In Media Res: My Instagram Pictures and Stories hold remnants of my personal narrative
I've been using Instagram for almost six years now, and I made it a public library of myself - what I do for the day, my interests, and even pictures that will soon become remnants of my forever cherished memories for that year. Instagram made me feel like I am heard, or even to display what I want to curate about myself, filtered or not.
Ever since then, romanticizing my life through lenses has been a form of escapism and coping, sharing every single music that I am listening to at the moment, picturing the scenery that I am currently in, or even sharing posts that dictate my current interest for a while. It became a staple for Instagram to become multifaceted, sharing everything that was once wished would happen, placing music to videos, and even doing boomerangs for God knows how long, and how many times I can do for the day.
Filters were also popping up, and as I feel good for today or that if I had a good hair day, it's already a routine for me to post it on Instagram. This dictates my narrative and how I traverse the world - May it be the most mundane thing that you'd ever see in your feed.
In Media Res, a Latin phrase for in the midst of things sums up most of my produced content. These multimedia stories are a part and chained into previous events of my story, a related chain of events so to speak.
Real-time updates on Instagram are as crucial as eating breakfast properly in the morning, making it a daily newspaper or a platform to just simply feel alive. It doesn't necessarily start from the time that I was born, no! Instead of actually creating a structured story, it made me travel through things that I initially never thought I would travel to, looking at other people's in media reses, fragmented stories, seeing what's up about them, starting conversations with them, and creating a connection that was deemed impossible before. It became a lifestyle for me to curate pictures on Instagram, and as I said before, it became a personal diary for me, and a collection of fragmented memories.
Fortunately, Instagram has the feature of actually making you look back at the stories and pictures that you previously published on your personal account, and I was reflecting on it, this gave me a mark to simply recover lost memories that I may or may not remember fifty years from now. These fragmented memories were not turned into tangible, living evidence of my life, through the media form of a singular device, projecting the previous thoughts and pictures that I collated six years ago.
I still have the drive to continue posting nilly-willy stuff on the internet. It made me feel alive for a reason; publishing MY story, and my narrative. All in one. Like a time capsule.
