Excerpts

I am addicted to Instagram, specifically Instagram Stories. If you don't know what I'm talking about, please bear with me; for your understanding of what follows, it's not necessary to share my addiction. In fact, it could well be better if you don't, for your own sake. Or perhaps not. Shall we see? Stories is a feature on Instagram that successfully mimics Snapchat, where you can post as many videos and photos as you like, with any number of filters, stickers, and text, and it doesn't show up on your main feed. So, as Instagram says, "You don't have to worry about over-posting." A Story lasts twenty-four hours, then it disappears forever. In August, I visited Ireland for my sister's wedding. In the run- up to it, my father celebrated his birthday and I was playing a comedy festival in Dublin. Lovely occasions, all: celebrations, family time, and reliving memories of home. Before I left for Dublin, I was extremely excited about making the trip. Not because of homesickness, or a love of work, or even the chance to escape the sticky heat of a New York summer. All I could think about was the content. I caught myself grinning in bed one night, imagining the quality and quantity of content those occasions would generate. I suddenly felt grotesque, focusing so hard on the material I could glean for social media from what should really be a lovely private vacation. My grin dropped, until a moment later when I successfully brushed my qualms aside by picturing toddlers on bouncy castles. Adorable! I could film them in "rewind" mode, making them look like superheroes with pigtails! And it would be good for showing off my work stuff too, the festival shots. I envisioned the hyped crowds of people waving in sequence as I snapped a photo of them from the stage. I'd look like a stadium performer, the Springsteen of hesitant observational comedy. All of that would come along and be picked clean and fed to my phone even before the big day itself, and there would definitely be stunning shots from that, I mean, my wedding day, my big day, the day I'd always dreamed of! Excuse me, I beg your pardon, I meant to say my sister's big day. Either way, there would be tearful speeches, heavenly food and sweet little flower girls. And I was determined that there would be at least one glorious image of me on the wedding day itself, in my wedding dress, as in the floaty pale pink dress I was wearing for the wedding, looking adorable and ephemeral, like a healthy fairy. The dress was actually a little too close to my skin tone for comfort, but I knew I could play with the contrast and filters before I posted it. I knew I could make it all look perfect. Perfection, when contrived, is laughable. Instagram is easy to dismiss for the way it flattens and fluffs. I'm happy to put up with accusations of vanity, though, to put something beautiful out there in the ether. Besides, I go for perfection in my posts, fun in my Stories, and that's my clunky motto. Perhaps because they disappear, the Stories people post tend to be more spontaneous, more silly, and definitely more enthralling than regular videos. There's a comedian I know a little, and every day I see their little Mexican hairless dog trembling in anticipation of a walk; I watch Chance the Rapper's baby girl learn to count; and I see what my sister Lilly is making for lunch. Stories are hypnotic, endless tiny glimpses into peoples' homes and heads. To stitch them all together into one big quilt to wrap myself in would surely answer every question I have about who we are and why we're here. This is what I've been looking for , I think, rapt, as I lie dead-still in my bed, tapping the snooze button on my alarm for the fourth time that morning. I'm cautious of this addiction, and of this belief that a new piece of technology can allow me into the secret lives of others, because I've fallen in love like this before only to see it all fall to pieces. For a brief few weeks during a comedy festival in Melbourne in 2010, I got completely hooked on Chatroulette. Still in its first year, this chat website randomly connected users to each other so they could chat over video. The Russian teenager who created it, Andrey Ternovskiy, named it Chatroulette because of that scene in The Deer Hunter , where prisoners of war are forced to play Russian roulette. That note should probably have signaled how it would all end up, a game of chance with terrible consequences. In this case, while I never blew my head off, I certainly saw many, many headless men masturbating. But there was a sweet spot just before that happened that lasted at least those few weeks I spent captivated in a Melbourne hotel room, flashing through portals into other worlds. When people who didn't share a language were connected, we could still smile and wave or conduct impromptu puppet shows. I was randomly connected to a German couple having a dance party with their friends, a teenager in Florida who wanted to talk about legal drinking ages, and an architect in Israel who carried his laptop outside to his veranda so we could see the sunset together. It felt like a real human connection, albeit through code. Soon enough, though, the curious ones, us chatty ones interested in connecting, we were outnumbered. Click after click became dick after dick. Like most of the Internet, Chatroulette soon got overwhelmed by all the dicks, and women, who were less likely to venture on there in the first place, almost completely stopped visiting. Instagram feels much safer, although of course there's a price to pay for that, with their standards that ban female nipples and their ever-increasing number of advertisers barreling through my feed. For now, Instagram and Stories have restored for me a place to join in, to span time and geography and connect with others as we all express ourselves in whichever way we see fit, as long as we don't show our nipples. Before I left, my therapist asked me how I planned to deal with all the feelings a trip to Ireland evokes in me. A visit home typically presents me with a real smorgasbord of emotions. I feel guilt for leaving, regret at old failures there, joy at being in a place so familiar, and love for my people and my misty little country. These feelings generally mix in together to create some kind of phantasm that blurs up on me and swallows me whole at the arrivals gate in Dublin Airport. I answered my therapist immediately. "Ummm, maybe I will just stack those feelings up and organize them when I'm back?" We smiled and bowed at each other slightly, as we always do when I make some kind of corny joke to buy time, and I sighed. "I suppose I'll steer clear of alcohol and I'll write down my feelings and express myself the best I can in the moment I'm feeling something." Expressing my feelings in the moment as best I could? I didn't know it then, but Instagram helped me to do just that. I walked through the streets of Dublin, feeling like a weird ghost myself, because me and those streets, we know each other well, but I'm not there anymore. I lived there, in five different homes, for twelve years. Now I don't have a home there. The redbrick buildings on South Great Georges Street are still standing; the unchanged smell of peeled eggs and coffee wafts out of Simon's Place, where I used to sit with my first boyfriend; the national broadcaster still plays the Angelus bells at midday; and the same man with bright blue eyes sits begging on Wicklow Street. There should be a word for what feels like déjà vu but for when you actually have experienced the situation before. Memory isn't the right one. Memories are what I have when I'm away. There is something physical that happens, something more than a memory that crowds in when I'm back there again. I try to document it. I capture the sound of the church bells, the metallic blue of the River Liffey, and the steam from the hot cup of tea I pour on my first morning back, and I put them all on my Instagram Story. I'm saying, Can you see this? All of this is still here, and now I am back here too. The best functions of this feature are the ones that are missing. There are no likes and no shares--the usual call-and-response reward system that goes with most forms of social media is gone. When I use Stories, I feel less like those laboratory rats who keep pressing a button for more cocaine. Which is nice. I wonder how much longer the feature will last; it's existed since August 2016 and has grown to over 250 million users in a year. It is increasingly filling up with advertisements that snap me out of my reverie as I watch other peoples' Stories, causing me to huffily close the app altogether. Of course, I open it again soon after. I scroll through my friends' Stories back in New York. There was a double rainbow in Williamsburg and most of them captured it. I love to think of them all taking a second to look up and do that. The guy I'd just started dating had a Story up: pretty standard fare of trees swaying and his cat looking pissed off with a cone around her neck. He must have gotten her spayed, praise be. For a second I'm back on his bed, listening as he explains, haltingly, that she gets so horny, and loud about it, he has to rock her hips to "calm her down." And in that second I'm horrified and impressed all over again at this man who loves his cat so much he'll help her masturbate. I wonder idly if he bothers to check who has watched his Story. I often check, although when over a thousand people have, it's hard to keep track. The ability to see a list of names of people who have watched your stories is an intriguing feature. It is very satisfying for the imaginative among us--I know that my busy little brain whirs to make sense of it all. Why is he watching, is she showing someone else, what will they all think of me now? Sometimes, before I post, I need to stop and check: Are these thirst traps? Some photos, some videos, am I hoping they will set in motion some kind of tryst, like perhaps I'm "tryna fuck," as my young friends would say? Yes, sometimes, but mostly this is bigger than some low-level neediness. I am sending these out to the world, anyone, anyone, anyone there? These images are me trying to say, to anyone who cares to look, this is what it's like, this is who I am. Excerpted from Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl from Somewhere Else by Maeve Higgins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.