hate mail for tiktok

I fell in love with a promise and it was time to fucking leave

“Are you sure you want to delete your account?”

I’m sitting on a quiet balcony in the Costa Rican jungle, about to permanently walk away from a combined 30K followers.

Oh, I’m fucking sure.

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Since 2021, TikTok was the toxic ex I kept running back to with a cautious hope that, by some miracle, I could change them.

Or if I’m more honest — that I could change, for them.

And oh my god, I tried.

With my first account, I played the game. I got immersed fully, posting multiple times a day, yapping about buying a house in Mexico as a Canadian, documenting the drama as we relocated to LA, shaping my delivery style to match the app with comedic timing, zero aesthetic — and even less meaning — for the sake of the algorithm.

It worked, ish.

That account grew to more than 25K, but I felt sick to my stomach every time I opened the app, needing to psych myself up to participate, in it.

I had BEEN KNOWING that it was out of alignment.

My body knew, my subconscious knew, but my ego just kept on truckin’.

I rationalized that it was because that account was frivolous, not connected enough to my purpose and my business, convinced that if I could create a new one from scratch I would be able to shake off the ick I felt in my bones and start fresh.

I took about 8 months off in between, and my Instagram following — a platform I’ve gone happily steady with for almost a decade, where creating is natural and the connection is felt — doubled during that time.

But I kept watching creators and educators taking to TikTok, seeing growth quickly, sharing thoughts freely, and I felt fucking jealous.

They always seem more appealing when they’re happy with someone else.

So I stayed holding onto the idea that it wasn’t really over, waiting for the right moment to send my “you up?” text and get back together.

Eventually, I went back.

I started a new account, clinically analyzing the style of videos I’d create, the number of times I’d post, the engagement I’d need to keep up with just to stay relevant.

It was a trap in the form of a cute little Notion dash, but I went ahead with it anyway.

Slow and steady, we made it work — on again + off again, for a year.

My Instagram growth came to a halt in tandem, but I didn’t think to blame the blatant distraction, so I blamed myself.

Classic.

I spent 12 months trying to figure out why my community wasn’t expanding at the rate it had been, and the fucked up thing is that I still thought TikTok was the ticket to fixing it.

I was NEVER inspired to post.

I was NEVER feeling a sense of community.

I was NEVER certain of the impact I was making.

I was NEVER expressing myself in a way that felt natural.

And instead of seeing the platform for what it was — a place that just isn’t fucking for me — I made myself wrong, for all of it.

I just needed to learn more, scroll more, post more.

If I could just keep showing up there, I would land on the thing that would propel my message forward and that recognition would extend into my Instagram, too.

But here’s the thing about the thing.

I already have it.

I just couldn’t see it past the promised land of exponential visibility in one simple click.

I don’t believe in virality as a strategy, and yet, I was counting on it.

Recently, I took a workshop that invited me to think about my “energy leaks,” and it finally hit me in a way it hadn’t, yet:

TikTok wasn’t taking a lot of my time, but the weight of it’s potential had become a hemorrhage for my energy.

Not only was it siphoning my strategic capacity, it was also dampening my creativity, because pretty little videos with a bit of text don’t give anywhere near the depth I desire, in my work.

I thought it would be enough to just resolve to stop posting.

That maybe I should keep the account open in case I wanted to scroll it for pleasure (which, by the way, I never did. The first sign a platform isn’t for you is the fact that you don’t even fucking use it, but anywaaayyyy…)

It wasn’t.

I could still feel that same tense frequency between my vision for sharing my voice more loudly and the possibility of TikTok as my megaphone.

But it never was.

It never will be.

When I picture my life, years from now, I’m not sitting at my marble kitchen island on a lush plot of land on the coast of Spain, filming a goddamn vlog.

The thing that makes my message louder, my impact broader, my community deeper, doesn’t come alongside the cage of a character limit or the awkwardness of a trending audio.

So, on that balcony in Costa Rica, when I happened to glance down at my phone and see the Co-Star app telling me to “abandon dead weight,” I knew what it meant.

I logged onto my computer — mad poetic, with the jungle view — and deleted both TikTok accounts.

I was bleeding energy to the promise, not the purpose, and it was time to fucking leave.