Why I Started Over Online

Why this was never really about Instagram

For most of my adult life, I stayed relatively private online. I didn’t get on Instagram until late 2016, and even then, I rarely posted. I joined X in 2025 but didn’t start sharing my thoughts there until the beginning of 2026.

Even after years of being a behavior analyst, building a business, and teaching, I kept a surprising amount of distance between my work and my actual self. At the end of February 2025, I started writing on Substack. I thought I was simply creating a place to write about education, behavior, and the systems I had spent years observing. What I didn’t realize was that writing publicly would slowly force me to confront how much of my life I had been keeping psychologically contained.

It wasn’t because my life was small. I’ve traveled, built things, and created memories with family that mean the world to me. I’ve also met people who shaped different seasons of my life in ways they probably don’t even realize. But I rarely shared any of it. I mostly let experiences exist in real time and then quietly move on.

What I’ve had to confront more recently is how much energy I’ve been spending on holding together chapters that were already over. There are certain transitions that happen slowly, long before they become visible to anyone else. I stayed mentally attached to old structures because they had been a significant part of my identity for years, and while I’m grateful for those chapters, I eventually realized how much space they still occupied in my mind, even as my life had begun to move in a different direction.

This spring, I finally sat with all of it.

Somewhere along the way, I also became more comfortable letting myself be seen. Not just professionally, but personally too. Not because my life suddenly changed overnight, but because I stopped feeling the need to keep so much of it tucked away.

Growth is strange that way; sometimes it doesn’t add to your identity so much as quietly reshape it. That’s why starting over online feels meaningful to me, even though it looks small from the outside. My new Instagram isn’t really about social media. It’s about finally letting my external life reflect the direction my internal life had been moving toward for a while.

My Substack community will still be where I write about systems, education, behavior, and culture, the ideas that shape my work. X is where I’ll think out loud about education policy and what I’m seeing in real time. Instagram is the newer thing: a place for the work, the people, the travel, the everyday, all the parts of my life that have lived quietly until now.

I think I’m finally ready to let people see more of the life I’ve actually been living all along.