On Privacy, Performing,
and the Quiet Luxury
of Being Unknown.

I remember when Facebook was just for college students. That is not nostalgia talking — it is a specific and important detail. You needed a .edu email address to get in. That barrier was the whole point. The people in the room were people you actually knew, which meant when you posted a photograph that was slightly provocative — even by the very modest standards of 2005 — your friends would call you. They would literally pick up the phone and ask if you were okay. Did something happen? Do we need to come over? That accountability existed because the space was intimate. It was bounded. You knew whose eyes were on you.

Then Facebook opened to everyone and the room changed. And the room has never stopped changing since.

I was right in the middle of that transformation — starting to become a model during one of the most significant cultural shifts in the history of self-presentation. I watched it happen in real time: the slow migration from a digital space where oversharing was still embarrassing into a digital space where oversharing became not just acceptable but expected, then rewarded, then monetized, then the entire point. I watched people I knew morph — gradually and without always realizing it — into curated versions of themselves. Not lying, exactly. Just performing. Editing. Selecting. Arranging the visible evidence of their lives to produce a specific impression in the minds of people most of them had never met.

I watched all of that and I kept thinking: I don't want to do that. I never found the language for why, exactly. I just knew it didn't feel right. It felt — the word that kept coming to me was odd. It felt odd to share the intimate details of your life with strangers. Not wrong, necessarily. Just fundamentally odd. Like handing your diary to people at a bus stop and watching them read it.

How I started — and what scared me about it.

Here is the strange irony that I have lived with for a long time: social media is partly how my career began. Someone found my photographs on Facebook. Not because I was trying to be found — I had posted some senior portraits without any particular strategy — but because that's how visibility worked in 2010. You existed online and people saw you. Ken Laurence found me that way. Michael Carson photographed me for the first time shortly after. The door that changed everything opened, in part, because I had a presence on a platform I was already ambivalent about.

And then I found out that someone had saved my modeling photos. Had taken them. Downloaded them. Was keeping them somewhere on the internet as a fan, as a collector, as whatever word you use for someone who takes a piece of your image and makes it theirs without asking. And I was not angry, exactly. I was something worse than angry. I was unsettled in a way that didn't resolve. It felt like a violation of something I couldn't fully name — some boundary between the professional image I was putting into the world and the private person I was still trying to protect behind it.

That is part of why I started going by Finn. Why I eventually landed on Infinity. I wanted a name that belonged to the work, not to me. A buffer. A professional identity that could exist in the world without dragging my whole self into public. It was not about hiding — I was walking runways, appearing in magazines, working with film productions. It was about maintaining the distinction between what I chose to share and what I chose to keep. Between the work and the woman. That distinction felt essential to me and it still does.

What the algorithm actually asks of you.

There is a thing that happens on social media that I do not think enough people talk about honestly. It is not dramatic. It does not happen all at once. It is gradual — a slow and almost imperceptible narrowing of who you are in favor of who performs well. The platform gives you data. The data tells you what people responded to. You do more of that. You get more response. You do even more of that. And somewhere in that loop, without fully deciding to, you have become a character. A version of yourself optimized for engagement. Recognizable, consistent, reliable — and slightly less real than the person you were when you started.

I want to say this carefully, because I am not judging anyone who has made different choices than I have. Building a following is real work. Creating content is real work. The women and men who have built genuine communities online have often done something genuinely valuable — they have democratized access to information, to beauty standards, to representation, to conversations that the gatekeeping industry would never have allowed. I am not dismissing any of that.

But I am also not going to pretend that the algorithm is neutral. It is not. It has preferences, and those preferences shape behavior. It rewards performance. It rewards consistency. It rewards a kind of relentlessness — the constant feeding of content into a machine that has no memory and no loyalty and will simply move on to the next account the moment you stop. And what it asks of you, in exchange for visibility, is your attention, your time, your interiority. It asks you to make the private public, over and over, at a pace that does not leave much room for the private to exist at all.

"Somewhere in that loop, without fully deciding to, you have become a character. A version of yourself optimized for engagement. Recognizable, consistent, reliable — and slightly less real than the person you were when you started."

The psychiatrist I saw years ago said something that has stayed with me. She said that a sign of a healthy childhood is that you do not spend your adult life seeking external validation. You develop an internal sense of your own worth that does not require constant confirmation from others. I think about that observation often when I am on social media. Because the entire architecture of these platforms — the likes, the followers, the views, the comments, the little dopamine hit of a notification — is an external validation machine. It is designed, literally engineered, to make you want more of it. And wanting more of it means giving more of yourself.

I never wanted more of it. That is not virtue — it is just how I am wired. I never got a hit from the numbers. I never felt better about my work because a post performed well or worse about it because it didn't. The work was the work regardless. The photograph was beautiful or it wasn't. The runway walk was strong or it needed adjustment. None of that changed based on how many people tapped a heart in the app.

What "following" means — and what I think it should mean.

I have always struggled with the word followers. Not in an abstract philosophical way — in a genuinely personal and practical way. I do not want people to follow me. I never did. I never thought about my career in terms of building an audience that would then go wherever I pointed them next. I thought about my career in terms of craft. In terms of showing up prepared, doing the work well, building relationships with the people who hired me, and letting the quality of the work speak for itself over time.

That is the old model. Not old-fashioned — old in the sense of having been the way that reputation actually functioned before the internet reorganized everything around attention metrics. You built a body of work. People who mattered saw it. They hired you, or they told someone who hired you, or a publication covered you, or a brand sought you out. The work created the following, not the other way around. The media talked about you. You did not have to become the media yourself.

Instagram changed that equation for a decade or so — and I will be honest that I benefited from some of what it offered. I built a following. I lost it because I changed my name, changed my focus, changed how I showed up. I did that more than once. Not because I was confused about who I was, but because I was not willing to freeze myself into a persona for the sake of an algorithm's preference for consistency. The platform wanted me to be one thing, reliably, forever. I was not interested in that contract.

What I actually do with my private life.

I want to dispel something that I think people assume about people who are not consistently online: that we are either not living interesting lives or that we are being mysterious on purpose. Neither is true for me. I have a full life. I travel. I go to dinners with people I love. I see art and films and shows. I read. I walk. I have conversations that I will never write a caption about. I have opinions about things that I will never put in a thread. I have a health journey that I have been navigating with care and intention for years. I have a career that has taken me to places and rooms that very few people from Birmingham, Alabama ever get access to.

I have hundreds of photographs — maybe thousands — of things I have experienced, places I have been, people I love, meals I have eaten, mornings I have noticed something beautiful. Almost none of them have ever been posted anywhere. They were taken for me. They were taken because I wanted to remember. Not because I wanted anyone else to see.

That distinction — taking a photograph for yourself versus taking a photograph for an audience — is one that I think has almost completely collapsed for many people. The act of experiencing something and the act of documenting it for others have become so fused that they are often indistinguishable. You see something beautiful. You photograph it. You post it. The experience and the documentation happen simultaneously, so fast that you barely have time to simply be in the moment before you are already narrating it for strangers.

I am not immune to this. I am not claiming some pure and uncomplicated relationship with privacy that exists outside of the cultural pressure we all swim in. But I am deliberate about it. I notice the pull. And most of the time, I choose to keep the photograph for myself.

What this means for a model in 2026.

People ask me — genuinely, with real concern for my career — why I am not building my following more aggressively. They tell me I am wasting my platform. That there are young women who would benefit from seeing someone who looks like me doing what I do. That I am leaving opportunity on the table. I understand the logic. I even appreciate the concern behind it.

But here is what I want to say to that: the assumption that visibility on social media is the only form of visibility worth having is itself a product of the last decade's particular cultural moment. And that moment is shifting. We are already seeing it shift. Influencer fatigue is real — documented, measurable, accelerating. Consumers are increasingly skeptical of sponsored content. Brands are increasingly interested in authenticity that does not look like it was assembled for the feed. Major companies are returning to the model of a brand spokesperson — someone with longevity, credibility, and a coherent identity — over someone with a large following and three product integrations a week.

The irony is that the deliberate quietness I have maintained for years is starting to look, in 2026, less like a career mistake and more like a positioning decision. Not because I planned it that way — I genuinely just did not want to perform. But the result is that I have not been commodified. I have not been so thoroughly associated with products and sponsored content that my credibility is complicated. I walk into a room and people do not already know everything about me because they follow me on Instagram. There is still something to discover. There is still something to reveal on my own terms.

"If everyone is an influencer, who is being influenced? And if everyone is selling something, what does it mean when someone is not?"

The question nobody is asking about the people at the top.

I think about the people who built massive followings — hundreds of thousands, millions — and what it costs to maintain that. Not financially, though there are real financial costs. I mean what it costs in terms of identity. In terms of the slow compression of a self into a content calendar. You have to be consistent. You have to be present. You have to deliver the version of you that your audience has come to expect, even on the days when you are exhausted or grieving or simply not interested in performing. The following becomes a job. A demanding one. And like many demanding jobs, it can become one you are trapped in by the time you realize you do not enjoy it anymore.

I have watched people I know reach the numbers they were chasing — the follower counts that were supposed to represent success — and find themselves miserable on arrival. Not because success is inherently disappointing, but because what they were actually chasing was not followers. It was validation. And validation, when you finally get enough of it, turns out to be a leaking bucket. There is never a point where you have enough likes to feel permanently okay about yourself. The external confirmation that social media offers is real but temporary — it fades almost immediately, which is why the machine requires constant feeding. You have to do it again tomorrow. And the day after that. Forever.

That is not a life I want. It is not a life I ever wanted. I was never in the competition for it, even when people around me assumed I was. I remember realizing that at some point — that there was a race happening that I had never agreed to enter and that everyone around me seemed to assume I was losing. I was not losing. I was just not running.

Why I built this website — and what I hope it does.

This website exists because I wanted a space that I own. Not rented from a platform, not subject to an algorithm, not governed by a company's decision about what content gets promoted and what gets buried. My own digital property, on my own terms, that people can find if they are looking for it and that will exist exactly as I intended it to regardless of what happens to any given social media platform next year.

I am sharing things here that I have never shared publicly before — the signing story, the NYFW years, the health journey, the mentors, the journey home. I am sharing them because I am ready. Not because an algorithm told me it was a good time to post. Not because a brand partnership required me to be more visible. Not because I was performing vulnerability in the way that social media has trained people to perform it — the strategic reveal, the carefully constructed confession, the caption that shares just enough to generate connection while protecting the most tender parts.

I am sharing because these are stories that needed to be told, in a format I can control, at a length that respects the complexity of what I am actually trying to say. A journal. A place. Something that will still be here in ten years in exactly the form I built it. That matters to me in a way that a post that lives in a feed for forty-eight hours before being buried by the next one simply cannot.

Those who find it will find it. That is enough.

Where I think we are going — and what I hope we choose.

Artificial intelligence is going to do something interesting to influencer culture, and I think it is already starting. When AI can generate a perfect image, a perfect caption, a perfect face with a perfect body in a perfect location, the scarcity value of a real human being simply existing and being interesting starts to mean something different. Perfection stops being aspirational when it is infinitely reproducible. Imperfection, specificity, and genuine human experience start to become the actual luxury goods.

I see people fatiguing from it already. Fatigue from the relentless consumption of curated lives. Fatigue from the influencer economy's particular combination of aspiration and inauthenticity. Fatigue from the sense that everyone is performing and nobody is simply being. There is a hunger — I feel it and I think many people feel it — for something that is actually real. Not edited. Not optimized. Not selected from forty-seven takes for the one that shows the light correctly.

I believe we are heading toward a cultural revaluation of privacy. Not because people will stop using social media — they won't — but because the relationship to it will shift. Being offline, or substantially offline, is already becoming associated with a certain kind of quiet confidence. The people who do not need to broadcast everything. The people whose self-worth does not require an audience. The people who are rich in ways that have nothing to do with a follower count.

I grew up in a time before this was complicated. Before sharing required a decision about platform and timing and caption and hashtag. Before existence itself became content. I walked outside with my friends. I had conversations that no one recorded. I had experiences that existed only for the people who were there. I miss that — not naively, not as someone who wants to pretend the world has not changed — but as someone who knows from lived experience that it is possible to have a full and rich and meaningful life without performing it for strangers.

Privacy is not a retreat. It is not a refusal. It is a choice about what is sacred and what is for public consumption. It is the decision to hold some things close — not because they are shameful, but because they are yours. Because not everything that is beautiful needs to be broadcast. Because some of the best things in a life are the ones that nobody else ever sees.

I know myself because I have had the space to. I know what I love and what I want and what I will not compromise and what I am building toward — because I have not spent fifteen years managing a persona in public. I have spent fifteen years actually living. The work, when it speaks, speaks for itself. The people who know, know. And the quiet that surrounds all of it is not absence.

It is intention.