I cooked, I almost quit Instagram 🍲

Lately when I go on Instagram, I find myself asking, “Where are all my friends? Where did everyone go?”

Last Friday, I tweeted: “what's a good soup recipe for acting like a slut, feeling like a bitch?”¹ and the replies rolled in: chicken dumpling with obvious carrots, lobster bisque, french onion with a good bread or crouton situation, zuppa toscano, warm borscht, basil gnocci (specifically this recipe), and roasted red pepper with tomato, dill, and coconut milk.

I’m always looking for easy soup recipes that will spawn copious leftovers. The goal is a lunch that I will want to eat again in a few hours for dinner, or dinner that could be lunch the next day. Recently, a recipe for kale soup came to me via Instagram Reels. The recipe entails blanching kale and blending it with olive oil to make a paste. I told Liz what I was up to and she said she’s seen a lot of Reels where someone blends greens and mixes the resulting paste with water to make a soup or sauce. Successful Reels and TikTok videos are full of movement and transformation, I replied, maybe the algorithm showed me this video because others were drawn to the alchemy of leaf to liquid, or the beautiful green color of the kale paste. Or maybe people are simply looking for new ways to eat winter greens, which are abundant this time of year.

The soup turned out bland and sloppy. I tried to cut it with basmati rice and leftover malai kofta, but it was still gross. I should have known not to trust Reels, Instagram’s cheap answer to TikTok and enabler of such content as stuffing waffle and broccoli-cheese sheet.

kale soup

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When I sent my soup tweet, I had a bittersweet feeling that it might be my last tweet ever. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, and yet… I have this feeling a lot on social media lately. Elon Musk’s Twitter--excuse me, X--is increasingly dysfunctional and pointless, and I have a vivid recurring fantasy of waking up in the morning and discovering that my Instagram page, xenaworrierprincess, has been deleted overnight. Instagram only provides customer service and tech support to users who pay for Meta Verified (a blue check on Instagram costs $14.99 a month, go figure), so there’s nothing I can do to get my page back. In this fantasy, I am relieved and not sad.

The original draft of this essay included a detailed history of my Instagram career, from the time I posted a picture of hot dog in 2012 and my crush liked it, to the Old Sea Dyke meme and The Ex-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend Is My Girlfriend zine. It concluded with a grateful acknowledgement that Instagram connected me with an audience for my writing. It’s where I met Liz and many of my closest friends. There’s no question that my life and career would be worse off without Instagram—or more precisely, the Instagram that existed between 2015 to 2019. During those years, there were entire days where the only place I wanted to be was in my bed, trawling around Instagram and coming up with new stuff to post.

my favorite lesbian meme

Today, Instagram looks and feels like if TikTok had an outlet store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.² There’s no longer a way to snooze suggested posts, so my main feed has become what the explore page used to be—a constant stream of terrible food content (if you liked kale soup, you’ll love Thanksgiving pizza. If you liked Thanksgiving pizza, you’ll love Thanksgiving sushi) and generic stuff that almost anyone would enjoy, like a wiener dog who feels the rhythm of the night. It seems like most of my friends and mutuals post on Stories, but not their main grid. This creates a jarring split where my Stories are entirely people I know calling to end Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine (call your reps!! download the 5 Calls app now), while my feed is just ads for dishwasher tablets and butter candle.

Oh God, butter candle.

there she is

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To be honest, some of what I’m feeling is sour grapes. Not many people like or comment on my Instagram posts anymore, or at least not like they used to. This is partially my own fault—I never made the transition to video and I refuse to pay for Meta Verified. I also stopped posting my face and body in 2019 for mental health reasons (I know I look like Ed Sheeran, okay?? You don’t have to DM me about it.) A lot of the energy I once poured into Instagram now goes to this newsletter. I have my grievances with Substack, of course, but the expectations are different when the platform is your job.

Many of the other artists, writers, and small business owners I know who invested heavily in Instagram during its 2014-2020 heyday are also feeling jilted and frozen out. It’s increasingly impossible to get anyone to check out your blog, visit your online store, or attend your workshop by posting about it on Instagram. Not only does Instagram bury Story posts that contain links, it makes it difficult to leave by taking your followers to an unappealing, white screen that’s meant to resemble an error page and asking them to confirm their click. My friend Rose, an astrologer and audio producer, recently described the current state of Instagram as, “a weird bulletin board that no one really looks at or sees.” Another self-employed artist friend predicts that the platform will be “a graveyard” in a year or two, similar to the Boomerfication of Facebook after the 2016 election.

thanksgiving sushi. the seaweed is turkey skin and the rice is mashed potatoes

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Even at the height of my Instagram career, I only posted once a week, often less. My memes were sloppy and zine-like. A lot of them flopped because they made sense to me, but no one else. Even so, Instagram put me in contact with writers and artists I really admired, which made me feel like a legitimate writer and artist. I received a constant stream of kind comments and DMs. There were shitty interactions and TERFs, to be sure, but these were so rare that they don’t even feel worth mentioning. Instagram is no longer like this for creators. To be successful on the platform, you have to make work that conforms to rigid formulas, and post on a daily basis. There’s not a lot of room for whimsy or waiting until inspiration strikes. If you want to use your account to promote another, non-Instagram project or moneymaking venture, good luck.

thematically appropriate anonymous meme

Lately when I go on Instagram, I find myself asking, “Where are all my friends? Where did everyone go?” It used to feel so social, like an off-label dating app. All the cool dykes were trying to say hey. Now it’s a ghost town. If there are any humans left, their posts get lost in algorithmic misfires and advertisements. The word that comes to mind is “slurry.“

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Kale soup notwithstanding, I’m a fair enough cook. I can dice an onion really fast. I know to wait until the oven is up to temperature before putting in the food. I salt my pasta water and deglaze my freaking pans.

When I started teaching myself how to cook 3 or so years ago, I would find recipes online and do my best to follow them. Sometimes this approach worked, but most of the time I failed miserably. Now I’m trying to learn a few basic dishes by heart—sweet potato chili, a nice red sauce, this pizza dough that takes a long time to develop, but is very little work otherwise, and tastes incredible when baked in an olive oil bath. I want to cooking to feel like a language I’m fluent in, like I can improvise and get started without much thought. This is what Instagram used to be for me—an extension of what I was already doing, something sustaining and fun. Now it just feels like work.

1. the Michete lyrics are actually “acting like a slut, looking like a bitch“ but it’s not really possible for me to look like a bitch, all my shirts are from dog rescues

2. i.e. not the kind of outlet store filled with righteous deals, the kind of outlet store that sells a separate, shittier line of merchandise pretending to be the same thing.