i am deleting instagram (again)
or how i have been saying the same thing for the past five years
My endless battle against social media is longer than I thought.
I started this Substack —blog? Is that how I should call it?— a week ago and I already knew what my first post was going to be about. I even came up with this title, feeling incredibly proud of myself.
i am deleting instagram (again) doesn’t just suggest that I am escaping that hell filled with curated pictures and highlight reels. It also reveals that I have done it before —and that I have failed. It’s almost like a self-fulfilled prophecy.
However, after going through my Notion and reading all the notes filled with ideas for that podcast I really wanted to start in 2022 but never did —yes, I am that kind of person—, I realized it wasn’t me who came up with that title.
It was my 2022 self.
So if my (almost) 2025 self is deleting Instagram (again) and my 2022 self was also deleting Instagram (again), it means that I have been trapped in an endless cycle of deactivating and reactivating my account for more than four years.

It’s kind of depressing, isn’t it? It’s like constantly going back to that toxic ex that you never really get over.
To be fair, none of the times I deactivated my account were with the purpose of doing it permanently. I never truly hated Instagram —but I’ve always felt the urge to leave it out of desperation.
Because I spend too much time there and, when it comes to social media, I have no self-control. I have tried everything —setting timers, downloading apps to block Instagram after using it for a certain time, deleting the app from my phone, etc.
And still, I always seem to find ways to climb those walls. My favourite one was redownloading the app (again), with the excuse of ‘just five minutes to see what everyone is doing / posting a story / replying to a message’ that would turn into hours of scrolling through meaningless reels.
Oh my god. Writing it down makes it more real, which makes it more embarrassing. I’ve been fighting the same battle for way too long.
Why deactivate, though?
I keep deactivating my account because, for some reason, if you reactivate it, Instagram makes you wait one more week until you can deactivate it again. The ‘just five minutes’ excuse dies with that. ‘Just five minutes’ would turn into a week, that could turn into a month, that would turn into over 10 weekly hours just watching other people’s lives.
It’s also because having an account —full of pictures of my face, the places I go to and the things I like— out in the digital world without being able to access it or control it is terrifying. I truly don’t know how celebrities can let teams full of people control their digital image.
It’s so ingrained in me that I see it as a part of me, and maybe that’s the whole problem.
However, something has switched since 2022.
Maybe for the first time in my life, Instagram feels pointless to me. After moving abroad completely alone and going through a crisis during the first two months, when I thought loneliness would end up eating me up, I realized something:
Instagram didn’t make me feel more connected to the people back home. In fact, it was making me feel lonelier than ever.
I remember the exact moment I was scrolling through the stories of my acquaintances when, all of a sudden, I felt a wave of cringe wash over me.
Don’t get me wrong —I used to post more than one story a week. Some years ago, I would even post more than one story a day. I don’t know what changed, but, now, every time I see someone sharing something or I feel the need to share something, I can’t help but ask myself:
‘Who are we trying to impress? What are we all trying to prove? Why are we doing all of this, and for what?’
I kept watching the lives of people I hadn’t seen in more than five years. I even had them on close friends, so they could see even deeper than my curated highlight reels. I watched as my high school classmates were moving out of their parents houses and even getting engaged.
And I compared myself to them. Damn, I compared myself to people who I haven’t talked to in half a decade. The more I think about it, the crazier it sounds.
There’s people I know who don’t wish me well and who keep seeing my fails and my successes, over and over again, every single week, as I keep posting them on the gram. It’s insane. It’s dystopian, even.
And then we are all collectively and endlessly scrolling, looking through strangers’ windows, letting them give us life lessons in 30-seconds videos. Who cares? We are going to watch 20 more of those videos today anyway, and we are going to forget about all of them.
I can know more about someone seeing which reels they have liked than having a conversation with them… And it shouldn’t be like this.
The final reason
My biggest fear used to be being invisible. I thought disappearing from the digital world meant disappearing from real people’s minds. I was afraid that, if I deleted my Instagram account, everyone would forget about me.
But now, that’s exactly what I want.
I don’t want the classmate that used to make fun of me in high school to see my face every day.
I don’t want my brother, who hasn’t called me since I moved abroad, to not feel the need to ask me how I am doing because he can already see it on Instagram.
I don’t want to be a profile. I want to be a real person in the real world. I want my experiences to be only mine. I don’t want to turn them into content to share. I want to stop hating myself for not always being the flawless and curated version I am in the digital world. I don’t want to meet someone new and use my profile as a presentation card. I want things to take their own time.
I want to live without the need to prove that I made it.
I know I did. And that’s all that matters.
I hope you know it too. I hope you get to acknowledge your own achievements without needing to share them with everyone you know. Fuck Sally from high school and the time she told you you would never make it.
You don’t need to prove anything to her. She’s not paying attention to your stories, anyway.
So, yeah. Turns out I am deleting Instagram (again).
Let’s see how long this one lasts.
I recently started using instagram again, and the amount of anxiety I felt everytime I posted, was just so overwhelming, the idea of people watching me, always freaked me out, but despite that I still was uploading stories and posts, just so people could see me, because I thought I should be doing what everyone else does, to sort of “fit in”, but reading this has given me clarity about the reality behind instagram, so thank you
i'm unfortunately not ready to delete instagram at the moment as im going back to uni soon and the only way to actually maintain friendships seems to be to connect through social media. i have, however, put screen time locks on it so I really have to be mindful with how i use it. and if i need to message someone, i'll use it on my laptop- i find that using instagram on Mac is super annoying, and i never end up doomscrolling on it.
on top of the screen time locks, i recently removed about 500 people that I had on my account and made it private; all people from high school, or from my city that were mutual friends that i realised i really didn't care about/want seeing any part of my life.
it's definitely helped me to stop feeling the need to perform and share every bit of my life, and at the moment my mindset is much clearer. my social life is lacking due to me living back at home and away from my friends atm, but i don't find myself being overly sad about spending time with my own thoughts and disconnecting from everything else.
this has encouraged me to keep going as well. lovely writing! :D <3