AFTER THE MOVERS LEFT and I’d made an inaugural trip to Trader Joe’s to stock up on necessities like cheap wine, frozen Indian food, and animal crackers (my favorite snack food, something my ex-boyfriend Nick had mercilessly teased me about, often quipping, “Can you really call yourself a vegetarian if you eat animal crackers?”), I collapsed onto the only piece of furniture in the apartment—my bed—and, too tired to locate glassware, began swigging wine directly from the bottle.

I scrolled through Instagram, double-tapping gorgeous nature shots, pictures of internet-famous dogs, and candids of my sister Maggie’s children with their chubby faces smeared with food, until I stumbled upon one of Izzy’s posts. It was a softly filtered, overhead shot of a meal for two: two plates of green salad topped with slivers of rare steak, two glasses of bloodred wine, and a partially sliced artisan baguette on a wooden cutting board. I recognized the dinner plates as the mismatched blue and green ones we’d found at the Brooklyn Flea. Izzy and I had picked them out together, but she’d insisted on paying for them, later claiming that made them hers when I tried to take half of them with me. I rolled my eyes and continued, seeing more celebrity pets, some gorgeous shoes I couldn’t afford, and then my friend Hannah’s attempt at an artsy shot of what appeared to be a bourbon old-fashioned. I cringed with secondhand embarrassment. The poor thing would never learn. She had been running a small lifestyle blog called Hannah in the City for almost four years now, and she hadn’t gained any traction or improved her skills. Most of her images were just like this one: poorly framed, poorly lit, with poor attention to detail. The stained, crumpled napkin in the corner of this shot might have read as a style choice from another photographer, but from Hannah it just looked amateurish. I’d always deflected when Hannah asked to write a guest post for my old blog or suggested that she “take over” my Insta for a day.

I couldn’t blame her for asking. She had almost no audience while I had over a million followers. But it had taken years of hard work to cultivate that following, and I wasn’t about to entrust it to someone as careless as Hannah. A woman has to zealously protect her brand.

I hadn’t always been so meticulous about what I posted. Like every other basic white girl on the planet, I’d started a blog in the late 2000s with a free WordPress template and very little to say. I wrote terrible poetry and posted memes and thinly veiled gossip columns about my friends. (Lavender slept with yet another member of the worst fraternity on campus, I wrote, as though Jasmine wouldn’t be able to tell that her code name was “Lavender” or, for that matter, that she had been the one sleeping with the terrible guy.) Despite being a shameless scandalmonger, I never lost any friends over it—almost certainly because no one was reading that blog. I had, like, two unique visits per day. I was essentially shouting into a black hole.