Be Afraid and Do It Anyway - Divesting From Instagram as a Tattooer
“We ordain each other.” - Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Mother Night: Myths, Stories, and Teachings for Learning to See in the Dark
If you or someone you love is locked in the cycle of active addiction with internet or technology use, you need not feel alone: ITAA is an active community with in person and virtual meetings always happening. Link below <3
35mm film double exposure from low tide at Amat Kunyily (Sunset Cliffs, San Diego), winter 2025; where I have ran and dunked consistently for the last year, my sacred space in the city, of play and prayer.
“Social media - it’s just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said, here - perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time, for no reason. It’s prison - it’s horrific. It’s performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”
medium format film of me by the talented dear human Smiles Meyer, along the Sweetwater River, Kumeyaay land (east county San Diego), April 2025
Before I write anything, my guiding light through these last few months has been that: leaving social media doesn’t make you better, or morally superior, or more enlightened than anyone else. I just don’t want to feel like I am dying as I create - and trying to continue as an heart-art-earth-soul-compelled artist-monk-witch on Instagram, at this late stage in the game, feels like sacrificing what is most meaningful to me, most central to my values and motivation for creation, at the online altar of colonial capitalism, cancel culture, and hierarchical, competitive, social supremacy.
I want to create from a place of knowing that I am important, that you are important, and that we all belong. I want to share from a confidence that there is enough attention and time for all of us. I want to connect from an impulse to build a community that enthusiastically sustains and supports each other through our myriad of endeavors, through genuine laughter, inspiration, diversity, and mutual care. All of this is fluid, none of these words should be taken as gospel or manifesto, may we simply ask every day what sort of wholeness Spirit is inviting us into now. How can we imperfectly lead our friends and communities towards deep, reverent, honest, kind, wondrous shared life, during our devastatingly short time on this wild, planetary home, empowered with our unique strengths, perspectives, and talents?
And so, in trust and trepidation, I hope we might find and remember this different, new, old, queered path together.
On January 20th, 2025, I posted an Instagram story telling my 11.6k followers that I would be participating in a weeklong Meta blackout, with a short “See you in a week” message - I then quickly deleted the app, as I always did after posting (I, a compulsive/addicted user, had a firm “post and delete rule), as my closest dears and I pulled up to a grocery store in east county San Diego to buy snacks for a hike, as a prayer of sorts the day before the inauguration. The ~19 hour Tik Tok ban would be lifted about twenty minutes later with a distinctly dystopian “Thank you President Trump” message emblazoned across millions of peoples’ screens, and I began to feel a looming, freeing dread that my week long hiatus from Instagram might take a different flight than what I had intended a half hour earlier.
35mm b&w film from the aforementioned hike on Kumeyaay land (east county San Diego), January 2025
The unabashed propaganda of lifting the Tik Tok ban scared the shit out of me. I have never once downloaded Tik Tok, and yet, it’s odd how one event so beyond yourself can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back: in this case, the pile of straw of human soul and data violations of social media companies, and the camel, all the excuses I have made for the better part of ~ten years, as I’ve continued to rely on Instagram for advertising my craft and supporting my livelihood. You can watch The Social Dilemma, you can physically feel your dopamine sucked out your brain through the straw of algorithms, you can protest the censorship of psychedelic and sex educators, you can publicly complain as you’re shadowbanned for posting about Palestine, and yet, I think all of our lines in the sand are as different as our creative instincts. You know what you have to do when you have to do it. “Let go or get dragged,” as a Zen proverb says.
Following the end of January, one week quickly became two, and through researching and listening to many thoughtful women and non-binary people who have left (or seriously distanced themselves from) social media, particularly Cody Cook-Parrott, Amelia Hruby, Lora Mathis, Tamara Santibañez, and Kening Zhu , by early February 2025 I felt nearly certain that my only path forward, for the sake of my soul and the heart of my tattooing, was to move my art sharing and online attention away from Instagram. It was something I have considered for a long time; I have been sharing my art online since I was 11 and learned basic HTML on Neopets, and have been promoting my art online as a way to make money since I was 15 on Facebook, in my early days of portrait photography. I have never thrived and survived as an artist without the assistance of social media, namely Meta’s platforms - I have also never tried to do otherwise.
To leave feels like one of the largest risks I have ever taken, however: if I am granted the privilege of a long life, at the end of it, I hope to honor the 30-year-old self who was an experiment for the cruel, addictive, untested technologies of social media for seventeen years, and I hope I will thank her for swimming in the unknown change that would necessarily follow from choosing very differently than what the current overculture expects from artists. (An aside: It baffles me that so many can make a fuss about vaccines being under-researched and yet those same peoples’ lives revolve around completely unregulated, exploitive, ad-infiltrated social media companies) In my dreams for the future, I would love to create a brick-and-mortar space that serves as a sort of immersive, multi-person art and immersive installation gallery, lil mercantile, tattoo studio, and venue/gathering space. For now, here in the liminal as I prepare to travel for who-the-fuck-knows how long, I will still have an online presence, just in a much slower, simpler, on-my-terms sort of way - “A system that allows for absence,” in the words of Kening Zhu (who I hired for a creative consulting session in March 2025 and was holistically helpful in processing my anxiety and fear around dipping out of the IG madness).
Below is the post I made mid-May 2025 to let my Instagram followers know that I would be transitioning to a website, newsletter, and blog as my ways of sharing my art with the world:
“The poor ego is always looking for an easy way out...We seal our own fates in this way. Deep in the wintry parts of our minds, we are hardy stock and know there is no such thing as a work-free transformation. We know that we will have to burn to the ground in one way or another, and then sit right in the ashes of who we once thought we were and go on from there.…This desire for a bargain over hard work is so human and so common that it is amazing to find a person alive who has not made the compact. The choice is so usual that if we were to give example after example of women (or men) wanting to quit the chopping of wood and have a more easy life, thus losing their hands - that is, their grasp on their own lives — well, we would be here a long time.”
I’m not obsessed with Bo Burnham I swear, but I think his artistic arc is really fucking important as a testimonial for what internet fame does to us, and pretty integrous in the realm of learning from and owning the fucked up shit he posted as a teenage white boy (I know many disagree with me on that, but we are allowed to disagree! yeah!). He’s literally like patient zero for having the world watch your creative, moral development as a conscious creature, and I think his warnings and passion should be taken to heart, given the gravity of his lived experience. This video was an important seed for me in the last few years.
The idea of A Social Media is not inherently bad; in 2007, I dreamt of this sort of easeful connection with my creative peers as a 12-year-old navigating the clunky messaging of DeviantArt. One of the closest people on my life has never left Tumblr, and apparently, that community is still thriving, shaking their heads at us sorry suckers on Instagram and Tik Tok. Most of the content on Tumblr is collaborative posts, people riffing off of each other’s shit indefinitely, it’s wickedly funny, and the main feed remains chronological. If I wasn’t hell bent on actually trying to reduce my screen time and reliance on regularly posting on the Internet (hey you, reader! word of mouth is the shit, share this with a friend!), Tumblr is where I would go. Yes, it’s still an echo chamber, yes there’s still unhinged and unthoughtful radicalization happening, but the essence of the thing is much closer to real potential community building (and the trials and tribulations we face in that endeavor IRL) than any other options currently available.
The idea of A Social Media is not inherently bad!!!! Many of my trans, chronically ill, and disabled friends have found camaraderie, educational resources, and accessibility solidarity in abounding ways online that most of our IRL communities and spaces simply do not offer (speaking as an American, where it is particularly bleak at the moment). People with the same very specific lived experiences and conditions have access to each other in ways that have never been available before - and this is to be honored and celebrated. I don’t think the queer community would be as vibrant, visible, and educated in our history and theory without social media. I don’t think we would be having the same kind of discussions around race, decolonization, global disparity, and reimagining the violent structures of our society without being virtually connected to people very, very different than ourselves (and the people we are surrounded by on the daily).
However, our current options on the great social media buffet are mostly flaccid and disappointing. These platforms flatten our compassion. Our sense of nuance, paradox, and holding complexity has been reduced to learning to speak the online buzz word SJW jargon of the moment. Our ability to listen to each other, to practice empathy, to ask good questions, has been replaced by a metallic certainty, a cold-knuckled grip on insistent expertise that has no grounding. Change is slow, and yelling only hurts each other. I think it is insane to expect boomers to understand and accept queer gender theory the first time they are presented it. It is unrealistic to expect our parents, or strangers, to always get our pronouns right. Our racist and homophobic family members will not shift their views through being sent any number of Instagram slides. The emergency, the absolute crisis, of heart and mind we are facing requires us to entirely reevaluate how we think, and why we think what we think, and fucking recenter our values away from the black-and-white, good vs evil, orientation of the online world (I think even the structure of “following” people reinforces this system of “in” and “out”). The true potential of A Social Media will not be seen with the current iterations we have been given (re: the Bo video above, referencing these companies going public and needing constant growth and engagement to be profitable).
It should not be sacrilegious to say that Palestinians shouldn’t be slaughtered in an open air prison with our tax dollars and, in the same breath, that Jewish people should not feel afraid to be joyfully visible in our society. We should feel safe to shout our identities, those we have been born into and those we have autonomously claimed, to the stars - and simultaneously have patience with those for whom our Being might feel threatening. We are trying to help each other get free, “We’re all just walking each other home,” and that transformation only really happens in caring relationship.
35mm film double exposure from Pimú (Catalina Island) in the days surrounding Samhain 2024
This shit is heavy; if you’re actively grappling with your reliance on social media, find ways to be in your body and with the earth, that which we are made of and will return to. There’s many ways to slowly discover what the next best thing to do is. Dunk in cold water, call a friend who you know will make you laugh, or close all the doors and dance hard to Disco Snails.
Tattooers can be cultural leaders of a sort, artists who are looked up to in a strange, specific, desire-to-imitate kind of way by many people. It’s an interesting phenomenon, because collectively, I don’t think we do this to every type of artist - certainly to hot musicians, certainly to lifestyle celebrities, certainly to actors and actresses, certainly to historical artists (I’m thinking of Frida), but it’s rare that it happens to a whole genre of visual artists. Tattooers are funny; maybe it’s the inherent ~cool rebel~ association we still have with tattooing, but there is a “tattooer fame” that has emerged that I imagine every semi-successful tattooer experiences, even in small doses. There is a mystical and magical essence to our craft, even if you don’t believe in spirituality at all, that brushes shoulders with the work of medicine people or sexuality educators, this thing of very serious, sensational transformation. I can’t put a solid finger on the nature or reason of tattooer fame, but I have been enraptured by tattooers I admire, and the allure is real. And with that allure does come responsibility, and with that responsibility comes an invitation for leadership.
If tattooers can’t divest from the poisonous platforms that changed our entire “industry,” and the lives of so many artists (myself included), then I don’t know how we can expect anyone else to.
Many of the tattooers I follow are some of the most radical anarchist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial people I have ever encountered. I am baffled at the known hypocrisy that I too have participated in, where we condemn large corporations for fucking us all over, all the while suckling on Meta’s teat for our sustained clientele. It is terrifying to imagine leaving the online space that propelled our careers, but we won’t know if a reimagined path works until we try. When I left Instagram in January, my stories were being seen by 200-300 people; I have 11.5k followers. When I send out a newsletter to my ~1,000 subscribers, usually around 700 people open the email. The math maths.
If the common discourse around anything is “I can’t live without xyz, (excluding ya know our actual spiritual, social, and physical needs)” I think it’s appropriate, and necessary, to try.
It is late late spring in Southern California, and as I drive through San Diego, the streets are lined with the cosmic purple of Jacaranda trees in full radiance; I am viscerally aware that this will be the last bloom I am immersed in for the foreseeable future. In a year, I will be likely somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. In a year, I wonder if I will still be absent from Instagram. I hope so.
I leave because we all deserve tangible abundant life. I leave because I don’t think, in our heart of hearts, any of us can continue to stay with full integrity. Social media is volatile, and we need creative roots of steadiness and support. We need to learn to trust each other instead of viewing each other as artistic or monetary threat, we need to share resources and learn a new model of tattooing as livelihood together. We shouldn’t have to perform our goodness for social acceptance. We do not need to contribute to the noise, and nobody should need a social media account to contact us. I don’t have a corner on the truth, I’m just continuing to ask myself, “Does this behavior asked of me (on social media, in a friendship, in a social situation) make me feel insane?” It truly wasn’t always like this, but everything is different than when we entered this virtual party bus in the late 2000s.
Instagram can be the beginning, it doesn’t need to be the middle, and what a tragedy if it was the end.
35mm film double exposure from Amat Kunyily (Sunset Cliffs, San Diego), winter 2025. These waters and sea grasses held me this year through all of my uncertainty and questioning how to move forward.
