Robin’s Reverie

On Solitude, Connection, and Digital Diaries

I was asked, just a few days ago, why I started @robins_reverie. I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a conference, and a few students—curious and perhaps politely inquisitive—posed the question over lunch. The tone was light, but the question stayed with me. I’ve never really known how to answer it.

The most straightforward explanation is that I started the account while on a year abroad in Turin. I didn’t want to flood my main Instagram with too many images, nor did I want to forget what I was seeing and thinking. So, I made a second page. A digital diary, of sorts. A place to store moments without too much curation or scrutiny. That was the initial impulse, I think—somewhere between restraint and preservation. But even as I write that, I sense it’s not the whole truth. The reasons were more complex, more layered. They often are.

I’ve always been inclined towards analogue things. I take handwritten notes. I prefer physical books. I print photographs and keep them in albums. I still own a fountain pen that I use most days. I find comfort in tactile rituals and quiet processes—handwritten notes, printed photographs, books with folded corners and pencilled margins.

When I moved to Italy, I brought a notebook with me and kept a diary in the traditional sense. But I also found myself wanting something else: a space that could bridge the solitude I felt, and offer a quieter kind of connection. That’s where the idea of a digital diary came in—not to replace the handwritten one, but to run alongside it. A way of grounding myself in a new city by making certain moments visible, shareable, even if only faintly so.

That, perhaps, is where the account began in earnest. A desire not to be entirely alone. A wish for some sort of connection, however small, to persist between me and the people I had left behind—or even between me and the version of myself I was still discovering. Instagram is not a diary in the traditional sense; it is public, and therefore performative. But it can still hold the spirit of a diary. And that’s what I hoped @robins_reverie might do.

At the same time, I was thinking more than usual about self-accountability. I had embarked on a year designed to be enriching—to learn, to wander, to slow down, to look. And I worried, privately, that I might not do those things properly unless I had something resembling an audience or, perhaps, a judge. I don’t say this with pride. In fact, it’s a little embarrassing to admit. Why should I need the knowledge that someone, somewhere, might be watching in order to feel I am living fully?

There is, of course, a wider conversation to be had here—about validation, about digital habits, about the pressure to aestheticise one’s life. I don’t want to overstate it, but it would be dishonest not to acknowledge it. We are shaped by our tools. And social media, however modestly we use it, changes the texture of our experiences.

Still, I don’t think @robins_reverie was born out of a need for approval. Not primarily. If anything, it emerged from a quieter need for presence. I was in a city I didn’t fully know, speaking a language not my own, navigating unfamiliar routines and streets and shop counters. And while I was often happy—truly happy—I also felt a certain kind of existential weight. Not a crisis, but a question. Who am I when I am not visible?

To say that social media made me feel less lonely is, I suppose, both obvious and faintly depressing. But it is true. It offered a sense, however illusory, of community. There were people who saw what I saw, or at least saw that I had seen it. There were messages from strangers, kind and sincere, that said: I feel that too. There were comments from friends back home. There was, if nothing else, the small comfort of continuity.

I had also, around this time, read a book I wouldn’t normally read—The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. I don’t gravitate towards self-help books. I find them often overly confident, economically motivated, and founded on vague generalities. But there were a few passages in that one that stayed with me. One of them was simple: do what makes you happy, and do it without justification. Not for prestige, not for approval, not for any guaranteed outcome—just for the joy of it.

I realised that I did, in fact, enjoy documenting my thoughts and surroundings. I liked taking photos. I liked writing short reflections. I liked the process of paying attention. And I liked the thought that, somewhere in the quiet spaces of the internet, someone else might enjoy them too.

The strange paradox of life is that we are always both connected and alone. I’ve always been drawn to the idea of solitude—what it means, how it feels, where it lives in our daily lives. My academic work explores this, too: how literature stages loneliness, how art reveals the hidden textures of isolation and desire. We do not always need to be seen in order to be ourselves—but being seen, sometimes, confirms that the self exists.

And that is perhaps why the account mattered most in those early months: it helped me feel seen in a way that was not invasive. It allowed me to share quietly, without the pressure of being liked, in every sense of that word. It became a space where I could be myself—no agenda, just fragments of a life, stitched together in image and caption.

I am fortunate, beyond measure, to have close friends. I do not want this to read as the lament of someone who is isolated or adrift. I have people I love and who love me. But friendship, even the most enduring kind, does not always mean shared passion. Often, our closest companions differ from us in important ways. They challenge us, complete us, offer perspectives we would never reach alone. That is their beauty. But sometimes, it is also comforting to find people who reflect our own instincts—who love the same books, notice the same details, are moved by the same scenes. And that is where the internet, for all its flaws, becomes quietly miraculous. You don’t necessarily meet these people, but knowing they exist changes something.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the account gave me space to feel less strange. That sounds dramatic, but I don’t think it is. All of us, in one way or another, walk through the world feeling a little apart. We think our habits are odd, our enthusiasms eccentric, our thoughts irrelevant. But often, they aren’t. And finding people who mirror them—however indirectly—is one of the great modern consolations.

Over time, the account grew. Not rapidly, at first, but steadily. More people followed. More people wrote. And slowly, it became something larger than what I had intended. It became a sort of shared space, a place where others could offer their own reveries, their own reflections. I never wanted to be an influencer—whatever that means—and I still don’t. But I do want to continue sharing things that feel sincere.

That said, my relationship to the account has changed. Now that I’m in Cambridge—Cambridge, England, that is—with a firmer support network, a clearer sense of rhythm, and more daily conversation, I don’t need the account in quite the same way. It no longer functions as a substitute for connection. It is, rather, a form of expression. A way of extending the interior life into the outer world. Something between a gallery and a notebook.

There is a kind of relief in that. In not needing to post, but simply choosing to. In letting the account be playful, without burden or expectation.

Of course, I’ve strayed from my initial ideas. That’s inevitable. No creative space remains static. But I think that’s part of the point. The deviation tells its own story. The evolution of the account reflects, in some small way, the evolution of my life during this period. The shifts in mood, place, thought. I don’t know exactly what the account means now, or if it means anything. But it has been meaningful to me. That is enough.

And perhaps that is where I want to leave this reflection—not with a grand statement, or a conclusion, but with a gesture towards continuation. I will keep posting. I will keep noticing. I will keep making time for reverie.

I also hope to write more here, on Substack. It feels like a natural extension of the same instinct: to pause, to reflect, to make something quietly public. The pace will be slow. The tone will be earnest. I have no great manifesto. But if you are reading this, then perhaps we already share something. And in the end, maybe that’s what I was looking for: some small sign that I wasn’t the only one who lives life in the way I do.