The Why Even

When I started my Instagram account of shitty phone pics of the food I was making, I was REAL depressed. I didn’t know it at the time. Or rather, deep down I knew but my brain was very good at staring at everything in the room except the giant depressed elephant WHAT ELEPHANT THERE’S NO ELEPHANT EVERYTHING IS FINE OHMYGOD PLZ SHUT UP.

I did normal things every day. Woke up on time, did work, texted friends, made some food. Everything was just fine. Except that every day it felt more and more like I might shatter into a million pieces. And wouldn’t that be nice. To shatter into a million pieces?

I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone in my life about the weirdness inside my brain. No one wants to be the sad friend and I got very tired of screeching “great!” every time anyone asked how I was. I couldn’t do it anymore, I was exhausted. But I could make dinner. And I could take a crummy picture of my dinner and post it on Instagram and maybe someone would see it and tell me they’d also made that thing. Or maybe I could tag the recipe writer so that they could see their creation out in the wild.

I’d never had a public social media account before and it seemed scary. I’ve tried very very hard to live my life under the radar, undetectable by anyone even if they were looking for me. It’s a coping mechanism I developed a lifetime ago that I kept around and eventually took to the extreme—insulating myself from new things because the perceived risk was never worth opening up for.

So when I started this new food account, I worked very hard to be as anonymous as possible. No name, no background, no location, no personal pictures ever. Back at the begging of 2019 before I took the plunge, I told my best friend of 11 years that I wanted to do this weird thing and she was very supportive but I didn’t even tell her my username until a couple of months ago. And then I basically asked her to never comment on anything I posted because that is VERY NORMAL, YES.

The idea of someone in my real life finding my account and putting two and two together gave me the nervous sweats. It felt very important to give nothing personal away and keep myself as anonymous as possible. In total, to this day, 4 whole people who know me also know about this account. Well, now it’s 5 because I spilled the beans to my therapist a few weeks ago. Anxiety is, like, SUPER fun.

I was safe and happy in my anonymous patch of internet. I’d hoped, very quietly in the back of my mind, that I could connect, at least superficially, with people through the food I posted and saw in my feed. Maybe I would tell the food blogger how much I loved their cookies and they’d get a little warm and fuzzy at having their work acknowledged. Maybe an internet stranger would ask about something I’d made and we’d have a pleasant little conversation about the merits of chilling vs not chilling cookie dough. I had BIG dreams.

As the months went on, those little connections never happened. I felt awkward leaving comments on strangers’ posts being the 100th person to tell them that their cake looked “so good!” and so I didn’t. But I still enjoyed cooking and posting my pictures so I let that be enough.

As I kept posting pictures, I would get a few more comments. I talked about pepperoni brands with a couple of people, that was fun. Eventually I got brave enough to be the 100th person commenting on a post about delicious looking cookies. No one ever chastised me for not having anything profound to add to the cookie discussion. Slowly I tested the waters and slowly my anxiety receded.

Then I did a copycat Levain Bakery chocolate chip cookie bake-off and uh, that kind of went nuts, at least relative to the very small bubble I’d been occupying. People asked me questions—How did x cookie compare to y? Did I really have a giant rambling Google Doc about this whole project and could they see it? People dm’d me about baking temps and ingredients. Which cookie would I recommend for someone who doesn’t like super sweet things? Have I tried this other cookie recipe?

It was all very surreal but it was fun. I expected that the hubbub would dissipate back into nothingness quickly and it mostly did. But a few people continued to pop up in my dm’s that had started following me after the bake-off. Sometimes it would just be simple reactions to my stories and other times it’d be some light chit chat. As someone who’d mostly become a real life non-mountain-dwelling Grinch, it was strange and surprising to interact so casually with people I’d never met. The warm and fuzzies I got from it were pretty nice though.

Then. THEN there was the whole burnt basque cheesecake DrAmA. My perfect looking little burned cheesecakes BETRAYED ME and it was a hilarious failure so I basically said “fuck it” and storied about it for the world to see. Because it was funny and it’s good to laugh at funny things.

I got so many messages from strangers trying to help me troubleshoot my recipe—or just non-judgmentally offering up alternatives—and so many other people just commiserating and laughing at the whole mess. It was…refreshing. Yes internet stranger, this IS hilarious and I AM glad you now feel better about your own cooking failures.

I’ve reached the point where I guess I’ve realized I don’t have anything to lose by not being such a tightly closed book. The internet’s a weird place, but also some people are nice? And getting to partake and share in that niceness is kinda good for your anxious and perpetually sad brain?

Huh.

Still not sure I’m ready to tell people my name or location though—not trying to get murdered.