I didn’t quit dramatically. There was no announcement, no farewell post. I just deleted the apps one Sunday evening and went to bed. I told myself it was an experiment. Thirty days. See what happens.

The first three days were the strangest. I kept reaching for my phone out of pure muscle memory — unlocking the screen, hovering over the empty space where the apps used to be, locking it again. I did this probably forty times a day. I didn’t even realize how often I’d been doing it until I couldn’t.

By the end of the first week, something unexpected happened: I got bored. Properly, deeply bored. And boredom, it turns out, is a doorway. I started reading again. I finished two books in a week. I called a friend I hadn’t spoken to in months. I cooked a new recipe not to photograph it, but to eat it.

By week three, the noise in my head had quieted. I hadn’t realized how loud it was until it stopped. The low-grade anxiety I’d normalized — the comparison, the performance, the constant awareness of how I was being perceived — simply wasn’t there anymore.

I went back after thirty days. I’m not sure I should have. But I went back differently — with limits, with intention, with the clear knowledge of what I was choosing to walk back into.

That, I think, is the real lesson. Not that social media is evil, but that we forget we have a choice.