Companion Essay

When I was first starting this experiment, now final project, I was worried about people's interest in submitting and following the Instagram. I was concerned that people would not be responsive to submitting their personal stories to my page and I would end up with no posts on my Instagram.

Contrary to my fears, my classmates were just as excited as I was about the depth and range of this project and were ecstatic to see the final result. They even offered to write me a few posts to start out. When I talked to my family and friends, they also readily participated by submitting stories. I was able to get my younger brother and my grandmother on board and submit their stories (see Allan and Aidan and Carol and Lorraine). My friend Nathalie actually sent me a powerpoint presentation of three stories about the girls standing up in her weddings. As I am also a bridesmaid, seeing the stories was an opportunity to learn more about the three girls in the bridal party with me this upcoming year. 

I was amazed at the excitement that telling these "meet-cute" stories brought when I asked people to participate. However, when I shared the idea with my friends and family, the response I would often get it was confusion because most people had never been asked how they met their best friend. No one has ever been really interested they said and this frustrated me. We often see these meet-cutes romanticized in the media, something allowed to only happen to couples. This is also exclusive and can sometimes be sad for those who don't have a significant other. Friendship often gets overlooked in our society as a relationship but they have a profound effect on our well-being and growth as people. Yet seeing the excitement and appreciation in people's messages and faces, as they were submitting the stories, showed how important people's friends are to them and how important these relationships are. I hope as this Instagram gains more followers and its message is wider spread, it promotes those to take time to reach out to friends they have not talked to in a while or to take a step back and realize how their friends make their lives better. 

I appreciate this class giving me the opportunity to work on an assignment that gave me so much joy. I was one of the people that got caught up in this romantic idea that I had to have a significant other in my life to have meaning. I was always saddened when I saw those couples Instagrams and saw how happy those people were with each other after their "meet-cute" moment. It felt like I was missing this connection to another person as I scrolled through photo after photo of happy couples. When I started this project, I did not want anyone to feel like that when they read all of the posts above. Everyone has a friend or has had a friend that has been influential in their lives and you had to have met them somewhere and in some way. I wondered why more people were not talking about this kind of love, the friendship love. This love can last for entire lifetimes as those significant others come and go. I am incredibly happy with the final result of this project. I was able to capture this underlying magic of friendship and start to understand how people met each other at the right times in their lives and stay friends for the rest of it. I hope to continue this project and this message in my Capstone class in the winter semester of my senior year. Until then, I will try to keep the Instagram updated and keep the message alive. 

~Julia S.