Why I Ghosted

On social media and my brain

You may or may not have noticed, but I disappeared from instagram. Maybe I should have announced it, but at the time I just thought that I needed a clean break. If I ghosted you, I’m sorry and I hope you aren’t mad.

When I talk about how instagram can be bad for me, I want to start by first saying that I understand that this may be a “me problem.” I know it probably isn’t the same for everyone and that I may just be particularly susceptible to the addiction-like behaviors that make social media such a minefield for me. 

There is just something about the endless scroll of social media that gets me in its grip and doesn’t let go. I think it has something to do with my mental health struggles. I’ve always been an anxious person, even as a little girl, and that anxious personality blew up into a full fledged mental health crisis in my teens and young adulthood. I’m doing a bit better these days but when the anxious feelings come back, as they always do, my first instinct is to dissociate, doing anything and everything to turn those thoughts off. This has always been my go-to coping mechanism, but it’s gotten more and more sticky with the advent of algorithm based social media feeds. Now, it’s all too easy to stick my nose in my phone and turn off my brain, blasting it with so much stimulation that forming coherent thoughts of my own becomes impossible.

As a way to derail a burgeoning panic attack, it’s extremely effective. 

Perhaps—and I say this with some trepidation—a bit TOO effective.

For someone who finds their own mind a dangerous place to be left alone in for too long, the social media scroll represents a mental escape hatch. And with the escape hatch so nearby at all times, just a tap and a swipe away, it’s hard to resist. I’ve found, over the years, that even though I am managing my panic attacks fairly well with this habit, I am actually losing the ability to sit in my discomfort and work through it. I’m a little bitter about this because that ability was extremely hard won for me. My therapy and hospitalization bills throughout the years will attest to that. I don’t want to lose it.

As it turns out, just because a coping mechanism works doesn’t mean it’s helping. Not in the long run. (Who woulda thought?)

So I knew I wanted to replace this coping mechanism with something that wasn’t going to deteriorate the progress I have made so far in my mental health journey. The simplest answer was just to uninstall the apps and stop using them altogether.

That’s what I did, and it’s why I ghosted y’all. 

I’ll tell ya, it wasn’t that easy at first. I felt like I was dealing with a digital version of phantom limb syndrome. I left my phone in my bathroom and tried my best to forget about it. It did get easier over time, though the fear that I was losing my ability to cope with anxious feelings without digital dissociation was definitely well founded. I’ve been more anxious since deleting social media but it’s been a productive discomfort. I’m working on it rather than avoiding it. 

The trouble is that just deleting all social media is definitely a “throwing the baby out with the bath water” kind of situation. The social scroll is definitely a dangerous trap for me, but social media actually is more than just the scroll. Being connected with friends is not a dangerous trap. Learning from people who freely share their experiences and knowledge is not a dangerous trap. Meeting people who share your interests and passions is not a dangerous trap.

Do y’all remember the days, not so very long ago, when our social media platforms didn’t even have feeds? Back on MySpace you had to manually go to each individual friend’s page to see what they were up to. It was the same on Facebook for a long time. This was back when these platforms were referred to as “social networking” sites rather than social media. The shift in terminology accurately illustrates the shift in behavior that these platforms were geared towards, from communicating with others to consuming media. The main news feed is a more recent invention made to make the consuming aspect of the platform all the more effortless. The introduction of algorithms to the news feed fluffed it up from just being updates from your friends to being that plus everything you might possibly be into, making it possible to scroll forever and never run out of things to fill your brain with. 

If I didn’t want to toss the baby (genuine social connection) out with the bath water (dissociative scrolling) I needed to be more specific about what I was cutting out of my life. It’s not the social network, it’s the news feed, it’s the scrolling.

So I unfollowed everyone. 

Yes, everyone. 

Even my mom. 

Even my best friend from real life. 

My instagram following count is zero. 

My news feed now is just my own posts and ads. As such, it’s very easy to ignore and not at all as compelling and addictive as it was before. 

Maybe you don’t need to do this. Maybe you can follow a bunch of people and not get pulled into the algorithm like I do. I’m just saying, for me, eliminating the news feed altogether makes it possible for me to use just the parts of the platform that are good for me.

Because, truthfully, I don’t need to be reminded who my friends are. I don’t need to be reminded what accounts I find motivational or informative. I don’t need to be spoon fed my own interests. I am actually perfectly capable of feeding myself. And by going to individual accounts when I remember to check in on them, that’s exactly what I’m doing. 

Now, instead of being inexorably drawn to a newsfeed, I can go about my day and work on my mental health, and when I see something that makes me think of my friend and wonder what she’s up to, I can go check her profile and watch her stories and send a dm and chat about her latest post or whatever is on my mind.

You know, kind of like a normal ass relationship. 

The way I see it, the algorithmic news feed is like standing in the middle of a huge crowded town square. Yes, your friends are there, but so is everyone else. It’s loud. It’s busy. It’s mind-numbing. It’s exciting for a while but you can only stand in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare for so long. 

Having a few bookmarks in my browser to the accounts of my friends and people I find inspiring is more like making phone calls. Yeah, I may not get all the latest updates instantaneously because I’m not going to sit here and hover over people's accounts constantly refreshing their pages, but allowing myself to be out of the loop until we touch base actually allows for those one-on-one catch up conversations that bring your relationships closer together. 

Anyway. We’ll see if this works out.