Walking the wild path
'Betwixt & Between' By Jennifer Hawkyard
Thank you everyone for your kind words about me leaving Meta. It has been heartening to hear that many of you have been feeling the same, feeling it may be time to leave and understanding my choices to do so.
Yesterday I sat with my fears about leaving Meta:
🌈 My fears of missing out.
I'm on lots of business-type support groups on Facebook. I've often said it was one of the few remaining things about FB that I like is the Groups. Also local happenings are often posted on groups, I know I’m going to disconnect from these. But here’s to reading the local bulletin board in our village shop instead!
🌈 Saying goodbye to 21k followers on Instagram.
Am I mad to do so? It took me YEARS to get to that point. But as I was saying to a close friend the other day - I never get to speak to those 21k people. IG never lets me speak to them all. I get maybe 50 of those people. And those 21k do not convert into sales. It's why I so incessantly encourage you to join my newsletter; it's the one way I can reliably speak to you without paying to 'boost' my post or knowing the algorithm will hide my art from you.
👉You can join here: https://www.jezhawk.com/newsletter
Walking the wild path:
The thing is, what I realised is that throughout my entire life, I've walked the wild path. Whether that was being just "weird" enough to not really fit in with the clicks in secondary (high) school, or choosing my own quirky fashion sense, refusing to bow to social pressures to look a certain way, drink a certain way, smoke a certain way.
I quit a successful job as an Art Director to follow this dream of doing the art thing.
I realised just yesterday that every single time I have struck out on my own, and did what the collective or social norm thought was bonkers and totally off the wall insane, it was 100% the right thing for me to do at that time.
So I'm reminding myself of that today.
As I move towards Feb 17th (my self-imposed cut off date) I feel I'm stepping into the great starry unknown, but I feel more in control, more like I'm making empowering choices rather than being ground down by some vast machine.
As of last count I had a little under 30 new newsletter sign ups since announcing that I was leaving Meta. You know what to do 👉https://www.jezhawk.com/newsletter
In this set of posts that I shall categorise as “The Meta Movement” - I do not wish you to feel pressured or shamed into following suit and leaving Meta related products (and yes that means Whatsapp too, I’m simply sharing where I’m at and why I’m doing it. Over the next few days I’ll be sharing some more posts here on my blog and they will be my final posts on Facebook and Instagram.
I look forward to sharing this journey with you! Feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments below.
