Too Much is Never Enough

My decade as a failed influencer.

I’m sitting in the backseat of an Uber with my friend, heading home from brunch. As the car makes its slow journey over the Chicago river, I reflexively check Instagram. To my surprise, I’ve gained several followers—like, a LOT of followers.

For the next couple hours, every time I check my phone, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of new followers. I watch as the total follower count on my page ticks up and up and up until finally, finally, with a giddy, manic sense of ecstasy, I watch it tick over the threshold of that coveted number—10,000 followers.

My initial attempts to understand why I’d been showered with followers are fruitless. For a moment, I’m afraid that I’ve been spammed with bot accounts, but they look real enough. I finally decide to ask a couple of my new followers where they were coming from, and to my utter shock, the answer is—Sarah Hyland?

The Modern Family actress had reposted a “this or that” graphic I’d designed to her multi-million follower audience. I screech. I text my mom. I text my boyfriend. I irritate my visiting friend by chattering incessantly about this as we wander Michigan Avenue.

This was a pretty big moment for me.

The year is 2018. I’ve been blogging and posting to Instagram since 2013, though I’ve really only just found a modicum of success (by which I mean—my followers started increasing once I moved to Chicago and had more interesting things to post about).

Around this time, so-called “Story Templates” had exploded in popularity, with people designing little games or quizzes people could answer and repost to their stories. I—a budding and enthusiastic, if untrained, graphic designer—pounce on this trend, spending all my free time designing more and more of them as my follower count starts steadily climbing.

I was so proud of these hideous things.

The more I design, the more followers I gain, and the quicker the growth drops off after a new batch are posted. I stay up into the wee hours of the night creating more and more of these things, losing sleep and once even calling in sick to work to stay home and design more. I’m a woman obsessed; the numbers keep going up and up, and it makes me feel great. It must mean that I’m worth something, right?

Virality is a slippery beast, and the more I try to grasp on to it, the faster it slithers away. Like most social media trends, the story template frenzy is short lived. I desperately try in vain to keep up the momentum but it’s no use—the hype cycle has died down, and no one wants to fill out another “this or that” graphic with their pointer finger.

By early summer that year, the trend was dead, and I was left with about 12,000 followers and a gnawing pit of need in my stomach. I HAD to find a way to get that level of engagement and growth back.

I started doing those horrible loop giveaways (where people would have to follow a list of 20-30 accounts to be entered to win something like a $500 Sephora gift card or a Canon camera), and felt sick with shame when one of my long-time blogger friends messaged me to ask if I’d been hacked, because it didn’t seem like the type of thing I’d normally post.

I joined “engagement pods”—Telegram groups where you’d send a link to your latest post, and everyone would go like and comment on it as a way to juice the algorithm into thinking it was good content. All it ever got me were vapid two or three word comments from the same 10 people.

I remember multiple times taking the 51 bus several blocks down from my apartment on Lakeshore Drive to the two-story Forever 21 in the Water Tower Place mall to buy armfuls of cheap polyester clothing with money I didn’t have just so I had new outfits to take photos of. Most of it never got worn again.

I hired photographers, met up with other bloggers, and cajoled my boyfriend into snapping photos of me at every turn. Everything was content. I chose restaurants and activities based on how photogenic they seemed. I set up a tripod in alleyways and used a timer to take photos of myself in front of washed out brick walls.

I cried after every photoshoot, because nothing ever turned out the way I’d envisioned it in my head. The angles were wrong, the lighting was weird, I wasn’t wearing the right clothes, I didn’t have the right hair, I was too short, I had a double chin.

The more I tried, the less I became. Everything I did was for the algorithm and the little squares on Instagram, and most of it was a lie at any given time. Every time I logged on, I was inundated with hundreds, thousands of images of bloggers who were doing it better than I was, who looked better than I did in the same Urban Outfitters sweater, who gained more followers, who secured cooler brand deals.

Another startling point of clarity came later that year, in the summer of 2018, when I was invited to an influencer-only yacht party. An interior designer had purchased and redesigned a yacht they were intending to rent out; they decided to invite influencers from all over the city to build buzz and generate bookings.

Things were already off to a rocky start that evening. I’d nearly had a panic attack trying to get ready for this party—the dress code was black and white themed, to match the boat’s interior, and my brand new dress that had looked so chic on the mannequin at the Michigan Avenue H&M instead resembled a shapeless sack on my five foot frame. Not to mention the fact that my hair was not cooperating and wouldn’t hold a curl, PLUS the Uber driver dropped us off half a mile away from the marina, so we finally arrived sweaty, frazzled, and out of breath at the dock, my feet already screaming in my last-season Target kitten heels.

Someone handed my boyfriend and I champagne in gaudy, rhinestone-encrusted flutes and I hesitantly stepped up on the top deck, only to realize with dawning horror that every other person at this party seemed to know each other already.

I valiantly tried to make conversation with the gaggle of long-legged, spray-tanned, impeccably dressed women taking photos together, but no one was really all that interested in actually chatting, their heads bent over phone screens to make sure each snap was #instaworthy.

In the end, my boyfriend and I spent maybe an hour awkwardly sipping champagne and nibbling on hors d'oeuvres in the corner. Some of the unattended Instagram Boyfriends found a stack of DVDs and started watching The Wolf of Wall Street on a tiny screen in the lounge. We left before it got dark.

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The next two years were a whirlwind in both my personal and professional life. At the end of 2018, I quit my soul-sucking full-time social media manager job and started freelancing, first as a social media marketer and then as a brand and web designer. To my surprise, it turned out that I was actually pretty good at it (despite what my early portfolio pieces would tell you now).

The sudden need to rely on social media, specifically Instagram and Pinterest, as marketing for my business and not just a place to post cute outfit photos drastically changed my content strategy. It was the era of Girlboss, the Wing, pastel pantsuits, and hustle culture, and I was thriving in it. At least, that’s what my Instagram feed would have you think.

In reality, I was a nervous wreck. Between the stress of my previous job and the stress of freelancing with no steady income, I had lost a ton of weight that I didn’t really have to spare. At one point I was down to 90lbs. My stomach was so knotted up with nerves all the time that I could hardly eat, and I frequently had borderline panic attacks at the thought of going anywhere outside my house.

On Instagram, I was all smiles and inspirational quotes and iced coffee and perfectly styled desk shots. I was recording podcasts and doing speaking engagements and getting professional headshots and developing courses on how you, too, could have it all!

Back on planet Earth, my income was laughably unstable, and when I did have excess, it was all funneled to courses and workshops and masterclasses about how to have a thriving business and hit $10k months and explode your growth. I was in an increasingly bitter, one-sided feud with another designer whose style and clients and Instagram feed I envied so much it made me sick to my stomach.

I wrote pithy blog posts and cheerful captions about how your follower count didn’t matter, how your self worth wasn’t tied to analytics on Instagram, how your life was so much more than square images on a screen. I believed none of it. Maybe that was true for other people, but not for me. I wasn’t worthy until Instagram told me I was worthy.

And then the pandemic hit, and with it, the pervasive popularity of short form video content. I was tired. I had spent a decade learning how to pose and post for Instagram photos, and now they wanted me to become a videographer? When would the indignities end?

I experimented. I pointed and danced. I scoured Reels for trending audio tracks. I hopped on bandwagons, and denounced them in the same breath. But no matter what I tried, I could never quite find my footing in this new social media landscape.

And while all that was happening, I moved home to Michigan. And got married. And bought a house and moved back to Chicago. And realized I was sick of freelancing, and got a full time job. Suddenly, the need to constantly sell myself and my skills and services was no longer there. My Instagram feed was a sucking, endless black hole but at least when it had a purpose, I could pretend it was all for the greater good. A necessary evil.

My follower count dropped every time I posted something. I changed my username probably half a dozen times. I was an interiors account, no a graphic designer, no back to fashion, no—

No matter what I did, I couldn’t stop myself from chasing that long-ago high of fleeting virality, certain that a Reel of my remodeled kitchen or a cute photo of my dog would be the one that finally got me back on the track to stardom.

And while checking my stats and scrolling my feed had often filled me with feelings of dread, self-loathing, and stress, it took on a different feeling now. A sense of overwhelming malaise, a bone-deep weariness. Why bother, when only a fraction of my followers would see any given post? The dopamine machine had run dry, but I still hit that lever like a frantic rat, hoping for one small morsel of satisfaction to fall out.

It finally hit me—Instagram was on its last legs, gasping out a dying breath. I’d missed the boat for Tiktok, and I wasn’t all that interested in chartering a new one. I was in my thirties now, and had officially aged out of the zeitgeist.

I thought I would feel panic, or terror, or a million other things. Mostly I was relieved. I will always be grateful for the career and experiences that blogging and posting have afforded me, but it’s hard not to mourn the years I spent comparing myself to others, doubting my own abilities, and attempting to fill the void with clothes and things and the hope that one perfect post could change my whole life.

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I’ve hesitated to write this essay for months now, because it still feels disingenuous somehow to call myself an “influencer”—at the peak of my tenure, I’d “only” made it to just under 20k Instagram followers, which is still considered a “micro-influencer” in marketing terms. There are so many people out there who have achieved so much more and have spoken eloquently about the burnout and the cycle of misery that being a content creator brings. Even now, after all this time, I can’t stop myself from the comparison game.

I’m not going to pretend I’m cured. I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t noticed how long-form writing on this platform goes largely ignored in favor of short, punchy posts of moodboards and perfectly styled flatlays and recycled Tumblr text posts. I’m not going to pretend that I’m not, at this very moment, spiraling into the same negative thought patterns about Substack subscribers and book ARCs and making sure my life is giving off the exact perfect blend of authenticity and quiet luxury and creamy journal pages and matcha lattes and rumpled linen bedding.

I’m only human, after all. Something that seems increasingly rare online these days.

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