Someone showed me my own Instagram in line at a coffee shop. I pretended not to know her.
It happened in SoHo. I was in line for coffee, minding my own business, running through my phone. The girl in front of me turned around and showed me her screen.
It was my Instagram.
She said: "I love her, do you follow her?" And I looked at my own face on her phone and I said "yeah, she's cool" and I bought my coffee and I left.
I'm not famous. Let me be clear about that. I have a following. There's a difference. Famous means strangers recognise you across a room. A following means sometimes a girl in a coffee shop has your face saved on her phone.
But even that is strange. The person on her screen - that's me, sort of. It's the version of me I decided to share publicly. The one that performed well. The one with the right light and the right angle.
The person standing in line in day-old mascara waiting for an oat milk latte is also me. That version doesn't get posted as often.
I thought I'd find it flattering. Sometimes I do. Mostly I find it interesting - the way we construct versions of ourselves and then send them out into the world and they travel to places and people we'll never know about.
She genuinely liked whoever she thought she was showing me. That's something. I hope the real version is at least as good.
x Seri.
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