In 2024, Instagram gave me a panic attack and I deleted the app off my phone.

In the first two months I went through feed withdrawal. I would open my phone out of habit every few minutes, only then remembering that I had nothing to look at. I felt intense FOMO on being a part of the day to day online world. I didn’t know what my friends and acquaintances and people I hadn’t seen since middle school were wearing on vacation, or how they were identifying aesthetically, or politically aligning.

I felt persistently out of the loop. I didn’t know news as it broke. I didn’t listen to music as it dropped.

I didn’t know about Moo Deng.

It was almost as if I had suddenly stopped speaking a language that I had been speaking fluently since high school. A language that many around me continued to speak, and assumed I still did.

And I missed that online culture. There truly is a world and life that exists in the cloud that I had purposefully denied myself access to. A community. I missed my personal documentation of life events and my fondest memories. I enjoyed seeing what my loved ones were thinking and achieving. But I couldn’t deny the anxiety that I felt every time I opened up that app. I couldn’t deny the time that it sucked away from me hour by hour.

The longer I’ve spent away from it, the more I’ve been forced to identify what self expression means to me when response of validation from peers is not a guarantee. I realized that as much as I loved sharing pictures from trips for my personal record, there would always inherently be a performative nature to those posts.

And I genuinely don’t know if the desire for notoriety or social clout can ever completely be removed from an online offering. Even this blog/personal website that I am hoping to use as a creative dumping ground can’t be free of the possibility of judgement from internet voyeurs. And I’m not dense to the fact that I’m partially creating this to be looked at - For people to see what I’m wearing on vacation, how I’m identifying aesthetically, or politically aligning.

I guess the Great Personal Experiment is how I create, how I present myself, if I build the rules of engagement. If I imagine the limits of possibility. Without the eyes and the algorithms and the ads.

AND WHO KNOWS WHAT THAT WILL LOOK LIKE!

P.S. - I know who Moo Deng is now.