New account, new me

It all started when I said to myself:

I think it’s time I stop creating a new Instagram account for every change of opinion or a new aspect of my personality.

What happened? When did I forget that I am supposed to be evolving? That shedding the old, embracing the new, stepping into the older, hopefully, wiser version of myself is the whole effing point?

It took me a long time (and quite a few different social media accounts) to recognize the pattern for what it was: trying to hide the previous versions of myself, trying to find the perfect way to be and pretending I’ve always been like that. Only when I’d realized this version of myself was (surprise, surprise) not perfect, I wanted to burn it all down and start from scratch.

“This time, I really know what I’m doing. This time, I’m sticking with this.”

Oh sure, because the whole point is to find something to commit to forever and never change anything, right?

Embracing all the past versions of myself, accepting all the girls and women I have been - and there have been so many - has been essential for becoming at peace with myself.

The trap of external perspective

If you’ve been around social media for a while and tried to learn how to improve expressing yourself in these spaces, you have heard about “finding your niche”. These ideas are thrown at you from every post and workshop on cultivating an online community: “find your niche”, “find your audience”; “find your tribe”, “know who you’re writing for”, “know how you want to be known/seen/percevied” and all that crap.

It’s not really crap.

I get it. The whole idea of understanding who you are speaking to and positioning yourself within your niche is a valuable part of operating in the world, especially if you are doing it by yourself. And if that’s the way you want to run your online presence.

But you should never start with that.

The foundation is never found in “how you want to be known”.

You must start with yourself.

Or at least, I must.

Maybe it’s a personality thing, maybe it’s a human design thing, maybe it’s an astrology thing, maybe it doesn’t matter.

The very basis for me thinking about my niche or my audience has to be me feeling grounded and assured in myself, in what I want to say, in my own voice.

And for so long, I was ignoring that.

The foundation

For a long time, I have been gathering resources about marketing, creating an online presence, developing online courses, posting on social media, and all that kind of stuff. Man, I feel I could teach that stuff at this point! (I won’t though, don’t worry.)

But it was all technical.

Because I was neglecting an absolutely essential part of it all: its foundation, its essence, its absolute basis - myself.

My own voice.

Grounding in yourself

Courses and programs that teach you marketing or strategies for posting online (be it Instagram, Substack, YouTube, TikTok, blog, whatever) are great for when you have a clear and strong connection to your own voice.

When you are starting from within.

These programs are about strategies that will help you amplify your own creations and find your people. They are not here to tell you how to express yourself or even to replace your own voice.

But if you lack confidence in your own perspective - as I did for so long - you might start to look for an easy way to substitute that. With fluff. With finding formulas that would make people like what you’re saying despite you not saying anything substantial, getting vulnerable, or taking a risk.

It has been a pattern: doubting my own inner wisdom and ability to express myself leads to me searching for answers externally. And yet the desire to express my thoughts online is there. Feeling like something is missing, I turn to social media where I can immediately find a million people telling me they know exactly what is wrong with me, why I feel like that, and how they are the ones to help me fix that.

But that is simply not true.

Reflecting back, it has never happened that I’d feel lost, confused, ungrounded, and unaligned and the solution would come from an outside source.

Not that I didn’t try. Often, I would feel out of touch and unsure of what to do so I thought, hey, maybe this course will help, or this book, or this workshop, or this program, hoping to get some clarity about what to do next.

But when I didn’t find what I was actually looking for in these programs, I thought, this just wasn’t the right one, maybe the next one will be. Maybe the next one. Maybe the next one.

Surprise: the next one wouldn’t make me connected to myself either.

Because of course not.

Well then, what did help?

Honestly, the answers always came from me either journaling or talking to myself or talking it out with someone else.

In order to feel connected to myself, literally all I need to do is listen to myself.

So simple and so powerful.

Who would have thought?

Those of you who are familiar with human design and know I’m a self-projected projector can now go, “Yeah, duh.”

And yeah. You’re right. Duh.

It’s a very me and a very self-projected thing. But I don’t think it’s only a me thing. Listening to my own voice is just my strategy.

But the principle is universal.

The fundamental answers do not come from outside, they come from within.

By no means am I saying you shouldn’t do any programs or courses or learn from people in general. But for me, it’s all about the approach to writing, the energy with which I enter this space, be it posting online or participating in a program.

Am I coming here from a place of serenity and trust in myself or am expecting this program to do something it never could (make me feel internally aligned with myself)?

Am I projecting the responsibility for something I need to do myself on this program?

Embracing the process

How does this tie in with several Instagram accounts, you ask?

For me, it’s about the difference in whether I put the focus first on the external appearance and try to fit my creativity into that or if I put the focus on what wants to be expressed from within me and then adjust the appearance to that.

The first is about starting with the idea of “how I want to be perceived”: a useless, empty, Sisyphean task of trying to build up a persona and then uphold it. This is about first creating a box and then trying to force yourself into that box.

The other option is listening to myself and hearing where my own intuition is guiding me. That means working from within out, not creating a box from outside but letting it grow around me and change according to my inner changes.

The second option includes a deep understanding that the point of what I’m doing online - or at least the way I want to do it, this may not apply to everyone - is supposed to be an external expression of my inner process, not the other way around.

So when I feel like I have outgrown the constraints of the container I have created online, that doesn’t mean I need to destroy it, pretend as though it never existed, and start completely from scratch. In fact, that can often be a bit of a cop out, a way of bypassing the actual process of transformation from one version of myself to the next one.

I should know, I’ve done it enough times.

Embracing the past versions of myself

What I do need to do in that moment is to recognize my own development and find a way to integrate that into the box around me. I try to find a way to create space for the new version of myself without denouncing the previous one.

This is what I hope to be doing here, on this very Substack, the space I am creating not from outside, but from the feeling within. I am not starting with how I want it to look on the outside but rather the feeling and atmosphere I want to create.

Let’s see if I’ve learned anything from my past.

If not, I’m not worried, and I will embrace the new lessons ahead.

If you liked the post, you know what to do.

Preview photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash