IT WAS AROUND 1AM WHEN I DISCOVERED MY IMPOSTOR was watching me. I was sitting up in bed, scrolling on my phone through the list of people who had viewed my Instagram story. The audience was the same as it always was: friends, family and a smattering of followers I had picked up over the years. But a tug from my subconscious told me, this time, something was wrong. I scrolled back up and there it was: an account I had never seen before. Their profile photo was a selfie I had taken in a bookshop basement years ago.
Have you ever walked by an unexpected mirror and jumped at your own reflection? That's how it felt as I stared back at myself, unnerved by my sudden appearance.
I brought the screen close to my face. The photo was old, from 2016, but it was a day I remembered well. I had just handed in my university dissertation and I was enjoying my newfound freedom. I had been ambling through Cardiff and had taken a snapshot in a mirror to mark the moment. My gold iPhone 5 looked tiny in my hand and I was wearing my favourite flannel shirt. These were familiar fragments of my life back then. Now, someone had seemingly come along and picked them up out of the bin.
Was it just a glitch? A strange Meta mess-up that would reset if I clicked on their account? I would feel silly but relieved, then settle into bed with the world returned to how it was. But when I visited their page the image remained. According to Instagram, it now belonged to someone named Paweł Sibilski.
Paweł had 691 followers and was following more than 2,600 people. I couldn't see who they were, or the four posts he had shared, because his profile was private. In his bio, written in Polish, he called himself a developer and investor. There was a Facebook link beneath it. I tapped it with a curiosity that swelled into horror.
This story is from the December 06, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the December 06, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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