#TMI

Going through my Instagram I realized that I really overestimate the attention span and the desires of my friends and family. Much like this blog, my Instagram goes in spurts. I get wrapped up with work, life, and my couch and forget to post and engage with others. Suddenly I decide “hey, let’s do something with this” and pick it back up momentarily.

Today I picked Instagram back up. (I mean, kind of. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

I was bored and decided to take a gander over to the “Connect” portion that shows you all your Facebook friends and contacts that are also on Instagram. I found a few old high school friends and almost followed them, but I didn’t.

No.

First I did what any rational human being does, and went through my entire Instagram feed to see if there was anything embarrassing that I would prefer they didn’t see. I checked to make sure there wasn’t anything that would show I am anything other than the ZOMG TOTES put together pseudo-adult I pretend to be.

Shocking no one, there was plenty that needed to be deleted.

This wasn’t a lame attempt to impress my long lost friends or erase embarrassing memories. I mean, I guess you could say it started that way. But it ended as a wake up call that not everyone needs to see what the sky looks like today because they too have windows and eyes. Not everyone needs to see the blurry picture of my mediocre lunch, they’re eating their own. I deleted at least a dozen pictures that were so blurry I couldn’t even make out what they actually were. I deleted some photos that wouldn’t make sense to anyone other than myself and the person in them, like the picture of Ryan driving a Uhaul. It was, again, blurry. But it also didn’t have a caption. It’s almost as if I just impulsively loaded pictures onto Instagram without thinking about the feeds they would be invading, treating Instagram like my own personal camera roll. I deleted at least 50 pictures today. Some of them, like the nearly dozen pictures of snowy trees, are gone for good and will be missed by no one. Most of them were screenshotted and are now saved on my phone for just me to have.

Just me.

This is a new concept, oddly enough. I usually take pictures only when I intend to post them somewhere or share them with someone. But today I realized, at twenty something years old, that I can have pictures just for me. I can have pictures for the sake of capturing a moment, not for the sake of sharing it with the world. For some reason, I find this incredibly relieving.

I’m sure my followers do too.