Why I am fed up of Insta poets romanticising heartbreak

In our Unfollow column, we take a look at the rise of social media tropes and put a finger on why some of them haunt us, even after we close the app. Call us negative, but we’re positive that sometimes, the only thing you can do to keep sane in our age of overstimulation is mute, hide, and unfollow.

I have never really ‘got’ poetry. While studying English Literature at University, poems made me strangely nervous. What a waste of a degree, I worried, as I looked down at the jumble of words I was supposed to understand. Lecturers assured me of rhyme schemes, imagery and “the best words in the best order”, but I just saw tangles of adjectives and strangely fractured sentences that made me feel small. 

Insta poets, however, are different: their unique selling point is their accessibility. Their poems are short, digestible chunks of sentimentality, designed to pierce our hearts before our fingers have scrolled past them and onto another image of someone else’s avocado breakfast. I should, in theory, love them—and for a long time I did.

Like every other millennial woman with a pulse and an Instagram, I worshipped Rupi Kaur. Famous for her crisp and poignant poetic-uploads on the  app, Kaur has amassed a devoted 3.7 million followers, of which I was dutifully one. When her first poetry-book finally arrived, the genre-defining Milk and Honey (2014), I devoured it, scribbling in its margins, dog-earring its pages, and withholding every dreadful instinct I had to tattoo a line (tastefully) onto my wrist. Kaur’s transition from smartphone to paper was seamless. Milk and Honey was soul-bearing and easy to understand; little, emotional confessions I relished in. 

The natural—and easy—criticism to make about Insta poetry is that its accessibility lends itself to simplicity. To this I cried: ‘sexist’. While I agreed that the standard of Insta poetry was sometimes questionable, it is no coincidence that much of the criticism stems from the fact that the field is populated mostly by women. In contrast, men have dominated the poetic canon for years, with writing likely to be just as flawed, but without the disapproval. Kaur and her Insta poetry cohorts, many of whom are women of colour, are not only bringing poetry back into the mainstream, but speaking for a female experience which is so often neglected. I stand by all this. 

Yet, as I found myself whiling away many a stagnant Sunday evening scrolling through swathes of gloomy verse on Instagram, my feelings toward Insta poetry started to change. I have always had a flare for tragedy (as a child I saw Les Miserables for my 5th, 6th and 7th birthdays, which I think speaks for itself) so Insta poetry, with its glamorisation of sadness, and specifically heartbreak, acted as a sort of emotional kryptonite. Wistful strands of Insta poetry justified more wallowing than I needed—I winced at bad-breakups I had never experienced, and mourned loves I had never lost.

Up to this point, my life has been a series of unremarkable events, and until recently, I registered undramatic as being synonymous with unimportant. For years I found myself eagerly awaiting enormous turmoil and heartbreak— as if having someone romantically wrong me would validate my otherwise humdrum adolescence. 

Insta poets, meanwhile, seem to always get their hearts broken. And the more I indulged in their work, the more I sensed I was missing out on some grand, universal experience. I started to panic: my relationships (romantic and otherwise) had always been fairly straightforward. A sensible person would consider this a victory, but the alluring melancholy of Insta poetry told me otherwise. Kaur, for example, has an extraordinary ability to make sorrow look elegant and covetable. Every time she reeled off something pithy about heartbreak (“what is stronger / than the human heart / which shatters over and over / and still lives” ), I would look down at my untampered heart and feel inadequate. If I had never felt as deeply as Kaur, maybe I had never really felt anything in the first place? It was a dizzying, if not unsettling, prospect. 

There is a fine line between being honest about sadness (necessary), and romanticising misery (troublesome). For all their important musings on love and life, and the kaleidoscopic spectrum of human emotion, I wonder why Insta poets so often blunder into the latter. My revelling in Insta poetry was not a cathartic form of empowerment, but a damaging exercise in worrying and self-pity. And as soon as I woke up to this, things started to shift. Where Insta poetry once registered as poignant, I now see it as over-indulgent and trite. I stopped lusting after drama and chaos, and instead started to view my entirely uneventful existence for what it truly is: lucky.

Anything you’re cutting out of your social media diet? Send your pitch to kathryn@sleekmag.com.