on instagram

1. birth

i first activated my account on january 26 2013

i named the account @fear_the_mm, a kind of portmanteau of two of my obsessions at twelve years old. the first part: the stanford hoodie i used to wear everyday that said "fear the tree". the second part: the quirky aesthetic of retro mickey mouse (aka steamboat willy). everything was further bumped up a notch by the fact that my middle initials are "mm". genius stuff.

there's no record of my first posts but i remember them extremely clearly anyway. the first was of a rubber toy of a daschund that looked like banana, which i posted complete with the darkest vignette possible around the corners and that purpley-orange tint that was customary of instagram filters back in 2013.

my next post, equally thick with filters, was of my little sister (who was 2 at the time), in a knit pompom beanie on our front porch in the snow, looking up at me and slightly blurry.

2. proselytizing

in february 2013, a month after i started my first instagram account, i went on a catholic schools retreat into the mountains with a bunch of other middle schoolers. it was an addicting first taste at freedom for a 12-year-old: a sleepaway weekend away in cabins with hundreds of other kids and minimal parent supervision. i heard stories that some kids kissed each other on these kinds of weekends (gasp).

in classic religious emotional indoctrination style, the weekend involved one evening where the high school counselors all shared stories of their personal encounters with jesus, shouting and praying as choral music started to play louder and louder and we were all encouraged to sway and sing and raise our hands and hold a hand to our heart and close our eyes and cry with them if we felt so moved.

i left the weekend feeling like i had just finished a transformative ayahuasca trip deep in the caribbean jungle. obviously it was because i, like the counselors, had encountered jesus, and and not because i had spent two hours trying to figure out an appropriate way to sneak away to go to the bathroom in the middle of the big auditorium.

to honor my revelation, i made an instagram account dedicated to jesus. i posted christian memes i found on pinterest and even started dabbling in making my own using an assembly line of free apps on my ipod touch. i posted for two months then quickly died off and promptly forgot the password.

yes, the account still exists. i've checked. no i will not tell you where to find it. no i don't think i managed to convert anyone to christianity.

3. popularity

at the end of 2013, i found out that my family would be moving halfway across the globe in january. suddenly invigorated by the sense of a ticking clock, i worked up the courage to start hanging out with the “popular girls” in my grade who i had always admired and envied. they were nowhere as scary as i thought they would be and they welcomed me, i started sitting with them at lunch.

devoted to capitalizing on this newfound sense of belonging, i came up with the idea of us all having matching instagram bios. at first, we all put each others' names in our instagram bios, copy-pasting each name from a site that would convert the regular text into a funky font to make it more quirky, then including a dedicated copy-paste emoji for each person.

words cannot describe how fucking cool i felt when this was my instagram bio. these were the big leagues. i had made it.

convinced we could push it further, i suggested we each put a different lyric from the same song in our bio so that, when stitched together, our bios made a full song. inexplicable, i suggested the second verse of “wake me up” by avicii.

in case you don't remember it:

i self-asigned myself line six. thus, my instagram account bio became:

yes, you can laugh.

4. fantasy

my second non-personal instagram (the first being the jesus one) was born shortly after i moved, at the start of 2014. i had just discovered @fetching_tigerss, an account filled with expertly crafted photoshopped edits of a girl my age floating in a bubble, holding lighting in her hand, or using a lapping wave as a blanket. i was mesmerized.

i was convinced that i could reach a similar level of fame if i started making my own edits of myself, especially given my existing full-stack expertise in free ipod touch apps. one app let me layer photos on top of each other, brushing on a mask with my tiny thumb on the tiny screen. another gave me access to a set of visually egregious filters and effects that i could combine ad infinitum.

my editing process was made easier by the fact that my new bedroom had nothing but a suitcase and a mattress on the floor for the first 2 months. no worrying about finding a blank background. also the fact that i knew no one and had nothing to do except twiddle around.

like the first, this account never blew up and didn't last long.

5. perfection

by 2014 or 2015, my dedication to crafting the perfect instagram persona had only accelerated. instagram still forced you to post your photos as squares, so i downloaded yet another app to add a white border around each photo, all of which i would first crop to be the exact same ratio and orientation so that the border would look the same on every photo. i would take a photo, complete my cropping/border effect, then add a custom pastelly filter that washed everything out just a bit and added a subtle tint of pink.

by 2016, when i moved back to the US, the aesthetic winds had turned. no more white borders or strong filters, it was embarrassing to try so hard so clearly, so visibly. on top of adjusting my instagram, the move had me reeling to establish a cool new in-persona persona worthy of my cool new American high school.

and so i deleted every post i had made, and started again

on my 16th birthday, fresh on my rebrand, i had my mom do an iphone photoshoot of me in our backyard holding a birthday balloon. she told me to look at the camera but i kept telling her no, she didn't get it, she was supposed to take them while i was mid-movement, mid-laughter, gazing off camera and smiling nonchalantly as was the new trend of 2016 instagram photos. afterwards, i remember i photoshopped a pimple off my forehead and the frizz off my bun and added a thin digital layer of mascara onto my eyes before i posted it.