MY BR EAK UP WITH INSTAGRAM By Munara Muhetaer “Don’t worry,” she said. “You can use my phone to call an Uber home later.”
I felt this need to maintain the image I’d meticulously crafted and mimic the lifestyles of the other beautiful women overcrowding my feed, no matter how unattainable.
I barely knew her, but she meant it as a reassurance. We were a small crowd of nineteen and twenty-year-olds partying downtown for a mutual friend’s birthday. This was her way of looking out for a female acquaintance whose phone battery had just died, and who’d have to make her way out of the city alone in the dead of night.
What was once a fun fling between Instagram and I had morphed into a toxic relationship and I was trapped without knowing it.
I appreciated her offer, of course. But at that moment, getting home wasn’t my main concern. All I could think about was how I wouldn’t be able to document this night and plaster it all over my social media. Outfit: wasted. Fancy drinks: pointless. Night: ruined. After all, if you didn’t post about it, did it really happen? Now, when I look back at this memory from over a year ago, I’m embarrassed that I couldn’t simply enjoy an outing for what it was. But at the time, my relationship with social media, specifically Instagram, was consuming. I was constantly recording and sharing my life: what I was wearing, where I was and who I was with. It was a habit, almost a natural instinct. There was a time when I’d spend entire weekends reading a book while curled up on the couch. Where I cut my own bangs unevenly and made my own jewellery out of beads that I bought at the dollar store. But over the years, I’d created and carefully cultivated a caricature of myself online: one that was outgoing, done up and with an expensive taste for clothes and food. It happened gradually. What initially started as a hobby bled off the screen and began to control the real-life me. Every view, like and comment I received validated my self-esteem, and so I kept seeking them.
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Then the pandemic hit. All my weekend plans went out the window, then the next week’s, then the next month’s — until there was nothing left to do but to sit at home and wait. In quarantine, my life became somewhat static and suddenly I was out of things to post. Yet that no longer seemed to matter anymore. There was so much devastation everywhere — people were losing their livelihoods, their loved ones, their own lives. I knew that I was one of the luckier ones.
