the forest
an excerpt from "thank u, love u, bye: personal essays"
the following essay was originally published in may 2020, as a part of my short collection of essays and poems, thank u, love u, bye, which you can purchase on amazon here.
“the forest” is the opening song from the chamber musical *octet,* with music by dave malloy. *octet* is about a tech addiction support group.
i have lived many lives online and been many different people, all much more beautiful and interesting than me.
i’ve done something called “role playing” on almost every social media platform, except facebook because that is too stupid even for me. i’ve pretended to be the *lord of the rings* character galadriel on yahoo instant messenger chat rooms. i’ve pretended to be quinn fabray, the pregnant cheerleader from glee, on twitter. i’ve pretended to be maddie from the suite life of zach and cody on the now defunct social media platform myspace.
i want to throw up reading that last paragraph. all of this is incredibly embarrassing, but i share this to make this point: the internet is a faceless demon seducing us with the ultimate lure of being whoever the fuck we want.
that’s why it’s become a haven for blonde white women who think they’re incredible chefs and angry men who hate when these blonde women feel good about themselves.
the internet is a virus that has changed the course of my life, my communication style, how i listen and experience the world. it has helped me learn about myself and what i want to be, and also made me feel like i am the most horrible, disgusting being ever to be born on this earth.
within the internet, i lose all identifying features except those which i present myself. i have control of how i am perceived and experienced and there is very little difference between what i put out as my “presence” and what people digest.
this is directly the opposite of the real world where i feel a huge, wide gap between my image, actions and identity and what people perceive them to be. the way i see my face in the mirror is not what you see when you look at my face.
we don’t even know if we think of the same thing when i say the color “blue.”
but because of this, i now exist so much online that it becomes hard to reconcile it with my real life. i see people i am tangentially friends with post the most embarrassing, dumb and self-centered shit on their instagram stories. then, i go to brunch with them and gossip to the point of being cruel.
we are experiencing so much cognitive dissonance. the life we live online is hopeful with possibilities and theories. the world in our reality is bleak and blunted with an ending we can see coming, and we know it is not good.
we experience so much cognitive dissonance as a society because life on the internet is endless and infinite. it holds everything we could dream of, where we can present the most beautiful version of ourselves, perfectly curated. we can also find the most hideous faces of our enemies, marred and disturbing. in comparison, we feel even more beautiful.
This is the last of my posts sharing personal essays from a collection I self-published as a bit of a quarantine project in 2020. It’s some of my favorite work I’ve done and it was very interesting revisiting is five years later. Some of it I still stand by and some of it I don’t. But that’s life! I hope you enjoyed some deeply personal stuff I’m still surprised I was able to put into words.
I might slow down on posting again— I’m in the midst of my second to last semester of grad school and am working on my thesis which has been very rewarding but I also abhor editing my own work and am incurring psychic damage from forcing myself to do it. I have some ideas in my drafts for new essays. We’ll see what I post next!