Goodbye for now, Instagram

If you didn’t already notice, I made the difficult decision to leave Instagram. This was not a decision I made lightly and was not a sudden one either. It has been a festering, heavy thought that’s loomed over me for over two years.

When I first started using Instagram to market our planner in 2017, I was full of excitement & hope but also fear & exhaustion. For years, it continued like this all through 2018, 2019, 2020, & 2021. Each year, the fear, exhaustion, and emptiness began to be the stronger feelings, so I knew going into 2022, the reality of leaving Instagram altogether would likely happen, but I pushed aside the emotions and stuck around.

The reality is, my personal relationships are suffering. My personal relationships with the people in my household, friends I’ve been blessed with in our community, and especially God.

Even after we added affiliates, I was still spending a lot of time on Instagram. After much discussion with my husband and prayer, and a very, very eye opening weekend, I decided this is the best decision.

Instagram is changing and I can’t keep up. We are also much too small a shop to hire someone to handle Instagram regularly. While I made this decision for our shop, it doesn’t mean I look at my time in that space as a waste because it wasn’t. It truly helped me find our people. It helped me get the exposure our business needed to begin to create organic return customers and word of mouth customers. It has been a wonderful journey!

Now, it’s time to enjoy the fruits of our labor and allow God to bring us orders because only He really knows how much we can handle as we slowly grow. (:

While I have a very, very long list of reasons why I had to leave, I am looking forward to seeing what this new chapter (of no more daily hustling and trying to prove our product worthy daily through squares) will be like.

I’m looking forward to being able to have time to spare for the little things that slip through the cracks after hours being just a mom followed by hours of packaging each day.

I’m looking forward to having time to entertain requests that come our way so I can truly serve our customers by filling a need they may have.

I’m looking forward to the tension headache being gone because I don’t feel present enough on Instagram AND as a mother.

I’m looking forward to not being immediately accessible to an audience that requests many things outside of what we already offer and being the people pleaser I am, having a hard time saying no. (:

I’m looking forward to operating more healthily and seeing what that even looks like.

I’m looking forward to having time to open my own products more so I can better improve them for our many wonderful customers.

 I'm looking forward to seeing my fast growing children's faces instead of a screen.

I’m looking forward to having the time and breathing space to continue to be intentional with all parts of our shop.

I have so much to look forward to and I’m so thankful that we are in a place that I CAN step back and the hard work has paid off.

Thank you to everyone who has made this very possible for us and for continuing to allow our family to serve yours. We are truly blessed.