“After so many years, I still feared what social media might ‘do’ to me”

“It’s an endless stream, a ‘monkey mind’, a city that never sleeps, a Las Vegas we can hold.”

I joined Instagram for the first time this year. I’d deleted MySpace in 2010, Facebook in 2014 and LinkedIn in 2016. They brought out the worst in me. I had a harrowing moment while curating a Facebook album after a friend’s suitably photogenic ‘derelict’-themed birthday party, when it occurred to me that I was putting more creative energy into a photo album than into my actual life. I wanted a life I was proud of before I had a Facebook photo album I was proud of.

So, almost a decade had passed when I found myself sitting at the kitchen table arguing with my partner about how I’d never be on social media ever again, because ‘Why would I invite that spiralling vortex of sorcery into my life right now? Clearly, I don’t need it. Clearly, I’ve created things without it. Clearly, I have friends without it. Clearly, I exist without it.’ Then, head in my hands, I realised that I was still scared of it. After so many years, I still feared what social media might ‘do’ to me.

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I’d also grown accustomed to the envious and admiring looks on people’s faces when I said I didn’t have it. They made me feel more noble and more pure than everyone else, and I finally saw this was just as much, if not more, insidious than anything social media could throw at me.

And I wanted to put what I’d supposedly learnt about myself ‘offline’ to the test. As the American spiritual teacher Ram Dass said, “If you think you’re enlightened, go and spend a week with your family”. Well, maybe, ‘if you think you’re enlightened go on social media and follow everyone you’ve ever met’ is equally applicable.

I didn’t sleep for two days after signing up to Instagram. Watching the algorithm guess at what I might or might not like became enthralling. A stalker following my every move, obsessed with me, desperately wanting my attention and trying everything to get it: Sleeping Beauty memes, candid snaps of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in Jason Statham’s lap, reels of Audrey Hepburn weeping, Shalom Harlow twirling down John Galliano’s 1993 runway. Oscar Wilde quotes about the moon, serums for glass skin, moody stills from Le Beau Mariage, Brittany Murphy with a finger to her lips. The living and the dead. Past, present and future.

It made me aware of how well humanity is doing. I had no idea. It’s a miracle we’re still functioning at all with this beast in our lives now. Social media exemplifies the axiom ‘where attention goes, energy flows’ because our passions, fears, insecurities and obsessions shape it. Whatever we linger on, hover over or click, we get more of.

Every spiritual text or self-help book I’ve ever read has made a point of this power of the ‘law of attraction’ and the algorithm simply magnifies it. Once we give it permission to enter our mental, emotional, virtual and actual space, it can only be blamed for so much. We are responsible for what it shows us and for where it leads.

A few weeks after joining, I was at a Magdalena Bay concert on the St Kilda Beach foreshore. It was a warm, late summer night. Luna Park’s Ferris wheel shimmered and spun. I swayed with the crowd, hypnotised by ‘Image’, when a bright phone screen was thrust before my eyes with Instagram’s search page open, cursor blinking. I turned and a guy with spiky hair and tiny glasses, who’d been fist-pumping alongside me, leaned in. “Love your vibe,” he said, pushing the phone screen closer, inviting me to find myself. I smiled.

“This is so weird, I just joined.”

“Well, fair warning, my page is pretty skanky.”

“I actually posted my first naked pic today.”

“Omg it’s so freeing, isn’t it?”

It is. Deciding what to do with the blank canvas of a profile page is exciting. Ah, a page of one’s own! A wide open space to ask the big questions: Who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I want to be seen? What do I care about? Is this personal? Or is this business? What’s private? And what’s public? If something happens and it doesn’t go online, did it happen at all?

Watching myself – and everyone else – play out these dilemmas is humbling, because we don’t have any DNA to help us out. Our ancestors have got nothing. We’re the first to play this billions-strong communal game, so of course it’s crazy and childlike and ridiculous and upsetting. It’s the big bang and we’re living it.

Some people are yelling and screaming while others are lurking, opting for anonymity. Some people are hustling while others are colour-coordinating their bookshelves and dumping baby photos. There are atrocities alongside string bikinis. It’s an endless stream, a ‘monkey mind’, a city that never sleeps, a Las Vegas we can hold.

Social media is scary and overwhelming, but there’s also a vulnerability that I hadn’t expected. People always talk about how toxic and addictive it is, but the desire to be seen and heard is innocent. Wanting to feel valued and connected to others is primal. Self-expression, dreaming of more, seeking inspiration –these are some of humanity’s greatest virtues and they’re social media’s truest building blocks.

The problem is when I, say, go to Instagram looking for an escape and I end up right where I started: wanting an escape. It’s just that instead of sitting and staring out a window, or lying on the grass, feeling my feelings and thinking my thoughts, fully experiencing awkwardness, existential angst, FOMO, boredom or whatever, I’m eyeballs deep in cat memes and quotes from writers writing better than me, and babes rocking bods better than mine, and images of unspeakable horrors that I can’t un-see and, my god, I’ve gotten exactly what I deserved, because if I can’t sit with myself, I’ll never be able to stand social media.

I’ve already deleted the app. I access it through my web browser and this seems to keep the beast contained somehow, in a cage, where it belongs. But it’s powerful to have it. Living with social media is like living with a narcissist: it can teach us a lot, and make us stronger, just as it can undermine and crush us.

After signing up, as I was spiralling, people I hadn’t thought about in years flooded into my awareness: high school friends, ex-lovers, extended family, crushes, uni mates, frenemies, old bosses. It reminded me of how social media interferes with the process of letting go, which was another reason why I deleted it in the first place. When I was done with a person, place or identity, I wanted it gone. However, I’ve subsequently discovered that nothing and no one ever really ‘leaves’ us. Everything we encounter becomes a part of who we are.

Then I saw a ghost. He was the brother of one of my oldest and dearest friends. He struggled with addiction and recovered before working in the recovery space and becoming a beacon of hope for many. He died suddenly in 2015. Hundreds turned up to his funeral. Yet there he was, on Instagram, with a handful of followers and three posts on his profile, the last a film photograph of New York City’s skyline from 2013. A virtual tombstone he had unwittingly created for himself. Yet we’re all creating them.

Together, we’re staring into the virtual abyss. Our social media profiles are going to outlive us. And while I don’t want to look back on life and think, ‘Wow, I spent way too much time on there’. I also don’t want to look back and think, ‘Wow, I was way too scared of social media,’ because it’s one of our lifetime’s most inexplicable and cataclysmic offerings. Our words, images and sounds are going to die in its arms. For better or worse, it will come to define us, individually and collectively, across time and space. With each post, we dance with eternity.

This article was originally published in Fashion Journal issue 198.

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