Vol 2.27 Day 18 of Dry January

Part 1 - My history with social media & recollecting my mind, thoughts and opinions.

The Sober Glow Studio is an extension of what was started on social media circa 2016. As I have evolved, the topics I cover have naturally evolved. Here, I provide stories, recommendations, and resources on the art of living an alcohol-free lifestyle, navigating health & midlife, and anything that simply feels good.

A playlist meant to be listened to while hanging out here.

Part 1 – The Sober Glow IG timeline and the cultivation and attempted dismantling of a community. And why taking time away is so damn appealing.

Part 2 tomorrow - The platform that’s disrupting social media and how to use it so it doesn’t feel like another social media account. And how I am learning to live with, but not in, social media.

PART 1

I enjoy Instagram. I do. Instagram has been good to me and for me. I have lifelong friends because of this APP. I have gone on crazy adventures with the most fun-loving women. The thousands of messages and emails I have received have been raw, wonderful, and vulnerable. And all those unexpected conversations that were so open and honest, they made me laugh and cry. I’ve coached and guided women along their decision to quit drinking, and I hope I have quietly inspired many more to do the same. Or at least try it for themselves.

I promise you that this is not me banging on about all the reasons why I am quitting social media. I am not. This will not be me telling you that you should quit social media either. Nor is it me on some pedestal taking praise for getting off the gram. However, what I will share is how I am figuring out how to live with it without living in it.

We’ve all ingested a million books, newsletters, and articles about social media, the time sucks, how it’s ruining our memory and abolishing our sense of self, and a million other reasons not to use it. And yet, most of us are still actively using it. I don’t think the problem is that we use it but that we use it incessantly.

I started my first Instagram account back in September 2011. My first post was a picture of a wooden sign just off a dirt road in the woods with the letters M & J. It had balloons attached to it, and its purpose was to attract all the lost NYC drivers looking for our summer camp wedding location up in the Berkshires. That IG account was used the same way most people used it, to share single-shot images with close friends and family. I maybe had 50 followers on that private account, and getting three “likes” felt magical.

September 2015 – August 2016

Like most big decisions in my life, I need to feel inspired. And I started looking online for other people talking about not drinking. The only accounts at the time were focused on addiction and recovery. Even though I didn’t find anything similar to my experience, I leaned hard on those voices because they were the only people talking about it in my life. It’s been eight+ years, so I don’t remember all the names, but these podcasts slowly introduced me to other sober women who were talking and writing about their recovery. I remember being ecstatic whenever I came across another woman sharing her experience.

• The Bubble Hour w/ Jean McCarthy

• Recovery Elevator Podcast

• Enjoli. The infamous essay by Kristi Coulter.

• Hello Sunday Morning website and community. I think I found this website way before I quit and attempted to monitor how I was drinking. Returned to it once I actually quit.

• Soberful w/ Veronica Valli

• And then there was a recovery podcast with two middle-aged men where I was introduced to many people, and I cannot for the life of me remember the name of this podcast. I believe this podcast introduced me to Kristi Coulter, Lisa Smith, and Ann Dowsett Johnston, three of the most significant voices for me in the beginning.

• I had read Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp and was starting to dabble in the few quit-lit books published around this time. My Unwasted Life by Sacha Z. Scoblic. Blackout by Sarah Hepola. Girl Walks Out of a Bar by Lisa Smith. A Happier Hour by Rebecca Weller.

In late August 2016, as I was approaching my one-year soberversary, my husband, who was tired of my complaints of not having any sober friends, suggested I join Bumble BFF. After I picked myself up off the floor with the horror that I would join a dating APP for friends, I decided that creating a new IG account would be less humiliating. Little did I know, it would be the same thing for free.

With a picture taken on the morning of my 40th birthday in Bermuda, wearing a shirt that read “Teetotaler.” I posted my first IG post under the impulsively chosen name of The Sober Glow. I knew the name was cute and catchy, yet I had no idea how much it would annoy me in the coming years.

The picture was significant in many ways.

• It was my 40th birthday and the first celebrated sober as an adult.

• My husband and I were feeling amazing both together and as individuals. It was the start of what I refer to as our second marriage.

• The word Teetotaler was something my mother used to refer to herself as because she never liked drinking and rarely participated in the act of it. I loved the seemingly old-fashioned word out of respect for her.

• It started as a Google search for one of those self-design t-shirt companies where I could make one myself with the label ‘teetotaler,’ and I came across the HOME podcast website selling this exact item. Not only did I buy the t-shirt, I found a whole new world of sober voices.

Having that little world of my own was incredible. It gave me so much hope that life could be amazing without alcohol, and I quickly found myself cultivating a community of people who were looking for the same. Inspiring words with generic templates and filters and thousands of people who wanted more. IG was fun in those days. I honestly don’t know if I would have stayed sober if I had not set up the greatest public accountability trap ever. I was acutely aware that if I decided to start drinking again, I would have had to answer to thousands of people. And that was enough to keep me going on the few days I would randomly romanticize the idea of being a better drinker someday.

Don’t ask me how I grew the IG community; it had an energy all on its own. There is no rhyme or reason to any of it other than that I believe more and more people were looking for alternative ways of living an alcohol-free life. Not everyone needed the traditional way. Not everyone found themselves in addiction or recovery. I believe that people like myself who were proud and open about having another experience were magnets to others who felt the same.

After moving to California in 2017, my account quickly grew. With growth comes requests. Some are great, but most are not. I got used to being approached by companies offering collaborations, which meant they wanted free promotion in exchange for some free product. I turned down every one of them every single time. I was very protective of my readers, and there was zero chance I would risk their trust for some random product I cared nothing about.

The growth of The Sober Glow also brought on requests for interviews, speaking gigs, even the New York Times Sunday Style section, and, to my surprise, offers to write a book. The first was from a popular literary agency that scared the shit out of me with the idea of it all, but my interest was piqued. I sat on it for a bit, talked to friends of mine who were published authors, and even hired a writing coach who had worked with Authors like Gabby Bernstein and Peta Kelly. Ultimately, I could not bring myself to sign on the dotted line, but I loved and continued to work with the writing coach for some time.

A few small publishers reached out to see if I was interested as well. I politely declined them and sent them to other people who I thought might be interested. But nothing topped the phone call from one of the big five publishing houses that basically had this whole idea for “my book” laid out, with a title that made me cringe, and any excitement I may have initially had was quickly lost. I declined and informed the woman that I would be crucified if I published a book with that title. Let alone I would have a deadline so short I had more time between my haircuts. That was my final no, thank you, and I never entertained the idea of writing a book again. And before anyone thinks I am tooting my own horn, I am well aware that they were all looking at the number count next to my name and not my actual writing.

The point is that IG gave me so many amazing opportunities. Whether I jumped on them or not. And then things began to change. By the end of 2019, social media had started feeling weird, and the feelings of fun had all but vanished. Everything started to look and feel the same. There were hundreds if not thousands of accounts talking about going alcohol-free, and yet nothing was new. Memes, ideas, quotes, businesses, and programs were all like the next. There was a kiss-the-ring energy, who follows who, and scarcity behavior overload, and I could no longer handle seeing the pitting of women against other women, especially in the community I had loved so much. There seemed to be so much encouragement when I started sharing my story, but that encouragement faded and oddly became competitive in nature. At the end of the year, I unfollowed everyone after having watched enough women act like school girls. I also put restrictions on sharing, tagging, and DM’ing. And all my notifications of any kind were turned off. That impulsive decision felt like a weight I no longer had to carry. It felt like freedom. It also felt like being an adult.

I wasn’t trying to leave IG; I was trying to find new ways to make it feel good and fresh. And that was by placing boundaries on myself. The freshness lasted about a year before that weight came back. I would randomly find myself scrolling through all my old posts, looking at the things I used to write, ideas I would share in a feverish manner, experiences that were at one time so profound but now, somehow, all of it felt so stale and cliché. It felt like it was written by someone else. Someone who no longer lived in that world. So, in September 2021, I painstakingly archived every single post (600+) I had ever written and shared. Again, the weight was lifted. I left my account with 53K+ followers and one post explaining why I was killing something I once loved, which had given me many new friendships and opportunities and had ultimately kept my ass accountable.

2022/2023 

Other than a few posts here and there, I used IG to hold space for my MVMNT practice via stories. As a user, I liked the ease of stories, and it felt nice to have a place to hold myself accountable once again.

July 2022

I started experimenting with other platforms where I could share parts of me other than the part that doesn’t drink alcohol. I considered Kajabi (expensive and way too complicated for my needs) and tried out Mighty Networks for a while. I had heard of Substack years prior when my friend

Jessica Elefante

started hers. At the time, I balked at the idea of charging someone for a newsletter. I guess the joke is on me because, years later, this is the platform that is truly disrupting the social media world. And it’s bringing me some great new challenges, which I live for.

January 2024

Dry January. Taking a month or so entirely off of social media. That’s it. There are no labels around it, no proclamations, no promises, no ridiculous goodbyes. Just the curiosity to feel something different that can only be met by trying something different.

To be continued….

In part 2, tomorrow, I’ll share the ins and outs of substacking, and all my favorite accounts on the platform, along with the accounts I love to pay for, and my number one tip to avoid letting this platform feel like another social media account on your nervous system. And lastly, I include some life tidbits on this social media Dry January experiment.