I joined Instagram in 2011, and last week I scheduled all my accounts to be deleted. It takes Meta 30 days to fully delete accounts. Maybe, like an abusive partner, they believe I will return once I begin to feel the pain of separation.
Fair enough. It’s not nothing to sever a structure that lasted almost two decades if I count Facebook. I miss posting stories, engaging friend’s posts with reactive emojis, and the ability to flirt with and send memes to friends, family and strangers alike.
But less than a week into my departure, I am all the more determined to leave Meta behind because I now have access to an inner landscape that has been missing since 2008. I know this is an emerging awareness, and whatever I feel or think now will change as I spend time tracing it. So in this first week and I am devoting my attention to whatever insights are emerging. I am mapping the gap, trusting that, like land, my inner world will re-wild itself into a new ecosystem.
Here is what I have observed so far:
Day one off Meta was like a digital reset. It was a much needed mental and creative purge giving me access to my mind and imagination which has been otherwise tethered to the constant stream of content that pours through Instagram. I had a small taste of this when I did Lights Out Meta earlier this year, but the finality of deleting an account really changes the outlook. This is not a break. This is a severing. This space is permanent.
Then, three days in, I began to notice how all my creative content has been platform specific. I kept feeling this impulse like, “ooh, this would make a good story” but I am no longer telling stories through Instagram. Leaving Meta is an invitation to consider how my “content” is not platform specific. This is such a basic idea, but also, so insidiously difficult to untangle since the way we weave digital social fabric is structured for the apps that feature content, rather than the creators who weave the fabric. Something I am pondering.
And today, day five off Meta, I am making an intentional effort to “mind the gap” that Instagram has made. I am mapping the spaces, the absences–where and what is missing with Meta no longer dictating the terms.
Some of these thoughts are able to make it into a blog, but some are not. There are clever stories I want to share on my phone, but nowhere to post them. So they are sitting there until I figure out what I am doing. Or, maybe, they will never make it off my phone. Part of this is also accepting that a gap is a gap. There will be things missing now. Maybe I will not post stories anymore, and maybe the trade off is access to my inner creative world that is not platform specific.
For now I am just noticing things. It is still too early know what all is able to grow in this now vacant lot of my mind. I am in no hurry to quickly fill it up.
Alexandra Ross Works 