I sometimes feel a cooling compulsion to revisit the past selves stored in corners of my social profiles, like little identity-confirming pills in the blister packet that is my Instagram archive. And there’s a wealth of material. Social media is part of our cohort - it grew up with Gen Z, the test bunny generation for a huge amount of new and shiny spaces.
Instagram was invented in 2010. I first got on the platform in 2012 to use it for filters and export those images to Tumblr or Facebook. I got my first period that same year. Also in 2012, Tinder launched, and pubescent teenagers all over the world were able to find other hormonally charged kids to chat to. Most of those connections never made it offline - but it wasn’t about that. Sometimes those weren’t actually other kids, which led to the platform being banned for under-18s in 2016. No shit.
I remember being stuck in a conservative, Catholic all-girls school with zero contact to boys, spending literal hours after school in an endless scroll through the clumsily constructed profiles of mysterious members of the opposite sex. I entered the meat market that is the modern dating world. Sitting on the grassy expanse of our school’s lawn, cardigans spread out like a picnic blanket, we flipped through boys like magazines. Them, on the other side, doing the same.
Contrary to what you might think, I’m not actually of the opinion that being on social media fucked me up at the time.1 My teenage experience on the internet was more empowering than not - I made actual friends, put myself out there and get over the crippling social anxiety I had assumed was just part of my personality, from a relatively safe vantage point. I was happy to leave the NSPCC to worry about creepy men pretending to be 15.
But what I think is a bit fucked about the whole thing, is that all those versions of myself, stuck mid-becoming, are all waiting in the memory box of my archive on Instagram, in my Snapchat memories, decontextualised and unrooted from the messy and frustrated context they were forged in. As a grown person, who has grown person concerns and a grown person body, it’s just as difficult not to compare myself with past me as to others.
Whilst I’m not the type to wistfully reminisce about the good old Frat House days or my teenage situationships, it is jarring to have visual proof of formative memories, the people that were there, the way I looked. When I was 17, I was very thin, pretty, in a way that the beauty industry loves to capitalise on - in a way that is impossible to keep up past that age. I didn’t fully understand how lucky I was, thought a lot about food, body checked all the time, staked my value on the opinions of other clueless teenagers, and had very little idea of who I was meant to be - like so many of us. But you don’t see that in the photos… and memory, especially of oneself, can be fickle and hazy. In moments where I do still feel lost, it’s tempting to go and take those humidity-controlled, perfectly-preserved skins out of the storage space, unzip the proverbial garment bag and stare at what I once was.
But it can be really helpful to remember how far you’ve come - grounding, even. Some psychologists even advocate for ‘Cognitive Reminiscence Therapy’2, which draws on past experience and memory to build self-confidence, resilience and a sense of meaning throughout the life narrative. But the risk of relying on biased visual ‘evidence’ once intended as a performance for others as a tool for reminiscence, is a skewing of one’s view of the past - of distortion. Memory is distorted anyway; but visual evidence might create an illusion of objectivity, of ‘proof’, even when the creation of those artefacts likely involved curation, subjectivity and performance. In contrast, reading through old diaries and messages to friends is sobering and paints a much better picture of the circumstances of all of this visual material. The archive is rich - but it needs to be viewed as a whole.
I’m sure I am not the only one who feels a bit unsettled by the presence of other versions of themselves. I don’t think about it often - it’s more like keeping a pair of jeans you don’t fit into anymore in the back of your closet. But it might be time to take them to the charity shop. Would it be liberating to delete those past selves? Is this a blocker from moving on, from accepting the inevitability of aging, growing up, changing into somebody else? Or is nothing more than an entertaining snapshot of a juvenile identity? We are new, and also the same, every day. With or without proof. I might just stick to the memories in my head, blurry as they are.
I may come across as techno-dystopian in my critique of ~society~, but that’s mainly because I feel like people are not actually having a good time with the way things are. If depression and anxiety rates, misogyny and body dysmorphia weren’t on the rise, I’d probably spend my time writing about more enjoyable things.
Hallford, David John, and David Mellor. “Autobiographical Memory-Based Intervention for Depressive Symptoms in Young Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Cognitive-Reminiscence Therapy.” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, vol. 85, no. 4, 2016, pp. 246–49. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48516008. Accessed 11 May 2024.