Why Am I So Obsessed with Self-Transformation?

Art by Jill Risberg

It’s become a ritual for me and my little band of college friends to not listen in our Monday morning art lecture—that is, if we even choose to attend at all—and instead trade our weekly horoscopes from the Astro Poets Twitter account. Specific enough to make us (i.e. anyone) feel seen but possessing a degree of vagueness that warranted forgiveness if it ends up inaccurate (i.e. me, declaring on a Friday: “maybe I just misinterpreted my fortune”), these couplets were revered like gospel. We were aware astrology is pseudoscience etc. etc. etc., but that’s such a boring take; we’d rather cling to these predictions, we’d rather believe the stars cared enough about us to align in our favor—or at least, predetermine our fate.

They are poetry, so I clung to some verses extra lovingly; some of it so precious I wanted to stitch it in the linings of my sweaters, etch it in alloy and wrap it around my neck. “The very kindest person will stop you and say hello,” they write in the Taurus horoscope for the week of December 3 last year. “Will you be rushing to the car and miss them? Will you be regal or relentless? Is the person you?” That morning in arts class, week 11/24 in Taurus, they said, “When you look out the window, you see the past. Look instead around the room to see what’s there presently.” But how can I do that, my dear poets from the cosmos, when I look around and all I see is my past?

Growing up, I loved reinventing myself. I never learned to do anything in moderation, so whenever I found something I loved I would always get consumed by it. It would swallow me whole, manifesting in the way I dress, what I say, who I am. Because I didn’t have a set personality of my own, I would adapt the personalities of, say, teenage girls I saw in movies, or artists I saw myself in; or I would commit to this single aesthetic. I wasn’t pretending, per se—the way I dress didn’t really feel like costumes, they just felt like my clothes—because I did want to be those things, I wanted to reinvent myself so I could be this way. And because I just found so much solace in art, all the phases I had were inextricable from it. When I say I found “something I loved” I always mean some kind of musician or book or movie or TV show, because since I was little I see myself in art and through art. In commemorating all my past selves it’s inevitable to simultaneously reflect on and celebrate the art attached within each one. In her essay Pure Heroines, Jia Tolentino writes, “The stories we live and the stories we read are to some degree inseparable.”

In 2012, unlike literally every other teenager on the planet, I totally wasn’t super obsessed with some boyband singing songs of what makes people beautiful and one things. I totally didn’t center my entire personality on being their fan. I wish it didn’t sound so hyperbolic when I say this, but this obsession (that I totally did not have) marked the beginning of my coming of age. Four years of my life are inseparable from this boyband (that I totally wasn’t obsessed with); whenever I look back at that time in my life—the experiences I had, the friends I gained—it’s always rooted on fandom, and the sense of community it provided.

Thirteen is a messy age for anyone, and I, despite my belief that I was the Protagonist Of Life and is therefore exempt from such cliches, was not exempt from such cliches. I was still into One Direction, but I found myself more inclined towards darker, louder (and with the gift of hindsight I can finally say: worse) bands. I started wearing all black everything and grew out my jet black hair; everytime I see pictures of myself from eighth grade, I would snark, now instinctively, “Damn ma is it that serious?” I wrote all-caps angry poetry; I started watching Skins (the UK version, the one all the cool kids watched); I wrote Mayday Parade lyrics on my bedroom wall. I was unbearable—what kind of 13-year-old listens to Blink-182 out of their own volition? I guess you could say this was my rebellious phase or my way of sticking it to The Man or etc. etc. etc., but I didn’t have the heart to do anything remotely disobedient, so I just projected myself onto these people who I felt were rebellious and/or sticking it to The Man etc. etc. etc. I defined myself through the art that I consumed. That meant I had all these artifacts: for this part of the essay I looked through my bedroom, which is essentially just a giant time capsule, and found the lyrics to Angels written in pencil on the drywall; the faded, scotch tape-backed pictures of Effy Stonem; the old journals where I used markers to write entries about “the boy whose name rhymes with ‘hurt’”. 

Because I was just so good at internalizing the identities I build for myself, all this performative pain turned into real pain, and I spent being fourteen hyperfixated on waiting for it to be over. Fifteen was better. My dark, angry poetry turned into the sunny, coffee-stained kind (still equally bad, but at least it was kinder). I was reading more books. I started listening to Fleetwood Mac and The Smiths. I got a haircut, i.e. I wasn’t hiding behind my hair anymore, i.e. I wasn’t paralyzed by insecurity, at least not as bad as the year before. I got tired of being tough and sharp and crass and I spent my afternoons pressing flowers in journals and wearing oversized sweaters. I wanted to make personalized mixtapes but I was a teenage girl living in 2015 so I made them in 8tracks.com instead. I was trying to (re)build myself into something softer.

I think, with all the flower-pressing and faux mixtape-making, it was only natural that I try to become an artist at sixteen. I was in no way good at it, so I just dressed like an artist as a consolation. I made pins out of cardboard and safety pins and stickers out of paper and tape. I made my own clothes and hung Monet postcards on my wall. I watched all the films every person with an artsy Tumblr account was obsessed with: every 80s teen movie and that one indie where Alex Turner did the entire soundtrack (I’m not the kind of fool who’s gonna sit and sing to you / About stars, girl…). I started taking pictures of my friends.

I saw La La Land when I was 16 and realized there was more to cinema than John Hughes, so when I turned 17 I was really into movies. I was watching at least two every single day, trying to catch up on the classics, then later redefining what ‘classic’ even meant: I got a Letterboxd account and gave the Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon-written romcom The Big Sick a higher rating than the bang-bang big gangster picture Goodfellas. I once snuck out of a physics class my senior year of high school so I could go to the city all alone to see Call Me By Your Name in a film festival. 

Throughout my teenhood I was completely fascinated with the idea that my identity was in my hands, and how doing something really mundane like changing my clothes helped reinforce the identity I chose for myself. I became so obsessed with self-presentation and how easy it is, how malleable I can be because of it. Whenever I want internal change, I trigger that through an external change. And I want change all the time, because I’m young and a girl and small and alone, and, as Simone De Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex, I am intoxicated with my isolation; I feel myself “different, superior, exceptional”, and I get tired of who I am all the time. 

But for someone who’s always desperately clamoring for change, I’m a very nostalgic person. “[INFPs] will often find a strong sense of pride in their authenticity and character,” says the description for INFP when I took a Myers-Briggs Personality Test online. “The number one trap of wanting to be authentic is believing their past self is more authentic than the future self. In other words, the person they used to be is more human, more real, than who they have the potential to become.” I never have any memories because my past is always here; there is no ‘revisiting’ if I always carry them with me. I am changing though, I know that, so maybe I am just an amalgamation of all the selves I’ve shed (but kept) through the years. When I turned 18, instead of getting a new persona like I did the previous years, I kept seeing pieces of my past phases in who I was then. On the day of my 18th birthday I was at a Harry Styles concert; I was growing out my hair again; I was reading poetry again; I was still sneaking out to go to film festivals. 

And I know this sounds cliche—again, very disappointed at the fact that even I am not immune from cliches—but going through all these transformations over the years really helped me figure out who I am and who I want to be. I’m very forgiving of these past selves now. I used to be so ashamed and embarrassed of the way I talked, how I presented myself, what I valued; but mostly of how unashamed and unembarrassed I was to be speaking like that, to be toting around school with half my arm covered in 1D jelly wristbands, to be sending a dozen tweets a minute about All Time Low. They’re who I am, and I love my multitudes. In a way, it makes me excited to meet the rest of me. 

***

At nineteen you’re not supposed to feel ancient. But I do. And you’re not supposed to feel childish, but I do. I went through so much change and it’s exhausting, but underneath I don’t really feel any different. My change overtook my growth, unbeknownst to little old me. I confused aesthetic for the real thing, image for the real thing. Again, I was never pretending: think Conor from the 2016 movie Sing Street copying the looks of his newest favorite band, or you unconsciously imitating the voice of the book you’re currently reading. I really was changing, but it was within this straight, static line; within a present that was repetitive and recycled and ultimately the same as my past. I stunted my own growth and called it nostalgia. I don’t need to relive pasts because I am still in it, frozen in time like a butterfly fossilized in translucent amber—an artifact.

I became obsessed with image, with history. My own personal history. I am a personal essayist, after all, so there is this innate arrogant assurance that people will find pleasure in hearing about the life that I live. Admittedly, a thought that is foolish and masturbatory; maybe the pleasure in the personal essay is completely one-sided, with the writer stroking themselves with the illusion that readers find pleasure somewhere they actually don’t. The first part of this essay is literally just me telling you in excruciating detail every phase I had this decade; don’t be fooled by this self-awareness though, because in the next parts of this essay I will proceed to talk about myself some more. Because I am obsessed not necessarily with myself (although I still am a personal essayist, so don’t take my word for it), but with image, with online presence, with other people’s perception of me; and because you are reading this on the internet, and it is that very thing that prompted my hyper-awareness of my image in the first place. 

This decade saw power and control trickle down from mass media to social relationships to identity, so we bore witness to the rise of individualism. Contemporary culture became so fixated on personality and identity politics, unaware of how invasive it is; “personal brand” is an oxymoron because branding, which used to be corporate, is now made micro. Word of mouth is commercialized, influence incentivized. My fixation on my image, I soon realized, was a fixation on my personal brand— I had one, as do you, and I was conscious of it and was cultivating it. 

I spent so much of my time and energy on the customization of everything I owned: my laptop is filled with stickers—not too different from any other person with a laptop, I suppose—but each sticker was meticulously chosen, depicting all dimensions of my impeccable personality. Oh, I’ll put a Black Mirror sticker so people will know I watch mind-bending shit like that, but let me put a The Royal Tenenbaums sticker as well so people will know my taste isn’t that mainstream. At first glance this is just me defining myself through the art that I love, but I’ve become increasingly aware that it isn’t as simple as that. My phone lockscreen is never just a pretty picture, it has to be something that, partly, means something to me, but mostly says something about me; I choose it with the intention that it will be seen by others. I distribute my interests across wallpapers and Twitter headers: my laptop wallpaper is a still from the 2014 movie Mommy; my Twitter header is a still from the season finale of Fleabag; my phone lockscreen is a picture of Lorde on tour. And I intended that, I intended that people will know more about what I like the more they see me, hinting at how expansive and complex and fucking interesting I am. 

That’s not limited to trivial things like headers: even offline, especially offline, I have to be presenting myself all the time. I walk into class wearing a Clockwork Orange shirt or a Stranger Things crop top and carrying a Harry Styles tote bag which contained my iPad with stickers declaring ‘Save Lumad Schools’ and ‘Stop Killing Farmers’. Everything I wear and have always has to say something about me: that I’m different, that I’m cultured. And sure, I do love these things so much that I stitch myself to them, but maybe I do that because I’m so afraid of appearing devoid of personality, of interests. Is this a superiority complex? Why am I so desperate to be more interesting? Why am I overcompensating? Why must I always feign specialness all the time, in all aspects of my life?

I didn’t have a personality as much as I had an image; ‘image’ suggesting that it’s directed outward rather than inward. I defined myself, yes, through the art I love, but also through how those art make me appear. Culture is heavily subtextual so the art I love always come with scripts: me carrying a ‘Men Have Made a Lot of Bad Art’ tote bag is never just me saying men have made a lot of bad art, but that I have feminist leanings; and I consume culture; and I am smart and socially conscious enough to critique that culture; and people who spend time in the same leftist corner of the internet as me see me walking in the hallway and nod at me. Adriana Cavarero writes in Relating Narratives, “Identity is not something we innately possess and reveal, but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others.” There’s a blurring between what I really like and what I want to be associated with. When I’m buying something, I’m not just thinking, Oh, I like this! but also, Oh, I like what this says about me.  And again, I’m not lying—I do like those things—but me liking them gets a bit pointless when I don’t broadcast it.

Adolescents, because we’re just as close to childhood as we are to adulthood, can still fall into egocentric thinking. This is manifested in our preoccupation with our own thoughts, obsessively introspecting and inflating the social relevance of our respective introspections. Psychologists Elkind, Lapsley, and Ginsberg said that adolescents engage in personal fable, or the belief that we are one of a kind, invincible, and that no one has had the thoughts and feelings we are having. It works hand-in-hand with imaginary audience, which is the belief that everyone is looking at us all the time; we are the center of everyone else’s world just as we are the center of ours. It’s true that adolescents are incredibly narcissistic (word check count on this essay so far: closing in on 3,000 words) but also incredibly alone, incredibly insecure and self-conscious. “I spent all my teenage years being obsessed with beauty, and I’m very resentful about it and I’m very angry,” singer-songwriter Mitski told Pitchfork a few years ago. “I had so much intelligence and energy and drive, and instead of using that to study more, or instead of pursuing something or going out and learning about or changing the world, I directed all that fire inward, and burnt myself up.”

The personal fable is not an inherently online thing, although it can be. I always find myself scrolling through my own social media profiles to see how a stranger would see it; testing if my curation of my online presence is the perfect kind of curated-but-not-really, making sure all my multiplicities and complexities are represented, a portfolio for my personality. My personal Twitter account, for example, has the perfect mix of witty, self-deprecating humor, empty but condescending cultural criticism, and surface-level political wokeness enough to make me appear socially aware but not too radical lest I scare my followers away. I’m never just scrolling mindlessly and retweeting stuff I like—which is, you know, literally the function of Twitter—because I’m aware I aways to have to appear a certain way. This worsened with the continued ease of going viral: this year I finally got tired and went on private, because the potential of reaching a bigger audience through a viral tweet, which would give me more social credit, i.e. fame, i.e. clout, made me so much more performative. All my jokes were suddenly an attempt to get famous rather than just something I wanted to tell my friends and/or scream into the internet void. 

In 1902, sociologist Charles Cooley introduced the looking glass self, which is our reflection of how we think we appear to others. Essentially, we tend to understand ourselves through, and act according to, the perceptions that others may have of us. This is why much of my identity formation is directed outward: because selfhood is an inherently social process, and, as much as I hate to admit this, I am only convinced I am cool and interesting and complex when I know people are convinced as well. Their perception of me and my perception of myself are not linked but instead completely identical. 

And I absolutely hate that, you know? I hate that I can’t be cool/interesting/complex/kind/good on my own, especially since I equate being all those things with being worthy. I define myself, and consequently, my self-worth, through how I appear to others. And I hate that, I hate that I always feel like I have to earn being treated like a decent human being. When I learned about Rogerian psychology and how it’s impossible to gain unconditional positive self-regard unless you receive it from others first, I hated how much it rung true. 

***

I mentioned in an earlier essay that I grew out my wavy hair when I started listening to Lorde’s Pure Heroine, then cut it shoulder-length when I related more to Melodrama. But I didn’t mention that that same summer, I watched Fleabag and, mimicking its equally wavy-haired creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, I got another haircut. Then it started growing back and I watched Jenny Slate’s stand-up special Stage Fright then went to the bathroom and cut it again. I hated how my hair’s ends always tickled my neck, and how my best friend who’s not really my best friend kept telling me to straighten it because he straightened his even though I kept telling him he looked better wavy and that I like myself better this way. 

When I cut it—the shortest it’s ever been—I felt regret, because I didn’t think it through, because it was uneven and I was scared of how it would look dry. My best friend who’s not really my best friend was the first to see and said it suited me better and it did, it did suit me better, and I hate that the aphorism “you can’t love others unless you love yourself” is a flat-out lie and actually the other way around. 

I hate that my best friend who’s not really my best friend never not makes me feel like he’s only with me because I have something he needs. And it’s kinda cruel, how I know we’re both aware of this, and yet he’s still my best friend (who’s not really my best friend). I hate how careless and generous I am with love—platonic and romantic and love for art, all kinds of it—but I always feel like I have to earn it. I hate that if love was a currency I’d be in poverty. 

If you Ctrl+F’ed ‘teenage’ and ‘feelings’ on all the essays I’ve written, you’ll find that I literally never shut up about teenagers and their feelings and how it’s okay to be a teenager with these feelings. But I still feel that tinge of shame and doubt, because I’m so, so young, with so, so many feelings, and here I am, rambling about love and if love was a currency I’d be in poverty—I mean, what the fuck kind of Hallmark bullshit is that? 

But since I’m learning to forgive my past selves, I’m also trying to be more understanding of what I am presently. With all the people I’ve been and continue to be, I’m beginning to figure out who I really am: cool and complex and interesting and kind and good and all those things I want people to see me as, but also sad and insecure and desperate for reassurance and narcissistic and foolish and afraid, and maybe being all these things isn’t as bad as not knowing myself at all. As Jenny Slate writes in a tweet too sacred for the hellsite that is Twitter: “As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love.”