The online is… loud.
If I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is go on socials (which I’m definitely guilty of, on multiple occasions…oops), then forget about it. I don’t know why, but my mind already feels a bit muddy. The day hasn’t even started and it’s already borrowed noise.
Not gonna lie, I feel envious sometimes of people who show up in the online sphere almost daily. Who “share eloquently” like it’s brushing their teeth — every life lesson dissected, packaged, and posted.
Prolific. I cannot do it.
And yet, a part of my “career” is online. My raw, personable sharing was what drew people to me in the first place, back when I started my coaching business online in 2021.
So there’s an irony here I sit with a lot: the thing that built this space for me is also, at times, the very thing I find myself protecting my energy from.
My life has gone through several seasons since then. There were stretches when I was simply too tired to show up online — my teaching day job often consumed so much of me, in the midst of a busy academic year, that the last thing I wanted was to add to the chatter.
And there were other times when I simply didn’t feel the need to share. Personal notes in my diary, photos sitting quietly in my camera roll — that was all the documentation I needed.
If I’m honest, I’m still caught in that push and pull. There’s so much I feel like I could share. But I don’t always have the energy — or the willingness — to put my life so visibly into public view.
What I want instead is meaningful documentation. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
But what does that even mean?
I don’t have a tidy answer. Maybe it’s not about a formula at all, but about a filter: does this need to be seen, or does it just need to be held?
Because here’s what I’ve come to believe — not everything needs to be shared publicly just to prove we’re living a good life. We know we’re living a good life. We don’t need the caption, or an audience, to confirm it for us.
So I want more moments that I keep only for myself and the people I love. I think some things get to stay unshared and still be enough. Some things are more real precisely because no one else was watching.
I used to be very much online, but the last three years, I’ve been practising something more intentional: giving myself real stretches of time where I don’t show up on socials at all. I just live. Offline, on purpose. I pay attention.
And every single time, something interesting happens — I come back with more to share, not less. It’s like the noise needs to clear before I can hear what’s actually worth saying.
Funny enough, the offline stretches aren’t a break from my “content.” They’re where it’s quietly being made.
Which is maybe the real shift for me: I don’t think I actually want to disappear from the online world. I still enjoy showing up there — genuinely.
But the enjoyment is different now.
I know I don’t thrive showing up online on a daily basis, so for me, it’s about finding what actually works: doing it at my own pace, and not worrying about keeping up.
I don’t think this means retreating from the online world I’ve built, or the community that found me through it. It just means I’m learning to be more discerning about what earns a place in the feed — and what gets to just… exist, quietly, in a life that’s already whole without an audience.
If you’ve ever felt that same tug-of-war — wanting to share, and wanting to protect — I don’t think you’re doing it wrong. I think you’re just paying attention.
And maybe that’s the takeaway, if there is one: you don’t owe anyone your every season. The version of you that goes quiet for a while and comes back with something real to say isn’t falling behind.
She’s just doing it right.
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