you can look if you want to

on voice, vulnerability, viewership — & an invitation into this space.

when i was 11, i would leave my journal on the dinner table and hope that my father picks it up. i am 21 now, and i keep my ‘vent’ profiles¹ on a public setting, very much okay with people organically stumbling upon it.

this sort of thing usually signals deceit, and is useful to craft specific narratives that aid specific purposes. except i have never been anything but authentic in any spaces that engage with the self — i simply wanted to trigger exchanges — with people, and about things and that i could not explicitly ask for. there were conventions (will come back to them later, multiple times, through publications, pieces, years and careers) around it.

in my teenage years, i was told that even you and your parents were separately watching the same erotic drama on TV, you could not just go up to them and try to bond over it. that it is not typical to go up to random women in your university lifts and try to extend solidarity over experiencing a man who just does not take the hint at a thursday-night party. if someone wanted to befriend you in a class of hundred, chances are they would never make a move.

i understood early that people’s lines between the private and the public, the interior and the spectacle, or casual conversation and literary analyses; were slightly more rigid than mine. it was also not particularly kind to negotiate with other people’s boundaries.

but it was not fun either. i was ravenous, promiscuous even — for high-stakes, personal, scandalously honest conversations outside my immediate friend group.

when i was younger and more obnoxious i would complain about a “lack of sincerity” epidemic and play that one matthew healy song on repeat.

(“and irony's okay i suppose, culture is to blame”)

these days, i just think about the intersections of trauma, shame, and late-stage capitalist individualism and try to steer away from the “i’m so special” territory.

the game changer though, was discovering that the only thing that invites sincerity has always been sincerity itself.

most of my access to other people’s vulnerability began with me offering them mine. at the dining table. while i look away and let them pick it up on their own terms. effectively pspspspsing² conversations, commonality and eventually communities.

pan to: an online mention of my television watchlist that was strategically not protected from my mother’s viewership anymore. a tongue-in-cheek twitter thread about the male student who repeatedly seeks out younger women, that triggered an echo of “ugh you TOO?” among the university’s twitter community. a public post on the internet like this (see below) from a time when i was struggling to not eat lunch alone.

now, do i do this to create collective discourses through the personal narrative? do i just have a debilitating attention deficit that makes me seek out stimulation this way? is this a function of not having a cult-y group of friends i can be mysterious with? am i trying to create a gen z rega jha moment? do i just need my ex-lover to perceive me somewhere because he does not live next-door anymore? did papa never believe stories about my day growing up so i just need someone to validate that things in fact, happened? i will figure that out in individual psychiatry.

i have, however, grown to decide that origins of desire can be less relevant than the intentionality you handle it with.

so in the meantime, i am formalising my scattered narrative/poetic/rant/rave/didactic/agony-aunt voice interwoven with everyone else’s — picked from elevator small talk, tapris, snarky subtweets, and actual responses to a rhetorical “what is wrong with you?” question — through this publication. i am flirting with the long-form. you can subscribe and read what i say in your mailboxes.

[aside: for serious cultural critique that involves me writing articles about things like a supposed intentionality famine, (🙄) stay tuned and wait on "Do you see that?", a sister publication on my substack.]

the dresser is glass. it has always been mostly glass. i bought it that way.

you can look if you want to. pspspspspsps.

1. an instagram convention to have a second profile with more personal content, usually with a limited audience

2. ‘pspspsps’ is used to mimic the sound one might use to get a cat's attention.

https://www.majorgeeks.com/content/page/pspspsps.html#:~:text=So%2C%20just%20what%20does%20pspspsps,to%20get%20a%20cat's%20attention.