It’s sunrise in Kauai on a beautiful April morning. The weather is perfect, with a temperature that allows for a light long-sleeved sweater, shorts, and sandals to be comfortable. I’m strolling along the well-known Hanalei Beach on the way to the pier to take in the views before we grab our morning breakfast. As we arrive at the pier, I’ve taken upwards of 30 new photos and videos of this gorgeous morning that I’m enjoying with my husband, Bill. You would think I’m obsessed with the beach with the way I’m whipping out my phone to take these photos and videos. While I’m doing my best to be present and soak up the moment, in my head, I’m thinking, “Maybe this is the content that will inspire me to begin posting on Instagram again…”
If you follow me on social media, you may have noticed that I’ve been quiet on Instagram for longer than I’d care to admit. Even writing this post fills me with a bit of shame and embarrassment, as there’s a lot of pressure put on creators to constantly produce content. The industry continually pushes out new benchmarks that you “need” to adhere to in order to be successful. Examples include posting 1-3 new blog posts per week, uploading 3 reels and 2 static posts per week, sharing a minimum of 2 Instagram stories daily, and creating 3-5 Pinterest pins per week to support your blog and Instagram. Not to mention, taking time to engage with your audience, shooting and editing new content, responding to comments and messages, pitching brands for partnership opportunities, writing a weekly newsletter to be sent to your email subscribers, researching new social media trends, and the list goes on and on…
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired just reading that list.
Exhaustion aside, social media underwent a significant change for me once my daughter entered the world. Before I delve into the current state, it may be worthwhile to take you back to the beginning to understand the evolution of my relationship with social media.
Backstory
When I started daydreaming about blogging almost ten years ago, I never imagined it would become a dream that would come to fruition. As I began taking baby steps towards building my website, coming up with a name, and learning everything I could about being a successful blogger, new visions started to take shape in my head. I envisioned building a blog presence and utilizing Instagram to establish a community that would support my blog. I saw other creators I admired following a similar path, and I thought that would be the right decision for me as well. Once I launched my blog, Well Read Travels, I also created and began slowly posting on my Instagram, @wellreadtravels.
Initially, I only posted on Instagram to share content related to the blog posts I published each month. However, as I started posting more regularly, I found that I began to enjoy the process of generating content ideas, writing captions, and engaging with people on the platform. I also started connecting with other creators, and I was over the moon with the idea of making new content creator friends.
I started taking Instagram more seriously and enrolled in a few online courses to further my knowledge of the platform and increase my chances of success. I was hungry for information and education on the topic of social media and tried to be the best student I could be. However, the same piece of advice would ring out from any training, online educator, or influencer in the space: “You need to post at least 3-5 times a week, write long captions, spend an hour a day engaging with your audience, and post to your stories daily.” For me, no matter how hard I tried, I could not for the life of me get to a place where I could post on Instagram at that level. Some days, it broke my heart because I wanted to be a successful creator. But at the end of the day, I knew that if I focused on creating quality over quantity, I would be satisfied with how I showed up on the app.
So that’s what I did. I posted once a week to my feed and several times throughout the week on my stories, with my focus on being a quality over quantity creator. All while writing a detailed and thoroughly written blog post every month. On top of being a human being with a husband, family, dog, friends, full-time job, and a dozen other responsibilities. And yes, I know many part-time creators can pull off hustling on the side while working full-time, but I quickly learned that the stress of trying to keep up was too exhausting for me.
As my Instagram started to grow slowly, I took pride in the work I created. I found joy in knowing that if even one person saw my post and gained a useful travel tip or insight for their trip, I had positively impacted their experience. Generally speaking, my content performed well, and I even had a handful of posts go viral. And let me tell you, the rush of dopamine you get as you start to see the likes, comments, follows, and share notifications flood your phone screen is intense. As I approached my second year of creating, I felt confident in my style and approach to Instagram as a creator.
However, my confidence quickly took a nose dive pretty early in the year. My previous posting schedule was suddenly no longer sufficient to push my content out to be shown to my audience, and my views began to decline post by post. Remember that dopamine rush I mentioned before? Well, the lack of engagement correlates with a lack of dopamine, which can really bring you down. This is why social media in general is so addictive and can become dangerous for young users. The drop in views not only affected my engagement but also took a toll on my mental health. Despite this, I carried on and tried to navigate the space to rebuild my engagement with the hope of growing my audience so I could serve more people with my guides and blog posts.
And then I learned the wonderful news that I was pregnant with my first child.
Nothing can prepare you for your first pregnancy. You’re stepping into unknown territory, filled with excitement, fear, joy, and stress all wrapped into one. As I alluded to in my previous post, my first trimester of pregnancy (and part of the second trimester) was rough for me. I could barely keep up with my day-to-day responsibilities, let alone try to create content to post on social media. My head and drive were telling me to continue pushing forward on my journey as a creator, but my body and growing baby had other plans for me. I took some time to be slower and more intentional on Instagram in order to support my overall well-being during my pregnancy.
Once I entered my third trimester, I was back in the swing of things. I had a rush of new ideas, energy for creating content, and a burning desire to try to grow this into something bigger for myself and my family. I envisioned new ways to create additional income streams to support my family and show my baby the possibilities of following their dreams (cliché, I know). Surprisingly, that energy continued even after my daughter was born and into my postpartum period. My excitement about creating something more significant for myself and my family was the fuel I needed to keep pushing forward despite the exhaustion after caring for a newborn baby.
Motherhood Era
Although I was excited, I also found myself becoming increasingly cautious about my daughter’s privacy. Even before she was born, I debated whether to share her name publicly on my blog or social media profiles. This might be silly, but I became nervous about strangers on the internet knowing her name. Then there was the question about showing her face on my Well Read Travel profiles. It seems like every creator who is also a parent has a differing opinion on this. Some share their names, but not their faces. Some share their faces, but not their names. Some protect the privacy of their children as a whole. Some people proudly share their kids’ lives on social media. Let me be clear that there isn’t a right or wrong way to show up on social media as a creator once you have a child, and I’m not here to judge anyone’s choices or parenting styles. But for me, privacy felt important. Call it mother’s intuition or just my postpartum hormones leading the charge, but I decided, for the time being, to leave her name and face off the internet.
Then came our first family trip to Colorado and Rocky Mountain National Park.
This trip was and is so important to me. I knew before becoming a mom that I wanted to travel with my future children and show them all the beautiful and unique places around the world that I love. Once our daughter joined our family, Bill and I knew we had to take our girl to the mountains and get her on a hiking trail. When we arrived in Colorado, we began shooting content, just as we had done prior to traveling with our daughter. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. However, with each passing day on our trip, I found it increasingly difficult to post the content we had shot. I hesitated to share my daughter’s face, which was difficult since she’s really cute, and she inevitably ended up making an appearance in some of the photos and videos. And I also became increasingly aware that sharing travel content featuring my child would potentially shift my niche from female outdoor adventure travel to family outdoor adventure travel.
I felt like I was at a crossroads, and I was extremely unsure about which path to take. As the trip progressed, I stopped posting on stories because I wasn’t sure how to authentically show up anymore. Once I returned home and began sharing feed posts and reels about the trip, I experimented with posting both standard trip content and content that featured my daughter partially. Neither route felt aligned with how I want to share my life and travels on Instagram. I felt lost about my identity as a creator, and burnt out from trying to create content for an audience I wasn’t sure I was serving properly anymore. So, I made the challenging decision to take a few weeks off to reset and realign myself with the niche and audience I want to serve.
A few weeks turned into a month. A month turned into two months. And two months turned into six months.
And here we are, six months later, with zero content uploaded to Instagram and very little engagement on the platform. It’s freeing yet also a little unsettling at the same time. The go-getter in me feels deep shame for “quitting” at something I worked really hard to build. But this new version of me supports the decision to take the time needed to figure out how I want to show up online. Not only as a creator, but as a mom, too.
Simply put, becoming a mother fundamentally changes you in ways you can’t even imagine. There are many beautiful transformations that go hand in hand with the difficult and uncomfortable ones, which you are required to navigate without a guide. You can read all the books on pregnancy, caring for your child, how to properly feed them, help them sleep, potty train them, and so on, but there isn’t a book (yet) about how to show up on Instagram with or without your child if you have a career or side hustle on social media. However, if someone were to write this very unique book, please let me know.
I absolutely adore being a mom and my daughter, but boy, I was not prepared for the challenges that come with it in this arena. Yes, I knew there would be hard days, sleepless nights, and hurdles to overcome in our day-to-day existence. I was not prepared for some of the more nuanced issues that mothers face now in the world of social media. This generation of parents is the first to raise children with the advantages of the internet. And while the internet offers many, many benefits, it also presents new challenges that we must manage without the guidance of previous generations.
While I’m still trying to figure out what the next phase of the Well Read Travels Instagram journey will look like, there are a few things I know for certain.
I still want to create content for social media to support my blog. As cliché as it sounds, I deeply value the ability to share my travel guides and tips with others, and I know that Instagram is another platform to reach my audience. I would like to incorporate some aspects of family travel into my content, but without making it the sole focus. Trying to deny the fact that I will likely travel with my family more than I will travel on my own or with my husband would be silly and disingenuous.
Lastly, I’m done trying to show up with the perfect content or follow the rules that led to me feeling debilitated from posting in the first place. I want to show up as authentically me, and right now, that means following a schedule that works for me and my family. I refuse to create content solely for the purpose of reaching a certain number of posts in a week. Quality over quantity will continue to be my mantra on Instagram, and I know deep down that my people will find me, despite not following the traditional “rules” for success.
So, what’s next?
Ah, the age-old question. Ideally, I would like to slowly dip my toe back into the Instagram world and start creating meaningful and engaging content again. I’m definitely battling some impostor syndrome right now, but I need to push past the fear to move forward. I have a wealth of content to share that I believe will be helpful for anyone planning an upcoming trip, and I’m eager to share it with the social media world eventually. Instead of getting swept up by trends and worrying about metrics, my focus will be on intentionality, authenticity, and purpose.
If you’re a mother, I would love to hear about your experiences navigating social media now that you have kids. Even if you’re not a creator! Feel free to leave a comment below; I look forward to connecting with you.
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