Pinocchio Syndrome
being real and taking up space
Several weeks ago Ariya (
) asked me what shows or movies I watched growing up where I saw a girl on screen and said, “that’s me.” Part of me was reticent to answer, because logically I knew that as a thin, white girl most girl-media was aimed to reflect me. I feared this accidentally becoming a gotcha moment. But I also couldn’t come up with any specific character from girlhood that I felt I was like. When I was a kid, I don’t remember ever looking at someone onscreen and thinking, “she’s just like me.” Any image felt aspirational, not intrinsic. Even Angelina Ballerina, the anthropomorphic, ballet-dancing mouse on PBS, was something I wanted to be so bad that my mom enrolled me in dance lessons, but I left my first ballet class inexplicably in tears (I think this granular moment aptly reflects the relationship I’ve had with dance as a community and institution for the last 20 years). “I want” is a phrase I can clearly remember, and have always been able to articulate. “I want” still escapes from my body, leaping out of my mouth, dancing down the sidewalk every day. Needy, unyielding, frantic to find something else to become. What did it say about me that I was unable to identify myself in others as a child? Even the bad kids see themselves in Judy Moody or Junie B. Jones. I saw myself in no one, but I wanted to be everyone.That conversation haunted me for days on end. Parents are often warned about excess screen time and media consumption, lest their children become negatively influenced by what they see on screen; yet I felt like a fraud for never having some innate sense of self that shepherded me toward one piece of media or another. What do you become if you are always wanting to imitate someone else? It feels like both my external self and internal self have cycled through a myriad of presentations - a freak, an emo, scene, indie, bougie, then indie again - but as time goes on, none fit any better. Trying on a familiar favorite feels more and more like a performance, requiring too much energy to feel as effortless as it (seemingly) once did. I always want something else, and when I get it, which is much more easily afforded to me now as an adult, I find I don’t really want it anymore and I’m never sure I ever did. The ubiquitousness of internet profiles, internet everything, turns selves into public performance. It feels like I write too much about social media-driven consumerism and its impacts on self-development, but this is more than Instagram becoming a shopping mall. Unlimited iterations of social media profiles allow us to refine the psychological self-knowledge we glean from things we consume, whether it’s what we know we are or what we want to be.1 Whole profiles are dedicated to specific facets of self, allowing us to indulge in the illusion that we are more one thing than another, or to spread ourselves wide across many swaths of internet culture. I suppose if you came into the world with a strong sense of self, then maybe you would be less impacted, or you would become a caricature of yourself. If you have never set your own anchor down in the sea of selves, though, then you are simply becoming a more and more abstract form, an idealized construct. But the point of an ideal is that it does not and cannot exist2, so you’re left untethered to reality, adrift if you stop to look up from your phone.
To go through life feeling so incongruous with everything around you all the time is a Sisyphean task. Tangible senses of self lose their meaning. Grief adds a layer to this, of course; a common theme in the last seven months has been my inability to function normally in conversation with close friends and acquaintances alike. This new complexity of somehow never being able to anticipate everyone else’s expectations of me throws a glaring LED spotlight on how unreal I feel. Like Pinocchio or the Little Mermaid, I find myself wishing to be part of where the real people live. But there are few ways to make yourself become real without a fairy godmother or a sea witch. I thought that I could squeeze myself into reality through brute force, contorting my body, often literally, into the world. I thought if I ate one thing and not another I could feel real. I thought, if I run so fast for so long that I might throw up, then I’ll feel real. Sometimes savoring the flavor of a dish or releasing endorphins can make you feel real. But the part that no one mentions is that your motive can’t be punishment or lecherous, greedy desire. To walk among the real and the living means to engage with things that make you happy. The tough part is figuring out what those things are, and letting go of any preconceived notion you might have about it being the “right” thing or how it affects the image you think you want to broadcast.
Tonight, I will make a big green salad3 using some vegetables I bought at the small grocery walking home from work. I will mix the salad with my bare hands, dressing coating my fingers. I will take the biggest fork I can find and eat standing in my kitchen directly from the bowl lurking over the counter, and for that time, I will feel real. Not because real women eat salad to stay skinny and hot, not because eating vegetables is the only way to ensure you stay on the planet, but because I like this salad recipe, and because not having to set the table for dinner or use the “correct” utensils is one of the small joys of living alone.
It seems I have gained some new subscribers through the Substack network - which is exciting for me! I’m so sorry I’ve been absent, but I’m reading and thinking and writing. This is just a brief piece to say that I’m still here, and that more is coming. The fascinating part about grief is that it’s all-consuming and yet also barely as noticeable as a breeze. Recently I haven’t been inspired to do much, but the season is changing, and I am too. More soon. x.
for more, see “Romantic Webs” in Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. or just the whole book, really.
I often fear my interest in Baudrillard last summer ruined me.
This makes me think of how comprehensive and important we perceive the social media profile to be, though a ‘profile’ only describes a two dimensional shape, an outline or a ‘facet’ like you said. loved reading!