How Taking a Break from Social Media During One of My Loneliest Years Changed Me

   It was the summer of 2025 and I was absolutely not well. Our family (my husband, our two together, and I) had been in Kentucky for a year after moving from Washington State in 2024, and boy what a year it had been! My husband had gone through a series of health difficulties, with a nasty sunburn (that he probably should have gone to the doctor for), a worst-case scenario of Hand, Foot, and Mouth (search engine photos have nothing on what he endured) and appendicitis that resulted in surgery.  I was still postpartum from our last baby, and struggling to keep two busy little girls occupied in a basement apartment with very little room and even less sunlight. Not all of our stuff was with us, so if I needed to switch out clothes for the season, get new toys, or look for a tax document that I thought we had at the apartment, it was a 20 minute drive away to storage, frequently with the kids in tow. We were in the countryside, so that put us far away from everything and we shared one car that my husband frequently had for work. It was hard. To make matters worse it had recently been my birthday, but any celebration plans ended up either being thwarted or minimal despite any bewildered effort on my husband's part. 

    I don’t even remember what I was trying to post, but I do remember that anxiety had me in a chokehold in almost every way you could think of. I thought I needed to escape for “just a minute” so I could be a good mom. Scrolling felt like the escape that I needed, and deserved. After all, I was a homeschooling mom with little transportation out of the house. I stayed home with my kids and was doing  stuff for everyone else nearly all day every day with no end in sight. I handle stress by cleaning and staying busy a lot of the time, so I wasn’t inclined to be idle. So go, go, go I went. My body, my time, my love, my everything already felt like it belonged to my children and the house. Didn’t I deserve for my brain to belong to me for at least a few moments? 

    However my brain would never belong to me while using the internet for an escape.  As I sat in the car with my husband driving, I remember being irritated at the very sound of his voice. I heard the Holy Spirit clearly tell me to log out of my social media accounts. It was one of those times when it was so loud and so clear that you can’t mistake it for anything else, and ignoring it would have been obvious disobedience. So I made a post explaining that I was taking a break, and I logged out. 

    That was over a year now, and what a wild ride this last year has been. I stayed off  social media for about 5 months,I believe, which means that I ended up doing the holiday season without it. During that time an emergency came up with my husband’s extended family, and he ended up gone from Christmas Eve to two weeks after. For the first time ever I had gotten all of the kid’s gifts wrapped and under the tree in advance, so we were able to do our celebration that Sunday before he left. So here I was, no social media, no husband during the holidays, and a new place I was trying to get to know. It was lonely.

    The loneliness hadn’t started there, and it didn’t stop there either. My family reached out to connect from time to time as they usually would, and I had a couple of friends reach out as well. However I wasn’t flooded with calls or texts asking how I was or how we were settling in. I was sad, I was lonely, and I was often angry that God would call us to a place I had never intended on moving to, only to have it slow going in the friend department. After all, if He wanted to convince me that this whole hair brained idea had been a good one, wouldn’t He want my first impression of our new homeland to be more pleasant? Convince me… even as I write those words, they sound stale. I was expecting the God of the universe, the one with no beginning and no end, the one who knit me together in my mother’s womb to convince me that His will was best for me. 

   Thinking back now, I remember a prayer I prayed in my car either to or from work in my single days. I remember sobbing as something that day had unsettled me and worn me down. I remember praying, “I don’t want to feel better, God, I want to be better.” The pattern of loneliness that I was feeling off social media wasn’t a new one, it was an old stain in the carpet returning. It was the chance to see how I was actually doing, and what I had spent years dancing around and painting a different color instead of dealing with it. It was the monster that if you cut off the head, two more would appear. I had always been lonely, even with friends around me or others easily accessible to me.

   Thankfully, in this last year I have learned more about myself than just a recurring propensity to feel alone. As I’ve been re-emerging back into social media (and the world at large) I’ve been reminded that Jesus Himself entered a season of wilderness before launching into His ministry. He was led away from it all, and then his close circle was established.

      In thinking about what this last year has done for me, I’ve come up with a few key points to share in conclusion about the benefits of having a lonely year. 

1. I had the blank space to actually figure out how to process. It was easier to actually mentally chew on things without all of the mental white noise social media (or a social life in general) can provide. Because I was thinking instead of scrolling, I was able to actually problem solve and work on my end of the changes that needed to happen. My subconscious was also able to do its job too and work on problems while I was going about my business throughout the day.  

2. Interactions with people started feeling more intentional. I started texting people more often, and I picked up sending mail to add to my growing list of hobbies. I had more phone calls that weren’t me crying on the phone begging for prayer, but actually chatting and joyfully listening.  The face to face conversations that I had with people were more meaningful and intentional as well. In the middle of all of this, I realized how much I have to learn on how to actually be a good friend and member of my community. 

3. I learned that my life is much, much better when I pick and choose what I read and write. I don’t need to be constantly aware of everything at all times, and Janet in Nebraska doesn’t actually care about my opinions. She wrote what she wrote to hear herself talk. 

4. My relationships with my family got the work it needed. I  needed to call my siblings, I needed to chat with my parents. My grandmother needed to hear from me more often.  My kids deserved a mom who had more joy and intentionality, and less exhaustion and distraction. My husband deserved to have me remember the love I had for him, and express it regularly. I was able to work on all of these relationships because my schedule wasn’t super full and I wasn’t on social media all of the time. I haven’t perfected any of these relationships yet, but I’m aware and working on them. 

5. The broken-down systems in my house (or pure chaos and lack of systems) were worked on. It’s wild how much you can get done when you take a deep breath and look at the ‘why’ behind the stress that fills your days.  I’m not talking about creating wild dinner menus, or elaborate and weird laundry systems. I’m talking about looking at every single element of my life and asking myself: Why? Why am I always late? Why is the laundry piled up? Why do I get upset when these three things happen at once? I kept asking God and myself why.  Sometimes the answer was that  I truly have no idea how long things take, so I had to start using a cheap timer from Amazon to help myself understand the concept of time. Maybe I needed to re-organize my supplements cabinet because I don’t use what I have when it’s a hot mess and I’m too anxious to have to dig around in there.  Digging around wastes time and leads to me being moody and overwhelmed because I don’t stay consistent with what I know supports my body. The list goes on and on, and I may do a whole post on just this subject, so let me know if you’d be interested in that!

6. Last but not least, I had way more time for hobbies and interests outside of the daily grind than I thought. Not by setting aside large chunks of time, but by being more intentional with how I spend my days and integrating more joy and creativity along the way. I’ve started drawing and sewing again. I’ve picked up writing letters and sending post cards. I fell back in love with cooking after working really hard to get my kitchen functional and easier to keep up on. I picked up diamond art with my middle kiddo because it’s actually fun and gives us something creative to do together. I started doing my make-up again, collecting vintage jewelry again (when I can find it cheap) and actually finding my style as a mom in her mid-thirties with plenty of weight to lose. I’m sharing movies I loved as a kid with my kids, and I’m writing again. I also have plans on picking up reading now that the September/October pre-holiday lull is upon us.

    My last point is what I hope to write about the most in this blog. I want to share the bits and pieces of joy that we’re working into our life and how fighting for joy has affected our lives for the better.  In my motherhood there have been so many days of self-pity and tears. Many times when I wondered why I was in the season I was in. But as the Bible says, to everything there is a season. Sometimes we have to step away from the constant stream of information to allow what we’re learning to truly process. But if we submit to God (and the season He’s led us into), beautiful things can happen. My days are as full as ever, but more joyful and meaningful too.