Goodbye Social Media

I've done it before, but I suspect this time is for good.

In early January, I deactivated all my social media accounts. (Insert a small woot). I’m a small business owner, indie artist and educator. As far as the over-culture is concerned, this is unadvisable behavior at best, and blasphemous at worst.

Where is the best place to start?

First and foremost, this decision took 5 years to make. It is not an easy decision for any creator. Having just made it for the second time in the past few years, I am confident anyone who wants to make it also, should not rush. Our culture increasingly spends huge chunks of its day online. The drawbacks for artists severing contact are real. For those that do go for it, the ways to do it sustainably are numerous and require deep thought. Even having thought this through for year, it is still a wild leap of faith. I have no idea if it will ‘work.’ And still... in spite of these things, I believe we'll see an increasingly passionate segment of artists stepping away from social media in the future.

I want to tell a story as an inroad to this decision. It's a story that is mine, but I also believe, yours too. I think it's a story all creatives will recognize. It is my belief as more artists move through their version of this story, they will choose to leave social media, as well.

***

Years ago a young man took a Life Drawing class with me. One of the projects was to reproduce a photo using the grid method. The steps of this process aren't important for this story, but for those who are curious, we used a grid to create references points from photo to paper.

This young man chose a photo of his wife.

I was immediately nervous for him. I had suggested people avoid drawing loved ones. Often the pressure of perfection is simply too great. He exuberantly ignored me. He had recently wed, and he was starry eyed and excited. He had also been drawing on his own for some time, so I relented.

It turned out to be fun to watch him. Early on, her likeness began to emerge on the paper. The other students were smitten. "He's going to do it" I thought to myself. As he moved forward however, it became obvious he was "close" but not there. In many ways, being close is more maddening for an artist than being far.

For weeks he worked.

I recognized in him two traits of an experienced artist:

1. He was patient. He knew the process. He leaned in. Try a little here. Try a little there. Step back. Nope. Try again.

2. He was sensitive. Not the " woe is me" sensitive. The superpower sensitive. He was somatically entering the work. He let his whole body sense into the marks. This was more than mental chatter. He asked his entire system questions: What next? Where is this stuck? How much pressure? How much size? This somatic perspective on art making is not one all artists are going to get on board with. However, it's one I see in my own practice. Artists make creative and technical decisions in their bodies, just as much (if not more) than analytically. It's why for rookie makers, it often feels difficult to talk about their work. Often all they say is: "I just feel this way" or I "just like it." I was taught in grad school that statements like this were a sign of immaturity. Possibly. But in another way, opinions like this are very somatic. Lacking language makes sense when the body speaks only in feeling.

I watched this student toggle back and forth between patience and sensitivity. Then after two weeks in a quiet moment, the class heard from his easel a resounding YES!

We hurried over. And there she was. He locked her in.

"It was her eyes," he told us. Then he proceeded to say something I've experienced myself many times: "It was just one mark. One little thing and suddenly she was THERE." Of course it wasn't really just one mark. It had been thousands of marks laboriously laid over weeks, and the "one mark" was just the final step.

What... you might ask... does this have to do with leaving social media? I'm glad you asked. Remember the patience. Remember the sensitivity.

These are two traits I believe all great creators possess. Must possess. In the case of drawing, the ability to feel a millimeter of pencil, slope of a line, or a fleck of graphite, is an absolutely priceless capacity. For a composer it's the tremor of a single note. For the sculptor it's a dot of clay. For a poet it's the way one syllable changes the feeling of an entire stanza.

You get the idea.

Or maybe you don't. Statistically you probably don't. Although if you're still reading this far, I'd wager you do.

One of the preeminent researchers on human sensitivity is Elaine Aron. She isolated a genetic component to human sensitivity, and it has become the bedrock of her life's work. Roughly 15-18% of the human population has a genetic trait predisposing them to nearly triple the depth of processing than the other 85%. In her book,she shares that most of this small, sensitive group of people, are creative in some capacity.

Aron doesn't elaborate on this connection, but I believe Artists need Sensitivity. It's integral to their work. For me Artists are less like a well with a bucket that dips down and brings forth water, and more like a sieve. When I draw, I pull the energies, experiences, shapes and lines, through my whole body. I feel them somatically. My cells filter each pencil stroke and emotion. Then I push out the next mark.

And here's the thing about Sensitivity as a sieve. It's not selective. It doesn't come with an off switch. The thing that makes me know when a shape I've drawn is a millimeter off, is the same thing that lets me know when a loved one is a millimeter off in their energy. Which is also a nice trait to have, until the sieve strains the energy of every single person in hundreds of posts across three feeds each day.

Artists don't merely observe art and life... they take it into their physical bodies. Put more radically, I don't believe most artists have the nervous system for regular (or even sporadic) social media consumption. At least not without blowback. Of course, this is only my subjective interpretation of the process. I've come to believe just as a Zebra cannot be less striped, I cannot be less of a processor for art and the world. I am wired to be a sieve.

I imagine some artists reading this will say: "I consume social media each day and I'm perfectly fine!"

Fair enough.

It should be acknowledged that there absolutely are toxic versions of sensitivity out there. Most of them are rooted in victimhood. Perhaps it seems like I’m victimizing myself and others, via claims about artists are out of alignment with social media energy.

Let me elaborate and reframe. I view my decision to leave social media to more meaningfully make art, similarly to LeBron James’ decision to engage in deep rest in between games. He’s not victimizing himself. He’s not giving rest undue power. He’s acknowledging reality. Power comes from having access to all of one’s faculties. Power comes from curating every single thing we consume and express. Power comes from knowing that the more we input, the more must output and vice versa.

If you experience yourself as 'alright on social media,' then for all intents and purposes, you are in fact alright. There are also plenty of pro basketball players who don’t rest as much LeBron. To each their own.

I used to be alright on social media, too. Until I wasn't. My line in the sand was in 2021, when I had a child.

There are many artists with children who navigate social media without a bat of an eye. I am only speaking for myself. When Braeden emerged onto the human scene, he took with him one of the most precious things to me. A thing I didn't recognize was precious until it was gone... my bandwidth. Almost overnight, ninety five percent of my energy was wrapped up in his tiny, pudgy hands. This would have been a smaller blip on our radar, if I hadn't already been expending massive amounts of bandwidth on every day interactions. Another name the over culture has given for the sieve in action is ‘neurodivergent.’ I’m resistant to labels, however for many people they are deeply helpful. To me, the term ‘neurodivergent’ (at times) pathologizes the great work Sensitives and Creatives do.

Just like a great artwork, you often don't know where to put something on a canvas, until you have something as a reference point. Having a child wildly changed my reference point for energy. I suddenly realized my relationship to the world had only been sustainable because of unique and tenuous circumstances. When those circumstances changed and I became a mother, everything fell like a house of cards. Desperate to get grounding, I deactivated my social media accounts as an experiment. I was caught off guard. I became immediately energized. Suddenly the waterfall of energy that had been pouring through my sieve was reduced to a relative trickle. The experiment enthusiastically continued for almost 2 years.

I truly thought I'd never return. Then in May of 2024 the call of social media began to beckon me with all its promises of connection, marketing and money. For the last 7 months I re-immersed myself in the soup. Only this time I was coming in clean. When the flood hit my system, I saw it for it was.

I began to play with different ideas. I tried to moderate my time online. I tried to moderate my time posting. In the end, I came to believe the thing that made me exceptionally good at drawing, also made me exceptionally poor at resisting cheap dopamine. Within a few short months my nervous system was absolutely fried, and by the holiday seasons I'd had enough. I shuttered my accounts. Within 48 hours my entire body relaxed.

Am I going to get everyone reading this on this train with me?

Certainly not.

AND even if not… might I pitch a speck of curiosity. If you’re still here with me in this post, might I pitch to you a tiny “Why Not?”

Is this idea any more capricious than the other wild things we hear online, in the news, from our leaders, and around the world? Do you imagine if a poet moves you to tears, they didn't first pull the same pain into their system so they could alchemize it? Is that so totally impossible to imagine?

To me, Artists inhale the world and exhale the work.

Up until social media arrived, Artists had a tall task, but it was manageable. Now in online spaces, they are trying to do the unthinkable. I can pull everything from a sunset or a trash can into my system. I can run it through my organs, and then push it out into a blog post, painting, or conversation. What I cannot do, is pull every sunset or trash can that you post through my system. It is like trying to swallow the sun.

I should wrap this post by saying, ultimately what do I know?

I’m not coming at you with peer reviewed, double blind placebo controlled research. We have a long way to go in understanding what Artists do when they create for us. However, following these breadcrumbs has led me to a peace that I haven't felt in my body since the mid-2000's. That was the last time my system was largely processing only for myself.

What does this mean for me going forward?

The short answer: I don't know.

The longer answer: We'll see. I look forward to trying more long form media. This Substack is one of them. YouTube, and On-Demand courses are in the pipeline. I also have a small but mighty podcast with a loyal following, and I'll continue to share on the Museletter.

Do you have your own thoughts about this idea? Please consider leaving a comment. I am voraciously consuming anything around artistry/ business without social media. I’d love to hear from you.

Warmly,

Becca