Hi friends,

Amelia, here. There are a ton of new babes on this list since the last time I wrote, so I want to open by saying: I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for inviting me into your inbox. Your digital consent is sacred. I honor and celebrate it.

Whenever I'm speaking to new friends, I like to open with the origin story of the thing I'm sharing. While this might be the very first time you're hearing from me, I've been writing this newsletter since late 2016. Back then I was sending cute tinyletters to a list of under 100 people. Last fall I moved to Flodesk to help promote the launch of my book Fifty Feminist Mantras. And since January, this list has been dormant as I dove deep to reconsider how I wanted to share my work and life online.

I don't think I've totally figured that out yet, but I'm grateful for this space to share what I'm learning. There are almost 500 of you here now—many of whom I've never met IRL or even had a conversation with online. It's exciting to write to you, and I hope you'll reply and introduce yourselves. Really, please do!

All of that is a long way to say that for me, this email feels like a new beginning. Why? Well, let me bury the lede for you—because I left Instagram on Friday! After endless hours of content creation to build my platform there, I said goodbye, logged out, changed my password, and deleted the app. As the subject of this email says—Goodbye ‘Gram! 

I want to be honest that leaving Instagram is scary. There is so much messaging that says you can't be successful without social media, especially if you're a creative or entrepreneur. I let that fear drive my decision-making for a long time. In fact, I doubled-down on Instagram at the start of last year and invested a few thousand dollars in branding and social strategy. But by late 2020, Instagram felt too energetically expensive, and I just couldn't do it anymore. So I wrote some Instagram Rules for how I'd engage with the app and made the public commitment to leave by my 30th birthday (which is a week from tomorrow!).

Once I made the decision to leave, things became a lot clearer. I spent less and less time on Instagram all spring. I sold one last round of my Selfies Practice Groups. I wrote a few final posts to share my exit process. Then I left ten days before my original deadline.

In the end, leaving Instagram has been pretty exhilarating. My attention, focus and capacity to write more than 2200 characters surged almost immediately after getting off the app for good. I’ve been singing The Chicks song Goodbye Earl to myself and inventing fun lyrical stylings like, "She held her phone in her hand and worked out a plan / And it didn't take long to decide / That ’Gram had to die." 

Side note: I've also been remembering that Jane Krakowski is the star of the Goodbye Earl music video and using the extra non-Instagramming hours of my day to watch 30 Rock and appreciate her comical genius.

Anyway. In the process of getting off Instagram, I created a few resources that I wanted to share with you all today. If you don't care about IG, rest assured that future issues of this newsletter probably won't mention it at all. But if you're on your own journey with social media stress, confusion, or addiction, I hope you find these helpful:

👉Here's a conversation about Cultivating Self-Love & Community off Social Media that I had with my friend Anna where I explain why I decided to leave Instagram after investing so much in the platform and how I'm working to build community off the app.

👉In this blog post, I share all the tools I've used to get off Google, Facebook & Amazon. It took me forever to find all these alternatives, so I made this list to save you lots of time if you're interested in doing the same. Share widely!

👉I also created this list of 100 Ways to Share Your Work + Life that Aren't Instagram (or social media). I know so many people that are only on Instagram because they feel like they “have” to be. I'm hoping this list can help deconstruct that story and invite us to take our power back.

👉And finally, here's a playlist I made as my own personal soundtrack for getting off instagram. I keep adding songs that make me feel expansive and joyful. I hope you enjoy it.

As I said at the beginning of this email, your digital consent is sacred. We're so rarely invited to cultivate consent in our relationships with the internet and virtual space-time. We're more often coerced into signing away our privacy as Terms & Conditions for access to crucial online services.

I believe that consent is necessary for freedom, and that freedom lies in our ability to feel freely and make free choices. I used to feel so much freedom online. But now? I left Instagram because it injured my freedom to share and receive, over and over again. I left Google because it undermined my ability to choose freely by algorithmically limiting the options in my field of vision. I left Amazon because by offering me convenience it stripped freedom from other bodies. 

So here I am off the apps and landing softly in your inbox. I'd like to be clear that I'm not here to judge your choices or convince you to make the same choices as me. That feels like the opposite of freedom. That said, I do promise to continue sharing the places that I see misalignment between my feminist values and my daily practices. I commit to creating and offering resources to help us all get free, day by day, together. 

I want to take part in global systems of care and accountability. 
I want to consent to sending my spirit out into the astral plane of the internet. 
I want that to be my choice, in service of love and liberation for all.

xoxo, Amelia