Performative Self-Improvement & the Pandemic

One holiday weekend while visiting my parents, I convinced them to watch Fleabag, forgetting that the first scene of season one involves graphic anal sex. Laughter eventually broke the awkward silence and I watched as my parents succumbed (my dad, reluctantly; my mom, enthusiastically) to the endearing charm of the titular character. Fleabag wants us, her audience, to love her. She breaks the fourth wall to talk to us, joke with us, and narrate her life as it unfolds. In other words, she is performing for us.

In today’s internet-driven world, many of us now live our lives with an audience. Private lives have become public domain, whether by active choice (Instagram) or passive acceptance (online surveillance culture). Our relationship to social media has become such a ubiquitous part of daily life that it’s prompted countless essays and the accepted discourse that what we see on our feed is simply a highlight reel. The social internet has changed from when it was new and shiny. The initial desire to present ourselves as perfect has been overtaken by a desire to appear authentic. And most recently, the desire to publicly demonstrate self-growth.

Read the whole essay on Medium.

MR Writers Club: Does growing up have to hurt?

Every month, Man Repeller poses a story idea and invites open submissions that answer the prompt in under 500 words. For September, they asked the question: Does growing up have to hurt? I tried my hand at writing a response and while it wasn’t chosen—this lovely poem was—I wanted to share what I wrote; it was a fun one to write that ended up in a different place than I thought it would—and, frankly, I’m shocked I stuck to the word count.

timothy-l-brock-UqriYLpT0pk-unsplash.jpg

I currently have a few small injuries: a blister from breaking in new loafers; a bruised shin from kicking myself with the heel of said loafers; and, a few raw cuticles courtesy of a childhood habit I never quite grew out of. If I have a hangnail, I’ll worry at it absentmindedly, often not realizing if it starts bleeding. It’s not that it doesn’t hurt, but it’s a small pain I’ve become accustomed to.

I can’t remember when I started picking at my nails, only that when I wanted to paint them in elementary school it was nearly impossible. In fifth grade, my friend taught me to paint the skin of the quick so my nails looked longer (spoiler: they didn’t). The nailpolish burned my sore skin and often peeled in the shower. Eventually, with the help of gel manicures in college, my nails grew to a reasonable length. But my cuticles haven’t been so lucky.

Writing about a childhood habit I haven’t yet broken seems antithesis to an essay about growing up. But something feels appropriate about this adolescent holdover having an element of physical pain. After all, our scrapes, bruises, and scars so often punctuate our growth—injuries that hurt all the more for betraying our childhood belief of invincibility. Childhood discomfort is literally referred to as growing pains, and we already know physical pain serves an evolutionary purpose. (You’re not going to touch a hot stove more than once). But what about the hurts that happen while growing up that aren’t physical, that don’t leave visible scars? 

Fifth grade, the year I tried hiding my shame-inducing nail-picking habit, is the same year I remember being desperately heartsick for the first time over fighting with friends. I’ve now gone through several friend breakups—but the hurt hasn’t gone away because I’m older. Rather, it has merely been softened by familiarity. And I think this idea is how I arrived at the slightly overwrought metaphor about my poor shredded cuticles. Repetition, while an apt teacher, is not always a cure. 

Growing up hurts like life itself hurts: inevitably. But I’m saying this with truly as little discouragement as I can muster. Hurt, and all the pain within it, is complicated. From it, we learn to appreciate its absence; we learn how sometimes, even when we want to empathize, we can only sympathize. As Elaine Scarry said, “to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” 

Hurt is as full of nuance as happiness, that fickle state of being that’s frequently the focus of modern essayists and social media darlings alike. What if we start looking at hurt not as capital “H” Hurt, but as something that, like happiness, comes in ebbs and flows and is just another part of life? Maybe, by giving it the same examination as happiness, we’ll find it needn’t be avoided or feared. And, in the meantime, I’ll keep trying to stop messing with my cuticles.

The 2019 Sad Girl: From Trope to Trend

17-year old Billie Eilish is, well, sad. Not in totality nor in singularity—but sad nonetheless, singing about insecurities and pain with a deadpan expression, big heavy-lidded eyes staring with preternatural emotion—or, more accurately, lack thereof. Her rise on the pop culture charts might seem to signal another rendition of the Sad Girl, popularized in the Western lexicon in the early 2010s in the time when Tumblr was at its height and the desire to be whisked away was translated into vampire love stories where one could die without dying.  

The Sad Girl—who, far before Lana Del Rey, owes its origins to the 1994 film Ma Vida Loca—is a creature entirely new from the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) of Kirsten Dunst acclaim. But even so, she has maintained the MPDG allure and fascination: you want to know her or be her. (A moment of irony: Billie singing to her own reflection: “tell the mirror what you know she’s heard before, I don’t wanna be you anymore”).

The Sad Girl was never out to discount depression but instead to glamourise and sometimes commodify it. Billie complicates the simplicity of this trope, much of which was embodied by Lana Del Rey. Where Billie has always been herself, Lana has not always been. Right before her debut album Born to Die was released in 2012, The Guardian published an article comparing the Lizzy Grant she performed as in 2008 to her current Lana Del Rey persona. People were incensed at the thought that their idol of flower crowns, vintage opulence, and boundless emotion might be a construction.

Jump forward 6 years to 2018, when another deliberate act of sadness was captured in My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh—but this time with a surprising level of self-awareness. It shows the unnamed narrator succumbing to sadness in a particularly privileged state of stasis and indulgence, by numbing herself with drugs and alcohol. She has money; she does not have to work. It is, in many ways, bleak and altogether devoid of glamour. And then the narrator literally takes part in performance art.

Personas have been dangerous, historically, in that they make it all too easy to believe that others pain may be faked. That others may also be hiding something. Perhaps Sad Girls are on one level formulaic—but patterns, both finding and following them, are a part of human nature. An astute and provocative 2015 piece on Sad Girl culture states: “Channeling depression into beauty through creative practice isn't new. It's an age-old coping mechanism that social media merely makes accessible.”

It makes me think of the backlash against the Basic Girl (or against any stereotype, particularly female, for that matter). Where Basic Girls are annoying, Sad Girls are dangerous. But why the harsh distinction? I have two theories. The first: because of the remaining taboo around mental health; if we can’t even talk about it in an open honest way, people should not be doing so in a way that is at all glamourising, as Sad Girls do. But when women shoulder the majority of the weight when it comes to emotional vulnerability, is it any wonder that some found comfort in a performative pathology? The second reason: because women are consistently charged with being false.

As a survey this is a scant one. But as a snapshot, it has led me to the conclusion that what was once a trope is on its way to becoming a trend. What could easily be a shallow, two-dimensional character is becoming something more—an acceptance, even a movement, by very real and very three-dimensional people, like in the Sad Girls Club. I am in the camp—of the metaphorical kind, not the Met Gala variety—that a trend need not be dangerous or cliche and that popularity can sometimes bring about positive change. Look at plastic use. Reusable containers are trendy, and also good for the environment.

We’re hardly there yet. But I’m encouraged by the idea that the Sad Girl of 2019 can be someone who pops a pill with a smile to keep her sadness at bay; that we can be open about the fact that yes, we are sad, and instead of being quick to judge one another, we can be quick to empathize; and, that a girl who is sometimes sad can sing about her insecurities without being reduced to a Sad Girl.


what stories are ours to tell?

IMG_4356.JPG

Last night,  I listened to a song my friend Becs wrote. It was, loosely, based on a romantic situation in which I’d found myself over the past few months. And it made me cry. I considered FaceTiming her, bloodshot eyes and all, to show her my very visceral reaction. (Unsurprisingly, I did not, relying instead on texts  because I didn’t trust myself to talk without once again devolving into tears). It was strange, wildly strange, to listen to something that in some small way told my story—but something that I didn’t write. And it made me think of all the times I had jotted down notes for short stories based on situations I had not lived through, but that my friends had. 

Often, I stop these stories before I really start them, unsure of what is ethical and what is most certainly not. In the most meta of fashions, I wrote a short story a few years ago about a character who loses his friends because of a play. In that play was a story they believed wasn’t his to tell. My short story has no real resolution, because even then I had no real answer. 


A friend of mine recently opened up to me about a period of her life I couldn’t even imagine going through, let alone go through by myself as she so often did. When I returned home from our conversation, my initial reaction was to fictionalize what she told me. And I was just as quickly ashamed, feeling no right to call her story “inspiration.” When does inspiration become appropriation? Was I capitalizing on my friend’s pain? 

But the more I thought about it, I wasn’t so sure that was it. I felt something when my friend opened up to me, something I couldn’t quite imagine but that illicited intense emotions nontheless. I wanted to write because I wanted to understand those emotions in the best way I knew how to — by writing. It was my way of empathizing. Though so often we are told to ignore authorial intent, I think intent can make a difference when empathy is at the core. 

But as of today, I still have no plans to write that story. Even with the best of intentions. 


In her book of essays So Sad Tody, Melissa Broder begins “I told you not to get the knish: thoughts on open marriage and illness” discussing this same dillemma. Her husband lives with a chronic illness; it is not something she often addresses. And she says as much, in the beginning sentences: “I did not think [his illness] was my story to tell. But the illness is a third party in our relationship….In this way perhaps it is my story, too.” Put in this manner, Broder does have some claim to write about her husband’s illness because it has affected her life in such a degree. 

Becs did not ask my permission before she wrote her song. It did not cross my mind that she should. After all, if effect gives you some semblance of ownership, then the myriad anxious texts I sent her were essentially my permission. But how much does something have to affect you before you can speak to it? Before you can tell it? It seems that there is some unspoken line, but no clear rules on how this line is drawn. 

Effect does not beget ownership, in the same way that honest intent does not negate appropriation. I don’t think we should only write what we know; but I also don’t think you can fully inhabit someone else’s story. I’m beginning to think the most you can do is be thoughtful. 

And this all begs the question, at the end of the day, are our own stories ever fully our own?