Free Fridays: Twelve thousand posts.

13 February 2026

“Mom, get off your phone please. You’ve been on it for hours!” the kids would tell me, annoyed.

But they didn’t know what I was actually doing on the phone.

I wasn’t wasting time or doomscrolling.

I was doing something quite pivotal in my life, something I never thought I’d do.

Remember my previous post I wrote about getting ready for Ramadhan and making changes in my life – time planning, springcleaning, shedding my luxury items slowly… there’s one more thing that I told you I wanted to share.

Well, I’ve been doing this:

Removing my posts from social media.

I think there comes a time in your life that you just feel like doing an audit of yourself. Where you’re heading, what to bring with you and what to leave behind. For me, one of the biggest things in my life is my social media – sharing was what I thought “part of my job” and I publicised my life more than necessary.

I mean… who posts 12,000 photos?

This @vivyyusof girl. She did.

As I looked back at the photos I posted, my thumbs sore from scrolling all the way to 2012 posts, I thought to myself goshhhh…

1) this girl posts a whole lot of outfit photos for local designers, even a small button gets a post – her laundry must have been crazy.

2) this girl lives and breathes her companies – everything was about FashionValet and dUCk, did she even have a life?

3) this girl really loves telling people about her awards and media clippings.

And I also thought ok la this girl’s captions are quite funny and her flatlays were quite nice. 😜

Do I regret any of it? No. I really believe everyone has to go through their own journey to learn their own lessons. My path was as such, and I know that through the 12K posts, none were posted with bad intentions. My life was in the fashion industry of glitz and glam, and I truly believed at the time that I needed to show the validation from media, awards, collabs etc, for the public to trust my brand. And I guess it did grow really well.

Until it was all taken in a blink of an eye by Allah swt.

Because I had forgotten one important thing – that nothing belonged to me, nothing was done by me, no credit should be given to me. We Muslims utter this phrase everyday: Alhamdulillah. It means all praise is for Allah. All. Not half, not 80%, not 30%... but all. And I think in human beings’ excitement of life, we forget that and we think the goodness comes from us. We are smart, we are successful, we are beautiful, we we we. And I think looking through the 12K photos, I did to some extent think it was me, especially because of the praises I was getting from so many people. And for that, I’m glad that I’m not that person anymore. But it had to come with going through humbling failures and returning desperately back to God. The arrogance and the ego needed to be stripped, for us to be truly humble and submit to Him.

Taking charge of my next phase of life, I know I wanted to trim down the glitz and glam of my past. I want to post with intention and really ask myself a bunch of questions before posting. Why is this photo going up? What am I trying to achieve here? Is it to stroke my ego? Why am I showing my children’s photos to the public? Why am I telling people about this achievement? To share and inspire, maybe, but is there an ounce of pride in there too? Hmmm…. #goodbyephoto

Was it easy to archive the photos? Of course not! It was so painful!

Physically, it was tiring and time-consuming. You can only archive 100 posts at a time so it was many rounds for me. And for collab posts, you have to do one by one - cry.

Emotionally, it was hard too. I remember the good times, the hard times, the effort every photo and video took for me to shoot and edit, and writing each caption with heart and meaning. So I did it in stages. The easy one for me to do was my kids’ photos – I was sure that my kids should be privatised from social media so I removed everything that had them in it. Even birth announcements, removed. Why the need to tell people?

The hard ones to take down was the work stuff – the journey, the memories, the beautiful collaborations, the recognition from international media – ooofff, very pain to remove. It took weeks to do bit by bit. I allowed myself the time to hold on until I was really ok to let go, and I’m still going through it now. Insyaallah, I’ll soon get there fully.

I’m down to 2K now.

Which means I’ve removed 10K posts. That’s not ten yeah, not even ten hundred.

That’s TEN THOUSAND posts.

I even removed all the highlights showing my yearly recap that I do annually. #pain

I’m sure I missed out some posts here and there, so I have to check again when I’m done getting my poor dry eyes fixed.

As Ramadhan draws near, let’s remind each other to shed things of the past that may stop us from getting His blessings. It’s so hard, but may our hearts want better versions of ourselves - not in others’ eyes or even our own eyes, but in His.

But yeah, need a thumb massage now. 😂

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Before you go…

Yep you saw that right! New colour for Sincerely, Working From Home jumper is out.

In everybody’s favourite colour - PINK!

Specially for my subscribers today, get your pink jumper before it sells out!

Click here.

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Before you really go…

Let me know you’ve read this. Comment “[the number of posts you’ve posted on your instagram]” on my latest post at @sincerelyvivy.

See you there! :)