It is not, ahem, ~smiled upon~ to post a nude the day after your father dies.

Caroline Calloway

With an Instagram grid filled with castles of Cambridge and views of the West Village; her name is Caroline Calloway and she is a mess. She eats dinner on her floor and sells paintings of boobs and copies of Matisse for eighty dollars and up. She is both loved and hated, and I myself have been on both sides of the spectrum. Now, dear reader, you may think this post is in time with the media storm surrounding Calloway within the last year, and more recently, the last few weeks after a former friend and co-writer, Natalie Beach wrote an op-ed for The Cut concerning their friendship.

That is not this post. I’m not trying to capitalize on the Calloway trend. She has inspired me to start writing again, with her raw posts about the death of her father which coincided with the latest flood of headlines bearing her name. I’d been following her journey to literary redemption since AND WE WERE LIKE, the novel that never happened, which originally catapulted her to “fame” when she squandered her advance and never published the book.

Since the non-publishing of AND WE WERE LIKE, Calloway has been published in and about by the New York Times no less than five times. She’s also appeared in The Harvard Crimson, Elle, The Atlantic, and Buzzfeed. She’s a fixture of NYC Twitter, and even inspired dozens of #Calloween costumes.

I find a lot of myself in Caroline: her Anglophelia, her struggles with mental health, her lack of punctuality. She’s spontaneous and weird and artistic, and very much not the type of personality anyone would expect of an almost-thirty-year-old. She broadcasts her intimate thoughts and experiences to 800, 000 people, often multiple times a day, and they respond in droves. Thousands of comments and likes flood in to validate her manic, her mourning, and her melancholy.

Though my social reach is nowhere near that of Caroline’s, I strive to meet her level of authenticity.

I’ve tried. And failed. And tried again.

I try telling myself likes are a social construct. I try listening to friends, who say they like my posts, and what others think doesn’t matter.

I’ve tried. And little by little, I’m getting there. Thanks, Caroline.