5 Things

the leaving Instagram edition

Hoping to spend a lot more time here, and a lot less time looking at my phone…

1. Let’s just get right to it. I’m deleting my Instagram permanently and I have all the feels about it. I’m putting it in writing so I can’t renege. It’s been a topic of conversation in our home for quite a while as my husband has observed the tendency for it to spiral me into anxiety, distract me from the people in front of me and generally inhibit functioning. But, like anything that’s hard to quit, there’s reasons I’ve held on to it. It’s served a function in my life for quite some years. I’ve formed so many connections and met new friends, it’s been a valuable outlet for finding my voice, it’s helped me find solidarity through long days of parenting, it’s been my baby book stand in, it’s been a way to stay in touch with far away relatives, it’s been a means of ministry as I share encouragement, it’s provided an avenue for learning about all sorts of topics and gathering information and resources.

   It’s also tempted me to envy others, promoted jealousy, incited anxiety, made me feel “less-than” more times than I can count, caused panic, made me stay up too late, lessened my attention span, formed me towards content generation instead of living… the list goes on and on.

   I am not going to condemn myself for taking this long to quit, nor will I shame myself for being so attached to an app. It’s been a lifeline at some points, a way to externalize and find humor in difficult situations, a safe-enough way to numb emotions when they were too big to handle and I needed a funny video to keep me distracted. I will forever be an external processor, so finding an outlet for my words is a need, not a want. When I started an Instagram account in 2014 I was a new mom and had been married only a year and a half. Instagram has catalogued my growing up. If I look back through my captions and photos I can trace the footprints of an exceptionally painful journey through trauma recovery and some of the hardest years of my life. I see the ways I chose to show up and do good work. I see myself choosing to notice the good in my children, and learning how to be a whole person. Though I know this is the right choice for me, I will miss the parts of it that have been good.

   I choose to bless the desire for connection that drove me to share my life. I bless the way taking photos for captions taught me to see ordinary beauty. I bless the way crafting a story taught me to find the funny side of a situation. I bless the joy of creating something. I bless the girl who needed it as a crutch and the woman who’s ready to let it go.

   Here’s to the next chapter!¹

2. This isn’t really a separate thing, but there have been many pieces to this decision and a few specific people that have given me hope that quitting Instagram is not the nail in the coffin of my writing career.

   Tsh Oxenreider
   wrote this piece a year ago, and recently followed up with this one - both encouraging and practical forays into the decision making process. I took a month off in January and wrote this - where I compared Instagram (the app itself) to a narcissistic abuser. Once I had named it as such I think I knew in my heart of hearts that I would have to end the relationship sometime in the near future.

   As a practical note it has taken me about four days to figure out a satisfactory way of downloading data, posts and captions from my account. I settled on a combination of downloading data from Instagram itself and using an application called 4KStogram (which I paid for) to download things like reels, stories, etc… One of my primary excuses for staying was that I had all my children’s “baby book” material catalogued in the captions. It was really important to me that I didn’t lose those captions.² It will probably never be quite as fun to look through them in other formats, or quite as user friendly, but I have the words. I deleted my personal account today and scrubbed all but one of the posts from my writing account. I’ll probably leave it up for a bit longer to direct people here, but that’s it I suppose. I’m sure I’ll go through a “detox” of sorts where I’m twitchy and wonder about people and wish I could slide down the rabbit hole of pointless entertainment. Lucky for me, my life really is quite full (understatement! ha!). I have a stack of library books, five kids, a garden, homeschool syllabi to write, camping trips to prepare for… I think I can find ways to fill my time.

3. As I thought through this decision I told my husband, “I’m afraid that when I quit I’ll realize how lonely I actually am”. It’s still a real concern. As I talked about this with a friend she noted that perhaps it’s just a function of this stage of life - the in between big and little years - when you really are at home a lot (at least as a homeschool mom with a range of tiny to middle age children). When I do leave the house there’s usually a tight timeline for appointments, kid activities and necessary errands. I don’t have children who are old enough to be left by themselves for any length of time, so the cost of going anywhere with five of them is still pretty high energetically speaking. When I had only tiny children it was easier to go out and about and meet up with friends. We had all the time in the world we were trying to fill and two hours of nap time every afternoon. These days I might see people at church or our homeschool group, and I stay in touch with friends throughout the day - Voxer, text, etc… but the in person interactions outside of that are few and far between. The sense of camaraderie that IG stories gave with its casual glimpses into other people’s lives will be one of the things I miss most. I hope to have more meaningful and pointed connections in its absence, but the habit of throwing a wide net and hoping for a response will be hard to break. The lack of community in actual geographical proximity is an ongoing dilemma (more on that another day).

4. Because I’m not sharing them on IG you might get more stories of ridiculous children antics here (they really are funny people). This week it’s the two year old who has adopted two erasers and a battery pack as his chosen comfort items. They should probably just let mothers of stubborn toddlers take care of any arms negotiations because we are experts in safety, creativity and avoiding detonation. I have had quite a bit of experience with toddler boys but this tiny child is giving me a run for my money. As I’ve been thinking and praying and thinking, and praying some more, second guessing and then having existential despair about my parenting choices, this was a helpful resource. The podcast puts words to the biblical distinction between condemnation and consequences. While I am far from the perfect parent that God is, I found it so helpful to have a reminder that consequences do fall within our loving duty towards our children. I grew up with legalism up the wazoo and no clear understanding of the purpose of the law in exposing our need for the gospel. I just thought if I couldn’t do everything right I was bad. I hope and pray that my children will take a different understanding out of things, but sometimes I swing a little too hard towards permissive which (ironically) is when I lose my you know what because I’m being run into the ground by the two foot tall tyrant 😂 Consistent and kind expectations and consequences are HARD to deliver! But I am convinced it’s still a worthwhile goal.

5. “Shiny Happy People” Ufff. All the chatter about this has been hard to stomach. I have not watched it and don’t plan to, simply because I’ve done enough deep diving into the subject matter that I don’t believe it would be healthy or helpful for me to watch more. I grew up ATI and IBLP adjacent, meaning that the bulk of the families whom we went to church and were friends with were somewhere ranging from deeply involved to on the fringes of those organizations. I still am not sure how I absorbed all the damage from these teachings - was it our homeschool curriculum? Sunday school? I know for a fact one particularly atrocious “bible study” in 7th grade left me with some hefty baggage to unpack later. And yes, these environments breed abuse. They just do. Ask any survivor.

   I think what saddens me most about this documentary is that I believe there will be two tendencies for the people who watch it, depending on their background.

   1) The secular audience will take it as an excuse to dismiss everyone who calls themselves a Christian or homeschooler as a fringe minority with abusive tendencies 2) Christians who watch may feel defensive and dig more deeply into self-righteousness, assuming that the similarities between parts of the homeschool movement and evangelicalism are not concerning and this is an attack by the secular bad guy, Amazon.

   Neither option is very productive.

   I don’t think we should expect Amazon to be sympathetic to Christian values, but I wonder why the people who chose to participate in this project felt they had to take their stories to Amazon. Could it be that the churches and communities in which they were harmed refuse to admit their complicity, acknowledge their fallibility and ask for forgiveness? Based on my own experience I’d say this is not just probable, but almost a certainty.

   If you think you need to protect God, well, maybe you should make sure what you’re protecting is God. And if it’s not? Take it down to the studs and begin again.

---

Lately:

The boys weeded and put in irrigation, my once crazy toddler is now a very sweet big brother so there's hope for the future of the current one, comfort erasers 😂

Reading: this essay from my friend

Grace E. Kelley

was such a good read. I think it put words to a lot of what I’ve had to tease out of the way I grew up. Attachment really matters and how we interact with our primary caregiver has implications for how we interact with God. Sleep training never really set well with me, and even when we tried it halfheartedly it didn’t seem to work. Now on this 5th go round I have a baby who sleeps well and so far as I can tell the only difference is that she’s my biggest baby and I might sleep harder (so don’t wake up to all the tiny baby noises) because I’m so tired. I just think babies are people and they come out with their own temperaments and nervous systems…and sometimes God mercifully gives you a child that sleeps.

Listening: this podcast from Jennifer Pepito was full of wisdom and grace (it’s sort of a response to “Shiny Happy People” but a wonderful listen even if you don’t have a clue what the show is about).

Watching: way too many videos of YouTube tow truck channels 😆When it’s rainy and the two year old is sick…(Our favorites are Casey LaDelle and Matt’s Off Road Recovery - no bad language and a lot of four wheeler recoveries…in case you also have machine obsessed small boys at home).

That’s all for this week, folks! Check back in next week to hear about how twitchy my thumbs are without a dumb app on my phone…

I’d like to thank Susi for upgrading to a paid membership! This letter remains free for you to read, but it does cost time for me to write. Thank you so much for supporting my work, whether by reading, sharing or upgrading to a paid membership. I’m so glad you’re here.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with a friend you think might enjoy it too.

1. I will probably keep my Facebook account for now - it’s become clunky and annoying and lacks the draw of IG. But eventually maybe that will go too. One hurdle at a time.

2. If you have a “baby book” type app or solution that you like I am all ears. I appreciated the ease of picking a photo and typing up a caption and have referred to them often to remember things about babyhood.