Sacred candle and leaving Instagram

I’ve been thinking about this for a while… maybe for a long time… It was the push and pull with my personal Instagram account. The wall full of snapshots cut out from my everyday was something I tended since July 2011 - an interaction born with curiosity. The Instagram platform’s focus on visual storytelling resonated with me deeply, especially in the early years of IG, since I had been practicing it even before then. I also felt the intimacy of the words I typed in the caption inside the little square, maybe because a smartphone had become so ubiquitous in my life… like an extension of my fingertip. The trace of the subtle feelings I always wanted to convey in each message naturally flew when I was typing those captions - honest with the essence of stories distilled in a bite-sized format, accompanied by a photo.

But so much has changed in the last 15 years. The technology has evolved from inside and out, and so has my family, BK, and I. I wanted to spend my time in a more analogue realm, and also wanted the “growing up” stories of my kids to be more private. Something sacred that belonged to them and us as a family.

You know where this post is going…

Yes. I closed my personal Instagram account about two months ago. As with many things in life, I felt my season with Instagram was nearing its end. I told myself that I could still share some analogue updates on Baum-kuchen Instagram, and for deeper thoughts that take longer to simmer, Substack would be a steady platform. On Substack, all my writing is done on my computer, and I appreciate not having to post from my phone to share a story.

It did take me a while to go through the process, though. First, I denied that IG was taking up too much space in my life, especially because I wasn’t posting at the pace I had a few years ago. Then there was an avoidance… in the form of trying to find a way to keep the account open with a justified reason. In the past, I tried to curate the way I interacted with the platform using my left brain. In theory, it made sense, but when something is quite addictive, I am not sure if we can reason the right hemisphere of the brain as well as we think we can. Then there was a trace of fear of losing the connection to my community, since my Instagram page was one of my few open channels for our analogue community and distant friends and family. Taking a break from IG was one thing, but deleting the whole account felt like letting go of the archive of our family experience, a little like throwing all my past journals. So I lingered in uncertainty.

One morning, I woke up to do my daily writing. I lit a Japanese candle, which we recently started curating at our shop. I was immediately drawn to carrying this candle at Baum-kuchen when I stumbled upon it. The stories of traditional Japanese candle-making resonated with me, evoking my childhood memory of sacred candles at the ancestor shrine. The one I tried out on a particular morning was a salt candle for clearing the energy. The moment a flickering light filled the still dark early morning space next to my desk, I knew exactly what I needed to do. Instead of opening my Substack draft page, I picked up my phone. I scrolled down the entire history of my IG feed - stopping here and there to read captions of photos that caught my eye and acknowledging gratitude to some of the moments captured - and went all the way to the very first post I shared on July 15th, 2011. And without hesitation, I clicked the “delete account” button on the screen. It was not complicated nor full of uncertainty… just clarity. By the time the candle burned down to the bottom and disappeared, leaving only a small pile of ash, my phone had one app less on the screen. I never looked back.

More than anything, I was a bit astonished by the impact of the candle I lit. Yes. Of course. The exact sequence of events could have unfolded that morning without the candle. But I also love the possibility that the candle had helped me clear the energy that no longer belonged in the space. Maybe that is what keeps me in awe and in wonder as a shop curator even after a decade and a half. Some objects hold qualities that go beyond simple beauty. Maybe we can call those qualities magic… or perhaps medicine with their depth in purpose, meaning, and spirit beyond what meets the eye. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could intentionally curate each of our spaces with the kind of artifacts that hold “a little something special” in them?

As far as my post-IG personal life goes, all is fine here. I pretty much eliminated everything “scrollable” from my phone, so the purpose of my phone has shifted back to being a simple tool rather than a source to fill the time in between. I finally started tackling a bigger writing project I wanted to begin for a while. I still have friends and communities (thank goodness). According to Frido, my mood swing has subsided, and Mango is happy hanging out with me more.

Now that we are approaching the days of “Oo-soji” (大掃除) - the end-of-year Japanese tradition to dust off and intentionally remove the old cobwebs of life - I am really grateful that I got started with the heavy-lifting part of the process. Who knows what will be cleared from my life next?