I Want to Be an Instagram Bali Girl
On peeping toms, influencers, and how social media injects feelings that aren't quite ours into our bloodstream
After not having Instagram for three months, I randomly decided to re-download it one Sunday. The app greeted me with open arms, and while I was bummed at the tumbleweeds in my DMs, I gluttonously began my dopamine binge.
Five minutes in, and I noticed that the girls I’d befriended in Bali last year had returned to the island. They’d posted stories of martinis with bamboo-skewered olives at Miss Fish, bottle service at El Kabron, and bikini close-ups that teetered on labial recklessness. Meanwhile, I was in New York, drained from an eight-hour workday of playing whack-a-mole with clients on Slack.
Ugh. Not fair.
I wanted my thighs coated in sugary sand. I wanted to feel my moped slice through the humid tropical air. I wanted to be lounging by the pool on a Tuesday morning, buzzed off expensive champagne, with an ambiguous job situation that allowed me to do so.
I did not want to be working in New York, where I spend my days flitting between Google Docs and Zoom, sitting under a heavy, gray sky, gulping down the shower thoughts of thousands on LinkedIn and Substack, all in the name of building a “personal brand.”
For context, I lived in Bali for four months in 2024 before deciding to move back to New York City. But as my screen glowed before me, beckoning with Southeast Asian highlights, I felt seized with a pang of regret that maybe I should’ve just stayed.
Pause.
Pause.
Pause.
This train of thought disturbed me, and I immediately re-deleted Instagram and chucked my phone across the couch. I’d left Bali because I longed for the city, and since returning to New York, I’d never once thought, “Shit, I’ve made a mistake” until I opened Instagram.
It’s weird, isn’t it, how Instagram can convince you that the life you have now isn’t enough. Instagram was actually part of the reason why I moved to Bali in the first place. I was burned out, bored, brokenhearted, and totally enchanted by Bali’s Instagram halo that it could “fix” people like me.
But if you’ve ever been to Bali, you know it’s a weird, wild place. It attracts a very specific type of person: The crypto bros, salty surf dudes, life coaches, and influencers. (So. Many. Influencers.)
While I tried to integrate into the community, learn Bahasa Indonesia, and forge my independence, I was so stupidly heartbroken and lonely that I never successfully found my footing.
And there was a lot of shit that went down that made me very homesick.
For starters, the Peeping Tom.
It started one night after I’d just stepped out of the shower, topless and totally unaware, when my roommate spotted a man crouched by the living room window, watching me. She bolted towards him in a blind rage, but he skittered off. (Mind you, my roommate was tiny [like, 5’ 3”] but ready for hand-to-hand combat with this guy. Fucking fearless woman.)
Peeping Tom returned countless times. He grew bolder with each visit, first shining his phone light through the blinds to catch our attention. Then he started to play porn while masturbating outside. It wasn’t long until I was clutching a kitchen knife whenever I was home alone.
One evening, as I was about to fall asleep, I heard what sounded like someone breaking in. He’s here, I thought, and my body started shaking uncontrollably. (It ended up being a false alarm, but I still feel that fear some nights.)
There was another man who groped me one day as he drove past on his scooter. He looked back at me with this vacant, zombie stare. Honestly, I would’ve preferred the Teenage Cocky Bravado harassment. It’s a lot less threatening than cold, glassy eyes. As any woman will tell you, that’s serial killer shit.
On top of all the sexual harassment (fun!), I was also navigating relationship turbulence with my partner, who’d stayed in New York. We were together one day, then not the next, stuck on the Relationship Merry-Go-Round from hell, going in circles and getting nowhere.
One day, after a particularly heated argument, I impulsively decided to get cheek filler, thinking 1 mg of Juvederm Voluma would “really boost my spirits.”
Lol.
Instead, I sobbed in the bathroom while a gaggle of Restylane-lipped women waited outside. (In case you’re curious, I did end up getting the filler. It made no difference to my face, did not boost my self-esteem, and cost about $400. Follow me for more beauty advice. 💋)
While living in Canggu, I started loosely befriending influencer-type girls. They invited me out one day to see Meduza at Savaya, and I drove down to Uluwatu to spend the night.
Once at the club, they spent an hour snapping hundreds of photos and videos of themselves before the sun slipped under the Bali Sea. I waited silently for them to finish, too nervous to ask for a picture. They were unnervingly hot, and I knew that seeing my photo compared to theirs would have been devastating, as it goes when you’re amongst Instagram 10s.
For as Jia Tolentino writes, “Instagram face is a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips.” Meanwhile, my eyes were sunken in from barely sleeping (thank you, Peeping Tom!) and face swollen from crying every other day.
It started being too much. I also couldn’t shake the weird, icky feeling about being a digital nomad in a country where ⅔ of its economy depends on serving foreigners. That imbalance comes with severe consequences, which I wrote more about here.
So I decided to return to the US. The night before my flight, I hosted a goodbye dinner at a tapas spot in Seminyak with a few friends. As one of them hugged me goodbye, she said, “Bye, Alice.” It’s pronounced ah-leece, not “Alice,” I wanted to scream. She’d known me for two months.
It’s been a year since all of this went down. Why bother bringing it back up?
Well, writing about these memories gives me the chance to assess the pang of regret that Instagram sprung upon me, instead of just blindly accepting it at face value. Because most of the time, when social media triggers an emotion within us (envy, self-doubt, rage, etc), we don’t question it. The emotion feels true, so we believe it to be true.
But feeling and believing are two different things. For example, you feel the anxiety and low self-esteem when an acquaintance announces they made Forbes 30 Under 30. But that doesn’t mean you have to believe that you’re falling behind. Chances are, if you paused long enough to remember your own achievements (and that we’re all on our own paths) you’d realize you’re doing just fine.
Another example could be a troll leaving a snarky comment under one of your articles, and you feel the sting of embarrassment and shame. But again, that doesn’t mean you have to believe that you’re cringe. Instead, you can ask yourself what might compel a person to leave such a comment, and see it more as a reflection on them than you.
Same goes for when you’re gobbling a person’s Instagram highlights and get the churning feeling that your current life isn’t “enough.” But when you stop and reflect, and run your memories through the kaleidoscope of context, you remember why you made the choices you did.
In a weird way, I still miss Bali. (As Catherine Shannon writes, “It’s true what they say: The worst times make the best memories.”) But I don’t believe in the idea that the life I have in Brooklyn now “isn’t the right one,” despite what Instagram might suggest.
In Shane Parrish’s blog, he mentions how a CEO with a track record that rivals Warren Buffett once told him, “Shane, most people don’t actually think. They just grab their first thought and run with it.”
I believe the same goes for those knee-jerk reactions you get from social media. The good news is you don’t have to run with it. You can pause, question that impulse, and then decide whether it deserves your full belief.
This was a really good read. I can relate in a different way from having lived in Bali.
Thank you for this, I really feel so seen!!!