AAs a writer, you know your attention is your greatest tool. But lately you feel like social media has colonized your mind, without your consent. Maybe you've tried to quit before, but you keep getting pulled back in because you think you need it for your business or to stay connected.
What if that belief is keeping you stuck in a creativity-blocking cycle of desperation?
What if there’s another way?
For ten years, I believed I needed social media to survive as a writer with a business. Note the word I used—survive. It really felt like life and death to me. I was stuck in desperate energy, and knowing that this was the opposite of the creativity and inspiration my work required kept me spiralling into stress.
Then I realized: I was in a dilemma. And, as Al Watt says in The 90 Day Novel, a dilemma is a problem that can’t be solved without changing the paradigm.
In a story with an unresolvable dilemma, there’s only one way to move from Act 2 into Act 3. That’s when the heroine chooses to surrender.
That’s how I knew it was time for me to change my paradigm.
I’ve been off social media for two years now. My mental health, emotional health, physical health, and financial health have all improved exponentially. My brain fog cleared up. My deep focus returned. I fell back in love with long-form reading and writing.
The inconvenience has been SO worth it. I want to show you how to break up with social media, in a way that works for you.
We’ll start with the internal work that makes everything else possible. You’ll examine your beliefs about needing social media and discover what’s really driving your attachment to these platforms.
You’ll learn:
Based on your new clarity, you’ll design boundaries that actually work for your life and business.
You’ll create:
The practical work of redirecting your energy and attention toward what actually nourishes you.
You’ll design:
In this retreat, you aren’t going to will yourself to do anything you aren’t ready to do. You’re not going to dissociate in order to “get it done”. This is about changing your paradigm, so that stepping away from social media feels like the obvious, life-giving choice. This choice is your power move.
You’ll leave with:
I’m Sarah Selecky, award-winning author and founder of Sarah Selecky Writing School. I’ve been teaching writers for over 20 years, and I’ve been social media-free for two years.
I understand the unique challenges writers face with attention and focus. I also know what it’s like to build a successful creative business — my school has been thriving since 2001, and my mailing list is still the best way to stay connected with my community.
Most importantly: I’ve walked this path myself. I wrote a whole novel to understand it. I know how we’ve been trained to serve social media our life energy, believe that it’s necessary, and how we can make a graceful exit. I know the fear, the withdrawal, the social awkwardness, and the incredible freedom that comes on the other side.
Making the shift to take back your attention is actually simple, but it can feel hard to break a pattern as insidious as social media. It crept up on all of us and took the oxygen out of our creative lives.
If you’ve made the decision to unhook yourself but don’t know where to start, let me hold your hand as you take action. It really helps to do this work together, with writers who understand why our attention is so worth protecting.
Questions? Email support@sarahselecky.com
The fortunate thing about being over 40 is that my body remembers how it feels to be connected and inspired without the internet.
We used to do this all the time. Those old ways of social connection are still available to us.
Could real, consistent in-person connection be …enough?
Could slow and inconvenient be… a good thing?
