We were told that the truth would set us free. But only if we told it the right way.
I’m Marla Newborn, a licensed social worker and addiction therapist. I write about recovery, shame, and the systems that dictate who we’re “allowed” to be. I call those systems ‘The Shame Factory’.
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Always On
In the insta culture, everything is now. Immediate reactions, instant opinions, constant self-reinvention. There’s no space to pause, reflect, or fall apart quietly. If you’re not visible, you’re assumed to be gone. If you’re not sharing, people start to question whether you’re growing at all.
Real recovery rarely looks how people expect it to. It’s quiet. Private. Messy. Nonlinear. Sometimes it’s not clear what’s happening at all. People are unlearning, grieving, recalibrating. They’re trying not to fall apart at work. They’re navigating relationships that are half-safe, half-wounding. They’re building tolerance for things they used to run from. None of that shows up well in a feed.
What It Looks Like in the Therapy Room
I see the impact of this every day in my practice. Clients show up feeling behind – not just in life, but in their healing. They wonder if they’re failing because they can’t explain their pain in the right language, or because they don’t want to talk about it online. They’ve absorbed the idea that if they’re not visibly recovering, they must not be recovering at all.
It’s not just pressure to get better. It’s pressure to prove it.
What Insta Culture Can’t Hold
But insta culture doesn’t know what to do with what can’t be packaged. It doesn’t value process – it values clarity. It doesn’t reward reflection – it rewards performance.
And if you’re in a long, confusing, painful season where nothing makes sense yet?
It will make you feel like you’re failing, when you’re probably doing the deepest work of your life.
McLuhan and Warhol Saw It Coming
Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message” – meaning the structure itself changes us. Andy Warhol warned, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” They both saw it coming: a world where identity gets flattened into performance.
This piece was sparked, in part, by a recent article in New York Magazine about “West Village Girls”—a profile of young women living an idealized, highly curated version of New York City life. I didn’t need to read every word to recognize the system it reflects. Even when we think we’re thriving inside it, it’s still working on us.
That’s what I mean by insta culture. It’s not just a set of platforms. It’s a system that reshapes how people relate to their own minds, emotions, and even their pace. It teaches us to look at our lives through the lens of how they’ll be perceived – flattened, captioned, and approved.
The Shame Is Still There – Just Better Dressed
I know this system because I’ve lived in it too. Insta culture doesn’t just pressure people to be visible – it pressures us to be emotionally fluent and narratively coherent, even in the middle of pain.
Shame hasn’t disappeared. It’s just learned how to look good on paper.
We’re expected to “own our story” before we’ve even made sense of it. And we often do—because we’re afraid not to. I’ve shaped my own pain into something readable, even when it wasn’t ready, because I didn’t want to disappear.
That’s the trap. You start curating your pain for legibility instead of moving through it at your own pace. Not because you’re shallow or performative, but because insta culture teaches you that being visible and being valid are the same thing.
You Don’t Owe the Culture a Performance
It’s no wonder so many people feel alone in their healing – not because they are, but because they don’t see it mirrored honestly anywhere.
- You don’t have to narrate your healing before it’s ready.
- You don’t need to be understood in real time to be legitimate.
I’ve lived long enough to know that insta culture didn’t begin with apps. I’ve seen it inside systems that were supposed to save people. I’ve felt the pressure to own my story before I understood it—not just online, but in rooms where that story had to follow a script.
So no, this isn’t just about Instagram. This is about systems that condition us to present a self that others can believe in – before we’ve had a chance to believe in it ourselves.
You get to be unavailable. You get to be quiet. You get to fall apart and come back together off camera. That’s not hiding. That’s staying human in a world that keeps asking you to shrink yourself into something more acceptable.
PS: If there’s an alternative to insta culture, it starts with refusing to narrate pain before you’ve even survived it. It starts with disappearing when you need to and trusting that disappearance isn’t failure – it’s restoration. It’s reclaiming the right to evolve offscreen.
Are you looking for a safe space to discuss this further? Book with Marla HERE. For more information about Marla’s great work, click HERE.
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