12/18/20 - New Beginnings

2020 has been quite a year, hasn't it? It feels as though we've bounced from month to month in a state of bated breath until we finally arrived to December and Christmas and nothing can happen now, right?

Wrong. 

Everyone I know and love is abandoning Instagram and it's such a relief to see it happen! Abandoning the platform has been an idea eating away at me since last fall. In fact, I had a domain name reserved to build a real blog this year, but with my pregnancy and lack of doing much of anything it never came to fruition. Imagine my surprise when I hopped on to my favorite time-suck yesterday to see a handful of my favorite accounts announce their leaving, mostly due to the updated terms of service although some had other reasons. I find myself in the latter category. I believe that if you use the internet in any capacity, you've already lost what social media is looking to take, the new terms simply spell it out better. Our phones already track everything we do and say - just after Thanksgiving I was watching YouTube on my TV, made a comment about needing to check L.L.Bean for baby long johns and no sooner had the thought left my lips than an ad for the aforementioned store popped up on my screen. With a coupon no less! Thanks big brother!

My desire to leave is related to my struggle for simplicity, for building real connections with my family and community. It's also related to a struggle I've had within myself; frankly, Instagram has made me stupid. While I have derived some benefit, it's become more than a little obvious that my stacks of unread books, piles of unfinished projects, the relationships left unpursued, and the feeling of having all the tabs open are a result of my constant scrolling. I'm scattered, irritable, and incapable of forming a thought much of the time. Where I once loved getting into the process of things, I find myself rushing for the end result with no regard for time and care only to be disappointed when things don't turn out. 

After a lot of consideration, I realized that leaving Instagram holds only positives for me. I can still pursue the beautiful reflections of others via their blogs (something I'm very much looking forward to) while I work on re-growing relationships along with my attention span. Although there are many people I'll leave behind, I find myself more thankful for the brief time we shared than disappointed at our parting. And with that I can finally breath a sigh of relief.