#26 The courage to listen to ourselves
Recovering is a free and paid weekly newsletter. If you just want to check it out and read free offerings, you can become a free subscriber. If you find yourself reading this regularly and get something from it, consider becoming a patron. This gives you access to all my essays and podcasts, 10 curated recommendations weekly, ability to comment, Hip Sobriety archives, and it helps me make a living. If you cannot afford a subscription, email contact@hollywhitaker.com and let me know you can’t afford it and want full access (no further explanation, please).
I took an Instagram hiatus in April 2021. When I did, I explained in my requisite “taking a break!” post that I needed to go be lost. What that post didn’t say was that I was really, really fucked up, and I needed to be that in private. The post also didn’t mention that being extremely fucked up, and feeling like you are still supposed to manage the veneer of your life so that you don’t lose your career, was fucked squared.
When I came back to Instagram in December of last year it was with trepidation, disinterest, and some insane idea that too much time had passed and that I Owed It To The Internet, or to my career, to once again slap on Instagram. 2021 was by all accounts the entire worst year of my life—and this includes the year I pretended not to be drunk during the workday (when I was) and racked up $10,000 in credit card debt on California Pizza Kitchen. By last December, even though I’d taken that long extended break from Instagram and really being any kind of an effective human, I was still a terrified, grieving, frozen, confused, depressed, lonely, anxious, tired human being who couldn’t recognize herself at all. And I had the very real and convincing thought that I needed to get my shit together enough to be on social media.
So I went back to Instagram. And I tried to make it work. And it hurt. And I left again this past May.
Nothing has made me feel more fucked up than this. And to be clear, it is not the being fucked up that’s the problem, but the idea that our grief and experience of actual life is a liability for our social media presence, or our curated image, or our ability to make a future living. I felt flawed not because I was in a meltdown, but because I couldn’t passably pretend that I wasn’t.
All the arguments that have ever been made about how terrible social media is are correct and relatable. Like everyone else who has written about it, I can confirm it eats time, sucks you into a joyless delusional reality that masks itself as fun, makes you feel like a fraud, makes you compare your insides to other people’s very filtered outsides, validates the worst fears you have about yourself, shapes you into a socially passable caricature of yourself, can make you think and live “in Instagram,” is extractive in that it both steals from you and then requires you to snort it to fill your holes back up, etc. All the arguments about how helpful it has been (to some, for certain to me) are also correct and relatable: most of my IRL friends are people I met on Instagram (or people who recognized me from Instagram at coffee shops that I subsequently made into my friends), I built my business one post at a time, I have a book deal because of it, it sparked a creative aspect of myself I could not have fathomed coming from any other medium, it gave me a microphone, it helped to create a community and give voice to a once extremely unpopular opinion and probably did the most heavy lifting in terms of changing our views on alcohol/the alcohol industry/sobriety/recovery, it is absolutely a tool of the otherwise voiceless, it’s where I do most of my donating to causes I wouldn’t otherwise know about, I found great fitting underwear there, etc.
I mention the above only because these were the known complaints and privileges (and therefore specific flavor of trapped I felt) prior to The Worst Year of My Life, and to explain what Instagram felt like during and after 2021 (TWYOML), the only thing I can think to equate it to was how in 2005 I worked as a public accountant in Silicon Valley from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. where I had to run something called a Black-Scholes model and validate statistical samples of accounts payable and write sentences that only started with “Per review of” and “Per discussion with” and I had a boss who yelled at me until I cried and another who wanted to fuck me and another who did fuck me and every day I had to drive into that job I prayed for a car accident that would maim me enough to keep me out of work but not enough to ruin my life.
My entire body rejected that job and still I made myself go to it because I believed I had no other option. My entire body, currently (and potentially temporarily! I feel obligated to say), rejects Instagram, and still I believe I have no other option but to find a way to make my way back to it, at least before my next book comes out. (And probably figure out TikTok by then, too.)
In no other area of my life do I believe in the idea that one must override their intuition, eat their pain, or kill their soul to keep or attain something “necessary.” In fact, in every other area of my life these are the clues that tell me a person, an opportunity, a relationship, a place, or a flavor of ice cream is wrong for me. When my body says no, I absolutely fucking listen. So why for nearly 2 years now have I consistently believed there is something wrong with me, that I just need to get in a different head space (or take a different tack or loosen up or not read the comments or not give a fuck or try Reels!), that my body is not to be believed, instead of something being wrong with say, using social media. It isn’t a rhetorical question. I seriously want to know.
I know this sounds like an essay about Instagram, but this is not an essay about Instagram1.
And I mean that. This is not an article about how good or bad it is, or why I don’t use it or don’t want to use it or why none of us should use it or any kind of grand statement about what I intend to do about Instagram. I, like many other people financially dependent on social media, have made that mistake before and I refuse to do it again. We all know it’s a fucking curse! We all know we hate it! We all know that anyone who makes a big claim about Instagram is going to have to eat that shit when they stop selling books or need to announce their new podcast! (Or when they just happen to get mentally stable enough to think they can stomach it and far away enough from the pain to think it didn’t really hurt and stupid enough to try one more time, because it’s fun. And here I’m definitely just talking about me.)
I’m not even sure what this essay is about; I’m kind of figuring it out as I write. But it has something to do with coming out of my little chrysalis in January of this year, and noting how many people wrote articles or created content about divesting from hustle culture, who were kind of, I guess, demonstrating hustle culture. I remember one article in particular that was talking about how we need to detox from hustle culture, and it was written by someone who hustles so much I had to mute them on Instagram two years ago because the amount of work they cranked out made me feel insane and inadequate. And that’s not what actually made it a problem—their behavior wasn’t the issue. What made it a problem was I could see all these people whose words and statements indicated one thing, and whose behavior indicated something totally other, and then instead of seeing that and having compassion for how stuck we all are, I instead rolled up my sleeves and followed suit and joined right in. Or, as Martha Beck put it on our podcast, I realized the pie was making me sick, but everyone was still eating the pie (even though everyone was complaining about the pie!), so I ate the pie harder.