I got my original Instagram account back.
That is a sentence I did not expect to write anymore.
Out of nowhere, I received an email from Instagram Security with a recovery code. It was not a reply to any recent support request. It was not something I triggered. It just arrived.
And somehow, this time, it worked. After nearly two years of being unable to log in, I was back inside the account almost too easily. No maze. No dead end. No vague error message. Just a code that finally did what recovery codes are supposed to do.
The funny thing is, now that I have the account back, I am not even sure what to do with it. I had already given up on it. I had already started publishing photos here on the website. At some point, I stopped thinking of Instagram as something I needed to recover and started treating it as something I had lost.
So now what? Start over? Clean it up? Leave it alone? Use it only to point people back here? I do not know yet.
But make no mistake: I am glad to have control of the account again. I do not know if someone from Instagram support saw my post and quietly pushed the right button. I do not know if this was just some delayed automated recovery process finally working after all this time. (I mean, they locked me out!)
I will probably never know. For now, I am just glad the account is mine again.