Unfiltered Reflections

Creating radical self-love in the digital age by fighting the algorithm by being the algorithm.

Let me take you back. It’s late 2012, maybe early 2013. I’m about 11 years old—you’re probably around the same age. The fourth and fifth grade common rooms are abuzz. It seems as if everyone is trading in their iPod touch for the iPhone. I was one of the first people in my grade to cop an iPhone 5 after Apple’s momentous reveal of a slimmer phone with a better camera and a new charging port. My mom was hesitant to get me such an advanced piece of technology so young. If only we had known what was about to be set in motion, and how long the effects would last.

The social clout I got from my new phone was immediate. People crowded around me to see my phone, strapped with the novel LTE wireless range. Suddenly, the times of playing Temple Run and Sims Freeplay were a thing of the past. It was around this time I downloaded Instagram, eager to establish myself as a “hot girl,” one worthy of being crushed on and talked about.

From a very young age, technology perverted my self-concept and self-presentation. In elementary and middle school, Instagram was where kids became cool. It felt like all eyes were turned on what people were doing each weekend and who they were with. Almost immediately, I felt bombarded by the numbers and names on Instagram: I was counting likes, comments and follow-backs; downloading apps to add cool filters and edit my photos; even going as far as to buy likes or use the hashtag “like for like back.” I was obsessed but pathetically misguided. I don’t have to tell you how easy it is to associate your self-worth with the statistics you see on your account compared to other people’s. Quickly, a pecking order emerged between the girls who used Instagram successfully—weekend photoshoots showing off their fro-yo cups, the Hermés bracelets they got for their birthday, their Lululemon outfit at SoulCycle—and me, a pudgy, awkward-looking, hadn’t-yet-grown-into-themself middle schooler. I wasn’t wealthy, white or thin enough to flaunt what no one wanted on my phone and confronted the being I saw in the mirror:

Her face is uneven. One eyelid droops lower than the other.

Her nose is wide. It seems to take up her entire face.

Her hair is frizzy and unruly beyond belief. Unkempt, uncontrolled.

Pudge peeks out over the waistband of her jeans.

To an impressionable, young girl, the images and messages I consumed online were very clear about what was deemed attractive.

And the reflection I saw looking back at me was not reaching those standards.

But none of this narrative is to say people who do align with the beauty standard can’t experience insecurity either. Our social media is constructed in such a way that convinces all of us, from any and all backgrounds, that we’re not good enough, not hot enough, not beautiful enough. For some of us, though, we don’t just battle internal dysmorphia — we have to contend with centuries of systematic racism and fatphobia perverting our beauty standards.

At first, I tried to fit in. Over the years, I tried so many things at different times and with different amounts of success. I straightened my hair—–the response was favorable, much more so than when my hair was curly. Boys commented on it: “You look so much … better?” or something along those lines. I lost weight. Again, people noticed. I even went so far as buying stupid Amazon nose pinchers to slim my nose. I poured honey and lemon juice into my eyes in hopes I would wake up in the morning with blue orbs looking back at me.

But these attempts all fizzled out eventually: I stopped trying to change myself. I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t be happy so long as I was forcibly going against my DNA, my culture and my origins to fit in a mold of “the hot girl” that would simply never reflect me.

I cried. I screamed at my mother. I cursed her name. I cursed her for giving me dark skin, a wide nose, curly hair and a body that holds its weight in the thighs and stomach.

And then I screamed at myself for hating every last little thing about me. For hating the DNA that made me who I was. I screamed at myself for deciding my self-worth was based on something as superficial as being wanted. And then I screamed at the world, at the algorithms, at society, at colorism, at thinspo hashtags, at Tumblr anorexia blogs, at People Magazine, at white-washing, at the boxes of curly-hair relaxers at the CVS. I screamed at them for making me hate myself and making me feel the need to change who I was to be loved, to be admired and adored.

But screaming and anger only last so long. The bubbling emotions eventually dissipated. I was tired of caring, so I stopped trying entirely. The curly hair came back, the weight came back, the nose pinchers were thrown out and the pathetic Google attempts to change my eye color or body type were left in my history browser.

I wouldn’t dare glance in the mirror. I taped up my bedroom mirror so I wouldn’t have to look, I kept my eyes down when in public bathrooms, and I stayed off Instagram.

I wasn’t born into a body that would wholly let me fit in, so there was no point in trying—hookup culture and romance simply were not for me. I focused on other things—school, extracurriculars, applying to college. I swallowed the fear of loneliness and accepted there is more to life than being loved or loving yourself.

Fast forward: I was 19 years old with no online trace of who I was. It was freeing, but very, very unorthodox for our generation. My phone, however, was full of photos and videos: of myself, memories from my life, pictures of good meals, mirror selfies, cute outfits I liked. They simply remained on my phone, hidden from the rest of the world that consumes everyone’s content. Protected by the privacy of my own device, those internalized beauty standards I grew up with couldn’t touch me, couldn’t affect how I felt about myself. It was only when I shared my pictures and saw others that I felt Judgment Day would come.

Eventually, I got bored of my storage piling up with photos no one would ever see. So I dipped my toe back into the Instagram world. I made a second account with a pseudonym, only following the closest of my closest friends. Little by little, I started sharing snippets from my life. The sunset from my roof. A new tattoo. A cute dog on the street. A nice sushi dinner. My body. My face. My hair.

The photos barely had likes or comments, but I liked watching the account grow. I was building a digital diary of moments from my life, creating space for myself in a little corner of the Internet where I could exist as myself.

In the first four months of having the account, I had 100 posts. I still had zero on my main Instagram account.

It was the end of freshman year when I finally gathered the courage to restart my main account. The first year in college for the Class of 2024 was the furthest thing from normal we would’ve expected growing up due to the pandemic. But as I started to feel settled, started to find and make friends that I now love, trust and cherish, I wanted to feel seen again — to be known. I wanted to stop hiding in the shadows of an account with no posts and few followers. Whether I liked it or not, Instagram was going to be a presence in our lives, with or without me. I felt it was time for me to have a public online presence again.

On June 4, 2021, I posted my first photo (since middle school) to Instagram, to about 1000 followers who likely forgot they followed me in the first place. And it felt really fucking good. And then I posted again, and again, and again and it kept feeling good. Say what you want about the thinly veiled superficiality of Instagram comments, but external validation can really do the trick sometimes.

As I kept posting, I found myself caring less and less about each photo that I uploaded. Sure, maybe my teeth were crooked in one pic, or you could clearly see my stomach rolls in a bikini photo. I had already learned that trying to change myself was an erroneous and dangerous attempt to align with a beauty standard simply not made for me. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t make space for myself on the platform. I gained confidence in knowing that every photo I put out there brought a new meaning to the word “beauty.”

Beauty could be frizzy hair, and cellulite, and wide noses and love handles. Beauty could be anything I wanted it to be because that’s how I was made, and nothing was going to change that. I deserve to exist in the real world and in the digital space as I am. I deserve the power to change what and who we consider beautiful. By choosing to do nothing, to post nothing, it’s almost as if I was reinforcing the beauty standards that I hate so much.

Maybe this is more a story about how much middle school sucks and perhaps the poor timing that Instagram dropped (before I hit puberty, when I was jacked up on hormones and first period horror stories and DIY haircuts). But being 21 years old doesn’t mean I feel like this fight is over. There are still days I wake up and want to shatter my mirror, when I want to straighten my hair to a crisp or put myself into debt with a nose job. Some lessons take years to unlearn; sometimes I doubt I’ll ever unlearn the mystique of the thin, white beauty standard. But it feels a lot better to keep trying. So each day I choose to make the algorithm a little blacker, a little curlier, and a little more chubby. I flaunt and exhibit myself as I am. I radically reclaim what it means to exist and be worthy of love. And that counts for something. We say who and what the algorithm is. And that’s a win in my book.