I'm Not Interested in Dancing Like a Monkey

(Six Months Without Social Media)

Hello, World!

Transcript

It's a Saturday morning and I'm sitting in my office at 7am, wide awake for no reason I can name. So I've got time, and I've got a promise I never kept.

Back in March, I quit social media. I said I'd circle back and tell you how it went. I never did. Here it is, six months late, which feels about right for me.

I closed every account. Deleted every app. And for a while my hand kept reaching for my phone out of pure habit, swiping toward apps that weren't there anymore, and I'd catch myself mid-reach with no idea why I'd picked it up in the first place. That's how much of my life had been running on autopilot. Not the posting. The looking.

What I got back wasn't just time, it was my own aura. My own energy, unfiltered by everyone else's trend, everyone else's opinion, everyone else's version of what I should be doing with my business right now. I stopped comparing. I stopped absorbing the nervous system of the entire internet before 9am. And I noticed I know less about my own neighborhood than I used to, which really only feels freeing.

I did go back into Instagram, but for strategic things. I log in through a browser now, on purpose, and I log back out. If someone sends me a link, I can look at exactly that one thing and nothing else, because the second you try to click into someone's profile without being logged in, it stops you cold. That's the only version of social media I have left, and it works because I built the friction in myself.

Substack, I tried again too, after quitting it the first time. No paywall. Never has been because the writing isn't what I'm selling. But I watched their Notes feature turn into exactly the thing I left Instagram to get away from... everyone posting, everyone performing, everyone chasing the algorithm's idea of connection instead of having it.

And that's the real thing underneath all of it. We don't own any of it. Not Instagram, not Substack, not whatever's next. Pinterest gave me the clearest proof: I ran an ad experiment, reached thirty thousand people in a week and a half, and almost none of them were the right ones, because you can't tell Pinterest's algorithm who you're actually trying to reach the way you can with other ad platforms. The pins I made years ago are still bringing people to my site today, for free. The ads weren't worth what they cost me in time.

So I came back to what's actually mine. My blog. My email list. This podcast. Same content, different doors, because we're all wired to take it in differently, some of you read, some of you listen, some of you want it dropped straight into your inbox on a Sunday. That's not a content strategy. That's just respecting how people actually work.

Here's what nobody tells you about pulling back that far: the silence changes what you have to say. I didn't publish for weeks, because I didn't have anything clear yet, and I wasn't going to fake it. What came out the other side wasn't a better tactic. It was a different direction entirely.

I've been marketing to entrepreneurs and creatives, and I love that work. But my heart is with women in midlife who are done. Done people-pleasing. Done with every should and have-to they picked up trying to play a game that was never built for who they actually are. Women asking, plainly, who the fuck am I today, underneath everyone else's version of me.

Human design didn't hand me that answer. It never does, not really, if you're using it right. It's a mirror, not a cage. Your chart shows you the imprint you came in with, and then it keeps evolving with you, through return cycles, through the questions each new season asks. Anyone telling you to live inside a fixed chart forever is asking you to shrink into something you already outgrew.

This isn't about blowing up your life. It's about the parts of you that were fully alive at twenty, still in there, still waiting. What's actually true for you. What you're not saying. Where you've been swallowing it to keep everyone else comfortable.

I'm not going back to who I was on social media. I'll use Instagram the way I use it now, sparingly, on purpose, and I'll let it be exactly that small. It was costing me more than it ever gave back.

If you've got your own version of this, quitting something everyone insists you can't quit, I want to hear it. hello@ayprilporter.com.