🪦 Grieving Social Media — How to Process Your Feelings About IG/Facebook/Twitter/TikTok

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].

[1:18] Hello and welcome or welcome back to Off The Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients.

Or as I like to think of it, a show about launching, running, or growing a successful, sustainable business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.

I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. I am the founder of Softer Sounds Podcast Studio, the co-founder of the Lifestyle Business League, and most recently, I just launched a new membership portal for off-the-grid listeners and fans called The Interweb.

The Interweb combines on-demand courses with live quarterly calls to help all of us run our business with our values intact while supporting ourselves financially, energetically, creatively, spiritually, however we're needing support in these times.

[2:11] I wanna kick off this episode by thanking all of you who have joined The Interweb during our founding membership period.

We just opened the doors on Friday the 13th and have already welcomed in dozens of folks who are excited about stepping back from social media and growing their business in the process.

I am literally eating a celebratory cupcake as I record this, or at least my celebratory cupcake is right in front of me with a big bite taken out of it. Because I am so grateful.

And I believe in celebrating these moments. I hope that you're celebrating the small and the big successes in your business as well.

[2:52] So once again, thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who's joined The Interweb so far.

I am so pumped for you to explore the on-demand courses that are already in the portal.

And I can't wait to support you on our live calls next year. I also want to highlight that I will be offering a free coaching day to Interweb members when we hit our first 50 members. So that'll be one day where I open up a ton of 30-minute appointments and Interweb members have a first-come first-served opportunity to schedule a call with me for free, which you normally can't do.

So if you're interested in joining, I think we'll hit that threshold pretty soon.

It's a good time to get in, help us hit 50 members, take advantage of that free coaching day.

The membership rate will be going up on November 2nd. So go ahead and join us by November 1st.

Okay, I am going to take a big bite of my celebratory cupcake and then let's dive in to today's episode.

[dive sound]

[4:00] I think that it's fitting that today's episode started with a moment of celebration, with a celebratory moment, because our topic for today is, in my mind, kind of the twin or the shadow twin of celebration.

[4:20] And that topic is grief. So in today's episode, I wanna talk about grieving social media.

[4:28] And this topic came up in my conversation with Nicole Antoinette.

And in that episode, Nicole shared so much that resonated with me, and I know resonated with all of you because I heard from so many of you that it resonated.

But something specific she shared that I wanted to go back to is this idea that...

[4:50] There was so much she loved about social media, and she had to step away from it anyway.

She wasn't leaving social media from a place of, "it's all awful, it's all horrible, I reject this, it's the worst thing ever, I'm leaving now."

She was leaving from a place of, "there is so much here that I once loved and still love, but I am leaving anyway. I am stepping back even though there is goodness still in this space."

And that really stuck with me and I've been sitting with it in the weeks since we recorded that conversation and thinking a lot about how often our cultural conversations about social media are very black and white. Like social media is good or social media is bad. You have to have social media for your business or you cannot be on social media for your business.

You know, we really polarize it when in fact, I think that the joy and the grief, as I said before, they're two sides of the same coin, perhaps, or inextricably linked.

And that's part of why the decision to leave social media can feel so challenging.

[6:01] So in today's episode, I want to weave together a few different articles I've read, things that I've been thinking about, and of course, strategies that you can implement for grieving social media. And I think that this grieving process will help all of us come to better clarity on whether or not social media is right for us. Rather than just, you know, listening to any given like talking head at any moment, myself included. Rather than just being like, "well, Amelia said leave social media, so I'm going to leave social media." I actually want to go deeper and help us start to sink into if it's right for us to leave social media. Because just because it was right for me to leave social media doesn't mean it's right for you to leave social media. In fact, I would say that most of the people I encounter through Off the Grid or that have become members of the Interweb, many if not most of them are still on social media, but they're interested in relating to it differently, investing in it less, or stepping back from it slowly.

So again, we're rejecting the black and white here. We're going deep into the gray. And from that, I hope that we'll get in touch with more honesty, more clarity, and more sureness about our next steps with social media, with marketing, with our business, as we start to wrap 2023 and head into 2024.

[7:32] So let me begin kind of weaving the web of what's been coming up for me around grieving social media lately.

[7:40] I've already mentioned my conversation with Nicole Antoinette, but I actually think these reflections might have started during my conversation with Lauren Ash of Black Girl in Om. She was on the podcast earlier this season to talk about her experience leaving social media, and in one of the prep calls we had for that interview, we spent quite a bit of time chatting about all our favorite things about Instagram. How much we used to love taking photos of ourselves and sharing them, how many friends we've made on the platform, how fun it used to be to write captions and to be up in other people's comments, how we would make friends in the comments of people's posts, how we were able to connect with people who shared interests and passions and dreams with us, even when we didn't live in the same place. In fact, how well we were able to meet people through Instagram specifically, but social media at large, like people we never would have met otherwise.

[8:40] And I feel this really acutely. Like if you've listened to Off the Grid, you know that my dear friend, grace allerdice is someone that I run a course with. She's a spiritual guide of mine and I would never have met her if it weren't for Instagram. Like quite literally, we met on Instagram. And so for me, this conversation about grieving social media started in reminiscing about the joy of social media and how I used to love spending my time on Instagram.

[9:16] And I would even say like how much I loved spending time on TikTok as well, or how in high school I used to love spending time on MySpace. Remember that one? I spent hours coding my profile and picking the perfect song, and curating my top eight, and I loved it. And then I loved being on Facebook and keeping up with old friends and remembering everybody's birthday and like checking out my crush and seeing what they were up to, right? Like I loved that.

And so again, any conversation about grieving social media for me starts with the joy of social media. Because when we remember the things that brought us joy and we remember those experiences, those practices, those people, that's when we can start to realize what might be different now and what we miss. What is missing now that we miss from before?

And this is something I've started to see more and more conversations around online over the course of this year. So I was really struck by a newsletter that Kate Lindsay of Embedded wrote called, We're All Lurkers Now. If you're a Substack person, you probably saw it floating around earlier in the summer.

[10:38] It's linked in the show notes and I wanna read an excerpt of it because I think it really speaks to a shift that has happened in social media that gets at the sort of thing we miss, that we're missing, that we're grieving at this point.

So in that post, Kate Lindsay is writing about breakup announcements and how people will like put these in even their close friends' stories and be like, we're breaking up, we don't want to talk about it. And that's kind of the impetus for her to write this essay. So here's what she writes.

"I couldn't stop thinking about the thought process of turning to social media, emphasis on the social, and asking no one to talk to you. This idea that we can safely expect to insulate ourselves from responses to our posts, even on close friends, a feature that was designed for sharing only with people you presumably trust and feel comfortable with, is indicative of how rapidly the social media environment has changed in the last three years. We're all just throwing up billboards now, unless we're the ones passively viewing the billboards. In other words, lurkers. This echoes a wider sentiment I've seen creeping into my personal feeds. No one really posts anymore. No one's having fun. And it's partly for this reason that no one seems excited about any of the newer apps and features, like threads, that keep popping up despite everything. So now social media's almost 5 billion users are not turning to talk to each other, but each turning outward, shouting their skincare routines or restaurant recommendations or opinions into a void. We're all just online for ourselves, which means there are fewer and fewer people to be the audience, to like, comment, or otherwise interact. As a result, our outward-facing posts are getting less engagement and we're less inclined to share them. We're growing silent, lurking, sitting in these digital rooms out of habit and not because we really want to be there."

[12:35] So much to unpack in what she's written there. But I think for me, what really stood out, is that she's pointing to the shift toward lurking, the shift from talking to each other to turning outward toward the void. And what's missing then, what we miss is connectivity. We miss connecting with other people. And we go back into these digital rooms, as she said, only to find them feeling empty, even when seemingly there are so many people there. And to me, this is one of the main things I see and hear people grieving now, is grieving the loss of connection on social media or grieving the social nature of social media. And I think that it points to something even deeper, which is that social media is shifting what it means to be social. It is rewriting our social habits toward turning outward instead of turning toward each other.

[13:40] And certainly, plenty of people have made these critiques. I'm not here to say I'm the first person saying this. In fact, I'm just pointing toward Kate Lindsay saying this, but I want to pull this in to our conversation about grieving social media. Because so often, I think when people think about stepping away from the app or leaving the app, they're like, "it's just an app, I shouldn't have such a hard time leaving." Like that's something I hear over and over again. "Why is it so hard for me to leave an app?" And I think one reason for that would be all of the literature around the addictive nature of social media and how it changes our brain chemistry. But I wanna also point toward this other reason, which is that when we say that, we're actually diminishing everything that social media has meant to us. Like, of course, it's hard to leave this digital room where we met some of our best friends and shared some of the best moments of our life. Of course it's hard to leave that place. It's like moving out of one of your favorite places you've ever lived. Of course that's hard.

[14:43] And it's not just hard on a brain chemistry level. It's hard on an emotional level. It's hard on an embodied level. It's hard on a nervous system level. It's hard in so many ways.

And it's hard because we have to acknowledge and move through the grief. We have to grieve it. And we have to give ourselves space to grieve it and not trivialize our desire to leave or why it's hard to leave or the feelings that come up when we want to leave.

[15:13] So that's one piece of grieving social media, recognizing what social media gave us, recognizing the joy, recognizing everything we treasured and gained from social media, so that we can make space to grieve it, so that we can acknowledge its prominence in our lives and grieve its lack of permanence in our lives. And a part of that grief very well might be anger. I feel angry at Meta that they so deeply changed Instagram. To turn it into a profit machine that sucked all of the social connection out of it. I'm mad about that. And part of my grieving process has to be recognizing that anger, recognizing that loss. When I left Instagram, I closed a door on making another friend the way that I made friends with Grace. And that is sad for me. That makes me feel sad, and it makes me feel angry, and it makes me feel so many emotions that are all a part of my grief.

[16:26] So this is where I would like to invite you into a practice.

[16:32] Something that I've done in the process of leaving social media and since leaving social media is try to acknowledge the joy that came up on these various platforms I was a part of, to be clear about what I will miss or do miss about them, and then to take a step toward what I will not miss about them.

So here's a practice I'd like to invite you into.

I would love for you to make a list of every social media platform you've been on. Here's my list. I've been on MySpace, I've been on Facebook, I've been on Twitter, I've been on Snapchat, I've been on Instagram, and I've been on TikTok. I'm probably forgetting some. I did a very brief stint on Vine that I barely remember. But that's my list.

I would invite you to pause this episode or to take a moment in the future, make your own list. What are the social media platforms that you have been active on? Write them all down.

Then from that list, I'd invite you to write down: What brought you joy about those platforms? What brought me joy about MySpace? What brought me joy about Twitter? If that question feels tough, you could change it up a little bit. What did I love about MySpace? What do I love about Instagram? You know, if you're still active, it's present tense. If you've left it behind, it's past tense. But start with a list of all the platforms you've been active on, and then write down the things that brought you joy, the things you loved about each one.

[18:00] If you can't come up with anything right away, give yourself some space. I'm imagining that if you were spending time there, there must have been at least something that you are enjoying about it, or I hope that for you.

[18:15] Now, let's go to that same list with a slightly different question. What do you miss or would you miss about that platform if or when you left? So what do I miss about MySpace? What do I miss about Instagram? If you're thinking about leaving TikTok, what would you miss about TikTok? So go through the same list of social platforms and write down what you do or would miss if, you were to leave or when you have left them.

[18:50] And then we'll return to the list one more time with another prompt. And that's going to be things you absolutely do not miss or would not miss about them were you to leave.

So things I absolutely don't miss about MySpace. I would never miss about Facebook.

Again, your list will be unique to you, but let me walk you through how I would do this for one platform, just as an example. So Instagram is the common favorite around here, so I'll do it for Instagram. So I'm starting with ways Instagram brought me joy or things I loved about Instagram. As I've already mentioned, I made so many good friends on Instagram. I loved sharing pictures of my dog on Instagram. I really enjoyed the way Instagram invited me to consider small moments about my day and share them on the platform instead of of just rushing past everything.

[19:48] Those are just a few examples. Now, things I miss about Instagram since I've already left.

I miss knowing what my friends are up to day to day. I don't text with most of my friends every day. So I don't always know what they're up to. And I miss that. I miss having a place to share audiograms from the podcast. I shared that in my conversation with Nicole, but it's true. I make these really cute graphics to share with guests, but they don't always share them. And I I wish they saw the light of day more. So I miss having a place to share those small moments, whether they be a small moment from a podcast or a small moment from my life. I miss that.

And now we can move to the third prompt, things I absolutely do not miss about Instagram. Like I absolutely do not miss knowing how many followers I have. That has taken so much psychic weight off my shoulders. I don't miss it. And I have not replaced it with another metric. It's just gone. There's just no metric that's giving me my worth these days. I also do not miss the compare and despair trap that we all fall into, but I definitely also fell into on Instagram. I don't miss that at all.

[21:07] So I invite you into this practice because for me, it helps start to map the arc from joy to grief to what's next. It takes us into what we loved about social media platforms, what we miss about them, or will miss about them if we leave them, or do miss about them while we're still on them because they changed, toward what we will not miss, what we are ready to leave behind.

And writing all of this down starts to map that path for you. But there might be a big difference between seeing it on paper and feeling ready for all of it in your body.

[21:47] You know, for me, it took me months to come to the decision to leave social media. Mentally, I was there. I knew. But emotionally and in my body, I was not ready. I was way too afraid. I had way too many feelings. I couldn't process them. I couldn't handle them. I couldn't, enact them. I was just kind of mired in this confusion. I was stuck in this sort of liminal space between knowing that leaving was the right thing for me and feeling capable of doing it.

[22:17] And that is the space of grief. And when I think about that space, I'm reminded of something that I just heard on another podcast.

I was listening to Whiskey Fridays with Kate Tyson, and Sebene Selassie was on a recent episode. Sebene is an amazing, amazing, amazing human, a spiritual practitioner, a meditation teacher, also a Living Systems alum. And she said something on this episode that like really stuck with me. And I went and grabbed out of the transcript because I was like, I need to hear this more often. So I want to share with all of you.

On the podcast, she said, "for me, it's really important to understand embodied engaged ways of participating with grief that include ritual and voice and movement and space and time.

For me, what's been missing a lot from the larger conversation around grief is that it becomes only sort of a psycho-emotional process and excludes all of these other elements, including the elements and nature and all of these other things that can be a part of of our process with grief."

[23:28] And when I heard that, I was reminded that I can't just grieve in my mind. I have to feel it and move it through my body. And I can do that through these ways that Sebene mentions, ritual and voice and movement and space and time. And I don't have to do that alone. I can do it with the elements and nature and other people.

Something else she points out in that episode is the difference between grieving and mourning.

One way that's often explained is that grieving is our internal or personal reaction to loss, and mourning are the outward responses. So grieving is that sort of dark gray swirl of feelings I couldn't make sense of that I mentioned a moment ago. But mourning is the process through which I share that outwardly, I express, I invite other people in, I develop practices.

That is mourning.

In my experience of leaving social media, grief was that deep period of turmoil, but mourning is what happened when I announced it and then spent two months sharing with my community why I decided to leave, what changes I was making, what I was worried about, what I was excited about. All of that was a mourning process.

[24:52] And this takes me to a new layer of my advice to not ghost your followers, which again, I'm not judging anyone who ghosts to their followers. But sometimes I think in the way that we leave social media, we might do a sort of all-or-nothing approach because we're afraid to grieve. And it doesn't mean that you have to mourn it with your followers on social media the way that I did, but I still think we'll need to grieve it. We all need to grieve that loss.

[25:21] And what's coming up for me as I say this and as I apply this grief and mourning lens to leaving social media is I feel in my body the resistance coming up that I mentioned earlier. I feel this, "it's just social media. I didn't lose a person. I'm not grieving a death of someone. It's just social media. Why do I feel like it needs all of this?" I feel that resistance coming up.

And I think, again, I just want to re-center myself in the fact that social media, for me, Instagram, it is where I spent the entirety of my 20s establishing who I wanted to be in the world.

And that's a big fucking deal. I don't have to trivialize that. It was a big deal to me, and I needed to grieve it. And I think so many of us need that too. And we deny ourselves that space to grieve. And that can leave us in this limbo of logging out and never looking at it again, but feeling weird about that, or not actually leaving because we don't want to face that. But there are ways that we can step through that when we're ready to.

[26:43] Because the other thing that I know personally about grieving is that there is no prescribed timeline. With the exercise that I shared earlier, I talked about how with those reflection questions, we can kind of chart the path toward leaving social media. But what I can't tell you is what timeline any of that will happen on. For me, there were years between all of that joy social media brought me and then realizing what I was missing there. And then there were months and months between realizing what I was missing there and realizing what I absolutely would not miss and was ready to let go of. And that's just my timeline.

For you, maybe it's days. I don't know. I'm here to support you in a real quick process. Social media might have meant different things to you. And so leaving it feels different. Or you might be like, Amelia, I think it's going to take me about 10 more years to leave social media. And I'm like, great. This is happening on your timeline. I'm not here to rush you. And I'm not here to slow you down. But I am here to invite you to make space for any grief that's arising as you consider stepping back or stepping away from one or more social media platforms.

[27:52] And to throw a huge whole other thing into the mix, my friends -- a cousin of grief is fear. So if you're feeling a lot of fear coming up, grief is probably coming right along with it.

If you're feeling grief, there's probably a bunch of fear right there too. And rather than fight those feelings, I would invite you to surrender to them with support, with care, with love, but still to surrender and to be open to what they are telling you. That's the only way we will alchemize them, we will transmute them, we will actually move down this path from the joy through the grief of social media.

[28:49] I think that promise of alchemy is where I'd like to leave us today.

In the show notes, you will find links to essays and podcasts I mentioned. I highly encourage you to go listen to them and to take away your own insights, which will likely be different than mine. And if this episode really resonated with you, and you want more support, stepping into conversation with fear and with grief, then I do want to invite you to join The Interweb.

Because of an amazing visualization that Grace created for us to clear the fear around stepping back from social media.

[29:34] It's really beautiful. In it, you get to visit the home of your business. You get to step into the room where social media lives and you get to have a conversation with it and open yourself up to the fears that may be a part of that conversation, to the grief that may be a part of that conversation. And it's just a really powerful visualization, which I can say personally, and I can attest to from the Refresh friends who have experienced it over the past two years and also gotten so much out of it. I can't recommend it enough. And I'm really honored that Grace allowed me to include it in the Interweb membership. So So head there if you want more support sitting with and clearing fear and grief around changing your relationship to social media.

And just thank you so much for listening to this episode of Off The Grid.

We have one more episode left in season two, and then I will be signing off for a much needed rest.

I can't wait to be back here with you soon. And until next time, I will see you Off the Grid and on The Interweb.

[music fades in]

Amelia Hruby [00:30:04]:

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.