I've done it before, but I suspect this time is for good.
In early January, I deactivated all my social media accounts. As a small business owner, indie artist and educator, the general rule is that this is unadvisable, and at worst blasphemous.
I suppose the best place to start, is to say 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. In a culture that 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. 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, too.
***
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 white 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 was 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:
- He was patient. He knew the process. He leaned in. Try a little here. Try a little there. Step back. Nope. Try again.
- 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. Rather than merely a mental exercise, he asked his 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 as (if not more) than analytically. It's why for rookie makers, it can often feel difficult to talk about their work. Often all they say is: "I just feel this way" or I "just like it or don't like it." I was taught in grad school that statements like this were a sign of immaturity. Possibly in one way. But in another, opinions like this are very somatic. Lacking language makes sense in another context. The body speaks only in feeling.
I watched this student toggle back and forth between these experiences. 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 line, 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 speck 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, I'd wager you are one of the ones who gets it.
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 most of this small, sensitive group, are creatives in some capacity.
Aron doesn't elaborate on this connection, but I believe Artists need Sensitivity. It's integral to their work. Possibly like Basketball players need Height. Of course there's exceptions in both cases. Still, there are things that are simply fundamental to our work. Often times these things are inherited. Try as I might, LeBron James I am not.
And here's the thing about Sensitivity. 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 it extends to the energy of every single person in hundreds of posts across three feeds each day.
It would be one thing to sense these energies and simply leave them. Many folks do this easily. When I draw (or live) however, I pull the things through my whole body. I feel them somatically. My cells filter each pencil stroke and shape, before I push out the next mark. They also filter the fear or love in each social media post. Artists don't merely observe art and life... they take it into their physical bodies.
This is only my subjective interpretation of the process. However, I've come to believe that just as a Zebra cannot be less striped, I cannot be less of a processor for art and the world. It is how I am wired. 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.
I imagine some artists reading this will say: "I consume social media each day and I'm perfectly fine!" Which I understand. I used to say the same thing. That might sound patronizing, but I don't mean it to be. If you experience yourself as 'alright on social media,' then for all intents and purposes, you are in fact alright. I used to be alright too. Until I wasn't.
Here's what happened to change my perspective.
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 even 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. Neurodivergent folks will tell you that they can function quite well in the world we have, but it takes pouring from three pitchers, instead of one.
Just like a great artwork, you often don't know where to put something on a canvas, until you have something as reference point. Having a child wildly changed my reference point for energy. I suddenly realized that 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 some grounding, I deactivated my social media accounts as an experiment. I was caught off guard. I became immediately energized. The experiment 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 her 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 noise 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 I found myself mired in something completely unexpected: The energy of way too many other people. I would be up all night with weird thoughts in my head. I spent most of my days trying to regulate feelings that seemed to come out of nowhere. By the holiday seasons I'd had enough. I shuttered my accounts and within 48h hour my entire body relaxed.
Again, I know this idea isn't for everyone. However, I truly think most Artists inhale the world. Do you imagine if a poet moves you to tears, they didn't first pull your pain into their system so they could alchemize it?
We have a long ways to go in understanding what Artists are actually doing when they create for us. 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 trashcan 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 trashcan that you post through my system. It is like trying to swallow the sun.
I realize I'm not going to get everyone on board with me regarding these ideas. 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. My goal in sharing this is less to get artists off social media, and more to share a perspective I desperately needed 5 years ago. I simply couldn't find mention of it, even in the dark recesses of the internet.
What does this mean for me going forward?
The short answer is, I don't know.
The longer answer is, we'll see. I look forward to trying more long form media. I have been exploring Substack, YouTube, and Teachable as ways to share online classes, writing, video, and photo. I also have a small but mighty podcast with a loyal following. In the meantime, I'll continue to share on the Museletter.
If you think about this topic, and have experience or insights, please leave a comment. I am voraciously consuming anything around business without social media. Stay tuned.
Love,
Becca