*TRIGGER WARNING* Suicidal thoughts 

*SPOILER ALERT*

The title of this post is inspired by Buddy Pine AKA IncrediBoy and then Syndrome from the Disney-Pixar film The Incredibles (2004). Anyone who has seen this film will know that Buddy wanted to be Bob Parr AKA Mr Incredible’s sidekick called IncrediBoy but when Mr Incredible rejected him, he later became Syndrome, the film’s main supervillain who wanted to get revenge on Mr Incredible. 

In the past two months, I have had an encounter with someone I thought was a legitimate fan of mine, but soon she went on to show her true colours. To protect her identity, I have changed her name to Sheila and I have also concealed any usernames, Instagram posts and profile pictures in the screenshots that I use throughout this post where appropriate. 

On 12th June 2020, I got a lot of notifications on Instagram from a person whose original username resembled my real full name. At first I thought it was someone who was impersonating me, but it was actually someone who made photo edits of me that were initially very impressive.

While Sheila did original edits of another creator and me at first, she soon began to share pictures from my account, my sister’s account and other creators’ accounts without editing them. I wrongly thought she was stealing those pictures from our accounts, but it turned out she no longer had the phone app she used at that point to edit them. 

Nearly two months after Sheila created my fan account, she messaged me on Instagram to ask me for some relationship advice. Because I’m single, I told her I wasn’t the best person to give her that kind of advice. She then messaged me again to ask me a question that made me feel uncomfortable, but I told her I had no idea how to answer that question. Next she told me to have a nice day, but then she sent me a message where she said she felt like she wanted to die and then she sent me another one saying I made her feel that way. I immediately deleted our entire Instagram direct messages conversation and then went on to have a lie down as I was feeling very tired due to the heat. A little while after that, I saw that she had unfollowed me, changed her username for the umpteenth time, appeared to have removed her fan edits and replaced them with an image of a well-known sports logo accompanied with irrelevant hashtags. I even saw in her stories that she made a false allegation about me. I then unfollowed her and blocked her.

After having blocked and unfollowed Sheila, I posted the whole scenario in my Instagram stories. I got a lot of supportive messages in response to the stories both on Instagram and Facebook. The whole situation even made me want to take a break from posting my own photos on Instagram for a while but I still continued to add to my stories.

A day after I blocked Sheila, I saw that she had made nasty comments on a couple of posts from another person I follow (that person shared screenshots of Sheila’s comments in their stories). The next morning, someone else messaged me to tell me that Sheila had randomly sent them some pictures of me. Sheila had also sent someone else some pictures of me along with some insulting messages. This encouraged me to ask anyone I follow to block her whether they were following her or not and I even asked them to block her if she was following them. There is another thing that happened between Sheila and me that I prefer not to mention in this post. 

The saddest thing about this whole scenario is that I have had to put up with it after having to deal with my grandad’s loss, some uncomfortable messages about me in a thread about yet another creator on a gossip forum, some negative comments on my YouTube videos and a stressful volunteering moment. 

If you have an Instagram account like me and someone makes a fan account about you, please be wary of their actions. They may appear to be a genuine supporter to begin with, but they may soon say horrible things about you and other people you follow or follow you. 

This is not a sponsored blog post.