Instagram and Me: A Breakup Story
Emotionally abusive. That’s the only way I know how to describe my last relationship. It took everything I had in me and never said thank you. Instead, it asked for more. Asked me to give up every little private piece of myself. Asked me to smile when I was broken inside. Asked me to fake it even when I didn’t think I could anymore. But I did it anyway. I did everything it wanted me to because I thought that I had to. I didn’t know if I could leave, and if I could, I definitely didn’t know how. It wasn’t a boyfriend, no. This toxic relationship was with the world’s favorite social media platform: Instagram.
It wasn’t always like this. As with all relationships that eventually go sour, things started out just fine. We were happy together. I downloaded Instagram the week it was birthed into the app-mosphere and never turned back. I was around fourteen at the time, a freshman in high school, experimenting with hair dye and lacking a care about anything substantial. When I first got Instagram, I didn’t think a single bit about the politics of it. I posted what I wanted to, not concerned about the quality of the picture or the quantity of the likes it got. I was just so happy to be there. So happy to have a new lens to view the world through. Everything I saw, I captured and posted, including ridiculous things like glasses of water and my bedroom curtains. Of course, it was totally silly, but I was also totally free.
It was this freedom that fostered my love for Instagram. It fell into the background of my life, a way to capture and advertise staple memories from my high school days. I was active on it without noticing. The app was just something everyone had, and while I wasn’t quite as intense as I had been in the past, I updated it regularly and didn’t think about it as anything more than something I did because it was something I had always done and something everyone else was doing.
After high school, though, I noticed Instagram evolving. Pictures looked more professional and less casual. Comment sections became areas of praise instead of conversations about the picture they were under. I even observed that people weren’t responding to comments left on their pictures; they just left them there like little nuggets of increased self-esteem to refer back to when needed. So, along with navigating a new world with my first semester of college, I stepped up my Instagram. Now, as I evolved as a student, my posts evolved, too. I became more obsessed with the quality of my photos, the comments they received, and the number of likes they got. Instagram was a game and I wanted to win. I wanted to be the best at it, and nothing was going to stop me.
Competing in this contest became the most important aspect of my life. I found myself caring way too much about the different facets of the app and allowed it to impact me way more than I should have. Captions and hashtags are always difficult to come up with, so my strategy was to devise something clever first, and then I would plan an event or a photo around the idea I already had.
One night towards the middle of my first semester, my college football team played Alabama in an away game. The rivalry between our two teams is pretty serious, and my obsession with football is even more serious, so I knew I would be watching. A few weeks before the game, a hashtag popped into my head: #JamasAndBama. From there, I thought it would be fun to have a group of friends come over to watch the game in pajama pants. I invited a ton of people (only a few showed up) and we took the picture I was dreaming of before the game even started. I was disappointed more people weren’t there because I thought it would hurt the amount of likes I would receive. The people of Instagram needed to think people came out in droves to participate in the #JamasAndBama event. While that wasn’t true, my followers and friends didn’t need to know. They also didn’t need to know that the event didn’t inspire the hashtag, and that instead the hashtag birthed the event.
I crushed that first semester with a 4.0 GPA and a new tight-knit group of friends. At the end of it, I threw a Christmas party at my house that included nearly twenty people. My house was flooded with friends and laughter. With mood lighting in place and a Christmas tree for aesthetic effect, everyone got in place for my obligatory “Look at all these people I know” picture. I made my mom pull out her professional camera for this one -- I knew what the quality needed to be. Every picture she took turned out blurry. I was devastated. Until I realized that some of my friends had also taken some on their phones. I went around the room checking for whose phone captured the photo with the best quality. One of the girls in the room had just gotten the newest iPhone, and since it focused automatically, we ended up with a picture worth posting. Hallelujah! My night wasn’t ruined anymore and we could continue on with our merry festivities.
Then spring semester came and it didn’t look anything like that for me. My classes were harder and my friends were busier. I went from eating at a full table of people to eating alone every day. My new group of companions was still around, but with none of us having classes together or similar schedules, we drifted apart. I entered into a depression that I thought was seasonal. When the semester ended and I still wasn’t any better, I got worried. At the beginning of that summer, I looked into counseling. That June, I went to Disney World. Standing in line for one of my favorite rides, I ended up on the verge of tears for no apparent reason. I didn’t what was going on, and I didn’t know how to fix it.
And the whole time, I became more obsessed with Instagram. As my emotional stability began to decline, my pictures got better and more frequent (but not too frequent, of course). My Disney World pictures got the most likes of all of my pictures, ever. My social media life didn’t reflect my real life at all, yet I needed to be on it all the time. I kept track of the likes and comments my friends got. Noticed who liked which pictures. Paid attention to how many days passed between others’ posts. And then I attempted to emulate what got the best attention rates. Instagram became the scale by which I measured myself. Even though I knew on some deep logical level that if I wasn’t feeling internally what I was posting externally, my friends weren’t either, it didn’t matter. I needed to put up the front because that was the price of existing as a person in my age range on the internet.
My realization came way too late. One night late that summer, I went out to eat with a group of my high school friends. After dinner, we went walking around the cutest part of our town. All of the girls in the group sat on a bench with a fine backdrop and took a photo so we could all remember the fun we had that night. I had a great time out with the people I love most, but I HATED that picture. The lighting was awful, my makeup had come off, and the quality would never hold up. No amount of edits could fix it. And because I didn’t realize it until after the hangout was over, I missed my opportunity. Was it a good picture to remember a fun night with great friends? Absolutely. Was it Instagrammable? Absolutely not.
As the summer started winding down, I got anxious. Was I going to have to force my way through another semester while depressed? Was I going to have to continue pretending? Two weeks before the start of my sophomore semester, I started to examine my life deeply and intently for ways to achieve greater happiness in a short amount of time. I had to wonder if there was anything in my control that I could alter to bring my life and emotions back to where I wanted them. Then, I caught myself doing something ridiculous: opening Instagram literally two seconds after I had closed it.
Did I really need to know what was going on that much? Did I think enough had changed in the time it took me to exit the app to open it back up? The evidence said I did. But why did it matter? It was harmless, right? I was just trying to keep up with my friends. Just using it as a way to stalk cute boys. Just doing it because it was there. Besides, I loved it. I grew up with it. Instagram and I had been together since ninth grade, and nothing bad had ever happened, so everything was fine. Right?
I heard the answer like a whisper in the dark: “Delete it.”
This was not the solution I was looking for. In fact, it was the opposite of what I wanted to do. Deleting Instagram just wasn’t an option. But after much prayer and deliberation, it became clear that the only way to feel like my life was alright was to remove the barrier that made me feel like it wasn’t. I wouldn’t know how well I was or wasn’t doing if I had no scale to check. I ordered a hard drive to save all my pictures and made my farewell post while waiting for it to arrive.
Honestly, I didn’t think anyone but myself would care. Yes, it was a bigger deal to me than it should have been, but I have an obsessive personality which tends to make things like this more dramatic than necessary. The number of “Are you really deleting Instagram?” texts I got was insane. I was honored that some people wanted me to stay, but of course my close friends want me to exist in the same spectrum as they do. They were all extremely understanding that I needed to remove the toxicity from my life -- that the app had become more of a problem than a pleasure, and because of that, it needed to go. We all moved on, and it wasn’t that big of a deal.
Or so I thought. The same day my farewell post went live, a girl I went to high school with - but don’t really talk to anymore - ran into my parents at lunch in town and mentioned it to them. That’s how I realized that while this mattered way too much to me, it at least mattered enough to other people as well. I knew then that this was a piece of our culture that so many of us thought we had to participate in. No one knew we could leave at any time. We weren’t devising exit strategies because we didn’t think we could use them. But I discovered an out and I had to take it.
So, that was it. I made a difficult decision that shouldn’t have been difficult. I had to completely remove myself from the equation. I sacrificed my favorite way to search people and my clever name handle for a life without likes, comments, captions, and hashtags. The most important thing about doing it is how bad I didn’t want to. If I thought there was any other way to feel better or to use it right, I would have stayed. But nearly a year later, I am still without it. When school started this past fall, I had the best time of my life! I walked in the freedom of no pressure to be perfect for others. I met my best friend, started a new major, and moved forward realizing my life still matters even when other people can’t see it.
I haven’t relapsed since deleting Instagram, but I have come close. There are days when I think, “If I do it right, it won’t be as bad. Now that I know what the problems were, I won’t be susceptible to them.” And then I get a taste of it and remember that’s not true. Most recently, this came in the form of asking a friend to look up a cute boy for me (some things never change, okay?). Within an instance of being on his profile, we learned that he had recently gotten a new girlfriend. Rest assured, this is not the first time this has happened to me. Nearly my entire Instagram duration was fostered by this same desire to know more than I needed to, seeking it out, and being disappointed with the results. But, the new knowledge changed my interactions with the boy. Had I never looked him up, the information would have found me on a need-to-know basis and I could have dealt with it organically. This little adventure on Instagram was fun and disappointing, but it was enough to show me that I can’t control myself when I have it. It was enough to convince me I am not ready to go back and won’t be anytime soon.
My life without Instagram is fuller and more genuine than it ever was while I had it. My events are planned out of a sheer desire to spend time with people I love and want to fellowship with. I had another Christmas party this past year. This party was more intimate than the last one, but it was filled with people who belong in my life, not because they make pictures look good but because they make life feel good. It was a more fulfilling experience, with games and food and laughter into the wee hours of the night. It was an entirely different tone from the last one. I was happier to be in the presence of other people, listening to stories and making new memories with them. Now when I take pictures, I take them for me. I don’t worry about my hair or my makeup or the backdrop for aesthetic appeal. I go on adventures for the heck of it and can take breaks when I need to because no one is waiting for me to post. Once I realized that I could live my life without an audience, I found the freedom I had been wishing for. If the way to find myself was to do it without anyone watching, then Hasta La Insta, baby.