Why Didn’t U Like My Pic
In 2021, Trudy Hall, Co-Founder of Orelier, became profoundly depressed and could not yet name why. She understood part of it clinically (an ADHD-related dopamine deficiency) but the deeper truth was harder to locate — she was disconnected from her own nervous system. Lost, overstimulated, and unable to identify the source, she spent obscene amounts of time on Instagram, a place where humans beings are essentially packaged and sold.
Around that same period, early mainstream reporting began exposing the health effects of digital life. Journalists including Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seetharaman reported on Facebook’s internal research showing Instagram’s harm to teen mental health, body image, and self-perception. As Trudy read, something clicked. She was not just undisciplined, distracted, or broken. She was addicted to a system designed to keep her there, and it had made her sick.
At first, she was furious. She wanted revenge. But the eventual solution she built was not revenge. It was strategy. That anger became the ignition point. In 2023, she began what would become a three-year independent investigation of Instagram, choosing the platform as her case study and herself as the subject. She tracked nervous-system responses, posting patterns, analytics, visibility, and suppression. Images that made her body an object of scrutiny accumulated engagement. Posts that displayed critical thought (especially criticism of the platform itself) disappeared into the shadows. She kept documenting. In secret, she began building a solution — Orelier. Alongside the research, she wrote a visual novel, Why Didn’t U Like My Pic, slated for publication in 2028. Then, on April Fool’s Day of 2026, she revealed the project. The rest is unwritten.
