I want to be transparent about where I’ve been, instead of just quietly disappearing and letting you wonder.
I’ve stepped away from Instagram and Threads. Not for a marketing reset, not for a curated “digital detox” era, but because it stopped being safe for me to stay.
I am autistic, with ADHD alongside it. That means I feel things in my body before I have words for them. It means I don’t experience conflict, cruelty, or public misreading the way some people seem to. as noise that passes through and leaves. For me it lands and it stays. A stranger’s hostility doesn’t just sting for a minute; it can sit in my chest for days, show up as anxiety, as shame I have to physically work to unlearn. I’ve spent years building something real on these platforms writing that mattered to people, a community that found each other through my words, and I don’t say any of this to diminish that. It was real. It still is.
But something has shifted in the terrain itself. What used to feel like connection increasingly feels like performance. A popularity contest dressed up in the language of community, where sincerity gets punished as often as it gets rewarded, where a good faith moment can be turned into a public spectacle before you even understand what happened.I can’t keep paying that cost. And it’s not because I’ve stopped believing in the value of what I make, but because I do.
I’m a mother of five, one of whom needs significant care, and I don’t have a surplus of nervous system left over to spend absorbing cruelty from strangers who will never actually know me. Something had to give, and I decided, finally, it would not be me.
This isn’t goodbye to my writing, my art, or to you. It’s a redirection. I’m going to keep creating, here, on this site, in a space I actually control, without an algorithm deciding who sees it and without a comment section built to reward the loudest, cruelest voice in the room. If you want to keep finding my work, this is where I’ll be. You can subscribe to the newsletter so you never have to go looking.
Thank you for being here, and for caring enough to wonder where I went. I’m not gone. I’m just choosing, finally, to protect the parts of myself that make the writing worth reading in the first place.
— Tarah
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