Farewell, Instagram!

Crispy, Crunchy, Fresh off the Sauce

Bare

I stand
with my bare feet
warm 

against cold blades of grass
Crisp air curling up my nostrils

“Wake up”
they whisper
to my screen-drenched mind

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I deactivated my Instagram. I am so glad they have that option now. I couldn’t entirely delete it… all of the poems, photos, memories, and conversations that only live there… well, I couldn’t discard them entirely–forsake them into the well of forgotten time.

But having access to the app at all bothers me. I’ll delete it from my phone multiple times a week. And it brings me back for one small reason or another (shoot, I don’t have her number…we’ve only been DMing…). And then I’ll stay, and my anxieties will build. The walls of identification that place boxes me into creeping ever higher. Then I’d delete it again to escape those walls. Such a course of pseudo-remedy only made them temporarily invisible. I’d be back in a few days, clawing at the mortar of my own doing.

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My first post ever was in 2011. It was of a plastic cat doll sitting on a makeshift concrete end table on my porch in the dirty little bungalow I lived in in Salt Lake City.

I was 21.

Most of those original posts were selfies taken at bus stations and the upward view of treetops from the sidewalks of my strolls.

I hated when people posted “real” photos–photos taken with a professional camera and not via the app. That was my regular world, the realm of “real” photography. It was my art, and my career, and passion, and the space where I took things seriously. I used places like Facebook pages, and Flickr, and Tumblr, and Model Mayhem to climb my art model ladder and to expose myself to professional quality work and to network with other professionals.

Instagram was meant for the grimey, diary image-thoughts. For finding others who shared the same stupid hashtag ideas.

I knew how to navigate search engine optimization for business or online clout very well, but at the beginning, Instagram was my escape from all that. It felt like the internet subculture of photo nerds from back in the early aughts.

To be fair, for most of the world, that is also what Tumblr was and how I’d started there, too. Until I turned it into some sort of specific, goal-oriented, curated, anthropological case study to experiment on myself with.

That sickness of success gets to you.

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After my bus stop selfie days on the gram, I got into vanlife, travel and relationship “ride or die” tributes. It was all very ego-driven and small-time self-serving. Until I moved to LA and it got to servicing my Los Angeles lifestyle. Instagram mattered in LA in an entirely different way. Agents and managers and bookers cared. And people you admired cared. And whatever I was doing was working.

At my first height of some thousands of followers, I cackled in my room at the 5550 on Hollywood BLVD, seeing that over 1000k people watched an idiotic ig story in which I slowly drooled on my camera from an unappealing angle (I loved a good drool bit).
So dumb.
In the palm of my hand, rapt attention for stuff that was just
so
dumb.
I mean that in the best way.

I loved how my dumb was doing for the masses.

By 2020, I saw that it was mucking up my focus on my live performances. It was useful in marketing for them and staying relevant with peers, blah blah blah. It was crucial in my makeup artistry business. But something about it had rotted for me. Or, I was rotting from it.

The culture of supporting and communing and creating with others so that you could tag and friend them so they’d re-post your post and you’d catch a wider audience… the necessary system to organically grow…had a flavor I did not find appetizing.

It was a game, and I hated being good at it.

So I deleted it and was fucking loving being gone.

Then March came, and the city shut down.

And I crawled back to the beast to bide my time. Mostly waiting in the shadows, absorbing the nation’s fear and confusion and division. Not utilizing it to launch myself anymore (and oh, it was the time to. My rebellious nature rears its rejective head at the most inconvenient moments). I just… lurked. Posted bits of art or poems or updates or political calls to action or lifestyle and health inspo? I was all over the place. Then things reopened, and it became a place to engage with acquaintances or market for the random performance or workshop or class here and there.

I moved and started working in Texas. In various jobs or in offering to help a friend with their creative project, I would somehow always get saddled with creating social media content and advising on how to use it. It felt good to be good at something, and I’d want to lend my skills, and then I’d remember how much I hated it and notice how deeply I’d let my boundaries get crossed and boom. The ick. The problem place. The what the fuck, I left marketing to be an actor HOW AM I BACK HERE story would come up again.

Instagram has been a frenemy energy for me for the last 5 years,

and,

well,

it’s time to call it quits.

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Furthermore, I do not want to be on that phone contraption much when I am with my children or dog, who I am with/will be with essentially all of the time. Not because I do not want to influence them in that way so much as I want to be present with them when I am with them.

When Alan and I first started dating, I chose not to hop on my phone when we were together. Even if he left to use the bathroom at a restaurant or bar, I’d stay present with the space that held me. It was an aspect of our time that really fed into the blissful, love stuff we cultivated from the top.

Currently I am still on my phone a heap.

Reddit / alt coin exchanges /article reading / Facebook dog information groups and marketplace hunts / wedding prep / baby prep / generic research on chatGPT / podcasts, and now my new car has an app, too.

But! It’s all temporary. These places don’t give me anxiety, and in no way are they public-facing or goal-oriented to grow.

Instagram never felt temporary. I even got my first smartphone so I could have Instagram, sync it to my Tumblr, and streamline posts (which actually was not good for my Tumblr in the end, anyway).

My ease out of the life that was into the life I am building continues, and it feels really swell.

We planted several new trees during this past new moon in our backyard, and with my feet in the dirt that turns into mud as I water them, I am being made anew.

Photo by Miles Robers; who…based off my searching around just now…I beleive also departed from the gram. Kudos, Miles.

A hui ho,

Julia