hiii guys full disclosure I don’t really feel great about this essay but decided that I had to just publish it to get out of my rut .. please be gentle <3 ily
as always you have such a concise and insightful way of verbalizing the the nuances and cultural pitfalls of this world. this piece helped untangle my own half-formed thoughts on the subject better than i ever could. thank you for sharing <3
The last line shocked me because I wrote a journal entry about that exact thing. How I see myself constantly though third-person POV. I’m always narrating my life very deliberately, both in my own head and on paper. Every single thing I write exists for strangers instead of myself. Even this comment.
if it makes you feel better, i think people have struggled to figure out where they end and begin within the cultural context for ages. the suffering woman or artist is a trope that has existed for centuries before the internet. In an interview, Borges said something like “i am not sure that I exist, im all the writers that i have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that ive loved and the cities i have visited” .to a certain extent, the food we eat becomes our bodies, and the content we read, watch, listen to, the people we love, the places we visit, the women we want to be, becomes our brain.
the fact that reading this made me want to be the 'type of girl' who blogged about issues for other women to relate to and love makes me want to laugh and scream. this is amazing
rayne... you've done it again. Every time I read your writing I physically sigh with relief - this take on identity as a packaged product for the world to consume (but worded so much nicer) has been an unformed frustration for me for years. Now I have the words to express it! As with all great writers, you've combined the personal with the universal beautifully in this essay and I think we all appreciate you being more vulnerable. Thanks so much for your work <3
You write with the words that scratch the itch in my brain, like I’m not fully evolved to express these thoughts in the beautifully penned lines like you do, but it is so satisfying to read
I teach spin classes and have a couple regulars that come in, 20 something year old green juice, slicked bun, and perfect skin girlies. today I made sure I had the perfect song queued up so that when my phone connected it would play. I am in a mode of complete performance without even noticing. thank you for writing this. your work is appreciated.
it’s become very common for women online to express their identities through an artfully curated list of the things they consume'
The fact that I simply stopped to open twitter to retweet your substack thereby confirming every single assumption made about me {while feeling excited that you just 'authenticated' a piece of my identity}, just goes to show you how crazily meta this conversation constantly gets. like you wouldn't even understand a fraction of that tweet or better yet be FEATURED in that tweet, if you weren't chronically online. And yet here we are knowing that the only reason we know the term chronically online is because we both are.
"selling your pain is easier than living with it" hit so hard. it's so strange to feel this, to recognize the way that you're filtering your own pain, and then not know how to stop or what to do about any of it
I was 14 years old when I got my first copy of Girl, Interrupted. I was 16 when the movie came out; this was also the year I performed the Tiger inner dialogue as a monologue in my sophomore acting class. At the time it felt like a curse that I was five foot ten and two hundred pounds, that I would never be the delicate waif who needed saving so badly, but looking back on my trajectory, it may have been a blessing. When I first heard Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill, I wanted to meet that girl so badly. It wasn't until I was probably 24 years old, that I realized that she was me. I was the Rebel Girl, at least in my social circle in south jersey. I smoked Kamel Red Lights and I had a cute line about drinking my coffee black, and I scoured the Nerve.com personals for a man as quirky and kinky as I was. I say all of this to your point, that we, *interesting women*, have been thinking of ourselves as our own consumer demographic for a long fucking time, and it felt natural to peer into every example of womanhood that I could find, and see if the key to acting like a normal fucking person was inside that trope. Spoilers - it wasn't. I'm not cute, I'm mentally ill. Okay, well, I am cute, but I have to be so that people will tolerate my symptom-ridden behavior.
What I want to say is this: it got better with time. None of the things that I expected to get better with time did, but the constant need to define myself by and through the media of the culture has quietly died. I am still afraid and I am still angsty. I am still alcoholic (13 yrs sober) and I am still mentally ill. I don't even want to say my diagnosis because it doesn't matter. I take my meds, I avoid triggering foods and I trust the people around me when they say my behavior is inappropriate. It sucks. But I had my Fleabag era from 2005-2012 when I lived like that. It was jarring and hilarious to see it on screen. When the priest noticed her talking to us, i got chills. I had the same internal monologue of an endearing performance, and when a man noticed me, when he truly saw me, I was scared and delighted, just like she was. And when it was over, I cried for an hour. The show, I mean, I married the man. It is no damage to feminism that we want to compare ourselves to each other, but it is dangerous to use the media of a patriarchal culture as a yard stick to measure our quirky femininity by.
this feels weird because i’m relating to it so so much which means i must be in my internet princess era and i had also stopped journaling because everything was written for a posthumous audience and the essay is written beautifully which makes me want to write again but who cares, so on.
you always articulate everything I have ever felt but been unable to identify- I feel this constantly as I make lists in my notes app about artists and shows and directors to get into in order to reinforce the identity set I have imposed upon myself- when I suppose in reality I should do things just cause and if I do identify with whatever I see that’s an added plus- anyways things to think on you’re amazing and if you ever write/compile a trick mirror book i’ll preorder it <3 much love hope you’re doing alright
i’ve been stuck in this cycle my whole life, feeling observed and like i’m performing life, feeling things in ways that seem in-genuine and fake. feeling like my every move is an act and criticising myself if i’m not exactly who i wish to be in that moment. i write things and have interests in hopes that someone finds me fascinating. i feel like i’m just a curation of all the things i want people to remember me by. i feel insane knowing its in my head but it’s so hard to escape it. (i wrote a better paragraph earlier but it got deleted but this will do) i truly love the things you put out. it’s so nice to have it put into words, thank you so much :)
hiii guys full disclosure I don’t really feel great about this essay but decided that I had to just publish it to get out of my rut .. please be gentle <3 ily
as always you have such a concise and insightful way of verbalizing the the nuances and cultural pitfalls of this world. this piece helped untangle my own half-formed thoughts on the subject better than i ever could. thank you for sharing <3
The last line shocked me because I wrote a journal entry about that exact thing. How I see myself constantly though third-person POV. I’m always narrating my life very deliberately, both in my own head and on paper. Every single thing I write exists for strangers instead of myself. Even this comment.
if it makes you feel better, i think people have struggled to figure out where they end and begin within the cultural context for ages. the suffering woman or artist is a trope that has existed for centuries before the internet. In an interview, Borges said something like “i am not sure that I exist, im all the writers that i have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that ive loved and the cities i have visited” .to a certain extent, the food we eat becomes our bodies, and the content we read, watch, listen to, the people we love, the places we visit, the women we want to be, becomes our brain.
the fact that reading this made me want to be the 'type of girl' who blogged about issues for other women to relate to and love makes me want to laugh and scream. this is amazing
rayne... you've done it again. Every time I read your writing I physically sigh with relief - this take on identity as a packaged product for the world to consume (but worded so much nicer) has been an unformed frustration for me for years. Now I have the words to express it! As with all great writers, you've combined the personal with the universal beautifully in this essay and I think we all appreciate you being more vulnerable. Thanks so much for your work <3
"i had to give up journalling because i couldn’t stop writing for the people who would read it after i was dead." .....fuck
You write with the words that scratch the itch in my brain, like I’m not fully evolved to express these thoughts in the beautifully penned lines like you do, but it is so satisfying to read
I teach spin classes and have a couple regulars that come in, 20 something year old green juice, slicked bun, and perfect skin girlies. today I made sure I had the perfect song queued up so that when my phone connected it would play. I am in a mode of complete performance without even noticing. thank you for writing this. your work is appreciated.
it’s become very common for women online to express their identities through an artfully curated list of the things they consume'
The fact that I simply stopped to open twitter to retweet your substack thereby confirming every single assumption made about me {while feeling excited that you just 'authenticated' a piece of my identity}, just goes to show you how crazily meta this conversation constantly gets. like you wouldn't even understand a fraction of that tweet or better yet be FEATURED in that tweet, if you weren't chronically online. And yet here we are knowing that the only reason we know the term chronically online is because we both are.
a masterful analysis as always, miss raynecorp
may your fleabag era be shortlived
"selling your pain is easier than living with it" hit so hard. it's so strange to feel this, to recognize the way that you're filtering your own pain, and then not know how to stop or what to do about any of it
I was 14 years old when I got my first copy of Girl, Interrupted. I was 16 when the movie came out; this was also the year I performed the Tiger inner dialogue as a monologue in my sophomore acting class. At the time it felt like a curse that I was five foot ten and two hundred pounds, that I would never be the delicate waif who needed saving so badly, but looking back on my trajectory, it may have been a blessing. When I first heard Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill, I wanted to meet that girl so badly. It wasn't until I was probably 24 years old, that I realized that she was me. I was the Rebel Girl, at least in my social circle in south jersey. I smoked Kamel Red Lights and I had a cute line about drinking my coffee black, and I scoured the Nerve.com personals for a man as quirky and kinky as I was. I say all of this to your point, that we, *interesting women*, have been thinking of ourselves as our own consumer demographic for a long fucking time, and it felt natural to peer into every example of womanhood that I could find, and see if the key to acting like a normal fucking person was inside that trope. Spoilers - it wasn't. I'm not cute, I'm mentally ill. Okay, well, I am cute, but I have to be so that people will tolerate my symptom-ridden behavior.
What I want to say is this: it got better with time. None of the things that I expected to get better with time did, but the constant need to define myself by and through the media of the culture has quietly died. I am still afraid and I am still angsty. I am still alcoholic (13 yrs sober) and I am still mentally ill. I don't even want to say my diagnosis because it doesn't matter. I take my meds, I avoid triggering foods and I trust the people around me when they say my behavior is inappropriate. It sucks. But I had my Fleabag era from 2005-2012 when I lived like that. It was jarring and hilarious to see it on screen. When the priest noticed her talking to us, i got chills. I had the same internal monologue of an endearing performance, and when a man noticed me, when he truly saw me, I was scared and delighted, just like she was. And when it was over, I cried for an hour. The show, I mean, I married the man. It is no damage to feminism that we want to compare ourselves to each other, but it is dangerous to use the media of a patriarchal culture as a yard stick to measure our quirky femininity by.
and i fucking love sleater-kinney.
this feels weird because i’m relating to it so so much which means i must be in my internet princess era and i had also stopped journaling because everything was written for a posthumous audience and the essay is written beautifully which makes me want to write again but who cares, so on.
tl;dr i loved this essay, thanks for sharing.
you always articulate everything I have ever felt but been unable to identify- I feel this constantly as I make lists in my notes app about artists and shows and directors to get into in order to reinforce the identity set I have imposed upon myself- when I suppose in reality I should do things just cause and if I do identify with whatever I see that’s an added plus- anyways things to think on you’re amazing and if you ever write/compile a trick mirror book i’ll preorder it <3 much love hope you’re doing alright
i’ve been stuck in this cycle my whole life, feeling observed and like i’m performing life, feeling things in ways that seem in-genuine and fake. feeling like my every move is an act and criticising myself if i’m not exactly who i wish to be in that moment. i write things and have interests in hopes that someone finds me fascinating. i feel like i’m just a curation of all the things i want people to remember me by. i feel insane knowing its in my head but it’s so hard to escape it. (i wrote a better paragraph earlier but it got deleted but this will do) i truly love the things you put out. it’s so nice to have it put into words, thank you so much :)
this is one of the most amazing things ive ever read. i feel so seen. i aspire to write/think like you <3