Catherine Tran never expected her Instagram account to blow up overnight; let alone receive hate messages, experience the anxiety of running a big account, and even receive death threats.
The Instagram page @wollongongaffirmations takes the emerging ‘affirmations’ meme format and adds some Illawarra flavour to it, and it has gained a lot of popularity in less than two weeks.
The affirmation meme format plays on the act of ‘affirming’ a statement or proposition to validate it as reality. It’s a common mental health and even spiritual practice in things like yoga and meditation. In Catherine’s memes, this sometimes takes an ironic/satirical angle where the joke is trying to ‘affirm’ something that isn’t always true. E.g., “I will beat Albion Park traffic”. Similar pages exist for Sydney, Melbourne, etc.
But while Catherine’s memes strongly resonate with a lot of people from Wollongong, she herself only moved here last year.
“A lot of people think I’m born and bred here, but I think I’m just really observational. I absorb things really, really quickly,” she says.
Growing up, Catherine would write her own novels, and she enjoys documentaries and books about anthropology. She finds the study of people very fascinating, and that comes through in her affirmation memes.
“When you’re a writer, you notice everything around you and you try to analyse people’s behaviour. And when I was in high school I wanted to be an anthropologist, and it’s like you study different types of people and you study social groups so I find it really interesting because I feel like an anthropologist sometimes,” she says.
As a creative who always desires having an active project, Catherine draws on her anthropological observations about Wollongong when making her memes.
“I just thought of things that were very niche or relatable, to be honest most of the affirmations I make are things that I always thought were just kind of peculiar to me, and then I’m really surprised when they do well,” she says.
“I also try to think of a universal experience that people have gone through, so the stuff that I haven’t gone through but that I see happen often.”
The @wollongongaffirmations account blew up overnight after Catherine made two memes at 5am, and it is currently pushing the 10k mark.
“Part of you is like ‘that’s so cool’ to have people following you, but then part of you remembers that you never really understand why influencers complain or kind of talk about their struggles, but once you’ve dealt with really stressful messages, or like hate and stuff it does kind of take a toll on you. Especially when you’re just some random, normal person.”
The dark side of going viral
But her account’s sudden popularity also has a scary side. Hate messages, the anxiety of running a big account, and unfortunately, even death threats. Many people were pressuring her to do an admin reveal (announcing her real identity) but she wondered why people couldn’t just enjoy the memes.
“Everyone was trying to figure out who I was, it was really annoying, I didn’t understand why everyone wanted an admin reveal. It was really frustrating, I was getting stalked, people were getting harassed it was genuinely so ridiculous,” she says.
“Someone messaged me saying ‘everyone here’s grown up with each other and everyone knows each other, so they wanna find out who it is”
“I actually never wanted to reveal my identity and I was planning on shutting down the account after I was getting death threats and stuff.”
But after discovering the truth about some of the people harassing her through the @wollongongaffirmations account, Catherine felt a bit safer.
“They were saying I was an ableist, entitled white male, and all that dumb stuff. They were making campaigns and stories. It actually turned out all those people weren’t even from Wollongong; they were actually from Sydney! That’s why I felt a bit more comfortable with the admin reveal because they weren’t even from here,” she says.
As a female person-of-colour with a disability, Catherine feels that these comments are pretty ridiculous, highlighting it as an example of how people will behave poorly online when they don’t see your face or really know who you are.
Catherine doesn’t believe in the death threats anymore, and while her mental health is still impacted by the anxiety around running a meme page and mean messages, the nice ones help her keep going.
“But at the end of the day, I get so many nice ones, and the one that really keeps me going is this older lady who lives overseas, and she said that every time she goes on my page it makes her miss our hometown and gives her nostalgic memories,” she says.
“It surprises me when so many people relate and it makes me feel less alone, I feel like a bit of camaraderie with so many people who identify with the same things.”
Copycat accounts
One of the things to come out of @wollongongaffirmation’s popularity are ‘copycat’ accounts, some of which just target individual suburbs like Unanderra. Some of them are well-meaning and fun like Catherine’s account, but she worries others aren’t.
“I got sent one this morning and I was really not that happy about it, because they were using the same likeness of my account, the same pictures, but they were using it to actually like bully people,” she says.
“I have seen a lot of other affirmations pages pop up, and I’ve seen one that copies my posts word for word but… oh well, I think it’s cool like starting a movement but I just think it’s not cool when you use it to bully people.”
The @wollongongaffirmations Instagram page hasn’t been up for very long, but in two weeks Catherine has been confronted with a mix of negative people, but also overwhelmingly positive people who lift her spirits up.
“When I made posts about how I was receiving death threats or how I was leaving for a bit, I was genuinely surprised that people kind of cared,” she says.
“I think that what’s quite unique to Wollongong is that people are a bit more sensitive to mental health, given the things that have happened here”
Through @wollongongaffirmations, Catherine has managed to tap into the hearts and memories of the Wollongong people, surprisingly without living here very long herself. And in turn, Wollongong has tapped into her own heart too.