insta-gone
[This may seem like a repeat, but I wanted to tell this moment anyway.] Today I ended my ten year relationship with Instagram. The trial separation really was what I needed. In 2012, I started my account when living in New York City. It was a new and simple way to celebrate beautiful moments. It documented my life as I moved to back to Indiana, to Portland and eventually found my home in Alaska. I earned a Master’s degree, met my spouse, and became a mother in that decade of life. It started out as one or two small moments of my day, but then it slowly started creeping into more and more. The platform changed. I put it on timers, and tightened my followings. This year it became like a deafening noise. I didn’t like the panic it put me in. It created a frenzy of scrolling. It has been a challenging year professionally. And the stress of it led me to want more and more of the dopamine that social media is so good at producing. Suddenly I realized that I was adding stra
