Be honest, whom do you secretly post for on Instagram?

She adds that many of her supporters are also people who knew her many years ago when she was “a ugly duck, not as cool or intelligent as now”. When she publishes photos, she always wonders how these people perceive her and hopes that her brilliant surprises them. Before speaking with Alia, I admitted to my friends that my only real follower was my publisher, someone I had admired before finally becoming my mentor, then friend. Despite our current proximity, I always feel the desire to impress him: ring as intelligent and funny as I think. It was simple: “I feel really happy when she loves one of my stories or think that something I posted is funny.” Now, however, I realized that there was another group of people for whom I posted: my former classmates.

Although I was not exactly unpopular at school, I was not the popular child either. It disturbed me endlessly. Even years after graduating, I wondered how I could become cooler, more ambitious, more desirable. How could I become someone with whom everyone was still envisaged to be a friend? My social media has become the best way to project a different image from me in public. This is where I could be more sociable, more nonchalant, more fun. I could casually speak of my achievements, my attractive friends and my exciting journeys, a reminder that I had evolved. The validation of foreigners barely imported. Instead, I desperately wanted to prove a point to the ghosts of my past.

I was not the only one to have taken this path. Tracking the instagram stories of peers which were less popular than me – a little, even – I found that they seemed completely different from whom they were IRL. Their candid photos have been modified, their poetic and philosophical legends. Sometimes I could barely recognize them. I realized that, like me, they were trying to undo what people thought and rose above in the food popularity chain.

Thanks to her Instagram account, my friend Parnika is also trying to distance herself from whom she was. “Even if we no longer speak, I always post with this old friend in mind,” she admits. “He was my best criticism in a creative way. I don’t care if he interacts with what I post. I just want him to see that I am happier now and that I can come from a place more independent of him.