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Imani and The Freedom of Living IRL
My dream is to quit social media altogether and simply live and work IRL. My dream is to be Imani.
My friend Imani is doing something revolutionary in 2021. She’s no longer active on social media. She deactivated all her accounts and is now living her life in real life. Her absence from all platforms wasn’t motivated by a scandal or shame. Someone didn’t dig up her old Tumblr and find insensitive posts or harmful comments. Her Twitter didn’t get suspended like mine did for telling a Kanye stan to die in a fire. (I was let out of Twitter prison eight hours later.) Imani’s step back from posts, tweets, stitches, stories and snaps was born out of pure disinterest. A proverbial “meh,” if you will.
Yes, she’s dabbled within the realm. She remembers feeling special when MySpace creator Tom showed up in her Top Eight only to realize Tom was in everyone’s Top Eight. She also remembers needing a college email address to log into Facebook back when it was called The Facebook. She was present when Twitter launched and was confused when someone replied to a tweet she originally posted hours prior because Twitter didn’t create the which-tweet-is-this-person-responding-to function in the early days.
Imani saw the beginning and end of Vine, live-tweeted on Scandal Thursdays, and danced along to the “Why you always lying?” viral video which…
