Life Without IG: Left out, for good.

The internet changed me for when I decided to use my real likeness instead of the one I made up, as it did for many others when they decided to do the same. Real names instead of usernames. It stopped being a special place for community building when we required ourselves to use our real identities. The lines blurred. We became internet people. Our @ names were our first and last. 

We saw that it was cooler to be real and live our real lives on the internet, but lost all the vulnerability and truth that internet conversations were known for. When we hid our identities, we were being our most authentic selves.

Only the internet can provide an opportunity like that.

I have recently returned to secrecy. In some ways, this could make it easier for me to lie. Right now, it makes it easier for me to be creative, to tell my truth in a space where judgment is not tied to the name my parents gave me.

We all want to share. We all have art to share. And sharing for the sake of sharing is all that is needed. Sharing our human experiences to confirm that each person is alive is all that’s needed. I just didn’t want people to consume me anymore. My experience was never made for consumption — it was made for sharing in love, no matter the medium.

I made an Instagram account under the name @awayfromhope, like “away from home,” because “hope” is the thing I am far away from when I am depressed. She became a character I wrote about for a small audience, and then after a couple of months, hope became my name. Now m. hope is my pen name (the “m” is to keep the initial of the name my parents gave me, because that has sentimental value as well). 

The first time someone at TRASH MAG called me hope, I cried. It felt like someone had called me the name of who I was inside, rather than the name on the face of the Instagram post with 300 likes. 

For crying out loud, there were just too many people who knew what I looked like. It was the creepiest feeling knowing that, even if I went private, there were people who knew what I looked like from 2015 to 2021 and could take those photos and do whatever they wanted with them, remembering every inch of my face forever. Previous generations didn’t go through that, and we weren’t made for that. 

Part of that fear comes from being a journalist and working in local news. There are tons of crazy people who, when they sense that your writing is biased — especially leftist — they will email you promising that your family will end up in hell, and tell you the names of your wife and children. It’s extremely common, and for a Black woman, it usually includes slurs and Jim Crow–era goosebumps. Those people do not get to have access to my whole life.

On Twitter, they have my professional persona, my shot-at-home-for-free headshot and my place of work.

On Instagram, you get hope. (Don’t ask me about TikTok — I’m working on making that more anonymous too.)

I’ve always wanted to be more mysterious, and I believe this is common among girls like me. Girls who laid down in the space between their bed and the wall in the middle of the night and scrolled through Tumblr looking for soft porn. Girls who accidentally ended up giving their numbers to men who were just a tiny bit too old for them. Girls who went on Omegle at sleepovers, and who got ghosted when their classmates did “like for a tbh” on Facebook. Shy, awkward, Black internet girls. 

Anonymity saved us from danger, and got us access to information our parents never wanted us to have. Somehow, that’s what the internet was made for. 

Now, in 2022, it makes sense to me that I feel so uncomfortable when I have a change in my life (a new job, a death in the family, etc.) and I think first about how I’m going to draft my Instagram caption so that I can keep all of my followers in the loop. 

I think about how, on Tumblr, your username or site name was more important than your real name. Building a brand meant building something entirely separate from yourself that could only exist on the web that went away when you closed your laptop. Now, for us, Instagram is the real world, and I just don’t want it to be.

I don’t want to be a brand — I want to be a person. I was maintaining a duplicate of myself on this Instagram account with my full name and middle initial like it was my real life. I couldn’t do it anymore.

I deactivated around five months ago. I can’t even remember how long it’s exactly been, and I haven’t even thought about going back once. This is surprising, because when I first deactivated it was to take a break for just one month. 

I see my friends — artists, musicians, writers — feeling this immense pressure when they have to post about something, then doing it anyway and feeling the wave of validation wash over them until the next awkward post. I never thought I’d say it, but we have Stockholm syndrome when it comes to this app. We berate ourselves for being trapped, but we didn’t know we’d end up addicted. 

But we can choose to leave.

Instagram is a tool. Twitter is a tool. It is not life. If it is for you, and you have influence, and you believe the benefits outweigh the cost, I believe you, and I follow your accounts from mine without judgment. It just isn’t the life for me. I’m being very strategic about how I use Instagram now, and introducing the app to hope is a second chance at enjoying this thing that is not going away for a very long time. Even when Instagram dies, it will resurface as something else and the cycle will continue.

Though I am left out of what seems like half of our world, wondering what everyone is talking about, I remember that if I want to know about someone’s life, I can just call them. And if they want to know about what I’d like to share, they can find me at @awayfromhope.