Why I didn't publish photos of myself online for five years

And how I'm doing it differently this time around

In 2018, after years of creating images that wound up in the feeds of the nearly 70k people who followed my Instagram, I decided to stop posting photos of myself on the internet. This letter is the most honest accounting I can muster of what it was like to inadvertently create an online persona, how it impacted my personal life, why I took five years of…