[Carrie Bradshaw voice]
This Memorial Day, I was forgotten.
I’ll set the scene: I wasn’t invited to a party, and immediately, I worried that I’d somehow offended the host. Anxious, yet trying to maintain a sense of propriety, I did the adult thing and sent a cavalcade of probing messages to my friends who were included, desperate to prove my fear that I was a pariah due to some wild, unconscious gaff. The answers I received were even worse: I’d done nothing wrong — I was simply not thought of. I was reassured that the lack of inclusion was not anything more than the host being busy and being left off of the guest list was oversight, a product of her not thinking of people to invite “unless they were right in front of her.”
Because it fits my narrative, I latched onto this as the rationale for my exclusion. In reality, there are plenty of reasons I have not been “in front” of this person — or many people —for the past five or so years: I’m sober; I’m working; I was busy falling in love; I literally can’t hear as well as I used to in crowds; I prefer staid, bohemian, cheap, diurnal activities, smaller groups, et cetera. However, the most obvious reason for feeling as though I’ve “fallen off” is because I’m not on Instagram.
When Jean Piaget introduced the concept of “object permanence,” it was a breakthrough in human development. Piaget posited that, prior to the age of 12 months, children simply can’t comprehend that objects continue to exist even when they can’t see them. This is why peek-a-boo, while a fun way to deceive infants and make me feel smarter than them, is a cruel game: their brains tell them if it’s gone, it’s gone. To the babies, existence is tangential, relational, substantive. There’s a rash of cultural critique about the adulthood now seeming “infantilized” due to a lack of socioeconomic markers that used to mark maturation (home ownership, strides in business, reproduction), and in their place we have elasticized waistbands, flavored vape juice, someone called beabadoobee. We live like babies because there is no sturdiness: we have no serif, everything is pastel, and you literally disappear into the ether unless you post, like, minimum once a week.
From its genesis, my relationship with Instagram was always going to be of the hot, toxic varietal. A magazine hound from the very beginning, I was hooked when I found out that I could use it as just that: a portal for self-expression that also fed my desire to intake personal details, anecdotes, gossip, spending long swathes of time tracing maps of connection from one person to another. Fueled by prescription amphetamines, I would tweak and tweak captions until they fit exactly what I was going for: the presentation of myself as a lovable mess, astute but flawed, often incredibly intoxicated, but fun. I was invited to parties because I could party, or at the very least — I looked like I could party. Through this performance, I could find who I needed to, to go where I wanted to go because I trusted others’ eyes more than my own to know who I was. It was a job all its own, keeping this form of connection afloat: a friend of mine told me once that you could “always rely on Alex Watt for a like and a comment.” It’s true — I liked to “engage.”
What’s less true is that I was sending those likes and comments because I had 100% pure intentions of sending encouragement, love, empathy, or whatever other emotion was appropriate. It’s impossible to sift through my actual motivations at that time, because I was, in many ways, like a baby who was struggling to find stability. I was supposed to be finding myself and I used social media as a map, trying to make myself neon enough for others to find me. Much like other forms of media I was intaking, I could graft pieces of other people’s lives onto mine, and I could use them to give me answers about who I wanted to be, what I wanted for myself, if I was doing things right. Instagram could help me find events to attend, places to go, but most importantly, people that I could emulate or learn from or date or post.
These days, exchanging Instagrams is a common way step to solidify a connection when you meet new people (even a grant I recently sought out called for this as part of the application). They want to see your feed to understand who you are. This isn’t a misconception — it really is a presentation of self, a carefully curated version of what you want others to know. I considered sharing some of my posts here, but they still feel raw — a confused mix of trends, a desperate need to entertain, and self-deprecating jokes that only I fully understood, all presented in an Internet-diluted childish blaccent. Like object permanence, this has become its own kind of developmental test: can you present yourself as acceptable? Entertaining? Sane? Stable? People want to know what you’re about. Mystique makes people uneasy, as if you’re hiding something. Peek-a-boo.
I loved using Instagram, but increasingly, I felt like I was robbing myself of something real. I became so detached from what I truly wanted and needed, spending hours worrying about who was where and where I wasn’t. In the process, I neglected the few things that truly make me feel embodied: writing, reading, being in nature, and spending time with friends who are real — flesh and blood.
During 2020, the year I slowly burned to rock bottom, some of my darkest moments played out on my “finsta,” a burner account where I spiraled with reckless abandon. It was a semi-private cry for help disguised as a joke — a performance of self-destruction that both thrilled and terrified me. Like a provincial Amanda Bynes, my social media became both witness and accomplice in my unraveling, and likely spurred my friends to finally confront me about my choices. Once it’s posted, it’s logged and public, bad behavior becomes undeniable, and harder to forget because it’s recorded. I was testing that theory — feeling unworthy of existence, I externalized my pain, integrating it into my public performance on others’ social media feeds. It was the most I’d ever posted, and it lead to one of the largest shifts in my life thus far.
Recently, I watched Ghost in the Shell at the Egyptian — a relic of a theater in more ways than one. There, both the American Cinematheque staff’s formal introductions and the film’s conclusions always garner applause. I find it amusing when people clap at movies; who are we really applauding if no one involved in the production is present? It reminds me of social media — a stream of limited gestures: likes, hearts, claps, broken hearts, flames. Safe, shallow markers of interaction, rarely carrying any true emotional weight. Still, I clapped for Ghost in the Shell, even though I only understood about 15% of it. It's a moody, atmospheric, philosophically dense film nearly 30 years old, and it was, according to the disgruntled fans behind me, incorrectly subtitled. From what I gathered, it explores identity and memory through its cyborg protagonist, Major, who exists as both human and machine. Set in 2029, in a world where humans can upgrade their bodies to extend life and surpass natural limits, Major asks her colleague how much of his body is still “his.” The “ghost,” as they call it, is the soul — sentience — the essence of who you are.
The film’s antagonist is an AI called “Puppet Master,” who initially appears to be some kind of Julian Assange-type figure, later manifesting as a consistently nude, blonde cyborg with eternally perky nipples and a smooth, featureless patch where genitalia should be. At one point, Puppet Master even requests political asylum. When it's denied on the basis that asylum is a right reserved for humans, the AI counters: “Man is an individual only because of his intangible memory… and memory cannot be defined, but it defines mankind. The advent of computers and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data has given rise to a new system of memory and thought parallel to your own.” Even though the cyborgs lack traditional reproductive mechanisms, Puppet Master’s mission is replication — to persist and evolve by becoming memetic, inescapable, ubiquitous. Its survival hinges on embedding itself into memory systems, into consciousness, much like humans do.
Watching Major and the others wrestle with these ideas, I naturally thought of myself (of course) — but also of Marilyn Monroe, a woman whose image is the ultimate in permanent consciousness, a person who has never really been forgotten. Dead for 63 years, she probably got the nod for this Memorial Day party. In Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, a fictionalized portrait of our eternal sex symbol, Monroe is imagined as thinking of herself this way: “She’s an American slash in the flesh. That emptiness. Guaranteed. She’s been scooped out, drained clean, no scar tissue to interfere with your pleasure, and no odor. Especially no odor. The Girl with No Name, the girl with no memory.” Though “Marilyn” is perennial, she’s a meme: a container, a mirror, a symbol. Norma Jean Baker exists less as a remembered person than as a projection — a replicable figure etched into culture, her likeness endlessly copied, captioned, and commodified.
We’re all doing some version of this now. My generation has falling birth rates, our authentic memories beginning to record with the first image of falling towers that in many ways kept us frozen, frisked at airports, free will constantly being negotiated. We are the babies in the digital void, struggling to make a mark, to assert permanence, to leave a legacy that might stick. There's a sequence in Ghost in the Shell where Puppet Master has implanted a complete false memory into a man’s mind: he believes he has a wife, a child, a home. He can even tries to show someone a photograph, as proof. But in reality, he lives alone in a bachelor’s apartment. The life he believes in is entirely synthetic — but his grief, his longing, his conviction, feel so real — a true motivation to keep living.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve become a ghost myself — just another image adrift in an infinite feed — or if I’m trying hard to outgrow the need to constantly prove I exist. Maybe that’s just how I absolve the guilt of opting out of a modality of digital, public life that was so fun to participate in. Until it wasn’t. In Ghost in the Shell, one cyborg tells another: “Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.” Like another 30 something overthinking party girl, Carrie Bradshaw, I’ve accepted that I’m still figuring out who I am without the party, without the photographic proof, without the proximity to others as validation that I still exist.
I haven’t logged into Instagram in over a year. It’s a choice that, like sobriety or committing to a relationship when you have wonky boundaries, can be isolating, consuming, even self-righteous— or, at the very least, annoying to others. And yet, stepping away from the scroll has restored some of my faith in myself. I’ve definitely dropped some of the performance, started outfit repeating more, my sartorial drive diminishing until I’m rocking the same jeans and Brandy Melville t-shirts four days in a row like a cartoon character. This has obliterated some self-conscious tendencies, but I do find it harder to stay in touch. I do find that there is a sense that interactions are happening over my head, behind my back. At the end of Ghost in the Shell, the cyborg Major is reincarnated as a “newborn” — a clean slate, rebooted, yet driven by the Puppet Master’s desire to persist, to replicate, to exist and be remembered. Every time I even consider redownloading the app, I feel that pull: fresh eyes, but the same underlying drive to be seen.
I wish I could use Instagram the way my friends do: as a tool for connection, a little magazine of me. But constant exposure hasn’t clarified who we are or crystallized our intentions. When I was most plugged in, I felt hollowed out. I didn’t know what I was becoming—only that I was following maps handed to me, one scroll at a time. Maps that felt attainable if I just bought this, did that. It seeped into my writing. I heard myself repeating party lines. I still do. We all do. Full disconnection is impossible — as I’m proving now, typing this and pretending it’s different from the Instagram stories I used to post. But it eats my hours. It scoops me out. It takes me off course. It makes me feel judgmental, even toward people I love—feelings that dissolve the moment I see them in person, ask directly, and listen to their experiences instead of extrapolating my interpretation of them.
As a child, I came up with a theory: the reason anyone does anything is that, on their death bed, they can say they did. I believed meaning came from memory—that experiences mattered because we carried them forward. They became our proof of life, our currency of connection. Instead of going to the party I wasn’t explicitly invited to, desperate to show my face, I helped a friend sort through fifteen years of old photos—evidence of her life in Malibu, in places now scorched and gone. We laughed hard as she paused on faces she once felt were important enough to capture. “Who is that?” she asked. I took it as a sign.
Maybe I won’t remember this particular pain of feeling left out in fifteen years. Maybe not even in fifteen minutes. Maybe as soon as I get off this page. That impermanence is exactly what we try to fight when we document every moment, cling to every memory. But in the end, we never get to choose what we actually hold onto.
But isn’t that what makes life fun?
[Carrie Bradshaw voice]
