Things I didn't post on Instagram

An autumn-ish photo album, plus why I stopped posting my photographs

I still take as many photos as I ever did, but these days I don’t post to Instagram very much. I don’t really know why (although this post has given me some ideas, which I’ll add at the end).
So, I thought I would try posting them here instead.

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I turned 40 last week. It’s been bittersweet saying goodbye to my 30s, arguably the first decade in my life where I consistently enjoyed myself. I had my daughter, and we watched her grow. I found a way to finally and properly express myself. I started my business and blew my own mind.
I want to go into my 40s believing the same level of incredible surprise and delight is still possible, but the limitations on my health right now make it hard to keep the faith.

The road home through a slightly foggy windscreen. I like how the softness and that incredible sky make it feel a little bit like a painting. Home is just down and to the left a little bit, for the record.

This is nothing. I just liked the colours and textures a lot.

Really branching out creatively these days, from horses-in-the-mist-with-coats-on to sheep-in-the-mist-with-no-coats. I am such a diverse talent.

His name is Baddie but he’s actually really, really good.

I like plants and trees that do something glorious and spectacular once a year then sit quietly forgettable for the rest. They’re a helpful reminder, I think, that everything alive has to live through its seasons. Nothing can bloom all-year-round.

Every season is wreath-season as far as I’m concerned.

After watching our friends renovate their home, whilst also working full-time (as doctors, no less) and parenting two young children, I swear, I’ll never call myself ‘busy’ again.
I’m reminded of just how much courage is required when we create on this scale. To make continuous daily choices about door placements, concrete quantities, paint colours and wood. To believe enough in our vision - a loose, hazy concept we can see in imagination, pieced together across dozens of haphazard Pinterest boards - to commit to the cost, mess and sheer inconvenience needed to see it all through. We’ve a longstanding tendency in the UK to dismiss care about our interiors as ‘shallow’ or superficial, somehow. We ‘should be grateful just to have a roof over our head’. But of course, we can be grateful and creative. It’s not like it’s a lack of appreciation for having our basic needs met that stirs us to make beautiful things in the world.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from repeatedly watching all 24 seasons of Grand Designs, it’s that the places we inhabit can really shape how we live.
(I, for example, would probably be well, never-sleepy and have perpetually shiny soft hair again, had I not missed out on buying the original French House.)

All of my feelings of autumnal-nostalgia distilled into a picture. Why does this season bring up so much wistfulness?
My most formative fall memories were formed back in the city. Huge sycamore leaves and conkers dropping onto rain-slicked and slippery streets. Glowing shop windows in the 4pm dark. Orla has learned the name for this feeling this year and now comments whenever she feels a wave of it, too. It’s fun to imagine which of the small choices we make here and now might stay with her as sensory memories for the rest of her life. And interesting to note that, however joyful and perfect we might make those moments today, her recollections will be inevitably tinged with a soft, aching sadness for the past.

Monty the Border Terrorist is 11 now, which sounds quite old for a dog except he is definitely going to live forever. This month he has a suspicious lump that thankfully turned out to be nothing, so we bought him a McDonald’s breakfast to celebrate. Terrible for him, I know, but imagine having the super-smell ability of a dog but never getting to eat a hash brown. There have to be some exceptions sometimes, I think.

I am now 40 years old and (some days) I have the best skin of my life - or of recent memory, anyway. I take very little credit for this; I’m sure it is mostly genetics + being house bound a lot due to chronic illness, so being deprived of the sun. Nevertheless, this seems worthy of giving a special shoutout to my favourite SPF50, this retinol, nightly Vanicream and very occasional botox in the corner of my eyes, too, for helping me not hate the mirror each morning as I start my 4th decade on Earth.

If I am 40, she must be 10. But some days she is still my tiny baby girl, sucking at the same two fingers she first found at a month old to soothe herself off to sleep. Other times, she’s a mini teenager: glittery eyeshadow, Billie Eilish on repeat and eviscerating sarcasm turned onto everyone but me. I love both versions, and all of the new ones still to come, but I’m determinedly making one last big hurrah for being little this year and cramming in all the outstanding childhood things that I hoped that we’d do together.

If there’s any sort of theme to these photos this month, it’s probably light. The dark months are difficult for me; more than ever since lockdown, I’ve found. My solution is to hoard and collect up light any place I can find it, hunting down patches of winterish sunlight like a finely-tuned cat ✨.

(All photos: iPhone 14 Pro, edited in VSCO)

So why did I stop posting to Instagram?

It’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the past few years, and have lots of good answers to.
I’ve been busy, been putting my energy into fresh challenges elsewhere. I’ve experienced the same sad grief for the ‘gram that once was as so many of you reading this know all too well. But looking over these pictures today, I’m wondering if there isn’t a secret third reason as well.
The truth is, my world has shrunk down a lot as my health as got worse. As I scroll through this photos I’m reminded of how small and domestic my life has become. It probably doesn’t seem that different from the subjects I photographed and talked about before, but of course, the shift is internal. Before, home was my retreat from the world and a place to be celebrated. These days, it feels more like a prison or tomb.

One thing I’ve learned in my years of coaching on Instagram, content creation - and now Substack, too - is that we most fear rejection for the things that we reject in ourselves. This new, smaller life of mine still has shame woven through it, but I’m hoping that sharing things here might help to let the light in again.

I’d love to see some snapshots of the light in your days.
Show me your small, quietish moments too?

S xx