I was twelve when I created my first Instagram account. 

"Baby Instagram," I will call it, allowed you to post one intensely saturated square photo at a time.

In my field of following, there were two ways of going about this-

The first was to maintain the fixed formatting of your photo with Instagram's lovely cropping tool and strut onward with your slightly distorted image of avocado toast. 

The second was to do the Cliffs of Moher some justice and download an app to apply a white background and preserve the entire landscape of the photo- also achieving some degree of consistency when looking at your account's page cohesively. 

This trend was made especially popular by Kylie Jenner and Ariana Grande, at least among the people that I followed at the time. The curation of such a seamless, congruent collection of photos was on one hand an allegiance to chromatic composition and aesthetic photography. 

But on the other hand, it was a major inconvenience. 

As a middle schooler who fell into the second camp, it felt like a genuine problem if the background of one photo did not rightfully complement the previous photo and vice versa. 

Why? Because I was concerned with how the page was viewed as a whole. 

And why would that be? I'll get to that later. 

Each photo was a single cell in the curation of what felt like something bigger and something better that could not exist anywhere else. I thought I was drawn to this pattern of posting because I liked design and photography. Those reasons probably cannot be entirely discounted, but the actual allure of the process was the design of a new perception of me. 

I couldn't control enough of the variables in my real life for it to be perfect, but I could control the visual identity of my instagram. 

Simply put, the act of curating a digital page of harmonious pictures was an escape- an escape from my perception of the real me. 

Eventually, I was probably influenced by someone to start posting full size photos again, if not for Instagram finally just adding the option in the app. But that didn't remove the voyeuristic lens I applied to my thinking- always predicting how I must look to other people when they look at my account. 

It does make me sad to consider how much of my childhood I spent living in the minds of other people, wondering if they are thinking what I want them to think about me.

And to be clear, this is not going to be a this is how I conquered the self-consciousness demons and you can too essay.

But it took a lot of time sitting in the emptiness that was my real life to learn that no matter how much I poured into the Instagram version of myself, it would never be enough to feel whole. In fact, spending so much time supplementing the online version of myself instead was incredibly counterintuitive to achieving what I actually wanted. 

In the contemplation of keeping or deleting social media, I listed the reasons why I *think* I like it- reasons unrelated to composition or notoriety. 

I like how social media supports small businesses and broadens their customer bases.

I like that I can see what specials Pistacia Vera will have when I go next Sunday morning. 

I like that I can look at photos of destinations I have never been to, but would like to travel to some day. 

I like that I can access communities of people who love the same forms of visual art, music, movies, and food as I do. 

And still, none of these are exclusive to social media itself- they're just more readily facilitated by it. 

Skipping ahead about nine years, and ~surprise~ I kept Instagram. 

But I had to learn how to decenter myself from my universe. 

My experience with Instagram now could be best described as seriously unserious. 

I am still inclined to consider the phantom audience, but it doesn't pull the strings anymore. 

*Here* is where this transitions from my semi-nostalgic and relatively very problematic relationship with social media in middle and high school to the pervasive consequences of its legacy. 

Similar to the awakening that people are not, in fact, thinking about *me* all day long, I had a similar moment of revelation upon realizing that not everyone is seeing what I'm seeing on social media. 

This is strongly correlated with the evolution of "baby Instagram" to "4-second rule" Instagram.

 The addition of stories, reels, direct messaging, and business profiles, and the removal of a chronological feed makes it such that people are now able to continually reorient themselves towards target audiences and algorithms, using freely distributed data about user insights and general trends. 

Now, most of my undergraduate degree came from courses related to cognitive and memory biases. but that apparently did not render my judgement to be sufficient enough to avoid the attention vortex that became my Instagram feed. 

Adjacent to diversifying news media and medical literature sources, I needed to do the same with my following.

The problems that seemed to be mounting in my head came with the increasing concentration and narrowing of the types of accounts I was allowing into my feed. 

I noticed how my lifestyle was eerily similar to the people I was seeing online- and though I'd love to believe it was pure coincidence and that I was the original, it is more likely that I was subtly molding my life to fit an archetype representative of the people I was following. 

More concisely, put enough people with similar interests, features, and engagement patterns in an incubator, and a gold standard, stale from overexposure and bereft of impact, will emerge. 

The specifics about my particular manosphere at the time are terribly predictable-

But like every other void of thinking I've fallen into, I had to wonder what its function was. 

How did this serve me? How did this serve people similar to me? 

OCD tends to promote the idea that I am bad, and because it also promotes perfectionism, it will seek out *as much evidence as possible* to prove it. 

Likewise, when given an easy, intuitive mold that defines a lauded paradigm of being, it is hard to escape the gravity of its pull. It is proof that I am, in fact, good, if only I can fit into that box. And evidently, that is what I wanted to be more than anything. 

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." (Anais Nin)

I first encountered this quote at the Columbus Museum of Art in 2017 in an exhibit called A Measure of Humanity. The exhibit delivered interpretations of how we attempt to measure and reduce what we are into discernible, often material, metrics- arguing that, ultimately, the labyrinth of the human psyche deserves a far more ambitious spectrum. 

Patterns of reduction define colloquial stereotypes and are often what make them so appealing. If you only buy the encyclopedia of strategically targeted brand-name health foods or the easily replicable sweatshirt that costs 7x what it's worth, you, too, can be good. 

And, of course, the price of this pattern is particularly unmanageable for most people, indicating that in order to be good, you also need to have status. 

In 2022, I gave a presentation titled "The Cost of Autonomy". It focused primarily on the dynamic between the injustices in our food system and health inequity- both downstream effects of industry centralization and under-resourced healthcare infrastructure.  

Without foundational public health services, consumers are forced to take their well-being into their own hands, often with single-solution fixes- supplements, specific dietary regimens, fitness journeys, wellness retreats- none of which are fundamentally problematic, but they suggest that "health" can be reduced down to commoditized bandaids. 

Despite my sincerity in this presentation- advocating for intricate policy interventions that allow for consumers to be cared for as individual patients and for constituents to have reliable federal support for food subsidies and nutrition programs- I was still yielding space to social media's reductive constructs of morality and wellness. 

After a few more years of untethered identification with an ever-shifting target of virtue, it was once again time to break down the constructs I had allowed to keep me stagnant for too long. 

The process unfolded similar to the back-and-forth when you're helping someone move- a ceaseless game of "toss or keep?" but applying the process to what I thought I liked and most wanted. I'd also argue this practice is beneficial, even if you haven't experienced some degree of moderately intense identity instability. 

After surrendering my substitute belief system and identifying the necessities, it seemed much clearer to me that I couldn't realistically escape the fear of being bad,  but I could find the confidence to believe I could override its ruling. 

The value structures I was rebuilding wouldn't defy me because they were created in alignment with the momentum that drives me. They could be forgiving if I misstepped because it was experience with my own successes and failures that brought them to life. They will always be a part of me. 

To have been so impacted by something as one-dimensional as an app is particularly haunting for a person who wants to think of themselves as:

~above the constraints of conformity~

But I never fully will be. 

It is natural to want to belong somewhere- and historically, it certainly serves one well to have a community, so long as you aren't identifying yourself by that community's standards alone.

Finally, to be seriously unserious on the internet means two things: 

First, it means to consider the unsubstantiated advice and suggestions of reality unseriously.

Second, and more importantly, to take yourself seriously enough to know that you are worth knowing and your values are worth protecting.