Recovering from my "hearts" addiction

The social-media dilemma for memoir-writers and other grown ups

God help me; I’m writing a memoir. Occasionally, I share some of the work-in-progress in Amid Life—early drafts, research, and scenes that won’t make the final cut—along with newly found perspective.

Like this one. Revisiting 2018 in the opening scene felt icky and out of touch—I can’t help placing Matt Gaetz among the creepy men on the beach (read it, you’ll see).

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Even on the tranquil beaches of St. John, there was no escaping the digital ping-ping-pings.

“Look, the Instagram girls are here.” I nudged Felix when three teenagers, oblivious to everyone but each other, kicked up sand, racing by us to pose in the waves.

Felix groaned and fluffed his backpack like a pillow before disappearing into Keith Richard’s autobiography.  

The girls shrieked like Rolling Stones groupies in the surf, taking turns playing photographer and posing—on their bellies in the sand or flipping their wet hair. The second they could get Wi-Fi, their images would be on the internet—like virtual gladiators in an anonymous digital arena where thumbs-up is the goal, but a fair share of abuse was more likely.

I squeezed another dollop of SPF 75 on the tops of my feet and surveyed the analog crowd for creepy men. I worried. Were the girls naive or simply ambivalent about the dangers their public exposure presented?

Also, I kind of wanted to ask them what filters they’d recommend.

Gold star seeker

At 56, a little red heart on an Instagram post was as satisfying as a shiny sticker on my grade school homework—and as sweet as brown sugar. Positive feedback propelled me through a thirty-year career—every ‘atta girl’ kept me coming back for more.

The morning after I quit my job, I sat barefoot and pajamaed by the woodstove in my kitchen, enjoying the quiet of a blank calendar and an empty inbox. Instead of stroking executive egos, I rubbed my dog’s buttery ears. Feeling smug, I posted a photo of the scene on Instagram—toeing the line between validation for good work and working for validation to feel good.

Rangely looked at the door, hoping to go outside while I balanced my coffee on my unopened notebook and scrolled for virtual inspiration. How would I write my next chapter?

A steady stream of confident and stylish midlife women greeted me through my phone screen. They were entrepreneurs, authors, motivational speakers, body-positive, anti- (or is it pro?) aging advocates. Every shiny image seemed to reflect the growing gap in my resume.

Moth to the flame

Among the 60 million+ women 45 and older on Instagram, I was a prime target for aspirational quotes like “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” The words and images rekindled an ember of my former ambition.

Why shouldn’t I join the #over50andfabulous set and build a brand on Instagram? How hard could it be? #midlifegoals #nevertoolate

I changed my screen name to @myreinspiredlife and created a PowerPoint deck to outline my content strategy. I would tell the story of my “not retired” retirement. I posted daily and checked my progress before getting out of bed —112 followers, 116, 123. The needle barely moved.

I paid for online seminars promising follower growth, taught myself to use design and planning software, and tapped into my marketing experience to profile my audience, find comps, and optimize content.

I posed for professional photos, paying extra for hair and make-up. I wrote pithy captions late into the night and practiced the best selfie angles. (This was in the olden times, mind you—before Stories and Reels, or TikTok and AI.)

“Are you trying to be an influencer?” my millennial daughter asked via text. “You know you need like a hundred thousand followers, right?”

I replied with an ambivalent shrug emoji, but six months after leaving my career, her question made me wonder. Without the feedback loop of a job, was I now measuring my self-worth in “likes?”

The human need for validation is a spark, and social media is gasoline. Most, if not all, platforms are designed to activate your brain’s reward center, similar to how good sex or good food might—but like if the sex resulted in an STD and the food was tainted with E.coli.

The negative impact of social media on young people’s mental and physical health is well-documented, but the data for older adults is scarce. When I first began writing about my influencer flirtation in 2019, I found a single study focused on middle-aged users.

That study concluded that midlifers faced similar risks for anxiety and depression because, on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, we compared status and progress toward important life goals—family, financial, and career—against our peers’ highlight reels.

A more recent study looking at women 40 and over found a clear correlation between social media use and poor body image, facial dissatisfaction, and concerns related to youthfulness. Quelle surprise!

Instagram burn out

<Checks phone> I have 473 Instagram followers.

I didn’t enjoy being a content creator. To be clear, I sucked at it, and worse, the effort stole time from becoming the writer I’d always believed I was “meant to be.”

After eight months of posting for all the wrong reasons, I dropped my ill-fated “influencer” effort and favor of my writing practice—first a blog, then an MFA, and a few publications. Eventually, I created this email newsletter on the Substack platform to hone my voice and amplify the voices of other emerging midlife women writers.

But now this!?

“Substack is the new Instagram.” According to HubSpot, a leader in inbound marketing, Substack is becoming a “new branding frontier for founder-influencers.”

Oh no. Not again.

My heart’s smoldering ashes

I wish it didn’t matter—subscriber counts, engagement, exposure. But it does. I mean, it still does, in more ways than I care to admit. 

Here’s the conundrum. New writers (especially memoirists) must establish a platform, build email lists, and grow highly engaged audiences to have any chance of publishing the book they can’t find time to write. So here we are, ping-ping-pinging.

Promotion is a necessary evil for writers, and today, authenticity is a must—no matter how practiced we are at the art of deception.

So, in creating content, posting, and promoting online, we must expose our tender hearts to even more judgment and comparison after we’ve already shredded them in the hard work of excavating our traumas and difficult truths.

St. John, USVI — 2019

There’s one selfie I like from that St. John vacation. I’m on a lanai high in the hills overlooking Coral Bay speckled with white sailboats. I made several attempts to find the most chin-flattering angle.

While Felix waited for me, I scrolled through the images to find one I liked. It was a different kind of editing than what is possible as I write my memoir¹. One by one, I deleted, cropped, and filtered all the parts of me I didn’t like.

1. In high school, my mother said, “Learn to type, and you’ll always have a job.” Four decades later—peri-menopausal and restless—I bought an old Vermont farmhouse, hired a “life wizard,” and left a fruitful career. Mom was right about the job, but what if I was meant to follow a different path? At 56, it was time to find out. Working title: Typing Lessons.