As part of my practice leading up to Beltane at the start of this month, I was assessing some of my creative endeavors and thinking of how to more effectively bring them to fruition; one of the outcomes is that I’ve decided to move to a shorter, weekly post format with this newsletter. I had originally envisioned semi-regular longer “topic posts” like my Envy/Desire1 review, but I find that these can be unwieldy, overly-reliant on fleeting inspiration, and never feel quite polished enough. I still hope to write more posts like that, but at the moment, I’m going to prioritize writing and publishing more.
Concepts: On Being Observed
In this section of the weekly post, I plan to talk about whatever’s been on my mind at the moment, even if I don’t have a neat resolution or narrative to put it in.
Some time ago I found myself lamenting to a lover about my hair—I’ve gone back to straightening after an ill-fated flirtation with the curly girl method—and she suggested I use a shower cap rather than carefully contorting myself to avoid getting it wet between washes. I, in turn, replied that I found the idea of wearing one off-putting because I would look frumpy (that is, I would look frumpy while showering, alone, in my house). She—understandably—laughed at me, but the conversation has stuck in my mind as emblematic of a set of brainworms I have around personal beauty and aesthetics. Namely, some part of me feels that nothing can be preparation—that messy period without an audience where things are being moved around and arranged but are not yet in place—rather, that the performance itself has no beginning and no end, and every moment must be as presentable as the next.
Were I only slightly more of a good feminist than I am, it would be easy to attribute this feeling to the male gaze—think of those commercials where a woman assumes a sexy pose to shave her already hairless legs. We see idealized, made-for-consumption images everywhere we look and project them back onto ourselves as an ideal of how our real human bodies and lives ought to look. My mind also wanders to the girl I knew in Teenpact2 who kept a diary intended to one day be given to her future husband (an extreme example, but this sort of thing was normal in that environment). Adjacent to that ideological space is the notion that God is—really, literally—always watching. It’s sometimes difficult to communicate to people who were not raised that kind of Religious how strongly and neurotically you internalize the understanding that everything not forbidden is mandatory, and that one day a record of Everything you ever did will be judged in front of everyone who ever lived. While the initial prompt for this post was about aesthetics, I suppose that the leftover neuroticism may have taken on a new objective after I left that spiritual space (others have also written about the similarities between evangelicalism and the hyper-progressivism to which many of its wayward children have defected).
So even if God is dead, his all-seeing eyes have fallen to other egregores. After all, aren’t TikTok and Instagram Reels filled with artists and craftspeople and even “ordinary” workers showing off their—staged, edited, sped up—processes? How can I fill a sketchbook with terrible drawings when I might need to post a “sketchbook reveal” later? It’s an odd perversion of Taylorism, and yet it’s one that I seem to have internalized even before high-speed video streaming gave it its place in the sun.
I wish I had a good piece of advice to end with about how I learned to avoid this kind of neurotic cringe. I don’t. To date all I’ve learned is that my only way out is through—a psychologically costly exercise of willpower. So, I’ll leave it to the comments, as one of the things I hope to do with these posts is spark discussion. Do any of you ever feel this way? How do you sidestep it or push beyond it?
Media:
In this section, I’ll talk about any salient media that I have or am planing to engage with in the week, along with thoughts I may have on it. Earlier this month one of my partners and I watched Mean Girls for what was my first time—and, wow, they really did just let you say anything in 2004. Assuming I can find a high-quality file or I break down and pay for it, I’d like to show her the most spiritually correct Jane Austen Adaptation—Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood Musical. Hopefully it will be a nostalgic journey back to the halcyon days before movies about Indians didn’t have to be either positive or negative commentaries on Hindu Nationalism to achieve breakout success in the west.
I’m currently reading Plato’s Phaedrus and Agnes Callard’s Aspiration. I really ought to have finished those by now, but in my defense, I have been touching an exceptional amount of grass lately. I may also start re-reading some of To The Stars, an ongoing, novel-length Madoka fanfic that I can’t recommend enough. I’ve found myself feeling stuck when trying to work on my own original fiction at the moment, and I might return to the project of writing a TTS fanfic for a while.
Aimee is currently fundraising for a new, feature-length film. If you have cash to support the arts, you should throw some her way. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/summer-in-saint-anger/x/37741007#/
Google it.
Scattered thoughts:
-Since I started transitioning, I've had brainworms about wanting to be presentably feminine at all times, with no effort or preparation required. It's a large part of why I was so insistent in getting full body laser hair removal, vocal feminization surgery, and facial feminization surgery, and why I'm pursuing various other procedures. A lot of other trans girls don't quite understand it, but I want to be me, even when I'm at home by myself in the dark, even if I'm not able to shave or wear makeup or do my hair regularly. I want permanence, not performance.
-The idea of writing a journal specifically for a future husband is incredibly bizarre to me. Maybe it's supposed to be a display of intimacy, loyalty, or trust, but it has the exact opposite effect: If the entire journal is written for him, then it's wholly performative and there's no reason to trust anything in it. Even if she tries to be honest, the journal's narrative will inevitably be skewed by the fact that she knows it's going to be read by someone; that's going to affect what she writes, subconsciously if nothing else.
I went through a phase as a teenager where I compulsively journaled about everything that happened in my life. I refused to show anyone, but deep down, I think I expected someone to read it eventually, and wrote accordingly. This is something that hinders my writing even now. I'll start out writing for myself, unrestrained, letting the ideas flow free. Then at some point, I'll notice that I slipped into writing as though it's meant for someone else's consumption: slowing down, becoming more cautious with my word choices and phrasing, making arguments instead of statements and crafting narratives instead of just expressing ideas.
-For as long as I've remembered, I've had a persistent sense of being watched, a feeling that everything I did - even in private - was being viewed from some absolute perspective. Same as you, I think it's rooted in my childhood belief in God; I was raised by secular Cafeteria Catholics instead of Evangelical fundamentalists, but I still went to Catholic school for 9 years and internalized a lot of Christian dogma. After I left Christianity behind, the feeling of being watched by God has changed into something more subtle and harder to describe - a sense of being observed and perhaps even judged by the Universe, combined with a sense of absolute permanence to my actions, as though they're recorded forever into the fabric of reality itself. These feelings have become less intense over the years but they've never gone away completely. (I'm honestly not sure whether this relates to the issues I mentioned above.)
-Regarding Instagram, TikTok, etc., I think this ties into the discussion we had the other night about why prosperity as a virtue doesn't work anymore. At the time, I blamed it on the hedonic treadmill and naïveté, but I think another huge factor is that the media (especially social media) gives people a very skewed perception of what 'normal' is, making them believe they're poorer in *relative* terms than they actually are. I saw a tweet earlier tonight that made things click into place (https://x.com/queerBengali/status/1794848377748000770), and while she's specifically talking about economics, I think this applies to a lot of other areas of life too. Whether it's wealth, attractiveness, intelligence, popularity, or accomplishments, constant exposure to people who are better (or just seem better from a handful of cherry-picked snapshots) can easily cause people to think they're below-average even when they're not.
-Go watch 'I Saw The TV Glow' if you get the chance! I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on it.