At a tiny desk in the only corner of my room in which it will fit, it is spewing out of me like vomit.
All of the creativity that wasn’t.
All of the words and paint that couldn’t be.
It is pouring out of me like water from a hydrant. The past year has been, ironically, both a wellspring of ideas and a desert of creation. It has fueled me with content but robbed me of time to do anything with it.
Last year, the start of The Crisis of My Twenties, came on the heels of The Best Year of My Twenties. The juxtaposition is jarring. Experiential whiplash. Both years gave me so much to write about, think about, draw about, dream about. But last year also sucked my soul out of me. Solitary confinement with only pockets of “yard time” here and there.
But now that I am free, everything that has been building up is releasing and it’s making piles on my desk, filling the pages of this sketchpad I’ve had for God knows how long.
I’ve got to do something with this stuff.
I’ll start an Instagram.
It’s 2016.
It’s still weird to post selfies on Instagram. There’s no such thing as Stories or Reels, or even TikTok. Fitspo culture is brewing in the basement but not really public yet. MLM mommies and “coaches” are just being born rather than seemingly the largest segment of users. When you open up the app, you actually see content from— get this— people you follow in the order in which it was posted. Remember those days? *sigh*
And so I start a second Instagram account, this one reserved for my creativity (distinct from my account reserved for stalking high school classmates and posting pictures of sunsets and my cat.)
I barely hashtag my images. It feels spammy. I’m not trying to sell anything. I’m mostly just trying to be a Tumblr girl (RIP Tumblr.)
It’s fun.
It’s easy.
It’s natural.
There is some hope for likes, sure, but at this point, likes are simply a function of timing, not an algorithm. Getting 80 likes on a mediocre doodle isn’t wild. (Today, getting 80 likes on a post I spent 2 hours creating and another 20 minutes captioning and hashtagging is like striking gold.)
Over the next year, like many girls my age at the time, I start to follow dozens of “fitness” girls.
Mostly the kind that, today, promote “gut healing” remedies and open up about their eating and exercise disorders from their competition days, aka— the days I started following them.
My search for meaningful work while I’m heavily exposed to these “fitness” models on Instagram and YouTube leads me to try out personal training (and calorie obsession- woo!) Believe it or not, “entrepreneur” is a new word on Instagram at the time.
Shifting my content from watercolor and words to movement and macros feels life-altering. I become aware of using Instagram for business (which, to me at the time, meant just posting and hoping someone reached out- great strategy👌🏼) and knew I had to step up my content.
It was time for self-timer “candids” of my body: my flexed belly, my twisted torso so you could see my waist and butt at the same time (would you believe me if I told you this was pre-“The Booty Pose” too?!), my flexed biceps with a smizing smirk.
The likes flew in. Girls were (still are) rewarded heavily for booties and bellies. The hamster wheel was officially in motion.
I stayed training for the next 4 or so years, the entire time arguing silently with my PT certification textbook that said “your body is your billboard.”
I hated posting these pictures, but didn’t I kind of have to? They were so devoid of the thing I loved most: words. But I did like the likes. Hating taking them. Loved having taken them. Hated the game, but felt like I had to play it.
Soon, “swipe workouts” and gym selfies became 2nd tier to Reels as Instagram maniacally raced to compete with TikTok. Now, in addition to being cute and ripped, you had to be theatrical. You also had to be trendy. The All Powerful Algorithm was full steam in charge of things now, and people who relied on Instagram for clients or dollars were losing their minds. Myself included.
It was all millennial business owners were talking about. The algorithm, the algorithm, the algorithm. Instagram became about feeding the algorithm whatever it decided it wanted this week in order to earn your spot on the feed now sprinkled with ads and suggested content.
(All of this of course, *if* you cared about your content being seen. If you were a casual user of Instagram just here for gender reveals and memes, this likely wasn’t a great source of turmoil for you.)
And the thing is, I was getting clients from Instagram. I was getting people saying to their friends, “You should follow Emily on Instagram!” I was making friends and business connections. Truly. By hashtagging my location and following other people in the local fitness industry, my in-person network of friends and friends-of-friends was growing like a spider web. I found out about the job that kickstarted the next (and happiest) phase of my search for meaningful work because of Instagram.
Instagram was “good” for me in so many ways.
But the ways in which it was bad for me were deep.
It was feeding me and breaking me down at the same time. Building me up, but not without a near-constant drip of self-doubt. Validating me and gaslighting me in the same day. Truly a toxic relationship.
But I couldn’t leave.
That was unthinkable.
I was posting every week day at 10am (prime time per my audience statistics, provided happily by Instagram of course) and itching if I couldn’t. Taking Sundays off felt like resisting my drug of choice.
Some days, posting was a beautiful, genuine, pure source of joy and art. Other days, it was fake and false and superficial and just a grimy feeding of the algorithm.
It took at least an hour of my day. To find a picture (or take one.) Write a caption. Format the caption (back when you had to “trick” the app to insert spaces in your captions. The OGs remember.) Hashtag the image. Share the image to my story to increase the likelihood of it being seen.
Because of how long it took to make reels but how popular they were, I started batch creating them by spending my mornings between clients changing outfits a million times in my apartment and lip syncing and miming in front of my ring light to whatever jinglejangle was popular on the app at the time.
I’d mass edit them later, save them to drafts, and Instagram would inevitably update and delete them before I could use them, so I’d start all over with new trending audio, new outfits, and new creativity a week later. Hours spent “marketing” “my business” (aka: my personality) while also performing the services of my business that actually got me paid.
In addition to just posts, there’s stories,too, of course. Daddy Algorithm rewards those who Story. So outside of posing and performing for the feed, there’s this constant sharing of your day going on in the background too: snapping of pics of your coffee, videoing your drive, showing your (aesthetic) meals, filming your feet while panning up to the sky. All day until you go to sleep. And show people how you prep for sleep, too, please. Then time-stamp your wake-up story so you can get clout for being a morning person which is also trending infinitely.
This hamster was tired.
I was also blogging on the side to maybe 20 people (7 of which I shared a last name with) every few weeks.
Another few hours of brain power and creativity— the kind I enjoyed most— that had almost zero correlation to my Instagram content because my audience there was so drastically different than my blog audience.
And I was even subject to “trying to make good stuff” instead of just making stuff, period. on my blog, too. My content there wasn’t really purely “me” either. It was Me Trying To Be Like Other Popular Writers. Me Trying To Be Good. Me Trying To Write Something Worth Talking About. Me Trying To Rank In Google Search Results. Me, Trying, Trying, Trying.
And I so desperately wanted to be just Me. Period. End of sentence. No trying, just being.
Outside the confines of the algorithm, I was painting. I was doodling. I was video editing. I was photographing. I was dipping my toes in so many other mediums outside of health and fitness.
But I wasn’t sharing them anywhere.
Every few months or so I would spill over and post a piece of art but then immediately feel guilty for “breaking up my feed” and “messing up my aesthetic.” The abused lover who dares speak up but is so well-trained she puts herself back in her place.
And then I got a new job and I moved to a new city and I imagined for the first time since the hamster wheel begun what it would be like to step off. I had the freedom to imagine this only because this new job was a regular job, not a self-propelled job.
When people ask victims of abuse why they stay, it’s usually because they do not have the freedom to imagine leaving. The real abuse is that they now believe their lives depend on the structure that’s built around the toxicity.
I’m in no way equating my social media addiction to human abuse, but my brain was in an analogous state: I believed my job and career-building depended on this toxic structure I had created.
But when I was finally just Employee, no longer Employer (of my self), the need to push content and stay relevant in order to keep my business successful plummeted like Pandora stock after Spotify’s emergence.
Shortly after moving and getting this new job, I forced myself to take a month off of Instagram.
When I tell you that was difficult, I mean like cold-plunge challenging. The mental angst and anticipation was half the battle. But when I re-emerged 30 days later, it was literally like I had gotten LASIK. Only I didn’t even know I needed it.
The clarity and peace that came from initially not being able to (but that later shifted to not having the desire to) pick up my phone and snap a pic of my dog on our walk or my lunch bowl I just made— from just being in my life all the time and never stopping to frame it and narrate it and share it— was life-restoring.
The time I got back from not scrolling between every half-second of boredom or writer’s block or red light.
The shows I actually watched instead of played in the background while I scrolled.
The articles I read instead of Reels I watched.
The words I wrote that weren’t trying to be anything for any audience or algorithm, just for me.
It was all so refreshing.
I paused for a half-second before logging back in after that break. Do I really want to go back to this? Am I just restarting an addiction?
But alas, watching my friends workout, play with their kids, walk their dogs, cook new meals, and share funny sh*t was also fun. Working from home alone all day, “talking” to people in DMs or listening to their stories felt like socializing a bit. And a fair amount of my news was coming from Instagram, too.
So I re-upped.
My posting significantly decreased, though. It occurred to me that, just as was true in my marketing and branding day-job, the fish we catch (clients, audiences, etc) are just a function of the bait we use.*
(*Continuing the metaphor a bit, “the fish we catch” are also a function of the water in which we fish. So while we can certainly take responsibility and choose our “bait” with intention and authenticity, if the pond is stocked with fish that feed on bait we aren’t willing to put out, well, here we are.)
Tired of posting only health and fitness content and not wanting to attract an even larger circle of health and fitness-exclusive folks (thus perpetuating the cycle), I shifted my content and began the process of shifting my audience.
The people who came for booty pics and reels probably won’t see anything I post because their algorithm is only showing them things of the like, but maybe, just maybe, the people like me who are searching for authentic expressions, genuine, everyday-art, funny and relatable 30something girl content, maybe their algorithm will put me in front of them.
And if it doesn’t, at least it felt good to make.
That is what I come home to each time I wrestle with my relationship with Instagram. What am I doing here? What good is coming from my devotion to this app?
→ Making good sh*t.
I think back to the days before Instagram. Before instant access to a million other people’s lives and ideas and influences.
I was making.
Because it was fun. Because I couldn’t not make.
I was writing on my walls my shoes my hands my journals and painting those same walls and old pieces of furniture, filling notebooks with Sharpie doodles and ink outlines, taping sh*t on my bedroom door and tacking things to bulletin boards. It was coming out of me like lava and I was displaying it however and wherever I could.
I want that again.
The spewing. The undisciplined displaying.
I’ll make it fit in 1080x1080px frames if those are my constraints. I’ll throw in some hashtags for visibility and searchability. I’ll hope it gets seen and loved on, of course. I don’t think any maker can truly divorce themselves from the desire to share their creations. We all just want to know if the world likes us, after all.
But I won’t not make thing because the Algorithm won’t like them. I won’t not post things because they don’t “fit” my feed. I won’t let an ever-evolving “gallery” dictate how I show up as an artist.
We broke up.
And it was messy at first. But we’re on good terms now, me and Instagram.
Why do I still want to be friends with my ex, you ask?
That’s Part 2, coming next week.