aspiring to not be self-aware
despite her best efforts, @menasmedia has become too self-aware.
For a couple of years, I’ve kept an Instagram account that serves as a digital diary of the media I consume (books, paintings, movies, etc.) I started the account my senior year of high school, and basically nobody followed it. It was really refreshing, to be able to post whenever and whatever I wanted, without thinking about how other people would perceive it. When I got to college, I kept posting, and my college friends started to follow the account. I don’t know exactly when I started to feel discouraged from posting, but there was a point when I felt like I had to be more intentional about what I posted, because people’s perceptions of me were being shaped by what I posted. Rather than it being my own space, it became a place where other people were always watching and analyzing (or at least, they always could). I felt like I was making decisions about what to post/not to post/to post and archive based on the people I knew would see it, and I recently realized that I really don’t want to be that self-aware!!
So, I decided to start this page instead. I’ve toyed with the idea of starting an independent blog a couple times, but I lack basically all of the graphic design and coding skills to do that, so this is the compromise. I am hoping that recording the media I consume on here will also push me to be more eloquent and thoughtful, since I’ve started to have a tendency to just describe things as ‘cool’ and ‘awesome’ (how middle-school-sports-boy of me! sincere apologies.) One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2025 (and 2024, for that matter), was to have more opinions about things. So this is me taking action towards my aspirations!
I don’t really know if this way of sharing content will do away with my desire to not be perceived or (even better) lead me to be more at peace with it. The future is undetermined. I’ve got to be at least a bit comfortable with other people thinking about me, or else I wouldn’t have started this series at all. Mostly, I want to restore honesty and genuineness back to Mena’s Media, and that no longer seems possible on the profit-driven vertical hellscape of Instagram. Although to be entirely truthful, I will probably still post less significant snippets of media there, and it might devolve into a regular second spam account like everyone else has (perhaps a travesty to my devoted followers but for me a welcome step towards being less ego-driven).
In the effort of being more genuine, here is something that I actually think about all the time but haven’t really posted on Instagram: my county map. I think she is beautiful and wonderful and she satiates my appetite for maps perfectly. I could stare at her for days. It brings me such joy to tick off the counties after going on a road trip, and I love being able to spatially visualize my life. In another life, I might become one of those people who has visited every single county in America, but I don’t know if I’m actually that committed to driving up and down and back and forth across Nebraska.
stay tuned for more media
love, mena
i love your prose