I started this blog six years ago on New Year's Day. I had been through some major life changes in 2018/2019, and really found myself along the way. I felt as though I really had cemented a place for myself within the Halloween community on social media, and often, when I would caption my posts on Instagram with snippets of memories, or a specific feeling that maybe not many others could understand, I would get comments and messages from new friends and followers, complimenting the way I wrote, sometimes even asking for more, and so, the idea to start a blog again was born, and, silly as it may sound, I am very proud that I've managed to stick with it as long as I have. Long work hours, personal problems, bouts of anxiety and depression....none of that has ever fully stopped me from coming back and doing what I love.
But, lately, I have been feeling a little off about social media in general, and that's something I really would like to talk about, as I feel it taking a toll. I don't know if I could ever fully put myself on a "social media break"...I don't like to say I'm going to do something like that, because, quite frankly, as most creatives could probably vouch for, you never know when you're going to get inspired. I have strings of days sometimes where I'm down and out, considering either posting that I plan to be gone for awhile or even deactivating all of my accounts, and then, something will catch my eye, and a spark will ignite in me, like a jack o'lantern with just a nub of a candle left inside it, and I'll feel the urge to photograph it or write about it, or some glorious times, both. So I am not writing this post as a potential goodbye or announcement of a hiatus, I suppose I'm just thinking out loud, and maybe explaining any gaps in my presence that may occur as we go into the new year.
For one thing, as anyone who uses the platform probably knows, Instagram's algorithm is beyond messed up. When I first started using Instagram more regularly, it was so easy to connect with others, and I feel like I fell into a sense of community almost instantaneously. It gave me a safe space to come home to at the end of the day, somewhere to spread my love and spirit and eternal longing for Halloween, and have it be not only acknowledged, but appreciated by so many people. It still amazes me that I was able to build a following of over 11,000 people. But now, posts aren't shown the way they used to be. Some of my closest friends, people I message and interact with on a daily basis, don't even see my posts on their feed, and vice versa. I can't even tell you how many times I've had to search someone's handle, because hardly anyone's posts show up on my feed organically anymore. My homepage is strange suggested posts that are not even relevant to my interests most of the time, and ads, with the occasional post of someone I actually follow sprinkled in. Don't get me wrong, sharing my photography on Instagram was never about trying to become "famous" in any capacity, but it is discouraging to go from having conversations and feeling like people really appreciate and understand what you do, to dead silence. It no longer feels like being a part of something. And even at the height of Halloween season, it's starting to feel more consumerist than creative. And again, don't get me wrong, I love stuff. I love to shop and collect, and I grind my teeth in anger when people take pictures of Halloween things in stores and caption it "landfill core" and things like that. But the true spirit of Halloween isn't about shopping and comparing your haul to the biggest influencers'. But I suppose that's a whole other issue, one that I think is talked about enough within the community when "Code Orange" season comes around.
On the opposite side of the Instagram algorithm issue, you have Insta's weird little conjoined-sister app, Threads. Oh, Threads. I joined almost the second it became available, mostly because I'd recently stopped using Twitter/X, and I missed having a place to just randomly vent about things. I never had much of a following on Twitter...I used to live-tweet some of my favorite tv shows back in the day, but mostly I used it to talk to a couple of specific friends, and just randomly vent or post a quick, immediate thought. Hardly anyone saw my posts on there and I never thought twice about it. And the way Threads was set up, to immediately import your Instagram followers when they join, if you choose to do so, I just assumed my audience would be the same on Threads as it is on Insta. But oh, boy, was I wrong.
Threads has the very exact opposite problem to Instagram. Where Insta shows your posts to ten people despite the fact that 11.5K follow you, Threads shows your posts to everyone and their mother. I didn't mind this when they had a bonus program that was paying me for every 750 views...I made very good money during that time period, and it was easy to laugh off anything anyone said to me, because their trolling was putting money in my pocket. But, that program ended about a year or so ago now, and I was left to realize just how toxic Threads is a social media platform.
As I said previously, my intention was to use Threads the way I used to use Twitter, and just randomly vent if there was something I wanted to get off my chest. And stupid, stupid me would forget every time that I wasn't just venting to my like-minded friends and followers within the Instagram Halloween community. I never really talked about it publicly, but I've had many, many posts go horrifically wrong on there.
The first big instance was probably Halloween 2024. I was in my hotel room in Sleepy Hollow, watching AMC Fear Fest in between events, and Christmas commercials kept coming on the tv, and not just normal Christmas commercials, but those ones that seem to imply you'd better hurry up and get your shopping done or else you're going to have the worst Christmas ever, even though Halloween hasn't even technically passed yet. It always annoys me to see people acting like Halloween is already over when November 1st hasn't it yet, so I posted on Threads, knowing most of the people that I normally interact with online would agree with me, "Friendly reminder that Christmas Eve is December 24th, NOT October 31st." It was meant more to be a jab at those commercials than anything else, but thousands of people took it personally, coming at me telling me what a hypocrite I was for trying to police how people celebrated Christmas when I celebrate Halloween year-round, that I was sucking the joy out of everyone's lives, etc., and when I tried to explain what I was actually referring to, that I wasn't at all trying to police individual people but was just frustrated by frantic commercials I was seeing on tv for Christmas literally on the one day of the year that I, personally, wait all year for and want to savor, I was still called stupid, and treated like I was threatening to go to people's houses and steal their Christmas trees away like the goddamn Grinch himself. Ultimately I'm used to people not understanding the way I feel about Halloween, but this was truly next level.
The worst came a few months later, though. It was early February, and Super Bowl was right around the corner. I was, at that time, in charge of inventory control at work and had to conduct what are known as "cycle counts" on certain groups of items in my store. The coming week's count was on Utz, Herr's, and Wise brand snacks, and as I was walking the aisles that day, I realized just how much I was going to have to count, due to the influx of product being brought in for the Super Bowl. It seemed like the equivalent of counting stuffing right before Thanksgiving, or something along those lines, and I felt very stressed in that moment. (That position at my job was absolute hell on my mental health; I left it this past October and am still dealing with the ramifications and have considered therapy specifically for what I went through, to give some insight onto what I was feeling at that time.) Without even thinking about what I was doing, again going back to my "talking into void" Twitter days, I suppose, I quickly hopped on Threads and posted something like "I wish Super Bowl wasn't treated like a major holiday." No, I'm not a football fan, but this was 100% strictly about counting chips. I didn't look at my phone again until my break, probably a couple of hours later, and when I tell you that post absolutely blew up...I had literally thousands of notifications...I still don't think I've ever actually read them all. People were telling me off left and right, going so far as to say I should kill myself, calling me all sorts of names, and one person even sent me a long winded reply about how I clearly suffer from some sort of "arrested development" because I enjoy Halloween as an adult. (And for the record I know I'm neurodivergent, so I'm not sure what that was supposed to prove.) By that point it was too late to try and explain that I was talking about chips, though I did make a post about that anyway and wound up getting attacked all over again about how that was a selfish way to look at it. At some point I made another post saying something along the lines of "Do people really not understand that sometimes people just post online to vent?" People responded angrily to that too. My best friends and I still joke about this whole debacle as "the time I got cancelled for football", because people really reacted to my post like they do to a celebrity saying something racist or being outed as some sort of sexual deviant. It was truly bizarre.
But at least I made money off of those two incidents. Shortly after that, the Threads bonus program ended and I started posting less frequently, though I'd still look at my feed. When Wicked came out at the end of 2024, I started getting involved in conversations about that, as it was something I loved for almost 20 years and had never really had the opportunity to talk to many people about, since up until that point it only existed as a Broadway show, and seeing all of the positivity toward it, and people having similar experiences and epiphanies to what I'd had in 2005, made me happy. I guess that made me get a little more involved in fandom conversations on Threads, which was fine, and then I noticed how many people just seemed to want to hate on Wicked: For Good. I, of course, didn't let it discourage me, as I'd been waiting so long for this to exist in a form that I could watch over and over again, and if other people didn't understand that, whatever. But I will say it was quite annoying. It was like everyone wanted to suddenly just be negative, after how happy everyone had seemed the year before, and that negativity felt sort of heavy to me.
Nothing compares, though, to the negativity that came with the release of Stranger Things season five, and, ultimately, within that mess, I decided to deactivate my Threads account. Literally every post about the show, a show I've loved for nearly ten years now and holds special meaning for me in a lot of ways, turned into a fight. On New Year's Eve I got called an asshole, solely for reminding someone that a certain character had not existed until later on in the show, after they tried to make a case that a main character needed to die in order for the story to have any meaning at all. (I am fully and completely against "make the stakes real" killings in media.) Even in conversations with people who agreed with me, someone had to cut in and talk about why the season sucked or why this or that character needed to die. I realized it was heavily tainting my experience with this final season of a show that's had much impact on my life, and while I was just about to post an argument that, by the logic some people were expressing, no traumatic experience is worth anything if we don't let it kill us, I realized how freeing it would be to just shut up those voices entirely. And so, I deactivated myself. Let all of my words and the words of others so eager to argue disappear. And the thought of going back honestly puts knots in my stomach, so I don't think I will be, unless by some miracle they offer to pay me again. It's truly a toxic platform and I'd really like to know why everyone on it seems to be so angry, at everything, at all times.
Since about October or so, I've found myself wanting to post on social media as a whole less and less. During October itself, I felt as though this was a result of me just wanting to be present in my favorite time of year, and I do feel like I enjoyed it more this year than ever. Around mid-November, I just started to feel uninspired, and the lack of interaction surely doesn't help. I hold out hope that inspiration will come, but I also don't hold my breath waiting for it. When something inspires me, I'll post it, but I'm not going to push myself. Putting myself out there in that way just doesn't always feel worth it anymore. Hopefully things will get better as the year goes on; maybe I won't feel so cynical about it in a few days, weeks, or months. All I know is, I think for now, the toxicity has caught up to me and my introversion and more or less asocial personality is starting to extend to online as well as in person, probably as a result of all of the negativity that social media seems to breed lately. I think maybe I'm looking inward a little more, and that's probably a good thing. As I said earlier, this is most definitely not a goodbye or any sort of "I'm taking an indefinite break" announcement...I've just been holding onto a lot, perhaps more than I realized, and needed to get it off my chest.
Hopefully this is a safe space to do so, unlike that damn Threads.
Stay spooky, my friends. I'll see you when I see you.
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