no. 57: how do you log off when you spent 10 years on your personal brand?
My 30 day experiment to quit social media and manage being chronically online as someone whose job depends on it.
I think, at this point in 2025, many of us recognize the fraught relationships we have with technology. We talk about screen time, algorithms and mental health, often with the same handwringing as previous generations talked about smoking or rock and roll.
But for those of us who have lived our personal and professional lives online as creators, the pull of social media isn’t only about engagement – it’s also about identity.
Over the years, I’ve been on all sides: an early adopter, a micro-influencer with nearly 65,000 followers, a comms professional, and today, someone who has largely walked away creating short form content on social media after years of posting almost daily.
My journey though the highs of attention and virality, the lows of creative burnout and comparison, and the uncomfortable reality of being chronically online as a job has taught me endless lessons - including how stepping back can feel like reclaiming yourself.
Today, I’m sharing
✅ Behind the scenes of my nearly decade-long experience as a content creator
✅ How I realized that my social media use was taking more than it was giving
✅ The experiment I ran to break free - and how I’m handling things moving forward.
If you’ve been reexamining your relationship with screen time and social media, found yourself locked in a mindless doomscroll, or endlessly comparing yourself to other peoples lives online, this one’s for you.
xx,
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I have a complicated relationship with the internet.
I was an early adopter. My first email address in fourth grade. My first online bullying incident in seventh (dear reader, I was not the perpetrator). I scored invite-only access to Facebook 2006, and downloaded Instagram mere months after its public launch in 2010. By 2016, I was well on my way to being a micro-influencer (more than 5,000, but less than 50,000 followers, allegedly).
Originally, I started a private account to document my running-injury-rehab obsession with LA’s boutique workout studios. But quickly, it became much more than that. From my desk at my job in mental health research, I became consumed - obsessed with growing my account, leveraging my passion for photography and writing, while I processed my own relationship with exercise after a tumultuous college rowing career and a disastrous encounter with the Boston Marathon.
For a while, I posted into the void to a handful of acquaintances who frequented the same studios I did. As I got comfortable being perceived online, my content expanded in time with my confidence. I posted about travel, I posted about mental health. I shared candidly about self-doubts and challenges, and in return I found a community unlike anything I had experienced before. I connected with other creators, some of whom are still friends today. I met followers, first in DMs and messages, then in real life.
Suddenly, I wasn’t just posting about workout studios and events – I was hosting them, with sponsors and waiting lists.
Living in LA in 2016 having any sort of audience felt a lot like being chosen, especially in the health and wellness space. I was comped Soul Cycle classes, a partnership with Classpass with unlimited credits. I received near daily emails offering free apparel, food, and experiences. I was invited to events and restaurants, to gifting suites and trips, ambassador programs and sponsorships. The careful curation of everyday experiences into perfectly-candid-but-still-aspirational captions combined into a just shy of toxic swirl that bordered on obsession.
I got sucked in, and fast. My relationship with food, exercise and experiences warped under the pressure of performance and perception. As much as I wanted to believe I was, I wasn’t just doing things and posting about them – I was curating my life in real-time. Always optimizing, always performing, always running a careful evaluation in the back of my mind about a perfect photo, perfect location, perfect outfit.
As a creator, social media isn’t just a hobby, or a job. It can be both, but it’s also an intoxicating dopamine feedback loop. Followers, comments, likes and sponsorship offers rolled in with every post and milestone. And when they didn’t? Anxiety and self-doubt. Comparison to my peers and friends was constant and instantaneous - not just follower counts and engagement rates, but sponsorship deals, and PR gifting. More than once I found myself rattled with jealousy, or feeling like I was going crazy when creators with bigger followings ripped off my content, sometimes word for word.
I’m proud that throughout the tumultuous experience, I always held myself to an extremely strict standards of honesty and authenticity. I turned down most of the offers I received, opting to never promote brands or products that didn’t align with my values. But despite this, the temptation was real. Even being (probably overly) principled about what I accepted, over the years still I received products and experiences I could have never afforded with my nearly minimum-wage salary in mental health research.
By 2018 I was successful enough that I seriously contemplated going full time. I went so far as to give it a trial run complete with a sponsored trip to a yoga teacher training in Bali and partnership with a major athletic wear company. But after a few months, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it long term without seriously compromising my integrity or mental health. For me, there was too much pressure, not enough stability or structure.
But stepping away isn’t as easy as it sounds. For a long time, I thought I was making a huge mistake when my husband and I made the call to leave Los Angeles and walk away from being a full time creator.
Instead, we pursued a work-life move that brought us to Seattle. I pivoted into a career in health and life sciences communications and strategy that leveraged my skills as a creator, but kept my personal presence on social media firmly in the hobby category.
For the first few months, I wrestled with doubt. I kept getting exclusive invites and emails about new partnerships and offers that felt impossible to turn down. But slowly, something shifted and the noise subsided. I settled into my new job. I made friends who weren’t influencers, and didn’t know that I was. I learned to post for enjoyment and creativity again. To unwind my feelings of worth from the numbers, and process for the first time since it all started what I wanted out of posting online, how to do so sustainably, and to the best of my efforts, ethically.
It worked – until 2020.
That year, TikTok invited me to join its creator program. They paid me a (generous) stipend and gave me dedicated training on short-form video as part of a push to bring more “educational” content to the platform. It was honestly a game-changer – not just for my career helping social impact organizations communicate more effectively, but for my own social presence as well.
I had always been a photographer and writer, but video is different. It took some painfully cringey attempts, but eventually I found my groove with at-home coffee recipes and vlog style content that romanticized my attempts to manage seasonal depression in the pacific northwest winters. By 2022, I had nearly 50k new followers.
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And here’s the thing: Tiktok is addicting not only for viewers, but especially for creators. Especially in 2021, it was like a slot machine. You never knew if this video would be the one. You might wake up to so many notifications, the app would crash. Without warning I was back in the cycle - obsessed with my analytics, structuring my free time to capture content while still working a full time job, and spending more time then ever online thanks to COVID.
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My initial creative surge of energy and excitement for the platform was eventually drowned out by the crushing volume of increasingly long and personal content needed to stay relevant. When I found out I was pregnant in 2022, I made the decision not to post about it at all. As my pregnancy progressed, and the baby arrived, I found myself posting less and less, but scrolling more and more.
By the middle of 2023, trying to keep my head above water after returning to work with a six month old, returning to any semblance of my previous content creation career felt completely hopeless. I kept scrolling, hoping inspiration would strike, and coming up with nothing. At the same time, I felt like I couldn’t walk away from nearly ten years I had invested in creating and posting online as a creative practice. I didn’t want to continue, but I didn’t know how to pivot, and I just kept diving into my FYP hoping I would figure it out.
Eventually, I installed an app blocker to substantially cut down my screen time. Doing so helped me to launch this newsletter. At the time, I said this of my relationship to the internet as a creator;
[as I experienced my first pregnancy] the more I held my own experiences close to my chest: the less willing I became to share them in the traditional short form content of Tiktok and Instagram. How do you share and celebrate a life with children, without exploiting that child for content? How do you compress the magnitude of the way your world expands and contracts upon meeting your child into a 10 second video? How do you explore your own complicated, evolving understanding of what it is to be a person, who is a parent, but who is still a person, goddamnit! into 3-5 instagram slides? How do you keep yourself from being algorithmically pigeonholed, sacrificing depth and complexity in favor of an arbitrary niche? How do you explain yourself in 30 second intervals?
…Having a child has only deepened my commitment to pursue a well rounded life: diving deeper into personal hobbies and interests, while exploring the adventure that is life with a small child. And today, part of that commitment means reevaluating how I create, document and share.
In 2024, I poured the majority of my time and creative energy into this newsletter, and was more creatively inspired (and productive) than I had been in years. I largely stopped posting on other platforms, and maintained reasonable screen time until the election kicked my doom scrolling into high gear. By the end of the year I was anxious, angry, and my screentime was back at an all time high.
This is a long winded way of getting us to the fact that by December of 2025, it was time, finally, to break the cycle.
My new year’s resolution this year was to do something I had been too scared to do for nearly a decade: figure out how to manage my relationship with the internet as a creator AND a consumer.