When Instagram Jail Becomes Instagram Vacation

Thoughts on Last Week's Digital Detox

I bet, or rather I hope, you’ve never wondered what Bill Maher’s sex life, Le Petit Prince, Instagram Jail, darling vintage jackets, fascism, billionaires, custom-made suits, and John Hughes all have in common.

And that’s probably not a bad thing. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that’s probably a very good thing. Also, I’m not really sure what they have in common, either, other than being a summation of my week last week. A very odd, very up and down last week. Since my brain likes to build connections out of nothing— sometimes to torture me with anxiety and sometimes to entertain me endlessly— let’s just see what meaningful stew we concoct if we throw those pieces all together in the pot and let them simmer, shall we?

First we’ll pre-heat the oven to overheated discussions on Threads: Four popular Threads to be exact that I crafted off the cuff, throwing in some triggering words I knew would trend and BOOM did they blow up beyond my craftiest dreams while I was offline driving one of my kids to a piano lesson. It was jarring to open the app back up that evening, expecting to have a lazy browse, check out the news, and instead field thousands upon thousands of comments as one post I’d honestly written in about as good faith as that child’s game where you make sentences out of words— here the words were The Handmaid’s Tale, Mein Kampf, and Florida censorship— racked up half a million views in only hours.

I never imagined when Threads, Meta’s attempt to compete with Elon Musk’s X, was born that it would unleash my most foul-mouthed and fiery self or that there would be a monetary reward for doing so. Because first off and most of all, I was terrible at Twitter. My professional resume was my bio, so Twitter felt more like LinkedIn than a place to gab about pop culture or cheekily denounce politicians. I abandoned that stifling profile around when Elon Musk went openly fascist, but before that I spent many an unhappy year posting in total obscurity there.

Welcome Threads, an off-shoot of my extremely unserious Instagram, and suddenly people were actually seeing and responding to the more relaxed approach there. I’m still not sure how to feel about that. I’d kinda gotten used to being invisible. It felt safe, mostly because, once upon a time, I’d paraphrased that great John Hughes line If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em! while commenting on Facebook on a Wall Street Journal story about dating Republicans who don’t read. It was my first time receiving thousands of likes but also actual death threats from Republican men… for repeating a John Hughes’ joke. A couple people recognized the line but most didn’t. One man said he was going to take a rock to my head. Bludgeoned for not even really my own joke. What an extra terrible way to go. Death by social media plagiarism might not amount to as great an indignity as a Little House on the Prairies measles death but that either option is viable sums up the year of our Lord 2025.

And then I was invited into the Threads bonus program, and suddenly death threats be damned. I was being offered money to do my favorite thing: gab and write, write and gab. I think even Kafka would’ve felt less morose about writing if he’d had such an outlet. He’d post about how writing is “utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself” and someone on Threads would reply, “TOTALLY! WHY DO WE DO THIS TO OURSELVES?” And Kafka would be all like, “God, I don’t know. Good question. Usually, I’d be all like, replying to a comment is like writing a letter aka intercourse with a ghost and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with ones’ own ghost but, like, this insta-back and forth is giving me LIFE.” Maybe “The Metamorphosis” would’ve had a different, happier ending for the bug just as now there’s more possibility of connection for us introverts.

All I know is, I love Threads. It was surprisingly easy for me to reach the milestones Meta set for me to earn my bonus, and I realized how much Twitter had dampened my self-esteem as a writer. I was also extremely grateful to all the people engaging with my content. So last weekend, when the aforementioned posts went semi-viral and one post went actually viral with around a million views total, to show my gratitude, I tried to reply to as many people as possible, when I was suddenly hit with this notice:

When I checked my Instagram account, I had no strikes against my account. I still have no real idea why I was punished last week. Too many replies, I think? Or were half of them too snarky by half? I hate wondering what I did wrong most of all. It feels pathetic, like a very tepid Agatha Christie mystery updated for the modern age, just like so much of social media usage. You’re not a person, you’re just a genre character being controlled by someone’s else’s plot. It’s like the way I see women with style accounts like mine who are far, far more beautiful or stylish than I am but with far fewer followers. I have no explanation for why certain style accounts blow up and others languish like my Twitter profile did in total obscurity. Social media is designed to hook you with dopamine doses but also to make you feel as small and insignificant as possible, begging for your pennies of pleasure in mendicant cups shaped as algorithm-pleasing posts— the peasant workers building the billionaire’s palace. Occasionally one peasant is raised over the rest to rally the rest of the worker ants to work harder and then cast back down as inexplicably in the pit.

There was nobody at Meta I could talk to about my down-casting, there was no recourse I could take. At first, I was furious. It does feel a little unfair to ask a writer to write for you and then punish them for writing content for your platform engaging enough to cause them to reply to too many people.

We’re at a boil now, so let’s pepper in the darling vintage jackets: And then before I knew it, I’d translated that fury into straightening up and reorganizing my entire winter closet. (I have a sizable collection of long, sweeping vintage coats with gorgeous epaulets, wool, plaid capes circa the 1960s, saucy, classic trenches that cost all of $30 each on eBay, Yves Saint Laurent smoking jackets, and various patterned scarves I long to tie on jauntily like Elodie Romy, a popular Parisian blogger, but never do). I know it’s almost March, but I still hadn’t found the time to organize my coats for winter. But put me in Instagram jail and suddenly I had all the time in the world. I haven’t taken a digital detox vacation in far too long, and while part of me anxiously awaited the billionaire overlords’ reopening of those pearly gates of Thread bonuses, a part of me felt grateful there were several more hours added to my day.

Time to mince in Bill Maher, sparingly. ALWAYS sparingly. A little Maher goes a long way: Mingled with the expansiveness of my newly discovered hours in the day, an uneasy sensation gripped me when I thought about Instagram. All those hours spent building up a platform, all to have it taken away with no explanation. What I did start to miss almost right away were the folks I regularly chatted with throughout the day, especially by the afternoon of the first day while listening to Bill Maher’s unbelievably smug monologuing on Pod Save America last week as he repulsively went on and on about how much he loves sex. Oh, the jokes that were loading in my brain with no outlet.

Death by bursting with Bill Maher snark.

Another bad way to go.

While there were some things I liked about the interview, overall Bill Maher is so unbelievably out of touch it’s not even funny. To the point of it being very, very funny. You’ll know you’re out of touch if you ever feel the need to constantly say how NOT out of touch you are, which Bill Maher felt the need to reflexively repeat every time he mentioned his personal chef, his recreational visits to the grocery store “just for browsing fun to see what’s new out there”, or how above social media he considers himself. If I’d taken a shot every time Bill Maher mentioned how in touch he was, I’d be dead. (Yet another bad way to go. What are we at now: three? Four?) It bears saying that people who are in touch generally don’t feel the need to point that out, because, you know, their feet being on the ground is as obvious to them as it is obvious to us that Bill Maher is intoning to the masses with his feet off the ground from a golden palanquin.

Sweeten your now sour dish with a hearty helping of Le Petit Prince: Later on in the week of Instagram jail/ Instagram vacation, I found out one of my children had to read Le Petit Prince for French class and hadn’t known about the assignment. Classic kid move. Luckily, The Little Prince, as it translates into in English, is a very short but very rich text. It’s often read by beginning French readers, which I know all about because, disclaimer: my father is French, my mom is American. The tone is deceptively simple in that way of fables, while being still symbolically rich. I offered to read it with my kid to help motivate them to plow through the short chapters quickly, and bribed them with offering to discuss it in our “book club”. They order a Shirley Temple; I have a glass of wine. We split a melted Nestle fudge sundae down the middle. It’s a good time.

I’d read Le Petit Prince several times before but never in one sitting and cramming the book was a revelation. I saw layers to it I’d never seen before, more focused as I’d been in the past on individual exquisite passages. Or maybe it was the fact that my youngest is a 9-year-old boy whose brain is as wise and impenetrable as the odd little alien prince’s is, so much so that he might as well be on a different planet from mine. The world he sees is so different from the world I experience. It occurred to me for the first time that the little prince who travels through space to visit Earth could represent not only the author’s inner child but that magical transformation children go through where they lose the child’s way of seeing the world and begin to see the world through adult eyes. It is a little bit like a death— spoiler warning: but the little prince symbolically dies at the end and is kinda reborn as a heavenly self in a very not Jesus Christ way, let’s not go there. (My high school English teacher was obsessed with Jesus Christ figures, but I don’t think the little guy’s death and rebirth is about that, either.)

It was more down-to-earth or in touch with our daily lives to borrow Bill Maher’s favorite phrase. More poignant than thinking of risen gods is the realization that my tiny son’s innocent and hilarious takes on the world will soon be no more as he begins to grow up, and that after that wise innocence of his has vanished as surely as the little prince’s body vanishes from the desert at the end that I could still choose to look up at the stars and remember there was once the sweetest little boy in the world and if I wished, I could picture him up there tending a rose and protecting it from a hungry sheep. And remembering to look up at the stars and thinking about these things, these vanished selves whether they are people we loved who are gone, who have changed through death or maturity matters more than anything in the world to paraphrase Saint-Exupery. How many adults remember they were once children? Or try to picture what that means? Or think about the transformative nature of love?

Essence of two oligarchs max or the dish will be spoilt: Elon Musk and Bill Maher give vile teen boy but innocent children who get down in the dirt to discuss life on an equal footing with snakes and foxes and roses? Not so much.

Saint-Exupery also ended on an enigma: is it a sad or happy thing to think of the child alone in the distant stars? It made me consider the enigma of my own last week in those terms: Was I imprisoned by Instagram or freed from it? My thinking ping ponged back and forth all week, but, ultimately, I think Meta miscalculated. Other than my guilt about not being able to fulfill my obligations to the small brands I work with and missing giggling/ commiserating with my friends about the news, being shut out of Instagram felt freeing. I was reminded how great life is without social media billionaires ruling it with their vizier of a byzantine algorithm. I mean I actually looked up at the stars and thought happy thoughts about children frolicking this week. MY INSTAGRAM-FREE BRAIN GENUINELY FROLICKED. I think I’m going to keep up taking at least one day a week off. And a whole week off here and there. After all, Bill Maher manages “to stay in touch” and he’s not on social media at all.

Top the dish with other things I did that I might not have done if I hadn’t been sent on an Instagram vacation and that I highly recommend doing because I felt great and you deserve to feel great, too:

1. Took extra long walks with my dogs and listened to podcasts.

2. Worked on my Spanish. This year I’d really like to progress finally from intermediate to more advanced. I used to work as a French language teacher, so I might make a language learning newsletter if anyone’s interested.

3. Reorganized my coat and clothes closets with the approach of spring in mind and put several more items that I’ve “grown out of” for sale on my Poshmark. You can check out my closet here.

4. Watched “White Lotus” and didn’t check social media once, which sadly felt both really good and pretty strange. If you can’t stand to take a day off social media— and I get it, the first day was HARD. It only felt good starting the second day—Maybe start small and take a TV show or a dog walk off.

5. Finished reading a romance novel and a non-fiction book by Frank Bruni. I didn’t really care for the latter, but I’m still on target to hit my book goals for the year, and I’ve started a book club on my Instagram channel if you’d like to join. I didn’t come close to making my reading target last year, but it still really enriched my year to even try.

6. Spent a little extra time at the gym and writing.

Arrange your dish and garnish it: Here’s hoping I’m allowed back Wednesday evening* (*spoiler: I was allowed back) so I can post about this beautiful suit (above) custom-made by a luxury sustainable brand called WILDA.ECO in Poland. I was allowed to post pictures at this time, just no text because sure, and the brand wanted me to also write about the suit as well as showcase it. I’m between a size 6 and a size 8 at the moment, so I was very impressed with how great the custom fit was and how much they helped me figure out how to measure bits of myself I’ve never measured before.

For vintage-shopping purposes, I do frequently measure my bust/waist/hips but to sew a custom-sized suit there were so many other necessary measurements like the outer part of the leg as well as the inseam and the shoulders as well as the length of the sleeves. They were even able to tell when I’d made an error and walk me through the necessary steps to measure the suit again. It was a beautiful experience I was gifted because of the global connections Instagram makes possible. There’s another one in the column FOR and not AGAINST Meta. I believe these social media spaces should be communal ones for that reason, not owned by billionaires. But that’s as much of a beautiful dream, I suppose, as imagining a child laughing above my head in the starlight.