on social media getting in the way of living

As the snow swirls around our cottage, turning down the volume of the world by covering it in a thick blanket of marshmallow-like flakes, I sit down behind my desk, wrapped in a woollen shawl, surrounded by burning candles. I open my laptop for the first time in ten days. Being away from my computer and my phone to celebrate Christmas with our family and friends back in the Netherlands made me realise something about how I’ve used social media over the past couple of years.

Next May marks ten years of me being on Instagram. What started as a journal to document something that brought me joy, one square photo a day, morphed into a tool to connect with others and share about my blog and photography business. But while my following grew, my health declined. And so did my desire to share.

For the past few years, I’ve been at the point where I hardly participate any more. I simply consume. For hours and hours, I’m seeing person after person after person after person doing wonderful things: sharing their art, voicing their opinions on things that matter to me, teaching about things that are difficult to navigate. Meanwhile, my ideas never make it out of my notebook.

Because make no mistake, I’ve put all my thoughts and wishes and hopes to paper. And if I wanted to, I could spend every single day writing and thinking and matching my words to photographs that live somewhere in a folder on a hard disk – unedited and never even looked at.

I know why this shift happened. Being present online became too complicated. You not only have to write the article or create your photos, you also have to maintain a website, start a newsletter, optimise your content for 487 different social media platforms that all require something different, you have to interact with your audience and make sure to reply to their comments. And along the way, it just became easier to be quiet.

But in that shift, I lost something of myself. I love thinking and writing and creating and connecting with strangers. So this year, I’m committing to rediscovering the parts of myself I have lost. And one way I’m going to do that, is by putting my pen to paper – or rather, my fingertips to my keypad – and simply write. Not with the pressure to publish, but to get my thoughts out of my head onto paper. Because I’m done hiding away, spending my days consuming what others create, while I have so much to share.