Fear of Being Seen

I’m scrolling through TikTok and video after video pops up: If you’re not doing this, you’re ruining your life. Another one: If people aren’t leaving a conversation obsessed with you, you’re doing it wrong. Misinformation is rampant. My life as a stay at home girlfriend. If you scroll past this you’re a terrible person. How to glow-up, how to get off your phone, how to start loving yourself, how to save Palestine. Scrolling through it I know the algorithm serves me as much as I serve it. The moment you create an account and start scrolling, it's like a newborn baby in your arms. Watching, reacting, learning from all your behavior and movements and storing it away so you keep coming back to hold it in your hands.

My feed, the videos I see are dictated by my input and I eat them up. So then why do I feel so sick by the end of it? It’s like a magnifying glass for all of my deepest insecurities and pointless beefs with myself. My hip dips, my double chin, my not-dainty-or-coquette-at-all stomach, my needs, my empty purse and heavy eye bags, my less than streamlined-optimized, un-picturesque life. I stop and stare at the beautiful girls on the screen, probably lip-syncing to crystal castles or deftones. Wishing I was them, wishing I could look away and never see anyone as perfect again. I could never be an exhibitionist but on my phone, I turn into a voyeur.

I want to be them and at the same time I hate them, hate them for their beauty and their endless praise, their instant friends and doe gaze. You can’t say things like this out loud though, because it reveals to others something within yourself they’d rather turn away from, in themselves, and also in you. Like a pothole they sidestep in the road to not fall into, a muddy reflection in the lake. I know I’m an angry person, is the thing. For all the times people have told me, “You’re so sweet.” I thank god they can’t taste the bitterness I hide behind my teeth.

I think we have to be this way though, and everyone has things about themselves which they’ll go to great lengths to mask. In a world full of shame and secrets, most of us would rather die than feel exposed. But the internet is full of exposure, and reeks of shame in every corner, and we learn from the treatment we witness others receive. For those of us who grew up isolated and cut off from their peers, the internet may have seemed like a safe-haven to hide. You could be anonymous, you could be a loser in real life but a god on tumblr or insane on 4chan or whatever your prerogative was.

Especially growing up in an abusive household, the internet was an escape. I could lock myself in my room and go on my laptop or phone to disappear from the scene in front of me or inside me. I found more empathy and understanding from strangers than my own father. But now I wonder how much it has distorted my view of the world and others, and I resent the fact that it raised me more than my parents ever did. How many of us turned to our phones so we wouldn’t have to look at our parents screwed up faces?

Yesterday I was watching a video on Youtube and the narrator said how mothers and daughters are uniquely connected because of the way a mother and daughters amygdala are connected. Mothers and daughters have a keen ability to feel one another's pain. I was in the car with my mom once and she reached over to smooth out the crease between my furrowed brows. “Stop, my mother always did that,” She said, “I would wonder what she was thinking about. You do it too.”

Sometimes I look in the mirror and I don’t know who I see more of - myself, my mother, her fingers on my forehead. I want to look away from her - to look away from my own mother, to reject her as her mother rejected her, to cut off her fingers so they can never touch me again, never serve as another reminder of the brokenness of the people whose hands have held me all my life. I keep staring at the mirror, I can’t look away from myself, and I can't break from her. I sigh, and look back to the screen.