the emotional residue of digital spaces

today, i spent hours manually unfollowing over 5,000 accounts on instagram. slow, tedious work — instagram doesn’t make it easy. no “select all” button. just tap, unfollow, scroll, repeat.

somewhere in that repetition, nostalgia crept in.

i started remembering who i used to be. a rusty designer. curious, impressionable, desperate to grow. i followed anyone whose work looked even a little better than mine. tapping “follow” was a quiet way of saying, i want to be like you.

tutorials. portfolios. aesthetics. vibes.

now? i barely engage with them. not because they got worse — but because i grew. my skill sharpened. my taste matured. what once lit a fire in me now feels like foundation i’ve already built on.

then i noticed something else — accounts stuck in time. brands that hadn’t posted in years. profile pictures that hadn’t changed since the early 2020s. pages from another era, another version of me.

and i realized: i have those too.

figmagik. controlalternatedelete. desolve. to mention just a few.

each one started with energy, hope, and a plan. each one felt like this might be the one. and now? they sit there. untouched. not deleted — but no longer alive either.

but here’s what i’ve come to believe: they weren’t failures. they were acts of courage.

i call them experiments. early brands i built. side projects that ran their course. bold attempts to show up, to share, to try — even when i didn’t have everything figured out.

the internet is full of those brave attempts.
unfinished work. ghost pages. good ideas that didn’t stretch far —
but stretched someone.

i find something beautiful in that.

so as i unfollow, i’m not rejecting them. i’m honoring them. making space for new stories. new attempts. breathing brands.

some may come back. some may stay archived. but they all left something behind.

maybe that’s what digital residue really is — echoes of who we once were, and everything we dared to try.