Is Instagram the narcissist?

and other thoughts from a week off the 'gram

On a whim, though not without thought, I decided to join a few other folks in abstaining from social media for the month of January. The timing was good after a month of scrolling while snuggling sick kids. When the jingles from reels start playing unbidden in my head I know I’ve crossed an unhealthy line.

It’s been a while since I’ve taken an extended period of time off, and it’s a little embarrassing how twitchy I’ve felt this last week - how many times my thumb reached to open the app, only to remember I had deleted it, or how many times I picked up my phone only to put it down again because it was sort of boring. Twitchiness aside, the thing I found most curious as I observed my reactions was this pervasive feeling that I was in danger of being erased. If I wasn’t on social media, how would people know I exist?

It sounds ridiculous. Why would I need social media to validate my existence? But the feeling that I might be forgotten altogether if I didn’t assert my existence, persisted. As I processed these feelings, I realized they were in fact very familiar and very old. Like most out of proportion reactions the feelings weren’t really about the situation at hand.

You see, I have been erased before. When I chose to disclose a reality that others didn’t want to, or weren’t capable of dealing with I became persona non grata. It was intensely painful and I’m still grieving. This experience shakes a person. In many ways I find myself still trying to prove that I am here, that I exist and that I’m not crazy. Writing is one way of asserting reality, and Instagram has provided a venue for that. But recently, it’s become to feel more and more like the abusive relationships that created this dilemma for me in the first place.

Sitting with the familiarity of these feelings is when the lightbulb turned on. Instagram itself IS a narcissist. It behaves in the same self-serving, people devouring way that any skilled narcissist does. It doesn’t care about you as a person, it cares about you as a supply for accomplishing its own purposes.

Perhaps the relationship started out innocently, but with every new update Instagram feels more and more like a conniving master, determined to make you bend to its own whims or pay the price.

That’s what a narcissistic system does. It’s the hallmark of an abusive system - you only get your needs met if you’re serving the purpose of the narcissist. Instagram doesn’t care about you. Instagram cares about it’s bottom line. Instagram rewards compliant behavior and penalizes you for talking about things it doesn’t like. Instagram will erase you without a second thought (how many accounts have you witnessed *poof* into thin air in the last year?) Why on earth am I relying on this system to validate my existence?

Well. Like any well designed narcissistic system, there has to be incentive to stay.

Whenever I hear a story where someone leaves an abusive system, be it a church, family, marriage, workplace or otherwise, there’s a question that hangs in the air.

“Why did they stay so long?”

From the outside, it seems obvious that the cost was too high. They should have left sooner. From the inside it’s more complicated. There’s all sorts of things entangled with the toxicity that make it hard to make a clean cut. There’s the good relationships you’ve made with people you love. There’s all the time you invested. There’s the record of your life, the collective memories that might go by the wayside if others choose to not acknowledge reality and step into it with you. There’s the pervasive hope that maybe you really can redeem this thing for good if you just stay long enough. There can be the matter of your actual livelihood being jeopardized. And there’s the reckoning that must happen when you realize the longer you stay, the more you’ll have to lose.

Making the decision to leave a system, a family, a church, even a platform, is not a black and white binary of good and bad. It’s nuanced. There’s pain in the staying, and there’s pain in the leaving. Some things might be reparable. Some aren’t.

Am I saying that everyone needs to leave Instagram? It’s complicated. I really don’t know the answer to that question.

Why am I still on Instagram? It’s a means to share encouragement. It can be a ministry opportunity. It’s a means to find a community of like-minded people. I have years of memories, sound bytes and photos catalogued on my personal account that I don’t want to lose. Publishers need you to have a platform to prove you can sell a book. How else will my writing be found?

But also… how much time do I waste scrolling? Does anyone actually see my work when I’m not bending over backwards for the algorithm? Am I ok with feeding into a system that exploits people? What if I put in all this work and my account disappears anyway?

I don’t know if it’s worth me staying or not. But this parallel I can’t unsee is unnerving me. Do I want to be part of this system? And if I choose to re-engage with the narcissist, then how do I want to do that? Past experience would say: very carefully, with stringent boundaries and without allowing my sense of personhood to be dependent on the response.

I hesitated to write this, it sounds so harsh - Instagram as an abusive narcissist. But it also feels true. It explains the hangover I feel from too much consumption, the undulating sense of self esteem that correlates with how much interaction a post gets, the need to be constantly working for approval and visibility. It’s all very familiar, and it’s exhausting.

I don’t have a tidy answer for you. I haven’t decided if this means I’m getting off (oh, how I’ve gone back and forth on this dilemma). I wonder if there’s other means to create the connection, platform and memory-keeping on which Instagram has built its empire. I hope Substack might be part of that answer, but the cynical part of me wonders if eventually it will succumb to the same fate. Regardless of what the path forward looks like, I’m brought back to the reality that it’s always on us to deal with our stuff so we’re not looking to the internet powers that be to validate our worth.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes, “There’s an image I’ve heard people in recovery use - that getting all one’s addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed.” I laughed out loud when I read this, because yes, that’s exactly what it feels like. How sneaky our coping mechanisms can be. We think we’ve handled something and put it to sleep, yet here comes an octopus tentacle, popping out from under the covers to grab our ankles.

If anything, I hope my honest grappling gives you freedom to know you’re not the only one struggling through how to engage, wrestling with self-doubt inflicted by a monstrous machine, or wondering why this whole thing makes you feel so weird, even when you love parts of it.

You and I exist, even if we’ve suffered the wounds of erasure. We are not the first to bear these wounds, nor will we be the last. I am comforted by the knowledge that God is “El Roi” the God who sees. We do not have to commodify our lives to be seen, even if the whole world wants to convince us otherwise.

---

Reading: I’ve set some lofty reading goals for the year (well, they’re actually pretty realistic if I don’t waste all my downtime scrolling social media 😂). I’m almost through Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Really enjoying the snark, self-deprecating humor and nuggets of wisdom. My favorite quote: “Take the attitude that what you are thinking and feeling is valuable stuff, and then be naive enough to get it all down on paper. But be careful: if your intuition says that your story sucks, make sure it really is your intuition and not your mother.”

In progress: When Narcissism Comes to the Church by Chuck DeGroat, Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan.

Making: I’m determined to master GF sourdough. I’ve got four hungry boys, one of whom can’t eat eggs and I need a filler option that doesn’t break the bank. I used Marissa Froese’s recipe from her sourdough course for a starter and it seems to be working well so far. I’ve made discard waffles, one beautiful loaf of focaccia and one that didn’t rise much at all. The experimentation continues. My children complained that it tasted weird and then asked for seconds. Kids.

Looking forward to: I think I’d be lying if I said I was truly looking forward to this, but my husband will be getting home with two, maybe three, deer tomorrow. Guess what that means? Yep. I’m the butcher. I have a love-hate relationship with processing meat. I love the self-sufficiency, the fact that the result is a freezer full of high quality protein and the satisfaction of taking an animal from field to freezer. I kind of hate the smell of raw meat that lingers, cleaning the dang fascia and bits of hair off everything and how long it all takes. Can’t win it all, can you?

Oh, and I guess that baby is showing up soonish. I keep getting bigger anyway. The toddler weaned, just to mess with me, but he still likes cuddling the belly.

snuggling with the belly & why can't I get a rise like this on the second batch?

As always, if you enjoyed reading this, please share with someone you think might like it! I’d really love for Substack to be the platform that gets the majority of my time, even if I do return to Instagram. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this subject - how are you navigating social media these days?