Volume 4, Entry 23: The Finsta Dilemma

Interrogating the implications of alternate accounts

On the morning of the seniors’ last day attending classes two weeks ago, I still hadn’t settled on what I wanted to say to them. That closing period of Calculus BC marks the final interaction I get with the majority of those students, so landing those culminating words carries weight with me.

I’ve written about these final addresses before. The first of those pieces, Anti-Déjà vu, reflects how I process and prepare for my final speech to my graduating classes: I connect it to something else. In 2021, I tied its cyclical nature to Olivia Rodrigo’s single “deja vu” to reflect on the dual familiarity and uniqueness of those last days and discourses.

When I actually addressed my classes that year, I didn’t mention Rodrigo’s song even once. Instead, I focused on the final scene of BoJack Horseman, and the idea of good things being temporary. That my address landed for the classes speaks to the power of that repurposed sentiment, but it was the reflection that coalesced around Rodrigo’s song that primed me to honor the moment.

Ever a write-to-learn person, I entrust writing with sorting out my thoughts not just for events like that but every day. I write my way through any number of tasks each week, typing out paragraphs of text to handle everything from tricky lesson plans to conversations I’m dreading. Indulge me with an hour and an empty note, and I can make progress on almost anything. In some ways, I trust my own typing fingers to operate like many students trust ChatGPT: given a task, I will produce writing about it. Where I go won’t always make perfect sense, but I’ll be on my way. The act of writing fires synapses in my brain. It’s the primary tool in my problem-solving toolbox.

Thus, on that final morning around 4:30 am, I set about trying to find my emotional way just as I had two years prior with my piece about “deja vu”. Staring at a blinking cursor on a blank, dark-mode black page, I began to type.

After a few paragraphs about Will Leitch’s new novel, The Time Has Come, which I had just finished the emotional act of reading, I transitioned into the topic at hand:

There’s a custodianship I feel for this moment. I am Charon, ushering souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead, but life and death here are high school and beyond. Pressed to be more melodramatic, I might argue I am ferrying them from childhood to adulthood, the final bell of sixth period our own Calculus-themed river Styx, but I don’t mean that in a grand sense. I am Charon; I guide a boat. I am guardian of the crossing and the crossing alone.

What followed was 1300 words navigating this metaphor of the ferryman. I explored the similarities between Charon’s role and mine, but I also waded through the many differences. Among the latter was a realization that my ferrying leads my charges not to an ending but a wide new beginning; after all, where high school and childhood end, the core experiences of adulthood begin. This revelation became the framing device for me to figure out my remarks later that day; this mindset of not toasting an ending so much as informing a beginning inspired what I would eventually say as sixth period concluded.

The piece I wrote, titled “Charon”, culminated here:

My shoulders feel strong today. I’m ready to row. This is my final day with them aboard my humble vessel, and I am going to make sure it is neither a somber occasion nor a wild party. Look back, look forward. Keep on going, keep on growing.

“Charon” was a moving piece. Powered by an allusion to Greek mythology, it carried an elegiac tone with its underworld imagery, but it held steadfast to optimism and affirmation. That piece lent me clarity, both verbally and emotionally. Despite its limited length, “Charon” had an intense vitality to it. I was as proud of it as anything I’d written in some time when I eventually clicked to post it.

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you might be scratching your head trying to remember if you missed the “Charon” post. The timeline probably doesn’t add up; my latest posts were about awards, crowds, and Inception…so anything earlier predates the seniors’ last day of school. So when could “Charon” have been posted?

My answer would be the truth: I posted the piece on May 19, 2023.

Were you to counter that I made no post that day, I would tack on one addendum.

“Charon” did indeed post on May 19, 2023.

I just posted it somewhere else.

*****

I remember being confused the first time I heard the word.

What Petra* said, I could have sworn to be “Finster”, the name of the embittered playground supervisor in Disney’s Recess. Miss Finster, a constant antagonist to TJ, Spinelli, and their friends throughout the show’s run on afternoon television, was a character I would never forget…but also nonsensical in the context of Petra’s sentence.

“What was that?” I asked, seeking to clarify what she had said. “You posted what where?”

I watched Petra retrace her words. Yes, watched: her eyes narrowed, her face squished, and her lips moved rapidly as though she was re-spawning her every utterance from the previous half hour.

“Oh!” A light bulb clicked on for her. She landed on my specific point of confusion without any further indication from me. “I said I’d only post that on my Finsta. It’s too dorky for anywhere else.”

I nodded, but the gesture convinced her of nothing. She knew me well enough to see the emptiness of my nod.

“Here. I’ll show you.”

Leaning over the desk, she opened up Instagram and selected a second account. Familiar with that process from when I had tried to post one AVID photo per day on a separate account from my personal one, I nevertheless had no idea why Petra was doing any of this. I hadn’t yet processed those last five letters of the word, my ear still held captive by visions of a cartoon villain.

Petra tapped a few times and then spun her phone toward me.

“Don’t read anything, but here,” she said matter-of-factly. “This is my Finsta.”

Although still finding my bearings, I recognized after only a few of her finger scrolls that this was different than the Instagram I knew. Every photo was out of focus and shot from an odd angle; most were gray-scaled, not as though put through a filter but as though shot in terrible light on an old camera. Normally impeccably dressed and composed to the point of self-consciousness, Petra was anything but her typically polished self here. This was the opposite of composed; it was chaotically un-composed even.

“So…this is where you post bad selfies?”

She shook her head as she pulled back her phone and closed the app.

“Well…sorta,” she said.

I must have looked confused because she elaborated further.

“F is for fake. Fake Instagram. You can post anything here. You don’t have to make it look good.”

In one motion, she contorted her face into a bizarre expression. Tongue lolled out, half-blinking, and with nostrils flared, she snapped a photo. She spun it around to me afterward.

“I can post this on my Finsta. Only my closest friends can see it.”

That made sense, but I remained a step slow. I had one more question lingering.

“But…why?” I intended my query as Why post that at all? but Petra took it as Why post it there and not on Instagram?

“You can’t be real on Instagram. You have to look perfect. You do your makeup first. On your Finsta, you can be real. No worrying about looking good for people.”

“So…you’re fake on your real Instagram but real on your fake one?” I stifled a chuckle, but I’m sure my head tilted like a confused puppy.

Petra gifted me patient respect when she withheld an eye roll and nodded. “That’s how it works.” Her words made me feel as old as navigating Snapchat had one year earlier, but her lesson was complete.

We shifted our discussion from there, but my mind stuck with her description of her Finsta. I tried to always listen on social media and internet stuff, knowing that early insight and adoption could keep me ahead of the curve. But there was something about the inherent contradictions of the Insta/Finsta divide that irritated me.

Why not just be real on Instagram? I wondered to myself. Be the change you wish to see in the world! Change the system from the inside! Why pretend in the public space? I naively wondered as a person who had just missed MySpace in high school and accrued zero days of experience as a teenage girl. Why not just be real all the time?

When I purged social media in 2020, Instagram was the first to go. Much as I tried, I could never feel out how to use it. I didn’t realize it then, but Petra’s information had shifted my own perception of the platform: I couldn’t unsee the insincerity and falseness in nearly every photo I saw. No matter what I looked at or considered putting up, I couldn’t shake that feeling of phoniness. Holden Caulfield would have had some epic rants scrolling through Instagram.

Instagram’s absence from my life was so welcome that I forgot that it existed on most days. Barring a specific link being shared with me, I rarely had cause to visit the place. It was gone from my life almost immediately.

The concept of a Finsta, though? That stuck around.

*****

I finished watching Succession several days ago.

That isn’t interesting, except that I only started watching Succession one week earlier. A prestige drama dense with social commentary and nuanced characters, every film and television YouTuber I subscribe to had seemingly made a post about it; even the sports vloggers and podcasters were joining them. To keep up with their discussions, I played the show from start to finish.

After completing the show, watching several video essay think-pieces, and laughing through Bill Simmons’ character draft, I needed to process and reflect on the show.

To do this, I opened up an aging online platform. After signing in with a screen name that long ago lost its meaning, I spent forty minutes ruminating over Succession. Nine hundred words later, I had a piece detailing my favorite characters and the moments that thrilled me, but also some deliberation about how odd it felt to listen to respected voices wax poetically about a piece of media I loathed.

Oh, did I fail to mention that? I couldn’t stand Succession. Hated it. Couldn’t wait for it to end. I had so much more fun watching Simmons’ character draft than the show itself that it’s almost obscene.

When I finished, I tidied things up a bit, titled the piece “What Others Like”, and then posted it. The maximum reachable audience was two people.

I have a private journaling app, Day One, that has some neat features. I love that app’s polish and flexibility. I’ve written there on many occasions; I literally pay for it! But I wanted to tell someone how I’d felt about Succession—just not everybody. I knew my impression was an outlier, and I also knew I might connect some of my distaste to specific relationships in my life.

Although the topics of Succession and being on the opposite side of not just the consensus but the consensus of voices I respect would have made for a rich newsletter, there was never even a consideration toward posting it here. I went immediately to that decaying old platform where I could modulate my audience down to precisely the two people who know me best.

This is the same place I posted “Charon” and the same place I’ve posted more than fifty times since 2023 began.

Several years after Petra first introduced me to the concept, I sheepishly had to admit that I had been too dismissive of the Finsta.

Because, it appears, I have one too.

*****

Petra’s description was distant enough in the past that I needed to make sure my understanding of Finstas was still accurate.

One out-of-nowhere text later, Jacqui had agreed to lend me her insight:

I don’t have a Finsta; I used to, but I never posted on it lol. From what I know, people usually use Finstas as their thought-dumps or diaries…The purpose is to get their thoughts out of their head, not necessarily to invite comments...Usually, only a few chosen people follow someone’s Finsta…such that only someone’s closest friends are updated on the more intimate parts of their life. Think [of one] like a private or close friends story versus [a] public-facing story.

Based on Jacqui’s thoughtful description, I learned that my understanding remains current. A Finsta still strikes back against the presentation required by Instagram and social media in general. Platforms like Instagram invite judgment, so people polish and curate what they post there. This is exhausting and feeds intense self-scrutiny, though, so people shrink their audiences down to only their most trusted confidantes and post more raw, natural versions of themselves there. Your Instagram is where you can be visible; your Finsta is where you can just be.

Jacqui’s definition didn’t press the issue as hard as Petra’s had, but the same sense remains: one needs a Finsta to be intimately real because one can’t be on a public-facing front. To curate authenticity and closeness, one needs to close doors. One must make the room smaller to shed that thick film of insincerity.

This idea makes perfect sense, by the way. Even though I’ve never had to face the same public judgment—I almost wrote “consumption” instead; maybe I should have?—that the average teenager does online, I still understand that retreat to safety. Social media works well when it centers on sharing, when some other person validates some element of ourselves. Unfortunately, social media can also dehumanize, particularly when distribution widens. We see this happen with celebrities most often; choose any post by a public figure, and one glance at the comment section will provide you the proof.

But people can be just as cruel and cringe-inducing with real people as they are with famous ones. Instagram is all about filters, but users seem to lose their own when commenting and DMing on the platform. It, therefore, makes sense to invest extra attention to detail when presenting something to a large audience.

I understand this with my writing. My posts on Substack, save for a few early pieces, go through several drafts. Revising each at least three times, I even enlist Grammarly as a final line of defense (porous defense though it is most weeks). Even those raw pieces that I’ve written while in the throes of an episode of mental un-health get a quick polishing to avoid letting spelling errors or word choice confusion disrupt my message.

Despite that polishing, I always think of myself as being wholly authentic with what I post and share. My revision and drafting serve as a gesture of respect to my audience: if people are going to read what I compose, I should invest in its readability. I want to think there is no self-censorship in that—just proofreading and clarifying.

I hesitate a bit on that statement, though. Posting on an alternate writing platform for a tiny audience of old friends gives me pause in light of my exploration of Finstas. I can’t deny that my other platform’s account is a Finsta, and one employs a Finsta to counter inauthenticity on their other account.

For the first time, I’m left struggling to reconcile how I write here.

If I’m wholly authentic on Substack, why do I use a Finsta?

*****

After writing the first four sections, I sat on this piece for the next several hours. I had jotted down a few notes about where to take it, but I really wanted to interrogate myself and see if I could stand behind my purported authenticity here in light of what I’d been considering.

I began by examining the nature of what pieces I’d written on my “Finsta” versus what I publish here. Scrolling through my 2023 alternate posts, I found a wide variety of topics and tones. I posted the darkest thing I’ve written in ages over there about my birthday, but the ratio between thoughtfully-upbeat essays and more intensely-brooding stuff was nearly the same as my record here. Tone-wise, the two platforms feature a comparable mix.

Skimming through that comparable mix led me to discover something unexpected: the overall quality of writing is often similar as well. Sure, there’s an unbound quality to several pieces there where I wander off on a tangent and, unlike here, never return. But most of them read very much the same as my regular pieces do here on Substack. Whether discussing a mentor in declining health, my first kiss, or a drive to San Jose, there’s a sense of confidence and purpose present. Many pieces—like “Charon”—could easily have been written or adapted for publication here.

That discovery delivered some relief. My “Finsta” doesn’t feature a wildly different tone or a radically different voice than I employ on Substack. The same person is writing in both places. I can be much more specific there, shirking anonymity in posts that are effectively private already, but rarely did I ever tackle subject matter there that I wouldn’t here. This wasn’t a real-versus-fake or shallow-versus-deep situation; almost all were just different pieces published in different places.

The biggest difference between the two is frequency: I post much more often over there. I’ve averaged roughly three pieces per week there, whereas I’ve surpassed my weekly limit of one on Substack only once (to discuss the Oscars). I maintain a schedule for posting only on this platform; I build selecting a topic, writing a piece, revising the draft, and creating its accompanying art into my weekly schedule. My “Finsta” is no holds barred: some weeks, I’ve posted four times, while others have included just one. Those posts tend to be spur-of-the-moment things and, thus, also much shorter on average.

Because Petra introduced me to her Finsta by showing me the blurry, amorphous photos she posted there, I tended to relate Finstas as a celebration of low-quality, low-effort productions. Insta was for polishing; Finsta was for stripping that presentation away. Exploring my own, though, I couldn’t help but conclude that my efforts on both platforms were elevating the quality of my writing. I’m fast approaching 100 pieces on the year between the two and my unpublished newsletter backlog—someday “Distrust the Process” and “Horse Water” will reach your inboxes!—and that volume of practice has raised the floor of what I produce. I have a better feel for the task now than I ever have before. Unlike a Finsta, it’s like my bad-selfie-shooting skills have rendered me not only a better photographer but also the owner of two accounts full of solid photographic art.

Still, the cruel part of me that insists on incriminating and indicting my every mistake refused to look past that handful of essays that could not be published here. That I would write something there that I wouldn’t put up for public consumption seemed like a proof of concept. I needed a Finsta because I couldn’t write fully as myself on Substack. QED. Your move.

That thought only haunted me for a few moments, though. While I duly confess to writing a few passages I wouldn’t be comfortable delivering to you on a Sunday morning, it dawned on me that, more often than not, I could have said the same about something I did publish on Substack. Pieces like last November’s “Pop” or February’s “Craterbound” stand as two of the best things I’ve ever produced. Both were pieces I fought myself over sharing…but ultimately chose to put out into the world despite their intensely personal natures.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had already, long ago, turned a corner on sharing via Substack. “Cope Floats” features four painful slices of personal grief and forced me to seek out permission from friends to share. That absolutely would have been something I slipped away in my “Finsta” years ago. So many others I’ve written for this platform coalesce around difficult subjects and either self-doubt regarding the future or painful recollections of the past that any line between my two-reader “Finsta” and my nearly 200 readers per week newsletter was long ago erased. I’m proud of that growth. I’m proud to no longer fear sharing what is in my heart.

And that pride owes to having an alternate platform. Without my “Finsta”, those decisions wouldn’t mean the same thing. Because I can always toss a tough topic there, every time I opt to share something difficult widely here marks a victory. I could choose to grant only four eyeballs access to my hardest-felt thoughts, but instead, I open my ribcage widely and bare my heart for whoever opens and whoever wanders by.

I cut my writing teeth over there, but I gnaw through trees with that same eagerness and proficiency here now. I’m not fake here but real there; I’m authentic and sincere on both platforms. I demonstrate it in different passages of prose for each.

These platforms are companion pieces, not antitheses.

*****

Social media has evolved significantly since I first encountered it in the early 2000s. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have undergone wholesale makeovers—not necessarily for the better!—while others like MySpace, my first, have effectively vanished. Their progressions have been responses to the changing landscapes around those using them. The social media world is simply a different place today than the one I joined in my early twenties.

When Petra introduced me to her Finsta, I was skeptical of its value and necessity. My naivety led me to question the Finsta’s role, viewing it as a cop-out rather than an extension of that organic evolution. I worried that carving out a separate, hidden space to be real would only stunt authenticity’s development.

I stand corrected; this need not be the case. Although not an Instagram user anymore myself, the patterns of my own analogous use of an alternative, small-audience platform has actually facilitated my increased openness on Substack. Having an additional outlet for writing and experimenting has nourished my creativity and fueled my growth as a writer. Instead of one service featuring sincere depictions and the other stoking Holden’s ire, both are honest reflections of the man I am trying to become.

In a perfect world, I’d still hope Finstas would be superfluous. There’s a powerful relief that comes from having one’s authentic self accepted at face value. I wish every person could tap into my pride when I share something intensely specific and vulnerable here and get peppered with messages of support and appreciation afterward. It’s a special feeling.

We’re not in that world. Not yet, at least. Until we are, then, may every person carve out a space for sharing, expressing, and reflecting on their lives and interests.

Any place is fine.

---

I always feel a touch out of my element tackling a topic like this that’s outside my wheelhouse—I don’t use Instagram and never really took to it—but this has been in my head for the last six months as the end of my running coincided with increased writing. I’m happy with where my exploration landed; writing about writing-to-learn actually helped me to learn. That isn’t a surprise so much as a satisfying conclusion.

Huge week for the Athletics franchise next week. I’ve never spent more time thinking about the state legislature of Nevada than I have these last five days.