so many thousands of people. Because a big part of my particular burnout that I was experiencing had to do with being so accessible to so many thousands of people on so many platforms for so many years. And I just knew that I needed a smaller space in order to write because that was the one thing that I didn't want to put on pause was my writing because that I mentioned before that there's creative through lines. That's my creative through line that's always been true. I started my first blog in 2007.

Nicole Antoinette [00:14:03]:

If everything else in my business went away, this is the one thing that I would always want to keep, that, yes, I write for the people, but I am a very big believer that what comes through me comes for me first. And so I knew that I wasn't going to be able to really get through this period of time without writing about it. And there's something about writing about it in a closed ecosystem where you're putting it out to people and they're able to give you support that feels a lot more supportive and nourishing to me than just journaling. So I guess that's a little bit of an overview. I will say I'm so glad that I made those decisions because they 100% worked. I'm feeling not over all of the burnout. That's kind of some separate stuff we can talk about. But the second antidepressants that I went on wound up working.

Nicole Antoinette [00:14:45]:

And so once I got to the four or five week mark where they were at their peak effectiveness, I felt unbelievable amounts better. And so I'm just grateful, grateful, grateful, grateful that that's true. And now I'm sort of in the position of, okay, I no longer feel just despair TM, right? It's not like despair, all the things and a lot of the questions of what was it about my business ecosystem, if that's the phrase that we're going to use, that led me into that particular type of burnout, what do I want the next phase of my life to look like? How do I have the business that I want to have without being so accessible to so many people?

Amelia Hruby [00:15:20]:

I felt like you really went through what's been going on. Some of the decisions you made, things that stood out to me in what you said were the way that it all came from, this felt sense of what needed to happen. I think that to me, really is I don't know that you'd use this language, but being an embodied business owner or intuitive business owner, this sense of so often we look to a metric to make a decision for us or a coach to tell us what to do or something outside of us to give us the path forward. I also really try to feel guided by, frankly, just like, my gut. And it's like, this is not it right now. And I'm kind of in this period of like, I'm really looking at, do I want to grow? Am I going to keep expanding, or is it time to contract? My gut is telling me that we're, like, pulling in. My metrics and everything else are telling me that I should just keep growing. And I'm really like I don't know. I don't know what comes next.

Amelia Hruby [00:16:14]:

And in some ways, I feel like I'm watching kind of the collapse of influencer businesses, and we're all trying to figure out how we do business online. Now that people are really shifting off instagram. We're having this Substack moment, but I don't think Substack is, like, the solution to everything. And I don't think anyone else thinks that either, except maybe like and I think we're all really in this space of what worked and felt good before, does not feel good and isn't really working anymore, and how are we going to rebuild? And I've really appreciated how vulnerably you've shared your story and what you're going through right now, but I definitely see it with others as well. This real sense of like, wait, what are we doing here online? What are we selling? How do we do this without feeling fully drained by the thousands of people who are able to access us in some way and what comes next?

Nicole Antoinette [00:17:07]:

Yeah, and I don't think there's any easy answers. Everyone, friends, peers who are also self employed or have tiny businesses have expressed similar sentiments, right? That whether it's just feeling like the landscape of online business has changed a lot, especially in the last couple of years with so many more businesses and offerings moving online because of the pandemic, I think that there's a lot of different things that we can point to. And the expansion contraction is interesting. I've been reflecting on because I already had this type of online business when the pandemic started, that I was really grateful that it was easy for me to offer online spaces that could be supportive. That's when I started. I run a digital coworking group, and that's when I started that.

Nicole Antoinette [00:17:51]:

And there were just so many things that I was offering in that period of time that felt wonderful for me to be able to create spaces for people. And it was part scratching a social itch and part being able to do other things together online. And what I realized in this phase of burnout is that basically, from the start of the pandemic up until this summer, I had expanded, expanded, expanded in terms of the number of spaces that I was holding for people, the number of workshops or gatherings or groups on Zoom, being on Instagram, having my Patreon community, having my newsletter. And there was no contraction. And so I just had all of these containers of space that I was holding. And it's not even like I really feel like I can count on max two hands, the number of times that I feel like someone on the Internet was asking something from me that was just not at all boundaried and ridiculous. I've been really lucky in that regard.

Nicole Antoinette [00:18:44]:

I don't have a lot of people trying to take take. And so it wasn't a fault of I had a couple of bad interactions, and that made me realize that I needed to have better boundaries. It was. I like all the people in all these spaces, and I like all these spaces, but I just said yes to so many things in a vacuum and didn't realize that, okay, I'm the one who then has to show up and hold all of this space and make all of this work and do all of this stuff. And it was not energetically sustainable for me. So the burnout wasn't, honestly, I'm not that busy. I don't work that much. If we're talking about work hours.

Nicole Antoinette [00:19:14]:

It was really energetic and emotional and relational. And it took a really big hit on my personal life as well, because I didn't feel like I had capacity for a lot of my friends because I was doing so much space holding for other people. And so I think a lot of the questions I'm asking myself right now are what's the boundary or what's the balance between honesty and privacy? Because I'm a personal essayist, right? The type of writing that I'm sharing is personal stories. And that's what I love to do. Okay. What gets shared and what doesn't get shared? If that's where I'm putting my energy, what else do I need to close down so that that's the only recurring portal in which people can access things from me? So that's a really big question, is honesty and privacy. And a few of the decisions that I made in the last couple of months, like I said, I switched.

Nicole Antoinette [00:20:02]:

So I was only writing for paid subscribers, which was wonderful. And I made the decision going forward that I will do for free subscribers. They will get one essay a month, and everything else is for paid subscribers. And that feels really good to me to have things in just more of a closed container where there's that kind of reciprocity and where it's not just going out to thousands and thousands of people and shareable all over the internet with no context. Something about that feels not good to me. And as of the time that we're recording this, yesterday, I quit Instagram for good, and that was a huge part of this decision for me. So I've shut down my Patreon. I'm no longer on social media right now. Substack and personal essays. That's where it feels good to do this kind of stuff. And that's it.

Amelia Hruby [00:20:47]:

Yeah. So let's go into that social media piece of this story. Could you share a little bit about when you got on social media, when your following started growing, and then some of the iterations it's gone through since, because I know you've taken breaks before. Can you tell us a little bit of that story and then take us to deciding to leave leave?

Nicole Antoinette [00:21:09]:

Yeah, sure. My first social media experience was Facebook, which I think is probably true for a lot of people, or at least a lot of people that are our age. My college was one of the first non-Ivy League schools to get access to Facebook, back when Facebook was only for college students. Remember that? Back in the day?

Amelia Hruby [00:21:27]:

Yeah.

Nicole Antoinette [00:21:27]:

So I think that was summer of 2004, I think. And it was this really new, fun, novel. You could have one photo, you could have a little profile. It was really simple. And because it was limited, basically to the people that you were in school with, it was super useful that, oh, okay, I met this person at a party, and I really like them. Or this person's in my whatever class. This is a way to message them. Or it was super useful and I loved it, and it was great.

Nicole Antoinette [00:21:59]:

I feel like other than getting on Facebook pretty early, I've been a relatively late adopter of other things. I wasn't the first one on Twitter or the first one on Instagram. I'm just in general kind of a late adopter. But I've been using social media since then, so there was that phase. And then I would say maybe 2008 to 2015 ish I had gotten on Twitter. Towards the tail end of that I started using Instagram and I started my first blog in 2007, not having any idea that it was going to turn into paid work at any point. But in that period of time is when I made the shift to self employment and became really increasingly aware of metrics of audience size, of comparison with other writers, other entrepreneurs, small business owners and started to feel that kind of jealousy, ego stuff crop up that I didn't experience when I was only using Facebook for fun with other people who lived in my dorm. It was really a different experience, especially once money became involved. And I never went the classic influencer route of getting paid for posts or sponsored content.

Nicole Antoinette [00:23:03]:

That was never interesting to me. But as someone who writes about her own life, right, I am the common denominator in all of my work. And so it would be a lie to say that I wasn't aware of the fact that the more likable I was or seemed on social media or the more people felt like they could relate to me, the more likely it was that they were going to become a member of a group or a workshop or a retreat that I was hosting, or pay for my writing, buy a book, that kind of thing. And so it was always this sort of amorphous line between who am I as a person and what is my work? And some of that is great, that's what I chose, this is what I want to be doing. But it kind of does take a toll when you don't feel like you understand what are my hobbies because they're fun and what are my hobbies because they quote do well on the internet, right? So that was kind of that period for me. And then a shift came in 2016. That was when I first got into long distance hiking. I was in my early thirties.

Nicole Antoinette [00:24:00]:

I had never gone camping or backpacking a night in my life. Like I was really a true beginner. And I started chronicling my hikes day by day on Instagram. So it would be one post per day of each of these multi hundred mile hikes. And I loved it because I felt like it answered a question for me with Instagram that I'm not a photographer, I'm a writer. I'm not someone who gravitates towards taking photos. I don't love being in front of the camera that much. I feel neutral about it.

Nicole Antoinette [00:24:30]:

So I always felt like I was trying to mine my life for postable photo content. And once I started long distance hiking, I was like, oh, I'm taking so many pictures because everything's beautiful. And I really loved using Instagram to tell a story from start to finish, right? Day one of the hike to the completion of the hike, whether it was actually finishing or quitting or whatever ups and downs happened along the way, I felt almost this sigh of relief that, okay, this platform makes sense to me now, or I have a way to use it. But that didn't stop the jealousy. It didn't stop the comparison. It didn't stop the fact that I never really used Instagram and felt better because of it. Which isn't to say that there weren't benefits. I've met some of my best friends on the Internet, right? I feel like Instagram and social media in general gave me a business in a lot of ways, an incredible social community, access to information and resources that I wouldn't have otherwise.

Nicole Antoinette [00:25:23]:

And it broke me in a lot of ways, and not big ways, but small ways over and over and over and over. And so late 2019 was the first time that I remember taking a multi-month break from Instagram, and 2019 had been a hard year for me. I had gotten divorced and moved out of the house that I shared with my former spouse and into a tiny 20 square foot van and was trying to figure out going from a two income marriage to having this kind of very small business, this it didn't make enough money at that point, right, to pay for my full time life. And I just reached the point at the end of 2019 where all of the questions that I've been mentioning just kind of hit a boiling point where I'm like, I need to take a step back. I can't be figuring this stuff out while trying to find cute photos of my life to post on the Internet. Something about that felt really disjointed to me. And I feel like that really was the start of a deeper inquiry for me into how I keep saying social media, but at that point, it was only Instagram. I had long since quit Facebook and quit Twitter, but it was the start of a deeper inquiry into how social media makes me feel and real clarity on what I gain by using it, because there are definitely benefits and what I lose.

Nicole Antoinette [00:26:29]:

And really grappling with the fact that literally everyone that I personally know who has gone viral, let's call it that, on any way on social media expressed to me privately how much more stressed and miserable they were as a result. And yet that is something that I had been holding up in my mind as some kind of fantasy. And so it was a really good opportunity for me to get honest with myself about I don't want to be more stressed and miserable. So what is it that I think that having that kind of popularity on social media will give me? And is there another way that I might be able to get those needs and desires met? If so, why am I on this platform? So that's kind of up until this summer recap. But yeah, like I mentioned, I quit yesterday. So happy to answer any follow up questions.

Amelia Hruby [00:27:17]:

Yeah, I mean, I think where I feel so much affinity with your story is that sort of eye opening moments or like the question of, okay, when I thought I wanted this many followers, 100,000 followers, whatever, viral success, what did I actually want? Because I don't think I actually know anyone who just wants 100,000 followers because it's actually meaningless, like having those numbers on your profile. What we want is a lot of things we perceive will happen because we have 100,000 followers. Whether that is money, whether that is connections to certain people or brands, whether that is the ability to travel more. Like there are a lot of things that are wrapped up in social media success.

Nicole Antoinette [00:28:01]:

Completely. I feel like the things that I was able to articulate that I wanted or that I thought that having a higher follower count or engagement would get me number one would be a book deal. And that from everything that I have heard, actually is true. I know people who are great writers who have really small platforms, who were civically told when they were pitching books like, you need to have a bigger platform in order for us to be interested in it. So it's not a myth, right? But I thought that it would increase my chances of getting a book deal. I thought that it would somehow equal more money for me in terms of conversion rate over into my business. But even that was sort of amorphous. I didn't have a really clear goal.

Nicole Antoinette [00:28:37]:

And then there's all the parts that feel, like, really gross and not cute to admit, which are that I wanted the legitimacy, I guess, that I could feel in myself that if someone new started following me or mentioned me in something, and I clicked over to their profile and they had 300 followers, The reaction I would feel in my body versus if they had 30,000 followers, I would immediately take them more seriously and feel like, oh, this person is more valuable than that other person. And that feels gross. And that's not how I actually think about real people in front of me, in my everyday life. And so I was sort of noticing this discrepancy in my values and how it was causing me almost to dehumanize other people and realizing, okay, well, that yet I also want to win that game. And it was all I think at this point, we all know all of the dangers of social media and what the algorithm can do and how it can mess with you. And so it was this, like, almost cognitive dissonance of knowing how fucked up the platforms are and are meant to be and are meant to make you feel this way, to benefit the bottom lines of the billionaires who run the platform. Coupled with, sure, I know this game is rigged, but what's wrong with me that I can't win it anyway? Maybe if I were funnier, maybe if my writing were better, maybe if I were hotter.

Nicole Antoinette [00:29:51]:

And these are the types of things that I would think. And all of this to say, there was plenty of pleasurable stuff on Instagram. It was a really great way to keep in touch with what I think of as sort of like secondary or tertiary rings of friends, people who maybe were not going to have a walk and talk phone call or like a zoom coffee date. But I do care about knowing what's going on with them. And realistically, and I have seen this to be true in my Instagram breaks. When I'm not on social media, we don't communicate right? So I was always really weighing, I think of it in terms of the price of admission for something. I could see the benefits that I would gain by quitting social media for good. But up until yesterday, I wasn't willing to pay the cost of admission.

Nicole Antoinette [00:30:34]:

I wasn't willing to lose the things that I would lose because I think something that's missed in a lot of conversations that I hear about social media, about Instagram, which is one of the reasons I love your podcast so much, is it's very binary, it's very black and white. Social media is terrible for you. You should quit. Okay? But also there's a lot of good to be found there too. And so what really helped me feel more liberated in my decision making was to be clear on, here are the, let's say, five things that I am going to be losing. Am I willing to pay that price? And the answer was no until it wasn't.

[music fades in]

Amelia Hruby [00:31:14]:

Hi, Off the Grid listeners. Amelia here interrupting our conversation today because I want to share with you one of my favorite marketing tools. When I left Instagram, I invited all of my followers to subscribe to my mailing list in order to keep in touch with me, and I promised to send them monthly-ish notes on a lot of the themes I used to talk about on social media. I've used many email service providers in my day, but my favorite of all of them is Flodesk.

Amelia Hruby [00:31:42]:

Flodesk is a gorgeous, easy to use email service provider. It helps you create beautiful, thoughtful emails. And even better, it's really set up to help you create easy to use landing pages so people can join your list and workflows so you can automate sending messages to folks who sign up through different pages. Flodesk is how I run all of the welcome sequences and lead magnets at Softer Sounds. It's also how I run the Leaving Social Media Toolkit that you might have downloaded after listening to this podcast. I'm surely not sending those emails out myself manually. Flodesk is doing all of that automagically.

Amelia Hruby [00:32:25]:

If you'd like to give Flodesk a try, please use my affiliate link below. In the show notes, you'll get a discount, I'll get a kickback, and we will all send more beautiful emails together. Again, check out the affiliate link in the show notes. For now, we're going to get back to this episode of Off the Grid.

[music fades out]

Amelia Hruby [00:32:45]:

What have I lost by leaving instagram? Maybe it's not what I foreground on the podcast as much, but lately it's been coming up a lot in my work, especially, I think, because I've been doing a lot of interviews and I'm like, oh, I miss, we'll even go as far as making the cute little audiogram. And I'm like, this is such a good part of the conversation. I'm like, I have literally nowhere to put this. You can't send a video through email. And I'm like, oh, without social media, I don't have anywhere for this to go. And sometimes I'm like, oh, thank God I never have to make another audiogram. And other times I'm like, what a loss that so many people won't hear this thought from this person because there isn't an easy place for me to share it. Or other moments where I remember somebody I used to connect with over some random thing in my life. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I don't even have their phone number. I guess I could go to their website and send them this weird link through the contact form, but I don't think I'm going to do that. I really appreciate you highlighting this because as much as I do try to stay in the gray with social media, we don't highlight like you do lose things, and I feel that pretty acutely sometimes.

Nicole Antoinette [00:33:51]:

Yeah. And going back a little bit, I made the decision earlier this year that I was going to quit social media on the first of May, which, you know, because we recorded a podcast episode around that time that I was like, actually, everything's changed for me. Can we re-record? And you were very gracious to say yes about that. And what happened, for all the reasons that we just discussed, I felt really sure that that was the right fit choice for me. But what happened was in early April, my first book came out, so I went the route of self publishing my books didn't want to deal with the alternative. And Instagram was hugely useful for book promo, I think, almost more than any other thing I have ever promoted, because books are relatively low cost. People understand what a book is. You're not trying to explain what a course is or a retreat or something. And it's really easy for people to share it in their stories, to post screenshots and reviews, right? That even, I guess in context, small amount of buzz and reviews and stuff that the book got made me really take a step back and say, because I knew I had this second book coming out, and I thought, am I doing this book a disservice, this second book a disservice by getting off of social media? And it was sort of framed as a question of what do we owe to our art? That I put so much into creating this second book.

Nicole Antoinette [00:35:17]:

And it's a fun story and I love it, and I worked on it on and off for years in different ways, that if I launch this second book without Instagram, is that going to make me sad? And so very quickly I was like, okay, well, I'm not going to quit Instagram, or at least I'm not going to quit until the next book comes out. That's the decision that I made. And it felt correct because I was unsure, but it also felt reactionary and fear based. And then kind of fast forward a couple of months, I wound up having this mental health collapse and getting off of Instagram anyway. And that just really clarified for me a couple of things. First of all, that I feel better not using Instagram, period. I just do. There are things that I miss, for sure, and I'm good.

Nicole Antoinette [00:36:04]:

Getting off of social media has really made me more present with the smaller number of friends and connections, especially in person, that are here. And so that became really evident. And then the other thing that became evident is that because I have now been able to determine that for me personally, social media causes more harm for me than benefit, I'm not willing to hurt myself for my work. I'm just not. It's against everything. Like, I'm anti hustle culture. I am anti capitalist as much as person can be.

Nicole Antoinette [00:36:36]:

But I just felt like it was really the last remaining thing that I was forcing myself, like, coercing myself to do for the benefit of it. And I really just had to get clear of, okay, if 50% of the amount of readers read this second book, if you get 10% amount of book sales as the other one, is it still the right decision to quit? And it was like, yeah, I'll find another way. I'll find other ways. Social media, I also feel like, can make me lazy with marketing because then I don't put into play or I don't experiment with all kinds of other creative options and just because I'm not on Instagram doesn't mean the book won't find its way on Instagram for other people. Other people can talk about it. And I'm not trying to be a New York Times bestselling author. So it's like, again, I'm not obsessed with the metrics of it. I'm sort of just trusting that the right people who are supposed to read the book are going to read the book.

Nicole Antoinette [00:37:24]:

And if it's not this year, the book's not going anywhere, right? So I don't know if that's making sense, but I really got to a point of like, let's start with I'm not willing to hurt myself for my work, period. And if that's off the table, then what are the creative options that come up in its place?

Amelia Hruby [00:37:41]:

Yeah, that's so powerful just hearing you say it. It feels like it should be so obvious to all of us, right? If I ask someone point blank, yeah, are you willing to self harm for your work? They're like, no, but then we do it all the time. It's so deeply embedded in our work practices, the choices that we make, the options that we give ourselves. And so that statement is really going to sit with me. I feel like I can write it on a Post-It, stick it on my wall, because it then follows through so many things. I hear you saying how it informed your decision to leave social media, but I think of it for myself in how I've had to start setting timers so that I actually stand up from my desk during the day and don't aggravate my sciatica because I just stayed here working for 8 hours in this chair. There are so many ways that we do compromise our physical health, our mental health, our emotional health, our spiritual health, for the sake of our work. And this really has me reflecting on why.

Nicole Antoinette [00:38:45]:

And also because we live under capitalism. We live under an inherently oppressive extractive system. The answer to that question is sometimes you have to. And I think a lot of what has been coming up for me is there are aspects of this system that are harmful to everyone, not to everyone to the same degree. Some people suffer from it a lot more than others. And so why am I hurting myself extra? Right? That's become the question. And a lot of this for me, parallels this journey, I guess we'll call it, that I have been on around the question of enoughness, specifically the question of how much money is enough for me.

Nicole Antoinette [00:39:24]:

And one of my favorite things about self employment is that when it comes to money, it can work as a dial. Like you can turn the dial up or down in a way that you can't in a salaried position. Right? So what I mean by that is perhaps this is more true when you have an established business, right? I'm not talking about you've just started your business yesterday. How much money do you want to make? Turn the dial up or down. Right? I can only talk from my own experience of I've been doing this in some capacity for over a decade. So if I want or need to make more money, I will create a new offering. I will launch more things.

Nicole Antoinette [00:39:58]:

And if I don't need to do that, like this summer, I took a massive pay cut that long term, that's not sustainable for me. I was able to do that because I have my newsletter income and because I had put some money aside in short term savings. And so I did the math. Basically, how long can I not launch a new thing for and not have to dip into longer term savings, which again, is a privilege and a blessing to even be able to have. But I say all of that because this question for me of how much money is enough? I believe that it's less than I always thought that it was. And so that's a lot of what I'm looking at, very tactically in my life of, okay, what happens if I'm able to pay myself $3,000 a month, $4,000 a month, $5,000, $2,000? What actually happens to my quality of life and what I'm able to do with my money for myself and my beloveds and the causes that I believe in and all of that? And when is enough? And then when I have that number, what is the least self extractive, most pleasurable work that I can do to reach that number and then can I, at that point, kind of like, take my hands off the wheel, practice satisfaction, and actually just not keep working more? Which that for me is really I have, like, goosebumps right now. It's physically uncomfortable to be like, I could be earning more. And I'm choosing not to because it goes against everything that at least I was raised to believe.

Nicole Antoinette [00:41:25]:

And that I think a lot of us were right. More and more and more money is better, more prestige is better. And I've never been someone who wanted the capital C big career, and I always felt so much shame about that. And I'm in this period of real reclamation, of, like, I'm not hugely ambitious. I want to make things that feel good to make. I want to earn enough money that's not just like, scraping by bare minimum, but is not excessive. And I want to nurture my well being and my relationships and have that spread out further. And not to say that that's, oh, well, that's it, that's all you want. That's a lot of things.

Nicole Antoinette [00:42:03]:

But I feel like a lot of this for me, is coming up into a practice of trying to right size my life and work and what would my business look like if it was, okay, this is enough readers. This is enough paid readers on Substack to cover my core living costs. That's my current goal, shall we say, and I'm not there yet, but it's moving in that direction, and okay, then. At that point, any other offering becomes, well, I'd like to be able to save some money for the future, or I'd like to be able to go on this trip or do something else. So that's really how I'm thinking of it. And putting it in those terms helped me to release Instagram because I don't believe, based on the readership size and the longevity of service to the people that I have, I don't think that I need social media in order to get to a point of enoughness, given my current cost of living. And that might change, right? I didn't deactivate and delete my instagram. I put up one of those static nine grid.

Nicole Antoinette [00:43:05]:

I archived all my posts, put up a nine grid that essentially links to everything else that I'm doing. So it's basically like an online business card, right? If other people link to me, they'll be able to find the books, find the Substack, find all that kind of stuff. But part of this is I've also given myself permission to change my mind if a year from now, I'm like, you know what, there's a real reason that I would like to get back on social media. It's not like freaking Zuckerberg's not going to let me back on. And that's the other thing I have to tell myself is it's so easy to get stuck in this binary, like, well, if I quit, I've quit forever. It's like, okay, if I decide that I want to come back on social media, guess what? I'll come back. Period. The end. I tend to make things such a big deal.

Amelia Hruby [00:43:42]:

Yeah, that came up when I taught the refresh this summer. And the way it came up I thought was really telling. It was sort of in this sense of, well, I find it really annoying when I watch other people leave and come back, and I'm like, can't you just make a decision? And I'm like, yeah, but that has nothing to do with them. It's like, we can't grant ourselves that grace to change our mind, to make a different decision at a different time. And I think that also taps into what you were saying about right sizing your business or your work or your audience size. I think about this a lot with my business as well, and what I remember is like, I can only right size for right now, and it's going to change. And so I hear you saying you have right sized your business to this moment when you really needed to go into recovery and heal and clarify and make space and clear it out. And as you said, that could shift. By the time we get to the launch of your next book, you could be in a very different place emotionally, financially, and none of the decisions you make right now have to be decisions forever.

Nicole Antoinette [00:44:48]:

Yeah. And I think that we can really stress ourselves out by trying to answer the impossible question of how much money is enough forever. And I was really stuck in that as well because my current situation, my partner and I live in a house that his family owns and has owned for generations. And we don't have to pay rent or mortgage. We pay utilities to live here. And it's quite an old house that has a lot of upkeep costs, projects, stuff like that. So we're paying for all of that. But, oh my gosh, my income needs would be so much greater if that weren't the case.

Nicole Antoinette [00:45:24]:

But part of what I was doing was this is a real example. We moved into this house and I was in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, well, I need to figure out a way to earn as much money as I would need if we were to break up and I would have to pay for rent by myself. What? I'm trying to be compassionate towards myself because I get where that comes from, right? But to realize, okay, I don't see that as even a remote possibility right now. So why am I trying to stress myself out to solve a problem that isn't currently a problem? There has never in my 38 years of life been a problem that I have not found a way to solve or found a way through on my own and with support. So if in some undetermined future I am not in this partnership anymore and need to move out of this house, I will figure it out. And so that's sort of the attitude that I'm taking with a lot of this is exactly what you said of right sizing for right now. Because otherwise I'm just stuck in this constant hamster wheel of nothing's ever enough. There's never enough money, there's never enough followers, there's never enough prestige, there's never enough any of this.

Nicole Antoinette [00:46:36]:

And I just feel like I'm so grateful to be in a place where I just feel like crystal clear about some of this stuff. And one of the things that shifted for me unexpectedly was I mentioned that I made the decision this summer to write for only a paid audience on Substack. And I did that really as a self protection mechanism, that's what I felt that I needed was to write for that smaller space. I cannot tell you how much more I enjoyed the writing process for that. It felt way less overexposed. It felt like I was in a space with people who really wanted to be there. And it also grew the paid readership quite a bit. It has almost doubled.

Nicole Antoinette [00:47:20]:

And that has given me such a burst of joy and hope because I've been writing a weekly newsletter or blog with some breaks, but pretty much weekly since 2007. This is my favorite type of writing. It's my favorite type of writing. I really enjoyed writing my two books. They're both adventure memoirs, they're really niche, they're fun. But I always thought in order to be a working writer, it had to be pitching freelance pieces to other publications, which I didn't ever really want to do. I like writing for an audience that I know them and they know me or it would have to be books and big book deals. And this paid newsletter like paid essay format has freed me up to admit to myself that this is the kind of working writer that I want to be and I actually don't need to strive for something more impressive than that. If I never have an impressive byline in my life, it's really okay. I love being able to write for the people that want to be here and so that also has shifted a lot of this for me.

Amelia Hruby [00:48:22]:

Yeah, I think this is one of the special magics of Substack that I see. I do think it's actively reshaping what it means to be a working writer for folks like yourself who are coming from community spaces into making writing their living or more of their living. And for folks who did do the freelance grind, who wrote for publications and are now able to self sustain their own writing practice through this platform. And I think obviously on this show I've had critical thoughts about Substack and I still do. It's still a tech platform that has raised capital and is trying to make money.

Nicole Antoinette [00:49:00]:

And also has done some actively bad things in terms of the amount of, I don't know all of the details, but money that they have paid to acquire writers to their platform who are transphobic. There is no perfect platform, let's just say that for sure, right? I'm certainly not here to be like substack as a company is the best, right? I actually don't know anything about it, but I think there is no tool or platform like this that isn't going to be informed by big tech. And so it's like, unfortunately, again, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so we make the best choices that we can for us within those spaces. But it's really the difference between and you've done such a great job of making this clear, the difference between a business's email newsletter whose purpose is content for sure, but is marketing the offerings of that business and someone like me who the writing is the offering. Which isn't to say that I won't ever promote other things, right, that I'm gearing up for the launch of the next session of my digital coworking group. I will absolutely mention that on Substack for sure, but that's not the primary function. Like the primary function is this is a place for essay writing and that that itself is the offering and I think that that makes it a good fit for me.

Amelia Hruby [00:50:13]:

Yeah, exactly. And I think in some ways then, it's actually really helpful in clarifying because we know what we're doing in different spaces or what tools will help us do different things. Because email can mean so many different things. So, so many different things.

Nicole Antoinette [00:50:27]:

And that's why I think it's so useful and fun to just be in this curious conversation with ourselves about what feels good and why. I will tell you. So yesterday I downloaded the Instagram app for the first time since mid June and hadn't been on it in months. And I felt my heart was fluttering, like, even opening the app, I had all of these weird, buzzy feelings of what are the DMs that I've missed and what's happened and can't see the stories that people tagged you. I just had all of this adrenaline. And then I put up the posts and logged off for what will hopefully be the last time ever. And I deleted the app and the entire rest of the day, Amelia, I had this feeling, almost like looking over my shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Nicole Antoinette [00:51:06]:

Like feeling like not like I just robbed a bank, but I was getting away with something that I felt this real, embodied sense of I just did a thing that I'm not supposed to do. And I don't know not supposed to by who, right? Not supposed to? By big tech, by the powers that be who tell you what Internet marketing should be, right? It was just this sense of, I'm not supposed to do that. Something bad is going to happen. And that's so funny to me that these almost subconscious kind of insidious stories of what we are and are not allowed to do. And even I'll give you another example in a really small way. So when I started my Substack, the other Substacks that I loved to follow, almost all of them used with each post or each essay, a photo. It was usually a photo of themselves or something from their life or, like, similar to what you would post on Instagram. And so when I started my Substack, I was like, oh, that's just what you have to do.

Nicole Antoinette [00:51:57]:

You have to include a photo of yourself. And through all of this exploration, I have come to realize I actually don't like sharing photos of my life on the Internet. Period. I just don't. And when I took the break from Instagram, the big change that I made on Substack this summer is I stopped doing that. And instead, there's an artist that I love that I started putting their prints, a photo of one of their prints with each piece and showcased their art and stopped putting pictures of myself. And that changed so much for me. But again, it was this moment of, am I allowed to do this? This is the way you're supposed to use this platform.

Nicole Antoinette [00:52:28]:

But really there are very few to no rules. Everything can be an experiment. I feel so much better doing it this way and not cannibalizing every aspect of my hobbies, my house, my pets, my life, my meals, my literal face and body as photography content to make people want to pay me money. Something about that just doesn't work for me, and that's not the case. Some people love posting photos of themselves. But I guess what I'm trying to say is it's been really helpful to think of everything like an experiment and to investigate and really make known to yourself what are the rules that you're following without even realizing that you're following them.

Amelia Hruby [00:53:05]:

Yes, absolutely. And I think the more that we surface those rules for ourselves, articulate them, and then share that with other people, and then we go do whatever else we want to do, the more creative choices that we make, whether it's privately or publicly, that also, in my experience, magnetizes other people toward us. I always thought that leaving social media would be the complete end of my work on the Internet or meant that I could never be self employed. And when in fact, it has now become the hallmark it is. The most popular thing I have ever done on the Internet is talk about leaving social media, and I do it without social media, which I used to think was the only way to ever meet or find people on the Internet. And the reason I think that it worked out that way is because people are much more interested in hearing how you make choices that are really aligned and what happens after the fact and learning how we can all do that than they actually are in getting the ten steps to do the exact same thing everybody else does and getting a fraction of the results they got from doing it before you did it.

Nicole Antoinette [00:54:13]:

Yeah, I really agree. And none of these were easy decisions or simple things to get to, and it was a really long process. But I feel like one of the gifts of how awful I felt for those couple of months is that in general, I would say that one of my favorite things about myself is that my tolerance for feeling bad is actually really low. It's why I've made so many changes in my life and why I've been willing to kind of go my own path. When I don't want to do something, I really don't want to do it. And so feeling so bad, mental health wise, in a way that felt sort of out of my control, really made me think about, okay, what are the levers that I can pull? So that whatever the next phase of my work or tiny business or writing looks like on the other side of this starts, it's almost like I wanted to start with an empty plate with a blank slate. Right now, nothing needs to come forward with me. So what am I adding back in? Right, okay.

Nicole Antoinette [00:55:15]:

I want to keep writing in what format, right? That it's been not assuming that just because you've been doing something for three months, three years, 13 years, that you have to keep doing it. And I really gave myself permission to question everything, and I think that that is serving me really well. And I do not know what my 2024 offerings are going to be. How I'm going to close the gap between the money that I make on Substack and the amount of money that I need, I don't know. But I trust that I'm going to figure it out.

Amelia Hruby [00:55:43]:

Yeah, I trust that too. I mean, there are literally so many threads that I'm like, oh, I didn't mention this, and I didn't mention that, and I didn't mention this, and I want to go there, but I actually feel like we've hit a really good point to kind of wrap up this episode. I'm wondering if there is anything you might want to say to yourself in this moment where you find yourself in between despair TM and what's next? Is there anything you'd want to say to yourself here?

Nicole Antoinette [00:56:12]:

I think that I have a history, I would assume I'm not alone in this, of wanting to rush to the next thing or rush to the answer or rush to knowing what's next, as if this isn't my real life also, and I have gotten so much wisdom from this period of time or just so many little knowings that I think what I would say to myself, especially because I don't feel completely recovered from that kind of emotional, relational burnout that I mentioned. But I am over the depression that because I'm feeling better, it would be very easy to go full speed. Productivity, productivity. I have to make up for these last couple of months. I have to catch up, right? That I can almost feel myself really holding myself back in a supportive way, that there is no rush. I do still have time, and I don't have to have the perfect answer.

Nicole Antoinette [00:57:22]:

I don't have to wait to know what my entire 2024 is going to look like in my business and what all the offerings are going to be and how much I'm going to project that they're each going to make in order to just do the next right step. And I knew that the next right step was, okay, leave Instagram, change your Substack. So it's one free post a month, and everything else is paid. Okay. And in October, I'll do the next co working group. Okay, we'll see. Does that sell out? It used to sell out. If it doesn't, that tells me something about what I need to do differently with marketing.

Nicole Antoinette [00:57:55]:

But it's like, I want to know step ten before I've done step one. And so I feel like the most useful message for me is just no urgency. Go slow, one step at a time. I don't need to have some kind of master plan because also I never have. That's not my style. I think that is what's coming up for me.

Amelia Hruby [00:58:16]:

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. It feels like something I needed to hear. I'm sure many other people needed to hear. And like we've said already, there are just so many of us, I think, in the small business space right now, in the self employed space. The tiny business owners, the creators, everyone we talk to is really in this work shrug emoji moment in some way or another, and that we don't have to know what the future holds. We can just take one next step. And that's okay.

Nicole Antoinette [00:58:48]:

Yeah. Especially if you're not at a place if you're at a place where literally every single aspect of your business feels bad. I think that that's sort of a different question. But that wasn't what it was for me. I was in no way at a scorched earth moment. It was, I know the couple of things that feel really right. Let me start there. Start with what feels good. Lean into what feels good instead of trying to obsess about fixing what feels bad.

Amelia Hruby [00:59:10]:

So simple, yet so hard.

Nicole Antoinette [00:59:12]:

I mean, we'll see, right? Get back to me in a couple of months. I don't know, right? Does the other shoe drop from quitting Instagram? I don't know. I don't know.

Amelia Hruby [00:59:19]:

Yeah, who knows? But like you've already said, you will come up with other creative ways to do things, and that, I can assure everyone, is very possible, because I have done it and plenty of other people I talked to have done it. And literally all businesses before the year of approximately 2011 or whatever, they did it, too. So we can figure out ways to share our work without social media if we so choose. Well, Nicole, thank you so much for joining us. Listeners, go subscribe to Nicole's Substack. You will find her there and you will want to be there. Get her book How to Be Alone, pre-order her upcoming book, which is called What We Owe to Ourselves. And until next time, we will see you all off the grid.

[music fades in]

Amelia Hruby [01:00:04]:

Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Find links and resources in the show notes. And don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig.

This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter, and our logo is by n'Atelier Studio.

If you'd like to make a podcast of your own, we'd love to help find more about our services at softersounds.studio. Until next time, we'll see you off the grid.