I’m Quitting Instagram.
There’s something about the start of a new year that makes you pause and take stock, well for me at least.
And take stock I have. (I mean we could call it ‘taking stock’ or we could call it ‘having-a-semi-break-down-considering-quitting-completely-and-reinventing-my-whole-life’, I’ll go with the former for social acceptability for now.)
Birth-ed is my proudest creation (bar child 1 and child 2), yet I’ve found myself spending much of my week ‘creating content’, designed not to truly serve you, the expectant families reading it, but to serve an algorithm. Entire days spent brainstorming ways to repeat myself, in a new way, that catch someone’s eye or convince them to *buy my course*. Now, no shade to full-time Content Creators, but it’s really not what I want my day to day job to be (frankly, I simply couldn’t cope, so hats off to you), but it’s accidentally what much of my day to day job has become.
Conversations around birth and motherhood on social media are as divisive, polarising, lacking nuance and over simplified as they’ve ever been, and I’m in equal parts bored and frustrated by the whole thing. I want to step off the Hamster Wheel.
When we reduce birth preparation down to a 60 second video on ‘5 birth positions for a quicker birth’ or an attention grabbing carousel of posts on how you should ‘never let a midwife pull on the umbilical cord’, we minimise just how weighty preparation for birth should actually be. We mislead women into thinking they are informed, whilst accidentally missing enormous parts of the conversation, leaving them at best- unprepared, at worse- causing serious harm.
Now, I don’t absolve myself from having created those kinds of posts in the past (thought not as much as most). Social media is this demanding beast that needs feeding. Feeding with the snappy hooks and the polarising opinions that makes people talk. And we need people talking so our accounts get seen. And it’s only once the account gets seen, that you can start the conversations that really matter. It’s only once your account gets seen, that you can run a viable business. It’s a real rock-hard-place situation, because I know none of you would have found my account in the first place or be reading this post, if it weren’t for controversial post titles, or silly viral trends.
And, (fully reserving the right to go back on this shift: I’ve got a business to run, kids to feed, a mortgage to pay), I’m getting off.
Ok, I’m not TOTALLY deleting Instagram (I’m not a complete idiot), but I am going to change the way I use, post and engage with the app.
The nuanced, detailed information is so important, and you’ll find that all in The Birth-ed Method. But I want to spend my days creating meaningful connections, building relationships, having nuanced conversations with people who really want to dive deeper. I’m through with the superficial, surface level chats with passers-by on the internet.
So those of you here, on my mailing list, in The Birth-ed Method, podcast listeners, people who’ve read to the end of my Blue Monday grumble... Those of you who have already chosen to invest in yourself, to be a part of this incredible community, this is my (semi) public promise to you. I’m starting these conversations.
I don’t yet fully know where or how, maybe over email each week, maybe a private podcast, maybe online meet-ups… it’s coming, and you’re already in the gang!
Now, when I first posted this, I sent it as an email. And finished with this- “And I want to finish by opening up my inbox, you can reply to me, it really is little old me sat here on the other end of the emails. What do you think about all this? Are you coming for the ride?”
In the space of about 6 hours, I made more meaningful connections and had more personal conversations than 6 months on social media. Just goes to say, the private, connected spaces really do make for the most connected conversations.
Want to make sure you don’t miss the deep stuff?