There aren’t too many parts of me that have remained consistent with who I was in 2019, but there’s one thing that never went away in those four years: the anxiety I had about my Instagram account. The posting, to make sure I was seen as someone worth being friends with, the follower count, to show people that I was well-liked and respected, and any other factor that would contribute to the persona I wanted to build for the people who would view me behind their screens, mattered. Way too much. Shortly after I graduated high school that year, I had the urge to remove everybody from my account that I knew I would no longer associate with in the future, but I feared that my decrease in follower count would slap superficial labels on me that I wouldn’t be able to escape when going into freshman year of college: “unpopular,” “outcast,” “weird.” The feelings of fear of being socially excluded won that summer, and my account remained untouched.
And so, when starting adulthood in Seattle, knowing that the app was undeniably a huge asset to my social life, I accepted every follower request that hit my phone that had the socially righteous “UW ‘23” engrained into the person’s bio, plus the remaining profiles that matched with the Panhellenic sorority I had elected to virtually join my sophomore year. At that point, my follower count had almost doubled, practically overnight, giving me a sense of the “popularity” that the typical teenager in me had wanted for years. But with that superficial “popularity” came the inability to not see Instagram as a chore, a confusing interface, a place of one meaningless encounter after the other. My feed became a scroll fest of nothingness—I’d see posts of names that didn’t ring a bell, face after face I didn’t recognize, and, as time went on, people who had since left UW and that I knew I would never see again, all of these people washing out the people I personally knew. After seeing the five posts at the top of my feed, which the algorithm most likely knew were the people I interacted with the most, I’d close the app and try again the next day, to start the draining process all over again. Instagram, for most of my college career, was a place of unfamiliarity and irrelevance.
So, on Friday, I’m parked on my couch at home, home alone, after completing all my pressing assignments for the week and tired of the TV noise. I don’t why I decided that, after debating this since I graduated high school, that this was the exact moment I was going to clean my Instagram of everything I hated about it for the past four years, but, despite it being an un-symbolic night in the middle of February, I started narrowing my follower and following account. Without stopping to think twice, I repeated the tedious process of hitting “remove follower” and then “unfollow,” first for one, then ten, then 100, and eventually up to around 280 unfamiliar accounts. I found myself shaking my head and burning in disbelief, wondering why I didn’t do this sooner. So after about an hour, I was left with around 325 followers of meaning, following 400, and the sense of relief hit me. Society may make us think we want the account with the thousands of followers, sorority girl crowd, traveling pictures galore, and anything else that resembles the carefree college girl aesthetic. Until I realized, this is all I really wanted these past few years—the more personalized Instagram experience, dictated by what’s actually important to me, not what’s redeemable to people that, really, have no impact on my life.
Shame me now, but I used to have one of those apps that would tell me who unfollowed me, and most of the time, I’d squint at the username, thinking, “oh, I don’t know who that is,” or even (sorry), “oh, they still exist? I forgot about them.” And I tried to never take this personally, that someone I don’t know unfollowed me and hence probably wasn’t interested in seeing my life in pictures anymore, so why was I so worried about what other people thought of me in return? I’ve known for years that it’s not a normal part of life and shouldn’t be, even in the era of technology often dictating our perceptions, to be able to keep tabs on people you haven’t talked to or even thought about in years. I don’t wish any ill will against these people by unfollowing them or them unfollowing me, of course, but I’ve been so worried about what people thought of me based on my Instagram statistics, that for years, it became clear I was giving too much of my headspace to something I never cared that much about to begin with, with no good justification.
So now, I feel more relaxed. I’ve narrowed down my account to people that I feel genuinely comfortable and eager to share the proud moments of my life with, and I look forward to seeing theirs, even if we’re not that close anymore. I feel less pressured to post what I used to think people cared about, and instead, I can post the things that make me happy, the moments and experiences in my everyday life, my own best of the best. Instagram doesn’t scare me anymore, and I should’ve abrupted that power it took from me years ago. But at least I can start now.