Edition #181: Your Brain Off Instagram
Two years later, I logged back in. Also, the trailer for my short film.
A Note From the Editor
Have you ever tried temporarily quitting sugar? No added sugar but naturally occurring sugar is fine. It’s harder than you think, not only to resist the sugar but to catch the sugar in the act, before putting it in your mouth. Everything has sugar in America. Bread, sauce, plant milk, yogurt, granola, beef jerky, peanut butter, protein bars, salad dressing, hummus, cereal, everything.
Still, it is possible to avoid added sugar if you’re stringent. You might get a little headache and be forced to acknowledge your petite sugar addiction. You might be doused with indigence. Why are they doing this to us? Why has no one done anything to stop it? We must stop this! Irritation will follow, then a quick stopover at desperation. Is anything even fun anymore?
Stick to it long enough and the cravings subside. Longer still and you’ll forget what all that extra sugar tasted like. You’ll start feeling better, physically and mentally, though you may not immediately connect your improved state to your decreased sugar intake. Over time, your tastebuds will becomes more sensitive to natural sweetness. A slice of ripe mango a cacophony of flavor, sweet and tart and bright, a Medjool date a holy experience. When that day comes when you inevitably consume added sugar again, your palette’s reference point will be altered. Like drinking a glass of Moscato after the age of 25, you’ll wonder how your former self could stand all that sickly sweetness.
A similar pattern follows when you choose to take a break from your social media app of choice. As you may recall, I drunkenly deleted Instagram from my phone in January of 2023. A year passed, I reflected and felt like a monk, then a second year passed. Year two was different than year one. I didn’t feel Instagram’s omnipresence hovering over my day-to-day as closely. Without noticing, being off the app has become as normal to me as being on it once was. Miraculously, my life experiences are no longer measured against the yardstick of its absence.
————
I visited this regenerative farm outside San Miguel de Allende in Mexico last spring. To get there, we drove through a dry, eroded landscape, dust and desert scrub all around. Nothing could grow in the degraded soil, so no one ever tried to plant anything until someone did. They started with a lot of experimentation, sowing native seeds that wouldn’t require much water to survive. “We make the plants suffer a bit. They get used to it and learn to regenerate themselves,” the farm’s founder told me.
They needed to get creative to make it work under these harsh conditions. There was a surplus of nopal cactus. After seeping in its own juices for 30 days, the pads of the cactus turn into something like kimchi. I tasted it right out of the barrel; tangy and earthy. Mix the fermented nopal with grain, feed the chickens and goats, the animals ingest higher nutrient content and fertilize the soil as they rove. Now the soil is healthier, now more plants can grow, now less feed needs to be purchased.
Plant aromatics around the outside of the raised plant beds to deter pests. Let the grass die if there isn’t enough water to keep it alive, it’ll grow back. Plant agave next to mesquite so the plants can suck CO2 from the air. Now a plot of degraded land, once thought impossible to yield, is doing the heavy lifting. Now there is food for the community. Now there are jobs.
None of this is rocket science. Observe for a while, learn a little, and it feels obvious. This is the way of things, proof natural intelligence exists when we allow it to emerge. I imagine something similar has been happening in my brain the last two years. What has always been there—a propensity to notice subtlety, a guiding force in the gut that says yes, no, red light, green light, a physical sensitivity to stimulants and other people’s energy—has begun to re-emerge. The natural order has returned.
————
Imagine me, brain soil just starting to regenerate, logging back in.
First, I needed to re-download Instagram on my phone. I had to guess my password a hundred times, then attempt to remember how it all worked. An assault to the senses. People I forgot about reappeared as if they never left, a fat stack of unread messages, everything urgent.
But I needed to prevail. I had a singular mission in mind: log back in, post the trailer for my debut short film, log back out.
I spent less than 24 hours with the app on my phone, around 1.5 hours engaging with it that day. A lot had changed. Friends with new career paths changed up their grids; no longer a personal diary but a display of new knowledge, refined tastes. I stopped by the profile of someone I had gotten to know intimately in real life but never digitally; their feed told an entirely different story than the one I knew. I witnessed relationships I knew the backside of from the front side, all sheen and smiles.
Perhaps most interesting was engaging with my own digital persona. I could get a feel for her after only a few photos. She was chiefly self-deprecating, veiled behind a light-hearted playfulness. She commanded attention but always accompanied by some belittling quip. She wanted you to know she was seeing the world, she was writing, she was doing cool things, but she couldn’t manage to take herself too seriously and neither should you.
Surprising, how quickly I was able to slip back into her coat. Three Instagram stories were all I needed to push my trailer out into the digital ether. I sat at a local cafe waiting for my Spanish instructor to arrive, fretting over what photo I should use for the background of the first story slide, what color the words should be, what font. Twenty minutes passed this way. In the end, I misspelled the word “the” and my text was crooked. I felt agitated.
————
I’ve heard two sentiments echoed in a loop since being off Instagram. The first, “I don’t actually use Instagram that much. I hardly look at (ads, my friend’s posts, etc.), I only look at (my friend’s posts, my curated feed, etc.). That’s why I have a healthy relationship with it.” I have rarely heard someone suggest their relationship with Instagram isn’t very healthy. More rarely have I heard someone express sincere curiosity about how their life would change off the app other than to suggest they might become productive.
The second sentiment: “Instagram isn’t real life. Everyone’s pretending.” I used to think this, too. It was a universally shared assumption: we are all putting it on for Instagram, showing the highlight reel of our lives, distorting the collective perception of reality by promoting a world in which we are always on vacation and never heartbroken. After my single-day sojourn back on the platform, I have a different theory:
Instagram isn’t the inverse of reality; it is an alternate reality, as real as each user decides it is.
There are now two distinct dimensions laid out before us, the brick-and-mortar world or the digital world. Each world has its own set of rules and requires a different persona. Most people like to think that their digital persona mirrors their human expression, though there is almost always a wide gap between the two. The trick is that you can’t see it from up close.
There is a natural crossover between the worlds—snippets of brick-and-mortar life shared in the digital world, cultural phenomena birthed in the digital world that become fodder for conversation in the brick-and-mortar. Some people live exclusively in one or the other, most people alternate between the two.
Of course, there are facets of these two worlds that cannot feasibly overlap. Lying on the couch next to a human your body feels magnetically drawn to, going from shoulders brushing to legs tangled to head on chest with auditory access to the their heartbeat is a treasure exclusive to the brick-and-mortar world. Time traveling through the life of a fourth-degree connection, pinpointing the precise moment when their photos went from grainy to polished, when their style evolved, when they met the man who would eventually father their children, is an experience exclusive to the digital world, impossible to replicate in the brick-and-mortar.
Is one better than the other? I couldn’t say; choose your own adventure. What I can say is that one imposes upon the other. Take one away and over time, the other will become more vibrant. It will sound, smell, feel, look, and taste different. I prefer to approach life as a never-ending classroom. Chemistry class, the one science I thoroughly enjoyed in school. Test tubes and goggles and beakers, conducting multiple experiments in tandem.
Remove this element, set the timer, take notes. Add a dropper of this, mix, observe. Move a beaker into the sunlight, then into a dark room, and wait. Don’t just sit and stare at the same test tube, partly disassociated, because it’s what all your classmates are doing. Mix things up, see for yourself what happens. That is the stuff of an interesting life.
———
Cheers my dears, and as always, thanks for reading. I plan to spend the weekend taking a Spanish lesson, surfing on my cute new board, and filming some snippets of life around town. Have a wonderful weekend. Research a trip you want to take, paint with watercolors, bake cinnamon rolls and lick the frosting from your fingers.
Three Cool Things From The Retreat I Just Went On
I haven’t consumed much content lately, in part because I spent last week at a creativity and writing retreat. It was my first retreat and it won’t be my last. I’m still digesting the experience, so I’ll write more about it another time. In the interim, here are a few cool things I discovered whilst at the retreat:
A Very Cool Textile Brand + Design Studio in Guatemala. You know when you meet someone whose story immediately expands your view of what’s possible? That's how I felt when I met Molly, a long-term expat, creative, and mother of two adorable kids based in Guatemala. The origin story of Molly’s textile brand and studio space in the middle of a coffee farm was a sweet reminder that magic can happen when you release control and let things flow. Guatemala has now bumped to the top of my to-travel list. When I make it there, I’ll be taking a natural dye workshop at Molly’s studio and purchasing this perfect tote and this gorgeous kaftan—both of which I wish I had for my upcoming trip to BVI. Dreamy!
A Lovely Tarot Deck To Pull From. A few months ago, a friend of mine had this spirit animal tarot deck at her birthday party. I was going through a breakup at the time and I pulled a dragon card; it made me feel empowered and assured in the difficult decision I was making. At the retreat, we would pull from a new tarot deck at the end of each workshop and it became one of my favorite daily activities. That same spirit animal deck came back around and this time, I pulled a very different card. It felt like proof I had lightened my load, that I was moving into a more playful space. Highly recommend ordering yourself a few tarot decks and pulling a card every so often.
A Discovery: Shopping Is Better In Colombia. If you’re wearing something I like and I ask you where it’s from, I can almost guarantee that I will go right out and buy it shortly thereafter—a much better method than sourcing questionably made products via algorithm, if you ask me. I made two new friends at the retreat who live in Medellin, Colombia. Each time one of them was wearing something I loved, it turned out to be from some cool, reasonably priced Colombian brand. I am obsessed with this print, this tote, and this fun little bag. I also like the look of these chic, cropped sports bras. I see a visiting-my-new-friends-powered-shopping-trip to Colombia in the near future.
Perhaps You Should…Ritualize Your Life
We talked a lot about creating rituals at the retreat, both around creativity and as a mechanism to enhance everyday life. I love rituals. Each morning, I light my palo santo, then my special morning incense. I avoid my phone and go right into my routine; dry brushing my face, stretching, coffee with collagen in the French Press, reading a few poems followed by a few pages of a philosophical text, then breath work and meditation.
When I feel super agitated, upset, annoyed, and unable to shake myself out of it, I blast this song at full volume on my speaker and dance/jump around for the song’s duration. Sometimes I even scream a little and I’m proper exhausted afterward. Each evening, I spray myself and my pillow with lavender essential oil, then I lay in bed and brain dump on a yellow legal pad. After a few weeks, I tear out all the pages, crumple them up, and toss them out.
Next up: creating new rituals to bookend my creative and working time.
**Bonus Content** (Up Close and Personal)
These shots from the 2024 Close-Up Photography Awards are spooky and strange and cute,
Also, if I had nine lives, a reminder that its OK to take a break, the sweetest birthday celebration ever, a genius level up for us cycle-trackers, my current favorite song, and a foolproof idea.
A Quote From A Book You Should Read:
“It feels impossible in the way only possible tasks can seem, when you know that despite the scale of what you must do, it’s not really beyond the realm of possibility to do it, and so it feels impossible because you know you must.”
-Real Life by Brandon Taylor
I loved your writing and musings about IG! And the clothes in Colombia. Shopping trip, please.