Today marks the one-year mark of me leaving social media. To say that this past year has been transformative for me would be putting it mildly. I’ve grown more mentally, emotionally, physically, and creatively in the past year than any other time of my life. I’ve come to learn that there was a significant amount of trauma in my past that needed to be addressed and worked through and through that process I learned to separate my sense of worth from what I can create or do for others. I’ve learned to appreciate those who have loved me and supported me unconditionally through the years. I began the process of tearing down walls within myself, letting past pains and fears intermingle with current hopes and aspirations. This process, which I refer to as the un-curation of my life, has brought me to a level of peace and self-acceptance that I hadn’t before known and I feel ready to engage the world in a new way.
In the year leading up to me leaving social media I had been feeling an immense amount of anxiety, but I didn’t understand what was causing the feeling or why it had been ramping up. Nothing seismic had happened in my business or personal life. I was creating work that I was proud of and I was having some great breakthrough moments in my career, in part because of Instagram, so why did I feel so shitty every time I opened up the app?
When I had first created my Instagram account in 2012 it was a place where I posted my iPhone shots, pictures of my kids, and little moments of my daily life. It was a scrapbook. I already had a website as well as a blog, so it made sense to me to use Instagram as a photographic third place, if you will. Over the years, however, it began to replace my blog and became the place where I first shared my new work. If I had just wrapped a shoot that I felt really proud of, for example, it didn’t feel like it meant anything until I could get it up on the ‘gram and get it validated by an audience. Since Instagram had basically changed the social media game and the whole world seemed to now be on there and anyone could be potentially watching, I had better only post my best work. Thus began the hyper-curation of my life.
By mid-2017 I was all in. I was planning out my posts. I knew which images would be posted in what order over the following two weeks. I knew the optimal times to post them given the day of the week. I couldn’t have too many black and white images drop in a row. I needed to throw in some subtle artsy shit every now and then to remind people that I have emotional depth. Did that image I posted three days ago ever make it over 500 likes? Archive that failure. My aggressive curation and self-analysis was not only crippling my own creativity but it was making me a mean, judgmental SOB with the attention span of a toddler.
So why was I suddenly so focused on needing others to like my work/me? I mentioned earlier that I’ve worked through a lot of trauma this past year. I now know that this was over thirty years in the making. The physical and emotional abuse that I experienced as a child— which I didn’t even know was abuse until a couple years ago— had taught me the message that I was on my own. I needed to do whatever I could to survive, so I did whatever I could to cope. When I was at home I survived by escaping into fantasy. I would watch the same movies over and over again, often daily. I was unknowingly creating my own, safe world. I knew my worth in that world. I controlled the narrative in that world. When I was at school I got by thanks to the arts. By second grade I had made up my mind that I would be an artist when I grew up. By eleventh grade I was taking as many art classes as I could, photography being one of them. The rest is history.
My propensity for fantasy and obsession lent itself beautifully to my development as a photographer. This was who I was now. This was my way out. My survival for real and not just fantasy. I went off to college, got my degree in photography, got married, launched my own business doing what I love for a living. It was all coming together. I had a couple kids, bought a house, published some books, opened a studio, and was really starting to feel my worth.
The flip side to my career choice was that I would easily get immersed in my work. As in buried. Especially once I had a studio of my own. I began shooting personal stuff daily. Some days I’d shoot three or four sessions just to have something to work on. I couldn’t be still because I didn’t know who I was if I stopped. Though I produced some of my best work during this time, there was a fragility and pain under everything I did. Many times I’d find that I was crying while I sat, editing in Lightroom, though I had no idea why. What I was to come to learn was that my survival and identity was so enmeshed in what I created that I couldn’t separate myself from my art. So what happened when my work was rejected or, much less, ignored?
While all this was playing out in my business life, my children were growing older. My son was reaching an age that brought to mind my own childhood experiences. The inner child in me began wrestling it’s way to the surface. Is it safe to come out yet, he wondered?
By autumn of 2018 I was getting a bounding heart rate whenever I even thought about Instagram, but had no idea why. I felt rejection constantly, which led to paranoia, which caused me to isolate myself, which perpetuated the cycle. It was all made worse by the thought that I needed to keep my accounts in order to survive as a business. By February 2019 I didn’t care anymore. It was either my sanity or Instagram. I chose sanity and deleted all of my social media accounts.
Within a couple of weeks of deleting my social media accounts, everything (fear, paranoia, depression, anxiety, etc.) bubbled up to the surface. I went through a massive identity crisis, not knowing who I was apart from my photography. Even though I was still creating personal work and shooting for clients it felt like what I was doing no longer mattered since there wasn’t an audience right there to validate it.
Now that I had an excess of time on my hands and my old methods of coping had been hamstrung, I needed to find a new, healthier way to pass the time between gigs. I took an intro to climbing class at a local gym and was hooked. I began climbing 2-3 times a week. The physical activity did wonders for my brain. I so needed it to ground myself and get out of my head. Climbing inspired me to get my road bike tuned up and I started cycling to the climbing gym.
I’ll be honest and say that it was scary for me to be new at something. When you climb you are often climbing with a partner. I felt an almost constant need to apologize or make excuses for not being better. It’s so hard for me to fail in front of others. Every time I showed up to climb I felt that fear, but every time I pushed through and felt a level of accomplishment that I had never felt before. It’s ok to fail, I began to learn. It’s ok to need and rely on others.
As I was growing physically and mentally, I still had the emotional side of things to sort out. Though I’ve been in therapy for a decade I felt that I needed something more regular to help me sort out what I was feeling. In March I began attending a support group called Adult Survivors of Childhood Trauma (ASCA). This is an ever-changing group of 10-15 people that meets weekly at a campus church to discuss how they’re coping with their pasts. In that meeting there were men and women of all ages and races sitting together, openly sharing a vast range of traumas that they endured. Despite the diversity of details, how we all dealt with the abuse and how the trauma had manifested in our subsequent lives so similarly was mind-blowing to me. I grew close to some of the members, texting with them throughout my week. If I was doing better I would share different things that had been helping me. If I was really down I’d reach out to see if they could give me some advice on how to keep going.
After several months of attending the group I felt ready to face my abusers. I confronted them, telling them how what they had done had almost ruined me and my family. How even though I have forgiven them I resent the fact that I have to work daily on myself so as not to act out the same behavior that caused my trauma in the first place, thus perpetuating the abuse to those I love. Though it was a brutal process, I survived it and it’s no longer something I have to carry alone. It’s finally out of me and my inner child is at rest.
So here we are in a new decade. I know who I am apart from my photography. I’ve learned how to be more present with my wife and kids, which is something I’m especially grateful for. I’m learning to be okay at being new at something. I have accepted what I can’t change and am leaning into what I can. I am ready to move forward into the next decade by living an un-curated life. I’ve decided to return to social media but in a way that reflects these changes in my life: by using it the way I did when I first joined, populating my feed with iPhone shots, pictures of my kids, and moments of my daily life (likely quite a bit of climbing and cycling). Essentially my life, un-curated.