trick of the hand
This Week in Reading
Look by Zan Romanoff
I read Look last weekend in the span of 24 hours. It is the kind of popsicle of a book that my brain inhales during the summer: YA, hella gay, smart and sharp and digestible in equal measure. Lulu is a private school student in Los Angeles and a microinfluencer on Flash—the novel’s version of Snapchat. She shares glimpses of her life paired with moody text—a selfie washed out by sunlight, a corner of a bathroom at a party. Several months earlier she was publicly humiliated in a PG-13 social media sex scandal of her own making, but she continues to upload snippets to Flash. The only thing worse than being publicly humiliated, is acknowledging that the public humiliation is affecting you in any way.
What I loved most about this book was the way it acknowledged the limitations of its characters. Lulu and her friends are Gen Z teens that are hip to social justice, but they still function within the maturity range of a 16 year old, no matter how well read they are on twitter. A rich white bro drops a racial slur and Lulu calls him out, but when he seems unrepentant of his actions, she doesn’t know what to do. She can tell her Filipino best friend is trying to talk to her about race, and she knows she flubbed this conversation in the past and needs to be more sensitive, but that doesn’t mean she knows what to say now. She knows how to spot injustice, and what action she should take, but she doesn’t know what to do beyond the first step. It’s a feeling that is easy to empathize with. A decade out of high school I have graduated beyond social justice 101, but knowing how to put theories to practice still feels daunting at times.
I went viral last month, an experience that was equal parts unexpected and terrifying. I had made a few infographics on my Instagram stories, visual representations of some offline thoughts and conversations I had been having in regards to social justice—all drawn with my thumb within the 5 in x 3 inch rectangle of my phone screen. Tired of messages from my friends asking if they could screenshot and repost them, I put them on my grid, and then, within the span of a week, watched with horror as my follower count ballooned from 450 people to 16k.
It felt dangerous— to have so many strangers looking at me on the internet. I like to position myself in majorities. I am unwilling to get another cat because I am afraid that if they joined forces they could overthrow me in a cat coup. I cannot fathom having more than one child— I am not interested in creating a population distribution where the adults in the family could lose the popular vote. Having the number of strangers who follow me online without knowing me at all dramatically outnumber the people who actually did, was petrifying. Cancellation felt inevitable. Me, a white-ish girl, talking about social justice on the internet during a time that was specifically calling to amplify Black voices? Dicey at best.
I am afraid of being cancelled, but what I mean is that I am afraid of being misunderstood. I don’t believe I hold any views overtly problematic enough to get me exiled from the internet, but I am afraid of them being misinterpreted as such.
I talked to my therapist about it. Why do you need to be known? She asked me. We talked about ego (we always talk about ego-work). In truth— it is impossible to be fully known. We can only know people as they are refracted through the prisms of ourselves— our experiences, our relationship with them. And in return I can only be known through the veil of someone else’s projection. Even those closest to me, who hear me talk and talk and talk, who have seen my actions and choices unspool over decades, even their understanding of me is limited by what parts of my life is visible to them— by what parts of myself I have chosen to share.
But perhaps, being known was never my goal. I wanted to be understood, and more specifically I want to be understood in the way that I understand myself. I am uncomfortable with the idea of other people coming to a conclusion about me that I have not already come to alone. This is not a free response essay! I want to be known in the form of a reading comprehension test: want someone to pay attention to me for long enough that they can dutifully repeat my own analysis of myself back to me.
I’ve been thinking about vulnerability recently—namely the type of “radical vulnerability” that we see so often on social media. Long, emotional paragraphs about someone—usually a young woman’s—trauma. How she struggles with depression or anxiety or spent years of her life hating her body or all three. You are so brave the commenters respond. Heart emojis lined up in a neat row. You are not alone. Thank you for your vulnerability. The internet seems to have confused “radical vulnerability” with “controlling the narrative.” When we use radical vulnerability, we are giving an audience a version of ourselves that comes with all the blanks filled in. We choose to share the bad parts, the messy parts, and that—they say—is brave. But what we are actually doing is presenting a narrative with no room for interpretation. It’s the end of the murder mystery when all of the motives and backstory are revealed. There are no more questions to be asked, nothing left to uncover. Perhaps true vulnerability is to leave space for misinterpretation. To leave the gaps unfilled, to allow people to understand me however they please, instead however I please. But I’ve never been interested in public vulnerability.
At the end of the book Lulu deletes her Flash account and uploads a video titled “What I Was Looking At While You Were Looking at Me”. The camera flips outwards, away from her carefully composed face, and instead frames the traces her physical body leaves in the world: an unmade bed, dog eared textbooks. It is her interpretation of the world, instead of other people’s interpretation of her. But wasn’t she always in control of the narrative, regardless of whether the camera was pointed towards or away from her?
When I share pieces of myself online, I am providing people with resources to understand my perspective. Here is the secret: writing is a trick of the hand. Writing allows me to construct a mirage of myself that can be consumed by an external audience. And when they consume the mirage, they don’t consume me, only a copy of myself that I have laboriously constructed to be as realistic as possible. Every sentence I write is a boundary—I am drawing a perimeter, trying to define myself more clearly. When I write two hundred words on Instagram or twelve hundred words here, I am trying to create a facsimile of my thoughts and perspective and experience. That description will always fall short of the truth, hindered by the limitations of language, and my clumsy ability to employ it as a tool for expression.
So here you go, have a magic trick. This newsletter: giving you less of me by giving you more.
Further Reading:
In quarantine, gay YA novels have felt like the salve to my inflamed brain. I also loved Girl Crushed by Katie Heaney, and Red White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuinston (NOT YA, an actual, full fledged, horny as hell romance novel. Made me blush listening to it with headphones at work, I cannot recommend it more highly)