Afterimages – Our Shared Unsharing

Our Shared Unsharing Instagram couldn’t handle 2020 either.

- By Stella Bugbee

IN EARLY QUARANTINE, stripped of our typical distractions, bored by our lockdowns but unable to stop the game of self-comparison, we began to scrutinize one another for sport. I remember getting a text from a friend criticizing someone for documenting their exercise habits on Instagram. Normally she wouldn’t have cared, but now the depictions of their outdoorsy life felt tone-deaf. The exchange made me wonder if my posts were the subject of such texts. I shared a beautiful spread of food, only to take it off my Instagram Stories a few hours later, lest it be seen as insensitive to those who were suffering food insecurity. And even as I was having that thought, I knew it wasn’t just that I was afraid of causing pain directly but also of appearing unaware that some people were experiencing food insecurity. The whole moment triggered one of the first major pangs of distaste I would have with myself (and my self-presentation) in 2020. It was hardly the last. I’d finally caught an extreme case of self-consciousness that I probably should’ve had all along but that the rules of engagement on Instagram had given me permission to override.

To post or not to post was a question I found myself asking over and over as 2020 ticked endlessly on—bad news compounding on worse news, in swells that never seemed to subside. After a decade of being the filter for reality, redefining our relationships with our friends, our bodies, our aspirations, and our favorite people, Instagram was suddenly one of the main portals to the rest of the outside world, and it simply wasn’t adequate for expressing the range of emotional experiences we were going through.