The Uninfluenced Holiday
Being unworthy of a like is where I have desired to always live
Dear reader…this isn’t the normal Wednesday essay, and I thought about leaving it for Friday, but nah…let’s do this. I am making this essay free this week because I think it is something we all struggle with now in modern/social-media life in some way when the holidays come around, so I hope my experience gives others a weight off their shoulders or at least a new perspective on what actually matters in this season.
Part of leaving the blogging/influencer world behind over the last few years has been working to understand the threads that wove into my life and why they did. To dig at the effects, the expectations of creation, likes, and pageviews began to strangle my life. Slowly, as I pulled the strings that spun around parts of life from those years, I realized what those strings liberated when released and what they had suffocated in me. That said, as I reckon with these bits of my life, I feel there is something important in giving them a place to live in the world.
So, though I don’t typically talk about this sort of thing, I am dropping it here and there for you to get some story and perspective on what that season of life held for me and how it has led me to where I am now. My hope is it also pulls you behind the proverbial curtain to free you, maybe as a consumer of media, too.
The lights twinkle this morning on the tree. I watch as my 4-year-old resets the ornaments for the 5th time since we put up the tree on the 2nd of December. The lights of the tree are shifting and falling from the branches. This tree is wild in every way, and I love it. It feels wild and free, like me these days. Liberated. I see the value it has to our family as our kids go every morning to turn the lights on first thing before the sun ever rises to the southeast of the house and the building clouds to the west turn pink. I don’t see how I haven’t gotten certain decor up yet or the way everything feels a little less planned than years prior. Then my mom texts me and says, “I need an image of the tree! Did you even get it up?” I send one that reveals the bad lighting, the strewn blankets, fallen ornaments, and inconsistent lights on our misshapen but happy tree. She writes back, “It’s perfect!” I couldn’t agree more.
I stepped away from Instagram this season for many reasons, but one that shines the clearest right now is that I don’t enjoy watching others posting and sharing the aesthetics or inspiration for their homes because it is triggering for me. I am sure what they are making is beautiful, and they feel proud of it, but I have a complicated history with these sorts of things. One that I am working through on a couch in the office of my therapist every other week.
These perfectly lit images of the draped garland or idealized family photos make me feel I need to have the same, aspire to it, or I feel shitty I didn’t do it. Nothing positive sits with me after I see these things, and I realize life is too short to feel this sort of thing. These feelings sharpen my awareness of the unhealthy connection with the binding of the string of consumerism and influencer culture from my past that I am slowly releasing. Now, though, as I unwind that string, I am pondering how many times I left others in the same place, and there is shame and guilt I feel in that, but life is about learning and changing so we can shift our ways, become healthier and make the world better. So here I am now.
The first winter after my son was born (2016), I sat in my office editing, creating, and writing another holiday-sponsored post. I sent it off, and the response immediately from the brand that afternoon was to change the writing to fit their exact wordage about the greenwashing they wanted me to sell. They sent whole paragraphs with copy they wanted to be pasted into the post. I closed my laptop and just sobbed. It was the 6th one that month when I felt I was told something similar and how my pay was related to saying yes once again and handing over a brand and career I had spent years building just to make it profitable and keep calling it worthy of my time even though I loved writing. Instead, this job I dream of left me feeling crushed and trapped.
It was the last Christmas I took any content campaigns like those that required those sorts of demands. I couldn’t do the perfectionism, being bought by brands, asking friends over to pose for another shoot with happy faces (bless you, Sam and Laura, for always being there for me), carrying the expectations of engagement and clicks, or how I felt I was holding together this version of myself that could be a billboard for a brand while still being me. I followed through on the final things I had signed on for here and there that next year. I had contracts to fulfill, and I put on a smile for the images, but inside, something felt empty and no longer me. I was tired of putting on the smoke and mirrors of it all.
In fact, the quote “Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good” from East of Eden by John Steinbeck has been hung in my mind for years since I shut that laptop that season. It has been a guiding force as I walk away from this chapter of my past. I want to be a good human to model— to my kids how to be the same in their lives. It felt that striving for perfection and being valued in likes or how I designed a tablescape just right or people loving the aesthetics of my home stood in the way of this being possible. If I was constantly trying to create a world that looked good for an Instagram shot, how would I help or inspire anyone else to be good in this world? How could I see the realities of the world around me?
Since then, I have walked away from it all little by little each year, but saying no is only the beginning of letting go of your past and healing the ruts of old patterns. I had learned in those days to see my life as only being of value if I could perform with numbers, likes, and aesthetics others wanted to view. The platforms only pushed this idea even when I stopped taking a paycheck. The free packages of new things to sell in another post arrived on my doorstep, holding the weight to continue the work a little more and enticing me into the traps of my past work. Just one more I would find myself saying as I felt the pressure of the packages still to decorate a life I was fooling myself I wanted.
Undoing this way of being takes time. This holiday season is the first time I have felt liberated from the desire to hang the perfect tree, make the garland for the photos, have the perfectly decorated mantel, and embrace letting things be whatever I want them to be without feeling any need to share it. This is a huge move in my life. There are no photoshoots or photos for the gram. There are no posts or stories to write to make that money in Q4 that a blogger would drool over because it is the end of marketing budgets for the year (IYKYK). I am no longer bound to saying yes and living in that frame of the world. If I had told that woman I was that first winter back in Michigan when I sobbed, that after Thanksgiving nearly eight years later, I decided to take a break from Instagram right now, she would be proud and empowered to think it was possible to disappear from this world and no longer be caged or defined by it. I know she would feel a sense that the cage was less constraining than she believed.
Maybe you wonder why I didn’t embrace the imperfect and keep going. Sure, maybe I could have, and maybe one day I will find some way to be in the social media sphere that way, but there is a path of thinking and being that was cut too deep to just heal through adjusting my ways. I was bound up and too entrenched in the rhetoric of what it took to be valuable for the big payouts, the partnerships, or the product lines to see that anything other than this path was the way to go despite telling myself differently. When you send daily lists to potential clients (advertisers/brands) for 12 years of your pageviews, subscriber numbers, and follower count, you are acutely aware of how this makes you worthy of value because your pay is directly related to it. It is hard not to see yourself as a number value even after you decide not to. When you have a past of feeling these things make you valuable to the world, you have to remove yourself and start again in a whole new way.
This system may be okay with some, but for me, I couldn’t do it any longer and keep a hold on myself and who I wanted to be in this world. My values no longer and possibly never did align with what the marketing world found to be valuable, and it also meant my kids were part of it. The perfect family tree photo with the kids decorating and finding wonder in the image had a higher price tag than just me doing it, and that was where the line would always be drawn. I couldn’t say yes any longer to that. If I didn’t enjoy living in the stress of a perfect photoshoot-ready life, how could I expect them to? Not to mention, their lives are not mine to sell, which is another thought for another day.
Washing away the past of the expectations of influencing and blogging was like a weight off my shoulders that I had no idea I was holding. When you stop being in the influencer/instagram/blogger-culture, you find the beauty within the realities of being a human. The dust in the corner feels less weighty or defines your value in the world. The not-so-matchy and handmade stockings all of a sudden feel adorable and quaint, not unworthy of likes. This unraveling has taken years to understand. It wasn’t something I could tell myself— that not striving for perfect corners of my home made me still valuable. That I could hold space in the world that possibly was better not just for me and my family but the entire world around me by being away from these unrealistic expectations or showing the good side of us and not our whole self.
For those of us who built lives on lifestyle content sites, strong and “worthy” careers by many standards, these things feel like shadowy figures brought into the light in the show of holiday magic-making. Something about that last list of styled content to create still may always hang in the wings of our lives like a ghost. Yet, I have found it beautiful and liberating to let myself off the hook to make this season worthy of anything but peaceful and connective for those I spend these days with. For the first time, I find nothing I do has to be shared with anyone but those right here in the room who are surrounded by the glow of the tree because, ultimately, these individuals care nothing about anything being perfect in any way.
I find that showing how I decorated anything in my home brings no value to who I am as a human; instead, what does is who I am as I navigate this season with those who love me. I can now think less about the photo I am capturing and more about dancing with my kids in the glowing light with our hair messy and mismatched pajamas. The image that will be scrolled past or the reel that won’t be seen or will won’t define the value of being connected to those I love. In fact, it could distract me from it. I want my kids not to remember the posed moments I expected of our life at all in those previous chapters; I want them to remember me sitting in wonder, watching them enjoy this season in the simplest and purest ways that didn’t involve stress or anxiety or pressure, just us being present and warmed deep in our souls as only unconditional love can.
How perfect my home looks day-to-day only washes away the realities of being human that unfold in these walls that I love being part of. The moments that unfold while making dinner on a Wednesday night aren’t perfectly styled, and I like them this way. I am a messy cook. I sometimes have mail on the counter while making a soup that looks like white mush but tastes deeply nourishing and made of the best things from the earth: Locally grown veggies that felt the struggle of the cold, grown by our farmer and friend just down the road. Those perfectly styled images of “our life” eliminate the memories of the kids and I playing tag or dancing to Taylor Swift while unloading the dishwasher. It doesn’t leave space for Mike sitting on the counter opening mail, drinking a glass of wine after he finishes work, and talking to me about life while I cook or the kids build a fort out of pillows in the living room and then us not cleaning it up because their creativity wins over our need to control and perfect the aesthetics of our life. I would rather spend time lying in bed while my 4-year-old falls asleep than make sure my kitchen is clean every night.
These are the moments that get painted out of a sterile-styled image. It makes me forget the mess of homework strewn on the table that tells the story of parents and a brilliantly creative child trying to fit into the boxes of the education system and build confidence and the belief that even if you are dyslexic, you are still very smart. I don’t want that, and none of us should forget the things that have written the chapters of our lives if we love it.
All that a perfectly clean space says is that I spend a lot of time keeping things looking a certain way for who knows whom. I realize I want to say more about life than that. I want to be present in the mess of it all because life unfolds there, not on a clean countertop or perfectly placed living room. A life well-lived has nothing to do with the state of your home.
Being present in this holiday season, the first one where I really let the kids take their own pick out of the Christmas box to decorate everything because I have been reminded this season isn’t about me but them. I feel that perfection and desire for likes have lost their value in my life almost completely. Though I walked away a while ago from that world mentally, and thanks to how the algorithm works it forced it into my life, I am finally seeing the work I have done to weed away the way those days constrained and blinded me from what was of value in life.
Though I still find moments it creeps in, I can spot it and dig it up, but only because I have spent so many years digging at it till my fingers hurt. Seeing the complete mismatch of decor, my kids have curated on their own that I have accumulated over the years from sponsored posts and trends that needed to be sold, I see it all has been worth it because now I realize the priceless joy in watching them enjoy this season on their terms. There is a peace in the mess I wish I had found the ability to embrace sooner, but glad I have now. There is a calm in the undone — stories that were designed by their hands that won’t be this small for that long.
I have come to a place where I find joy in the making of the decor and how I have to move with what nature offers as I make things from what the land around us gives for no other reason than it makes me deeply happy. I don’t miss the anxiety that comes with it all being styled in such a way, not even a little bit. I love the slow build of our home's decor in this season and that it no longer has to be created before Thanksgiving to hit the marketing cycle.
So, though our tree has stories of the past work I did to build the life we have now, I no longer feel the weight and pressure it placed on my mind and heart that distracted me from the life I actually was hoping for as I built those moments for an image.
I am elated with the mantel with the handmade stockings, the decorations we made from pinecones together, or the mess of needles under the tree from the bargain lot that doesn’t want to hold the lights on its branches. I love the way we sit near it, and it smells of pine while we are cozy under blankets or play games together. I am thankful that the ornaments get taken off for playing with, or one is broken, and nothing is precious except us as a family as the snow falls outside.
I am thankful there is no email telling me the images needed to feel a little more like this or that or the wordage should align this way or that. I am thankful my value is now clearly untethered from anything around this season, and it is never more clear here as myself uninfluenced by anything but to be present and uncoaxed by the world outside our own reality and home. I am happy to see now that being unworthy of a like may mean that I am doing things the way I have wanted to all along and how much joy that brings on its own.
I want to tag some others who have written great pieces/substacks on removing themselves from the influencer culture and transforming their careers from the toxic nature of it all. from ,
of , and wrote this amazing piece about being an OG Blogger.There is an unspoken and quiet healing happening amongst transformation in careers of bloggers/influencer world that I think is important to understand as others in the industry and anyone who has been there consuming the media created on social platforms.
While I am an not an influencer, your words resonate so deeply with my complex feelings regarding social media and how to have a “balanced” relationship with it (and is that even possible? Or more importantly, worth it?). I find myself overanalyzing the feelings and at the end of the day, what I know is the simple fact that “it no longer feels good” and that is enough.
Thank you for this insight and sharing so beautifully.
Oh Megan. As someone who has followed you for years (and also happens to have two kiddos the exact same ages) this is the best thing you’ve ever written. Thank you for the window into what really is behind all those slick shiny images and the reminder that is really isn’t much more real than a Crate and Barrel catalog. I’m decidedly not an influencer with a regular person day job but I’ve lately been increasingly feeling the pull to drop Instagram beyond following just personal contacts bc it really is negatively influencing my mental well-being, especially as a mom.