My Friend’s Instagram Account Has Taken a Dark Turn

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Dear James,

I have a friend I used to be very close with—I was in her wedding party eight years ago—but life circumstances, life goals, and geographic distance have rendered us a lot less so. We don’t communicate much aside from reacting nicely to each other’s Instagram Stories, which don’t reveal a lot about a person. Recently, her posts, usually just happy photo dumps of her cat and vacations with her partner, have taken a turn; they’re full of odd quotes about being a bigger person, learning not to hate, purging one’s soul. She also posted an Instagram Story that made me think her cat was dead. But I follow her partner, too, and it seems that this person now lives in a separate city with the cat.

I feel called to check in, but all avenues seem awkward. Our last text exchange was just sharing links to news stories from months ago. Who am I to text, “Hey, saw on Instagram that you may be going through something”? I could send her a message on Instagram, but that seems insufficiently serious if she’s indeed going through a dark period as a result of what I presume to be a separation. If my presumption is wrong, then reaching out would be even more awkward. Any insight here?

Dear Reader,

This is why I’m not on Instagram.

You don’t get news about a person: You get shifts in curatorial policy. But it sounds as if your friend—unless she’s working on an elaborate cover story before embedding with a politically suspect performance-art troupe—is going through something. And as you’ve been conducting your own informal probe into her situation, you’ve been keeping in mind the old journalists’ maxim: Follow the cat. The cat has moved. The cat’s in a different city. The self-help quotes are proliferating. I smell brokenness.

The question is: Do you want to help her? Or are you just kind of fascinatedly tracking the downturn in her online vibes? (Another Instagram effect: It turns us into dissociated consumers of one another’s lives.)

If you do want to help her—and you were in her wedding party, which in my book gives you a stake, however remote, in this marriage—then I see nothing wrong with checking in via text, carrier pigeon, whatever. In fact, I would say: Definitely do it. It’s never too late, or too early, or too weird, to see if somebody’s okay. Encourage her, if you can, to give an account of herself that exceeds the pixelated Instagram version.

Rooting for the cat,

James

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