Blog / 2025 / Getting to Know Me through My Social Media Profiles

It was November of 2020 when I deleted Instagram and Facebook, with the rest of my corporate social media profiles to follow soon after. For all I’ve celebrated my liberation from these apps in the last five years, I’m sad to report that there is one thing I truly miss, and it’s a doozy:

I yearn to be judged through a social media profile.

Writing it out like this, for all the Internet to see, makes my ears go hot and my armpits prickly. I’m embarrassed to admit that I ache to have people assess my value based on my follower count and a cursory glance at some of my most recent comments, but I pine for those times now and again.

The social-media-assisted super-speedy appraisal of a person’s character is the way a lot of people feel safe* interacting with other humans these days and I miss feeling safe to my fellow humans.

This is my Facebook profile in the moments before I deleted it. It’s mostly black, because I had it on “dark mode” to conserve at least a small amount of power—a notion that reads as quaint today, given how AI’s massive suck on our electrical grid is now the default on search engines that lead with so-called “answers” that a robot has freshly hallucinated for you instead of links to actual answers.**

Please note my stats: thousands of “friends” and not a small amount of “followers” as well.

I’d been broadcasting my imminent departure for six weeks at this point, a move that allowed me to figure out other ways of staying in touch and to hear from contacts who were, as the comment above reveals, just as done with the platform as I was.

In the upper right square is a “live” I did on Instagram in July of 2020, months prior to quitting. This was after I’d taken a sabbatical, but before I’d told anyone that I was getting ready to leave permanently. Look at those views! I’d only been on Instagram for four and a half years at this point, but I almost never got less than forty “likes” on my posts and I often achieved triple digits.

Looking back at these profile screenshots and knowing all I know today about how my brain feels since leaving social media, I would still quit.

It irks me more than it probably should that there’s a fake Gwenn Seemel Instagram account that uses my old handle and my art, but I don’t wish I’d left dead profiles up, holding my spot on the apps, as it were. The gesture of deleting my profiles completely was meaningful to me.

That said, it is a little bit pleasing to share my stats with you, to prove I was once believed to be trustworthy according to the numbers.

I’m fairly certain that at least part of my desire to be social-media-judged comes from living in a small town that’s addicted to Facebook. The various Lambertville Facebook pages function as a public square so effectively that I can’t help but wonder how the community used to come together. Refusing to join Facebook at this point feels a bit like declining to engage in civic discourse. I hate that Meta has been able to take ownership of my community’s conversations in this way.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on being a part of Lambertville. In December I’ll be speaking at a lovely new store in town, Howling Basset Books!

I’ve titled the talk “The Essential Work of Rainbows” and it’s all about making a living as an artist when your creativity both delights and challenges at the same time. My aim is to encourage others to question the supremacy of tech corporations, while also sharing about self-publishing a number of books.

Howling Basset Books
45 N Main Street (entrance on Coryell Street)
Lambertville, NJ 08530

Talk: December 6^th from 6p to 8p