Why I Quit Social Media After Eye Surgery

On December 1, 2022, I underwent corrective eye surgery after almost three decades of wearing contacts. My vision was -4 in my right eye and -3.75 in my left eye. It certainly wasn’t the worst prescription, but the world remained blurry enough that there wasn’t much I could do or see without my contacts or glasses in place.

Since I was a teen, it’s been part of my daily bathroom ritual to put contacts in every morning and take them out every night, but at age 40 I said, “No more of this touching my eyeballs nonsense. I just want to see!”

I wanted to see from the moment I opened my eyes every morning. I wanted to never have to make a drugstore run while on a trip because I had once again forgotten to pack my contact solution or contact case. I wanted to swim without goggles and not worry that I would lose a contact lens and find myself temporarily blind-ish. I regretted the hundreds of times I woke up in the middle of the night to tend to a crying baby, their faces always an impressionistic blur of the real thing because I was too tired or too lazy to find or put on my glasses.

So when the burden of pandemic worry had mostly lifted and I could start to take care of myself again, I made an appointment to get my eyes measured and assessed in mid-2022. In my research, I learned that there are three main types of corrective laser eye surgery: LASIK, PRK, or SMILE. I hoped for LASIK, which has the quickest healing and recovery time; within a day or two you could see well, drive, and basically return back to your normal life – it sounded like a magic trick!

Instead, I was told that PRK would be my only option if I wanted to go forward with correcting my vision. LASIK or SMILE are done by cutting a flap into one’s cornea, and mine were too thin for either of those procedures. I would have preferred like a thin waste; instead I was gifted with thin corneas. Of the three, PRK has the longest healing time because the top of your corneas are burned off by lasers to reshape it.

The first few days of recovery would be painful. I wouldn’t be able to see clearly for about a month, and 20/20 vision would take several months after that. But the part that would make most people shoot straight out of the doctor’s chair was no screens for two weeks. Aside from sleep, most of us can’t even stay off of our screens for 2 hours! However, even with all of these considerations, I knew the long term payoff would be worth the short term pain and inconvenience. Plus, I was curious what life could be like without screens – like if you can’t digitally exist, can you exist at all? I was ready to find out.

I scheduled my surgery for the end of 2022 so that I had time to work ahead of all my Cook Smarts tasks and delegate the ones that had to be done real time in December. The biggest chunk of work was actually all the filming I needed to do for our social media posts to get a full month of content done before signing off, and this wasn’t easy for me. Creating social media content had become the least favorite part of my job. I dreaded the extra content that I would need to create to make up for the time off, but I guess I still felt the need to digitally exist during my screen sabbatical.

I am a planner though, so I got everything in order and was ready to bear witness to the wonder of modern medicine. On the morning of my surgery, I was placed basically into a dentist chair and then reclined back to look up at a big machine that was designed to give me perfect vision. A technician clamped one eye open and covered the other with one of those pirate eye patches. He then administered a few drops of anesthesia and before I knew it, the lasering began. As invisible beams burned off bits of my cornea, I could smell and see smoke rising from my eyes. At first, I thought that one of the machines was overheating and a small fire had broken out during my surgery but then I realized, wait, I’m the one on fire! Is this supposed to happen?

Apparently yes, because the doctor just went about his work. I would very much like to meet the mad genius who came up with this crazy idea of burning someone’s eyeballs to correct their vision and also patient zero because who would volunteer for such an experiment?

In under 30 minutes, both of my eyes were done and I walked back out to the waiting room where my mom was anxiously waiting for me. My mother is a pessimist and an extreme worrier. She did not want me to get this surgery done because she had convinced herself that I’d only end up blind. So when she asked, “When does the procedure start?” I knew she really was hoping that I had changed my mind and that’s why I had come back out to the waiting room so soon. Instead, I surprised her by saying, “I’m done. We can go home now.” It was probably the shortest she’s ever had to wait in a doctor’s waiting room.

On that first day back home, I felt almost no discomfort but by day 2, I was struck by the latent pain of having one’s corneas burned. It felt like the surface of my eyes had been subjected to dozens of paper cuts with antiseptic then poured into them. Even small amounts of light heightened the pain, so I spent close to 2 days in my bed with my eyes closed and the lights off, going in and out of sleep while listening to the many character voices of Dan Stevens (aka Matthew Crawley from Downton Abbey) narrating Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. 

Fortunately by day 5, that initial recovery stage of raw, visceral pain had passed. I was still incredibly sensitive to light so I often wore sunglasses even indoors, but I was no longer bound to my bed in my dark bedroom. The problem now was my vision – the world was just a blur. When I wore contacts, my day started when I put them in and I could view the world with clarity.

During this next stage of recovery, it felt like my days never officially began as everything remained in a haze. It also didn’t help that I wasn’t grounded in my usual routine. I couldn’t drive the kids to and from school and their activities; I couldn’t go to the office and work; I couldn’t even indulge in lazing around and watching all the TV shows that I was hoping to one day get to. 

And so I had to create a new routine. Even though I couldn’t see clearly, I certainly wasn’t blind. I was too restless to just stay at home; with good enough vision to detect the shapes of moving vehicles, I felt safe enough to go on walks. And walk I did. For hours and hours without direction over most of December. Sometimes I would walk the same loop over and over again. Other days I would just keep walking farther and farther away from my house, deciding hours later that if I didn’t turn back soon, I would never get back home. One day I took a rideshare to a non-eye related doctor’s appointment and instead of ordering a car to take me home, I thought I may as well walk. I have nothing better to do.

Numerous audiobooks became the backdrop to my daily walks. With so many miles of walking ahead of me, I found the courage to download The Power Broker by Robert Caro, a 66 hour audiobook (don’t worry I listened at 1.25x so it only took me ~53 hours to finish) about the life of Robert Moses, a public official who over the course of decades shaped much of New York City’s physical landscape from public parks and beaches to many of its main transportation arteries. Apparently when you can’t see well, hearing the play by play of a meeting between government bureaucrats can be riveting.

Though I was alone during these daytime hours, I found wonderful company in audiobooks. I put on my Inspector Gamache hat and tried to solve the murders in Louise Penny’s mysteries (always unsuccessfully because I’m no detective or murder mystery writer). I soaked in the character-rich worlds of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s books, Daisy Jones & The Six and Malibu Rising, which is one of my top 5 books about siblings. 

Most of my adult life had been viewed through the 2 by 5 inch frame of my phone or the 8 by 12 inch frame of my laptop. For many hours of the day, those were the boundaries of my world – what I viewed, the output of my thoughts and efforts, the time I often wasted, the conversations I had with friends, the meetings I had with my teammates – all confined into these small 2-dimensional spaces. These screens were portals into so many parts of our lives – our work, our entertainment, our Amazon packages delivered in 2 days – especially during those pandemic years. But during those weeks of my recovery where I wasn’t allowed to look at one, I felt surprised at how little I missed those screens. 

Even though I couldn’t see my environment crisply, my deficient eyesight actually made me focus more on the physical and visual world around me. As minds inevitably do, mine would wander frequently on these walks – away from the story in my ears when I noticed a neighbor’s tree or to the chatter of my own inner thoughts. I was 41 years old at the time and very aware that I was firmly in the boundaries of midlife now, and without the noise of my usual everyday demands, finally had time to ask and really think about, “What’s next?”

I had been running Cook Smarts for over ten years, and the work had changed a lot over these years. I had gone from doing everything – the recipe development, the food photography, the coding, the graphics, the marketing, the customer servicing – to just focusing on marketing and new product features. Of course, I was still involved in all the other aspects but I (luckily) was no longer the one doing all of the work.

While I still got excited about working on features to improve our meal plan service, marketing the service just filled me with dread, especially since so much of marketing now relies on social media platforms. While I could see how social media was fun for others, it hadn’t sparked joy in me for quite some time – as a content creator or as a consumer of content. The hours every week I would spend on coming up with content ideas and then creating it in front of the camera had ballooned into the largest park of my work time.

These short-lived moments that took so much time to create and were also largely dependent on the whims and ever-changing algorithms of the social media companies had left me feeling unsatisfied at work and questioning the why of it all. Plus, I don’t know if human beings were meant to spend so much time looking at our own faces in video selfie mode. It makes you lose a sense of your own being. I wondered if I was performing or producing life versus just living it. Like, if you do something but you didn’t show it on Instagram, did you actually do it? Or would I actually be doing this if I didn’t have a virtual world of people to share this with?

My recovery stretched on longer than I anticipated. I didn’t really see clearly consistently until close to 6 weeks after the surgery and even then my eyes would often ache by the end of the day. In the first month after the procedure, there were days where I might have good vision for a few hours in the morning only to have fuzzy vision again by midday and then there were days when the world was fuzzy all day long. I was expecting much more linear progress but that just wasn’t the case.

As my vision eventually sharpened, so did my sense of what I wanted next. I knew I wasn’t going to return to social media, at least not in the near future. The world is big and no one would miss me, but I would miss a lot of the world (and possibly myself) if I stayed on. I also knew it was time for me to consider what’s next after Cook Smarts.

I know for so many of you reading this, my Cook Smarts OGs, this is not what you want to hear. I promise it will take a lot more walks for me to figure out exactly what this next stage of work-life will look like for me as I enter my mid-40’s. I promise that I am not going anywhere anytime soon – there are still lots of things I want to do as the Founder of Cook Smarts so that wherever it ends up, it will remain a service that continues to support our community members. Being a part of this company has given so much meaning to my life, and I love you all so much. 

When I walked into that doctor’s office on that dreary December day in 2022, I simply thought that I was just getting a routine procedure to fix my vision. Instead, I also gained a much clearer sense of how I wanted to live my life going forward. It gave me space to bring all of these new rituals into 2023. I spent so much more time enjoying the physical world and continuing my new habit of daily walks. After going a year without social media, I do miss having a way to connect with all of you and so I created this newsletter – I guess old fashioned me is taking us back to the good old days of blogging. I’m so happy that you’re here because I have a lot of thoughts to share in this midlife stage. And I haven’t ruled out returning to Instagram one day but for now, this way of sharing and being feels just perfect.

Curious how you feel about social media these days?

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