SOCIAL MEDIA, this term wasn't a natural component in my life. Nothing I did in more than 50 years - and that was a lot - had anything to do with it. When I was young, I had pen pals, diaries and classmates or fellow students. There was the local swimming pool or the nearby quarry pond for self-expression. Every now and then, there was a so-called "Power Party" - that was always a high light. It was THE thing!
Later there were discos or street festivals.

In short, everything took place in the three-dimensional domain with people you either knew or at least passed by from time to time. You could look each other in the eye - or if you were too shy, avoid eye contact.
It was all straightforward and easily understandable.

But the world was changing.

FIRST ATTEMPTS

I tried to keep up, influenced by my three children, who brought Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or - now forgotten - MySpace home to me.

I had a fashion boutique in my varied career - my first Facebook account was "necessary" to stay competitive. I went with it but didn't understand why I should need it.
Later, I had a fashion blog. Clearly, a case for Instagram, as my daughter advised me. Pinterest, it was my daughter again who had introduced me to it. I liked it. I enjoyed browsing through it and creating all kinds of boards - also for my fashion blog. This is the only place where some photos have actually survived. I deleted everything else after I closed the blog.

MENTAL HEALTH SHIFT

After my experience as a fashion blogger, I didn't want to deal with social media anymore, especially since the call to respect privacy more was getting louder. My eldest son was severe on this subject and had set me up accordingly.

But that was not the only reason. I felt that this Instagram thing was doing something uncomfortable to me. I felt that I was on a terrain I neither knew nor wanted to be on.

My husband says I'm too honest for that. I don't know. All I know is that I cried when I realised in 2020 that I had to face this "monster" Instagram again in order to be noticed as a yoga teacher. Every particle of me fought against it. Sheer willpower made me finally reignite my old fashion account - not without deleting all the fashion photos and redesigning the content into a yoga account.

It went badly, as usual.
I got very little attention and felt inferior, too old - wrong.

At the same time, I set up my first yoga website - in German. But after a few months, I realised it didn't sound, look or come across as professional as I wanted to present myself.

NEW ACCOUNT - MORE STRUGGLES

So: New website - new Instagram account!

Everything thoroughly professional this time! All photos matching the same scheme. Consistent - almost - daily posting. Interacting with other users, posting ads, posting ads, posting ads. Spending a lot of money for little result.

By proper calculation, I paid at least €1 for each follower.

I was advertising my ZOOM classes, which I was still offering at the time, promoted Instagram lives - I was just about dying of fear truly!

Out of all the rare contacts, very few remained for which I am very grateful. One is my yoga soul sister Aga.

To be completely honest:

I feel foolish on Instagram. I don't have anything earth-shattering to say every day, yet I'm not the type to post my food either.
Filming myself doing yoga has become increasingly mentally draining. The sacredness of my practice as an intimate moment with myself on my yoga mat has been taken away. Turning the camera on myself in such a personal moment and then sharing this with an anonymous audience has taken away the very meaning of it.

My yoga practice became more and more a performance act. Far away from what yoga was supposed to be for me and had been before. I love my practice! I love working with my body! I love feeling into myself on a cellular level! I like to try things out; I do weird stuff sometimes - nothing I want to reveal to an anonymous audience.

I've taken workshops, booked expensive audits (a waste of money!!!), and paid programmes to schedule my posts. An ordinary person can no longer operate this monster Instagram without the support of automatic programmes.

Everything made me depict the whole thing more and more grotesque.

GROWING RESISTANCE

I furthermore can't agree with the thesis in a workshop that the app (Instagram) should be free and that we as users should be happy to use it for free. I perceive it the other way round: I provide this app with free content on a DAILY basis and pay for it so that my followers actually get to see it. The hell it is for free. It eats my time, money and my health.

And last but not least, an algorithm that I don't understand decides to whom my posts are shown - or whether they show up at all.

My inner resistance was constantly growing. On Facebook, I was only on paper anyway. I merely connected the two accounts. That's it.

The rest of my relationship with Instagram was scattered by films like "The Social Dilemma" and Bo Burnham's satire "Inside". Do we really need more proof of how harmful social media is to our lives?

An essential topic of my website, besides authenticity, is mental health.

So how can I continue to support a medium indisputably responsible for mental illness? That makes women feel inadequate and inferior? That promotes those who are always in the spotlight while further marginalising those too shy to promote themselves? It's an app that doesn't reward authenticity and rather punishes it because honesty doesn't read as great as show.

I was never the "fake it 'til you make it" type. If something doesn't work out for me, I say so - and if I'm frustrated, I say so too.

„I can no longer arrange with my conscience to pretend that I cherish being there and that everything is “so good”.“

— Indra

FINDING MY DECISION

No, I don't take this decision easy. Of course, I'm afraid I might cut myself off from a channel that could perhaps bring me the desired success. But still:

My intuition tells me that I have to and want to find my way away from social media.

Since I withdrew from Instagram [for the umpteenth time], my days have been lighter, happier, more productive, more meaningful. I go to bed with a light heart. I don't need more proof that I've made the right decision.

What does that mean for you, my dears? Actually, only you can reach me [almost] EVERY TIME on my website. Because this is the tiny virtual space I have created for myself and in which I feel safe. If you write me a message - which I would be pleased about - you will land directly in my private mailbox. That means I'll probably reply to you much faster than I ever did on Instagram because I never allowed a messenger to send me push messages anyway.

It's time for a change.

A change towards more humanity, towards a feasible amount of work that can be done by a human being. A change towards more conscious decisions by the individual, more boundaries and respect for them. Towards more sanity and moderateness. Constantly more and more cannot function, and we already feel that...