42 new york | september 16–29, 2019
my senior year of high school, I had three Instagram accounts: a public
one, a private one for friends and internet friends, and a private one that was just
for me. By this point, I’d had an online audience for six years or so: first for the
fashion blog I started when I was 11, and then for Rookie, the online magazine
for teenage girls I’d started when I was 15 as an alternative to the getting-a-
boyfriend-centricmainstreamteenmagazines that still existed in 2011.
maybe never switched off but an instinct like any other, dovetailing
with the many conscious and unconscious decisions that made up
all my acts of self-expression. After all, I had been honing my share-
ability lens for many years before Instagram and already received
much praise for “being myself.” Somewhere along the line, I think
I came to see my shareable self as the authentic one and buried any
tendencies that might threaten her likability so deep down I forgot
they even existed.Where would I be without Instagram? Definitely not in the
luxury rental building I was paid to live in and post about for a
year back in 2017. Nor in the apart-
ment I moved to when the year was
up, as the pay stubs provided to my
new landlord were mostly from
appearing in ad campaigns that had
required posting on Instagram.
Without Instagram, it’s possible I
wouldn’t have gotten the acting job
that moved me to New York, nor the
relationships, experiences, and iden-
tity that followed. I definitely would
have less income and less of an audience to share this essay with.
Who would I be without Instagram? The fact that it’s impos-
sible to parse its exact influence on me indicates that it runs
deep. I can try to imagine an alternate universe where I’ve
always roamed free and Instagram-less in pastures untouched
by the algorithm. But I can’t imagine who that person is inside.
I can’t tell you exactly what Instagram has done to me, but I can
tell you how it has felt to grow up with it.
I got Instagram in 2011, when I was 15, at the same time I
got an iPhone. Early on, it felt like a fun, paced-up version of
blogging, meant for savoring parts of my real life and peeking
into the realities of people unlike me. The more I used it, how-
ever, the more I found myself searching for some definitive
reality in the way I was perceived by others via comments,
likes, and follows. Before Instagram, my faraway audience
could be conjured only when I sat at my computer, and it disap-
peared when I went to school.
With Instagram, self-defining and self-worth-measuring
spilled over into the rest of the day, eventually becoming my
default mode. If I received conflicting views of my worth or,
looking at other people’s accounts, disparate ideas about how to
live, the influx of information could lead to a kind of panic spiral.
I would keep scrolling as though the cure for how I felt was at
the bottom of my feed. I’d feel like I was crawling out of my skin,
heartbeat first, for minutes and hours. Finally, I’d see somethingPosts on my public account were mostly dispatches from my
in-person life, which still consisted primarily of going to school
every day in Oak Park, Illinois, and editing Rookie when I got
home. The private account for friends was more of a place to
voice frustrations and petty thoughts. And the private account
that was just for me was like if my public one was more shame-
less: thirstier selfies, pictures with famous people at their homes
and dinner parties, souvenirs from the world of wealth and pres-
tige that I’d occasionally been granted access to through my
internet fame. These photos felt too obviously desperate and
social climb–y for my other accounts, but I wanted to know how
it would feel to enhance them with filters, to watch the little blue
bar advance as they uploaded, to see these moments framed—or
blessed, really—by Instagram’s interface.
I can’t remember exactly how the account came about. I used
it for only a week or two and then, regrettably, deleted it—most
likely out of shame or a fear of its being somehow discovered.
But it feels accurate to say that it was the only thing I made
growing up that truly was just for me. Unlike with my diaries,
there was no lurking notion of posterity. I would have been
horrified if anyone had seen it, rather than like, “OMG, that’s
so embarrassing; but what about the prose?” It existed just to
scratch an itch, to satisfy the part of myself that had learned to
register experience as only fully realized once primed for public
consumption, but that was monitored by the other part of
myself, the part that knew the actual sharing of these specific
moments would appear inauthentic: I’d look too fancy for
Rookie and too trying-to-be-fancy to be a real celebrity. So I
engaged in this private fantasy of my own public life, just dif-
ferently packaged—openly shrewd and braggadocian rather
than “relatable.”
It’s not that my public account was some highly curated per-
formance. I’ve always thought I could be myself in public pretty
easily—by which I mean, speak without second-guessing myself
too much on social media, in writing, in interviews. But the
memory of my private account tells me I still had a strong
instinct for savvy that I couldn’t or wouldn’t admit to myself or
anyone. I never considered myself calculating—who does?—and
when I did catch glimpses of my own ambition, I thought it was
ugly, disgraceful, incongruous with my authentic self, who sim-
ply wanted to make things and connect with people and prob-
ably, one day, move to the woods.
And yet the rapid-fire stage-mom math I performed in curating
my various Instagram accounts was likely instrumental to the pre-
sentation of my authentic self that would eventually lead to
branded-content deals, acting roles, and my career as I now know
it. Rather than some tamped-down impulse, my ability to control
how I was seen, to know what to say (and when, and how), was
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