I Turned the Page
How restarting a social media account has helped my writing...so far
I didn’t plan to turn the page.
I planned to do some new things in the new year (as I mentioned in last week’s post), but I didn’t expect to feel the way I do right now…like I’m closing one door in order to open another.
It started about a month ago, now that I think of it.
I was doing my morning writing, as usual, when I had a feeling, for the first time in recent memory, that I’d been down a particular road before.
“Have I already said this?” I thought. Even worse,“Have I already said this better?”
There was something troubling about the sound of the lines I was writing. They sounded like…me. Or at least they sounded like I’d sounded before.
So I put my pencil down for a few weeks and recharged. I focused on other writers, other voices, other thoughts.
Then, in what seemed at first like an unrelated occurrence, a friend’s Instagram account was hacked.
He’d sent me an odd message, but not odd enough to raise immediate suspicion. It included a link to a contest. It asked for my vote. I clicked and immediately had second thoughts. Regrets. I didn’t click the next link in the chain but worried that I’d already gone too far and that my account would be hacked next.
Then life intervened, as it always does—seemingly-unrelated shit storms of all kinds—and I started to question even more of what I was doing…including various aspects of my everyday life, and my daily routines, and even my social media presence.
Instead of waiting around for yet another shoe to drop—an actual hacking, for example—I decided to shut down my Instagram account, which I’d opened in 2021, and start again.
A combination of motivations, seemingly unrelated, led to an act of pure instinct. I’ve lost 97% of my audience as a result, but it was an important moment.
I opened my first account long before I understood how Instagram worked, or what I wanted from the platform. It became my primary marketing tool and my primary connection to an interested public. But it was constant trial and error for me.
Now I have a chance to rebuild more deliberately, carefully and, hopefully, productively.
The process has been instructive. Somehow, restarting Instagram has given me a little distance from my older work, and has reinforced my decision to rethink my writing as a whole.
I’ve shelved a couple of works-in-progress (rather, I’ve shoved them to the back of the drawer), and I’ve been doing things a little differently. I feel as if I’ve freed myself from a creeping sameness.
I’ve turned the page. (At least I think I have.)
For now, I feel good about it. I’m sure the old, familiar dissatisfaction will kick in soon, but I’m okay with what I’ve been doing. So far.
It will take a minute for you to see the results in my published work—it will take a minute for me to figure out what I’m really trying to do, and to publish it!—but I hope you like what you see when you finally see it.
In the meantime, you can find me at my new Instagram account: @johntessitorewriter1.
Luna speaks…
