Portrait of an (internet) woman
Who even am I on the internet. Who even are YOU?
*Today’s post has a bunch of pictures so there’s a chance it may get cut off in your email. If it does just make sure you press ‘download entire message’ to read it all. Or get the Substack app.
This year marks 25 years since I have been on some form of social media. I logged onto Friends Reunited a quarter of a century ago. I was a 20 year old student back then and signed up for no other reason than to check that every boy who had ever rejected me had failed miserably at life. (As it turned out the only people actually on Friends Reunited were 50-something divorcees looking to hook up with their first love from kindergarten.)
Two years later I dabbled with MySpace before realising it was full of the exact sort of boys who had rejected me my entire teenage life - nerdy, needy music-heads with undercuts. Then I hit Facebook, uploaded a bunch of old pictures in the hope people would come running to find me (they didn’t) before hitting Twitter where I got into discussions I felt too ill-informed to have.
Finally, thirteen years ago I found Instagram, at the exact moment it felt like my life was vaguely interesting enough to share with the rest of the world. (I’m not going to talk about LinkedIn here, which feels like walking into the world’s worst speed networking event filled with people like this…)
Instagram, finally, felt like the perfect place in which to create the ultimate portrait of whom I wanted the world to think I was. I was 33 years old, an age old enough to know better about what would come next…