Disconnecting

Ece had been posting on social media almost every single day for the past six years, building a modest but devoted following of nearly forty thousand people who enjoyed her lifestyle content. What had started as a casual hobby during university had gradually transformed into something that occupied nearly every waking thought.

The turning point came on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday evening, when Ece caught herself photographing her dinner before actually eating any of it, mentally composing captions while her food grew cold. She realized, with a sudden and uncomfortable clarity, that she had been living her life as content rather than genuinely experiencing it.

That same night, she opened her analytics dashboard and was struck by how much time she had spent, cumulatively, managing her online presence. It had been calculated that she spent an average of four hours daily on the platform, time that, she later admitted, could have been spent on almost anything more meaningful.

Ece's decision to delete her accounts wasn't made impulsively. She had been considering it for months, ever since a close friend had told her, during a difficult conversation, that she seemed to be constantly performing happiness rather than actually feeling it.

When Ece finally announced her decision to her followers, she was surprised by the response. Many people expressed genuine support, admitting that they had been struggling with similar feelings about their own social media use, though few had actually taken the step she was about to take.

The first week without social media was, according to Ece, disorienting in ways she hadn't anticipated. She had been so accustomed to checking her phone constantly that her hands would instinctively reach for it, even though there was nothing left there for her to see.

Her mother, who had never fully understood the appeal of Ece's online career, was quietly relieved by the decision. She told Ece that she had always worried her daughter's self-worth had become too closely tied to numbers that could change unpredictably from one day to the next.

If Ece had continued at the same pace, her therapist later suggested during one of their sessions, she likely would have experienced a more serious burnout within another year or two. The constant pressure to perform, to remain relevant, and to generate engaging content had been slowly and steadily eroding her mental wellbeing.

Over the following months, Ece rediscovered activities she had almost entirely abandoned during her years of constant posting. She began painting again, something she used to love as a teenager, and found herself reading actual books instead of scrolling through fragmented pieces of information.

Interestingly, several brands that had previously worked with Ece reached out again once word spread about her decision, curious about her experience and wanting to feature her story in campaigns about digital wellbeing. She was offered a modest but meaningful partnership to speak publicly about healthy relationships with technology.

Ece has since created a small, private blog where she occasionally writes, without any pressure regarding likes, comments, or algorithmic visibility. She has described this space as the first place in years where she has felt completely free to express herself without performing for an audience.

Looking back on her decision now, nearly a year later, Ece believes that if she hadn't stepped away when she did, she might have eventually lost touch with who she actually was beneath the carefully curated online version of herself. "I used to think disappearing online meant becoming irrelevant," she reflects, "but it actually helped me become real again."