Today

​The beginning is always today.
— Mary Wollenstonecraft

I woke up to the news that my IG account had been enabled again. They said the disabling was "accidental," which is strange, right? Also strange is that I didn't have to go through the rigamarole of taking my picture with my screen name and email and whatever else to prove that I'm an actual person and not a Russian troll bot. Normally the identifying picture is part of the reinstallation process but instead I just emailed the IG "i believe my account was disabled in error" office about a dozen times protesting that I hadn't broken any rules and apparently they agreed with me,

I'm grateful. Obviously. But still annoyed that a project I've worked on for a year can be obliterated by "accident."  While I know that my social media constructs are fragile and that I still exist if they disappear, I still had an unsettling feeling of being untethered when this IG account disappeared. As if part of me was gone too. 

I had dinner with my sister last night and we talked about social media. She has a 13-year-old girl and fortunately, this little niece of mine is an aberration in current society. She doesn't post much on social media, she takes no selfies, she rarely checks her phone and forgets to text me back and she somehow manages to be a sweet goofy awkward kid who is universally liked by different groups of students in her school while identifying with no clique in particular. 

We should all be so lucky as to be this kid. 

I'm going to make an effort to borrow her spirit in the coming weeks. Put my phone down more, care less about likes and visits and all the ephemeral constructs of online life and just take pictures for the fun of it.  

The beginning is always today.