Earlier this week, 23-year-old Jenny Johnston displayed the incredible ability to appear okay IRL although her online presence is a major car accident.
“When I first met Jenny she seemed like a pretty normal person, even sort of cool,” says Molly Higgins, who met Johnston at a party. “She was pretty easy to talk to and she didn’t do anything overtly insane, so it was pretty shocking to see her Instagram. It was like a carnival funhouse filled with hundreds of different selfies that all looked vaguely the same.”
While Johnston can hold a conversation in-person that makes her appear like a reasonable, thoughtful individual, her online presence counters everything about physical presence. On Instagram, Johnston used over 35 hashtags on one photograph alone, including hashtags like, “tbt,” “soyoung,” “verysweaty,” “hot,” “haha” and “!”
“It’s so weird because actually speaking with her face-to-face is so pleasant,” says Higgins. “Then you check out her Facebook page and it’s like a fucking 12-car pile-up leaving six people dead and 20 wounded. It’s just a disaster.”
“I’m so over this,” reads a status Johnston recently posted. It makes no mention of what she’s over, who she hopes will read her status or what she wants out of any of this. Several minutes later, Johnston then posted, “You know exactly who I’m talking about. Good energy only. #nodrama #lol #me #cute #follow #followme.”
When reached for comment, Johnston claimed she was just “being dumb.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” says Johnston. “I got really mad the other day and was just being dumb. It’s not a big deal.”
Johnston then continued casually dismissing her statuses, as though they weren’t indicative of an unhinged individual careening around online without any self-awareness.
“Jenny’s great in real life,” says Kiley Connellan, another acquaintance of Johnston’s. “She talks normally, behaves normally and can even appear to think normally, but the rules disappear when she’s online. Suddenly there are no street signs to create order, and she’s posting dozens of statuses and pictures a day about a sandwich she ate at Pret. It’s chaos.”
Johnston’s 2,350 facebook friends agree, all noting that her erratic hashtagging and unwarranted oversharing online are at odds with her personality IRL. It seems as though Johnston, like many others, just requires the correct platform to release what her friends call her “inner car crash.”
