Losing your social media account can land in your body like actual trauma

As a therapist, I was stunned how painful it was to lose my Instagram account. Treating it like an actual loss that needed to be grieved helped--and it could help you, too

In 2022, my Instagram with over ten thousand followers—which I’d slowly grown for over ten years—was unceremoniously shut down.

To this day, I don’t know, for sure, why it happened. All I know is that at the time, I’d started re-posting a sequence of Tweets I’d written about unpaid women’s labor every day, and those tweets had started showing up on Instagram’s equivalent to the “For You Page” (can’t remember what it’s called). Unlike anything else I’d ever posted there, these Tweets were getting millions of impressions every single day—way more than they’d gotten on Twitter (and they had done pretty decently there, too).

Unpaid women's labor

My page was *blowing the fuck up*, as it were. I remember it was a thrill to look at my stats. As far as virality goes, I’ve had many things go viral on various platforms in a really intense flash-in-the-pan explosion of attention that leaves almost as soon as it strikes. But this was different. It was a slow, sustainable burn that was picking up speed over time and I had the sense it would last quite a while. New follows were flooding in by the hundreds daily, and my Insta-stories (which was always my favorite part of that platform, and which until then had been enjoyed by a small cadre of devoted followers) were being viewed by many, many thousands of people every single day.

Then, on a random day in early 2022, I opened the app to post something and, oops, my page wouldn’t pull up.

”That’s weird,” I thought, assuming it was a malfunction.

I tried again several times. Nothing.

I checked their website to see if there were malfunctions on the app. When that coast seemed clear, I looked on their help page for why this might be happening—hackers? internal difficulties within Insta itself?—and soon encountered the horrid possibility I’d never even considered: some accounts are permanently removed for violations of Community Guidelines.

Mind you, this was weird. I’d never been flagged or warned for any violations of any kind in the decade or so that I’d used Instagram (at least as far as I knew). I’d never heard a single thing about the possibility of violations even.

But something in me clicked when I read that sentence, and and slowly it began to dawn on me as I stood there, stunned, in my home office: my account had been shut down.

I know this might sound dramatic, but I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I went into actual shock.

I had to sit down. Right there on the floor of my basement office, I sat, head between knees, and did some breathing exercises. I sat in the shock. I let my brain assimilate this new information.

And believe me, doing this step was growth for me.

In the past, my normal instinct would have been to try valiantly to “get over it”—instantly, almost defiantly—by shoving it to the side of my mind (aka, stuffing it deep, deep within), saying something to myself that sounded noble and true but was actually dismissive and cruel to the part of me that had worked so hard. Something like “it’s just social media! This isn’t a big deal!” And then I’d have just plowed forward with my day pretending I was oh-so-cool with this—way above something as silly as social media, in fact!—only to have what happened haunt me with spirals of disturbing, suppressed thought and feelings and shame for days and maybe weeks on end.

Thankfully, by that point in my career as a therapist and Human Being on Planet Earth, I knew what I had to do to not let this thing upend me for weeks. I had to sit in the extreme devastation I felt and let myself honor the meaningful soma-emotional communications erupting inside my conscious awareness for what it was, and then talk myself through the shockwaves that followed.

So, I just allowed what was happening to happen, staying as consciously aware and observational as possible. It sounded something like:

*tries to open the app for the 800th time*

Shit. This is actually happening. Right as it was taking off. Right as it was finally taking off! This is actually happening! SHIT!

Okay, what are we feeling?

(gross feelings erupt from deep within)

FUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!

Okay, self, that is valid, but C’mon. What are we the feelings behind that fuck? What are we feeling in our actual human body right now?

(Pauses; assesses)

Shock. And disbelief. And horror. And sadness. And disappointment.

And a deep, almost overwhelming grief.

Bingo. Right there, on the floor of my office, I remember fast-tracking quickly through this process and landing with a thud on that bedrock: this was grief.

Bona fide, true, valid, absolutely understandable Grief with a capital G.

And since grief, in essence, is the process of shepherding (or at times simply allowing) one’s body and mind on the path to acceptance of an event in time and space that we really, really did not want to be real, I knew that it would probably be a good idea to define exactly what the loss I had experienced was, and why it was hurting so badly.

If this ever happens to you, too (it seems to be a thing in this day and age, for sure; my heart truly broke for all the Tiktokers that genuinely thought they would never record on that app again recently, for example) I hope you will take my little outlining here as something of a template for your own loss. Obviously, the content will be different, but the themes, and the ways our social media accounts intersect with vivid, absolutely crucial sometimes, parts of our IRL lives, will be similar.

What is the loss here? Why was this dumb-ass phone app so important to me? Why does this hurt? In losing this account, what are the things, past and present, that I am truly losing?

Here’s what the break-down of it all looked like for me:

First, LONGEVITY

I’d been on Instagram for 12 years. I hadn’t been a super-loyal documentarian of my life there by any means (I’m not a great photographer), but I’d posted some significant amounts of stuff every one of those 12 years, and that was a lot of history that had been curated, sometimes from sources and hard drives I no longer had access to. (“Back up your data,” says this writer with ADHD who can never remember to back up his data.)

Second, STORIES

I’m an elder Millennial/Xennial, so while most social media waves have appealed to me over the years, when Snapchat hit the scene, I was too far out of high school and too fuckin’ old basically, to get myself onboard. So when my sister convinced me to give the stories feature on Insta a try in 2017 it felt a bit weird and pointless to me. Like who cares about a bunch of shit I throw on a screen for 24 hours, right? Surely this is a waste of time… But, to my surprise, the Stories feature became my go-to almost immediately. I loved it WAY more than the standard features of the app. I relished the spontaneity and impermanence—the way it let me be messy and make mistakes and know that the next day would be new and fresh, unaffected by the content of now.

By the time I was sitting on that office floor in shock, I had half-a-decade’s worth of daily stories, separated on Instagram’s calendar into a chronicling of time that served as an ersatz diary. It felt like a travelogue of my own life, and I absolutely cherished it and the way it kept me connected (again, ADHD, object impermanence/low working memory) to the events and highlights of my own life. And while, yes, most of these Insta-stories exist still somewhere on the cloud, losing the immediacy and infrastructure of this daily check-in-to-self was devastating. I’ve gone looking at them a few times, and for the most part I find they are now largely bereft of context to me—a bunch of floating images stored somewhere vague and easy to forget, like keepsakes in a forgotten box in your parents’ garage. The value they had to me was insofar as they were connected to the social media outlet that had begotten them, and the ways that connection had anchored me to other people and to myself. Without that, the value disappeared.

Third, LOVE & NOSTALGIA (trig warning: cheesy love story ahead)

I remember sitting there with Jenni in her living room as I tried to get into “stories” and distinctly knowing, on an intuitive level that sometimes hits me, that this feature would change my life in a positive way I assumed that meant in terms of my social media reach, and indeed, that’s what I thought was finally happening in 2022 as my posts started being seen by millions. But, obviously, given what I am describing here, that notion turned out to be wrong, and I have since realized that instinct was likely referring to something else:

That stupid fuckin’ app helped me land my husband, Carlos.

When we started dating we were long distance, and Carlos is an introverted, cautious, somewhat stoic guy which is part of why I adore him. I love sensing the layers of depth within him, and knowing, too, that to be invited into those deeper layers is a distinct privilege.

Part of what this means, though, is that the guy isn’t the most outwardly emotive person on the planet, which was at times confusing during the infatuation stage of our relationship. I’m pretty attachment-secure (thanks mom!), but even I had moments of doubt during those first few weeks, new as I was to the whole “dating someone I’m actually attracted to” thing. With Carlos, I could sense our vibe, but his texts were often very succinct, almost verging on terse—definitely not overly emotive and verbose like mine can get (what? the guy currently on paragraph 32,000 of this essay about social media can be a tad prolix? You don’t fuckin’ say!).

Anyway in those early weeks, his natural boundaries and, shall we say “texting-efficiency,” occasionally made me question whether he was actually interested in me. But there was one thing I started to notice that cut through any of that noise like a hot knife through Haagen dazs: Carlos was the first person to watch every single story I posted. Without fail. Every time. Multiple stories a day. For months.

I know there are a lot of jokes out there about how delulu it is to think someone watching stories is a sign of anything other than a bored person on their phone, but I’m here to tell you divas and divos who have ever wondered: SOMETIMES IT ACTUALLY MEANS SOMETHING.

I just knew it. Once I realized that his tiny red little profile was always the first to appear after I posted a story, I knew in my heart of hearts that this guy wouldn’t be paying that much continuous attention to me unless he was, actually, for reals, down. bad. And so I started, as anyone sane would, to tailor my stories to him. It’s like an art-form, really (I’m sure some of the girlies out there know exactly what I’m talking about here)—the nonchalance and generality of tone necessary to be able to claim it was for everyone—plausible deniability, of course!— while also laying on thick those tiny tidbits of specificity and context that let the person of interest know they’re *the one* you’re going to all this trouble for.

Instagram Stories is how I hung in there for months as we got things started living in different states—especially in those fragile first weeks where most people would be spending lots of time but we couldn’t. Anytime I wondered “wait, is this guy actually into it?” I’d just pull up that list of people who have viewed my stories and there his photo would be—the cute smile, red shirt, dark hair I can still see in my mind’s eye—and then, deep breath. It’s real. It gave me a boost every time I checked. It’s kinda the thing that made those early moments of low communication tolerable—and seven years, a marriage license, a mortgage, a cute little doggie, and co-parenting four kiddoes for half-a-decade in, I think it’s safe to say: I wasn’t making it up in my head.

All thanks to that damn account that I was sitting on the floor, grieving! This account that was finally blowing up, finally getting somewhere, that I’d curated for many years, waiting patiently for my content to start getting reach— and that had also, without question, changed my life for the better in very tangible ways, one of which was sitting a floor above me in the living room, legs crossed, sipping coffee from a “love is love” mug before he left for work.

Damn it Instagram! Why did you have to make me fall in love with you before you betrayed me?????

To long-story-short this for us and get to the point, I tried restoring the account for the next month. I have memories of a gazillion attempts to upload a picture showing that I was the account owner, and then waiting for some kind of response as to what I should do, how to proceed, how to not lose this thing I’d worked hard for and treasured a lot.

Crickets.

The final straw came when I talked about this on Twitter and one of my followers said “hey, I work at Meta, I can definitely look into this and try to help you get your account back.” I thought all would be saved! All would be restored!

But instead, this guy just came back and said “listen, I don’t have any explanation for this, but they let me know there is no way you’re getting your account back.”

Huh? Like… why though?

The only thing I can figure (and Meta’s recent decisions around LGBTQ and trans content seems to align with the general sense of this theory) is that the higher ups in Meta REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY FUCKING HATED the posts I was making about women’s unpaid labor.

And honestly, fuck that shit times 6.2 billion. That’s fuckin’ grooooosss.

Anyway, obviously, after any and all attempts to restore the thing, at that point it became apparent that the account was donsies.

And, as with any grieving process, I had to take steps to heal.

For a long time, I didn’t open a new account. I just couldn’t bring myself to. It felt too sad. But anytime I started to feel real sad about it, I was able to think back to the initial moments there in that basement office—the shock, the hot flood of emotion that came over me as I realized what was happening, and then the active choice not to just hop onto another app and doomscroll pretending I was fine—the choice to instead sit on the damn floor and breathe and then LET THE FEELINGS THROUGH.

To this day, remembering this anchors me to acceptance, which in turn anchors me to a regulated nervous-system state of calm

BTW, eventually I did open a new Insta, but I’ll be honest, it’s just never felt the same. I can’t get back into it. And part of the reason for that is because, there, on that very first day of letting ALL those pesky feelings through, I arrived at a thought that felt true in a way I was sure would last (and it has): I knew that I never, ever, ever wanted to try to build a platform or a following in an Internet app again—some random place controlled by people whose values don’t even align with mine, where I could go one moment connected to millions of people and the next have zero access to any of them.

If I luck out and start doing something on some app that brings folks in (which has happened to me a few times—like when I started talking about ADHD on Twitter and gained about 20,000 new followers in a couple of months) I’ll be grateful, and I might keep putting whatever weird random content struck a cord up for a while till I get bored. (I can honestly see this happening on TikTok for me at some point if I ever get back to it.) But I won’t be tying my future to that in ANY WAY.

Instead, I knew then and know now, I need a place that is permanent. A place that isn’t a flash-in-the-pan, and that allows me to control my contacts instead of hoarding them for me and then serving me like a product through their algorithm.

There are various places like this on the Internet, of course. But, my friends and fellow countrymen/women/theys, I want to say that, for me at least, so far, this place seems to be a pretty good place to do that. I mean, it feels a little weird to be talking about this on Substack—like I’m trying to convert people to a thing I like or something, but also to a thing you obviously already know about since you’re reading this there— but what’s true is true, and I get nothing for promoting it so hopefully my words sound believable.

For me, Substack has become (and is still becoming, several years after that whole fiasco) the type of place I truly want to be. A place to write. A place to converse with like-minded folks. A place where deep thinkers converge around subject matter in largely safe ways. A place where things I used to enjoy elsewhere that got RUINED by greed and weird politics can be enjoyed safely, all in one place. (They even have a very functional, very active idea-sharing component called “notes” which is very similar to Twitter, minus the knot seas. Huzzah!)

Anyway, the point is, as part of my healing journey, it is nice to be able to write in a place like this. This is a place where the safety truly lies in owning YOUR OWN FUCKING EMAIL LIST THAT CAN’T BE DISAPPEARED BY SOME MAN-BABY IN A TECH OFFICE WHO STILL THINGS OF WOMEN AS PROPERTY AND DOESN’T LIKE THAT YOUR POSTS ABOUT WOMEN’S UNPAID LABOR IS CAUSING HIM TO FEEL ICKY IN HIS TUM TUM.

And that safety, my friends, cannot be over-estimated.

In the meantime, wherever your Internet wanderings may take you, please know that if you ever lose one of your social media hubs to fascists or new tech or the passage of time or whatever else, know that this therapist-and-fellow-Internet-sojourner gives you “permission” to grieve. I give you “permission” to know inside yourself that these apps on our phones aren’t just silly distractions for weak minds, or frivolous and femme pastimes that have no importance in this world. They actually matter. They are instruments that drive deep connection in isolation, and joy in times of sorrow, and laughter in phases of confusion or distress. They are tools and money-makers and advertising machines and portals to the past and journals documenting everything from the very minutiae of our day-to-day lives to the global events of a world that knows as much chaos as its ever known peace.

and to lose these things is to lose something vital to our lives and to our mental health.

It mattered. It was real.

Let yourself truly mourn on your way to acceptance.

(Then open a Substack, or something similar, and never give that much control to tech bros EVER AGAIN!)

With love,

Joshua