I’m not very online anymore. When my age started with a ‘1’ or a ‘2’, I was submerged, enveloped, deeply comforted and drowning in social media.

It’s funny to think about the way my relationship with social media ended up, considering I grew up in Britain in the late 90s with stranger-danger constantly ringing in my ears: don’t speak to strangers, don’t give them your name, and don’t go on chatrooms! Chatrooms were made out to me like they were darkly illegal spaces that children should never go on else they’ll end up killed. Funny how we stopped using the word ‘chatroom’.

It started small and harmless. I was about eight years old when we got the AOL CD-rom from Asda (remember those days?). Back home, in front of the glow of our Windows ME computer which took up most of the box room, we booted up AOL and I signed up for my first email address. From there, I could send emails to friends. So fun! Just as fun as getting my first phone1 and sending my first text. ‘Wow!’ thought small Ren, ‘now I feel like one of the American kids from Nickelodeon.’

Then it started to creep slowly. Secondary school was a sea of ‘What’s your MySpace?’. Note, it wasn’t ‘Are you on MySpace?’. The expectation was that by 11 years old you were firm friends with Tom and had a Top Eight. I did. My Top Eight caused many small dramas. I checked it every day after school, sending bulletins out, commenting on my friend’s pages and slowly giving myself a basic education in HTML and CSS (so it wasn’t all bad I guess…). I loved it when I made someone’s Top Eight; it was a specific buzz that I sought out time and again.

At the same time, girls in my year discovered a site called Piczo. You made websites on Piczo and amazingly you could use GIFs as your website background. This meant you could have animated, and usually very twinkly, backgrounds on your website. However, again the social aspect crept in, and in our case it meant the creation of ‘Burn Books’. We’d all seen Mean Girls by this point, and some girl had the bright idea to make a password protected guestbook on their Piczo website. I never did find out if I made it on there; I kind of hope so in a weird way, as although it was appalling, and the girls responsible were definitely given detention by the school when it all came to light, it is kind of hilarious to be featured in a 2005 era burn book made on a janky website filled with gifs that say things like ‘Jealousy is a disease, get well soon bitch.’

Things started to go south with Facebook. Again, the ‘oh wow’ factor played a part for this naive AuDHDer - ‘Oh wow, I can add my family and speak to them online!’ How novel! How about speaking to them in real life? At university we would take a digital camera with us on nights out (my hair is turning greyer at the thought) and the next day the camera owner would upload hundreds of photos of the night out and tag you on Facebook. Imagine doing that nowadays! University for me was a very Facebook-centred experience. I ran Facebook pages, I shared night-out photos and I got a specific buzz from posting status updates about my achievements.

Yesss, let me win at social media! Do you see me winning?!? Look at all this sweet, sweet external validation! I have no sense of self or emotional core!!!

I became a big, compulsive, toxic Facebook user who prioritised social media over most things.

Facebook was followed by original Twitter. I loved original Twitter with my whole heart. I was there for the ‘do white people wash their legs in the shower?’ discourse. I was there for Ed Balls tweeting ‘Ed Balls’. I was there when Rihanna told Ciara ‘Good luck with booking that stage you speak of’. Over then course of ten years or so on that platform I found genuine real-life positive opportunities on it, and also met a lot of autistic people on the platform later on. But like any social media, it was always rotten. Twitter never became a cesspit when it became X, it already was one. I’d read reams and reams of tweets that made me sad and wonder later why I felt so upset. But again, it was somewhere I checked often, too often.

Instagram was the same. What started as me occasionally posting a photo of coffee art (because I have always and will always be an insufferable hipster from 2012), turned into me compulsively checking Stories every hour. Why? Was I a private detective wanting to keep tabs on everyone I knew? No. Did I know that by constantly looking at the highlights of someone elses life, it was making me feel shit about my own? No. Why did I feel the need to constantly be on that app? ‘But Ren!’ says Me from the Past, ‘we watched Wagatha Christie happen in real time!’

Who gives a shit? Truly. I am past caring - for all the hours I have spent on social media in my life, imagine all the things I could have created, or all the books I could have read, or all the conversations and special moments I could have had with the people that matter in my life.

I deleted Instagram last year and it honestly felt like I grew wings and ascended. The weight that left my brain was ridiculous, and yet I kept on feeling that itch, to open my phone and cycle through the apps ‘Instagram’, ‘Facebook’ ‘Twitter’, ad nauseam. I could, and did, spend hours upon hours in that cycle. I was a fiend for dopamine, understandably so. It was readily available, so why not? Because it was and is fundamentally harmful to my mental health, particularly as an AUDHDer.

As I starved myself of content by deleting the apps and accounts one by one, I’d look elsewhere on my phone. I’d think in a moment of delusion: ‘What’s LinkedIn like these days?’ Grim.

I thank myself every single day for never downloading TikTok.

It hit me recently that I haven’t got rid of every social media, and it irked me. As I have been working through deleting apps, I realised that I’m on Substack Notes a lot. Liking, replying and posting most days. I open the app up and check it when I’m bored. Once I post a newsletter I am on the hunt for likes on the Substack Notes feed. Substack is social media. Uh, oh. Compulsive dopamine and external validation time! Mayday!

I open the Substack app for the same reason as why I drank alcohol- to dull the constant negative thoughts in my head and to get a buzz. I know this logically and yet many times I try to weasel out of it and justify my use to myself. Worrying.

So I’m quitting. Properly this time because I’ve definitely said it before and come back with my tail between my legs like nothing happened. Quitting is the only way I can get my binary-coded brain to stop doing something that’s bad for it.

This time I am going a step further. I will be moving to Buttondown as a newsletter provider in the next month or so. This means I never have to log into Substack and see the temptation of the Notes feed ever again. Just a newsletter provider and my website. No more social media.

Don’t worry if you subscribe to this newsletter, I’m taking my subscriber list with me, you don’t need to resubscribe. Please do check that you are subscribed.

I’m serious this time - I need to do this for my health. The weight of all the content I consume, the compulsive checking, the wasted hours, all contribute to poor mental health, but I can change it by looking after myself and doing nice things like reading books, spending time in nature and generally being anywhere other than on my phone.

The move will happen soon once I sort out logistics.

So please, if you enjoy reading my content, and you are a Substack follower rather than a subscriber, then please consider subscribing. That way I can take you with me when I move. I have no access to followers sadly. (I have 920 subscribers, yet I have 1,400 Substack followers. I’d love for you to come with me on this next chapter.)

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As ever, take it easy

Ren