My Year of Clashing Identity Performances and Hyperfixation
“The girls that get it, get it.”-Khaenotbae
If you post regularly on Substack, you'll begin to notice certain metric patterns. I know which days yield the most engagement for my posts and which types of posts receive the most responses. However, I haven't done anything with that information because my brain excels at recognizing patterns, not necessarily at using that information effectively. In fact, I often tend to focus–hyper-focus, really–on things with the least practical value like sharing these machinations with you, which are meant to remain invisible on the page.
It’s rare that I hyper-focus on tasks that benefit me. Instead, my most extreme instances of hyper-focus—those that have transmogrified into hyper-fixations—have often been unhealthy, unnecessary or profoundly arbitrary side quests and rabbit holes. I won’t unpack all of them, but having a little beverage at all times as a self-soothing intervention is one that’s still going strong, something I nurture daily. My body, which I am now learning to disengage from obsessively monitoring, has been my most enduring hyperfixation this year. Maintaining this obsessive focus was not only masochistic but also pointless. While many things that have ceased to feel good move the plot along, a hyper-fixation on my body does not.
Another hyperfixation of mine has been My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, which I’m currently reading for the third time. I’m still in shock that it wasn’t included on the NYT’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, but I don’t expect them to get it. They haven’t read it three times like I have.
On my first read, I resonated deeply with the unnamed protagonist, especially her harsh internal monologue and bed-rotting. This time, I’m struck by how much I see myself in Reva because I’m finally allowing myself to. Initially, I resisted fully relating to Reva because I preferred identifying with the bed-ridden loser over the striver loser who remains stuck in their mediocre reality despite their best efforts. There is nothing aspirational about either of their performances of womanhood but one is less pathetic. Me refusing to want to be the more pathetic one doesn’t make it any less true that I’m the more pathetic one. It was giving Jessa delusion.
I’m interested in advancing the plot, one hyperfixation at a time. I believe each post of my blog, whether considered or hastily written, does that.
This effectively reintroduced me, a writer whose career had been dormant for two years due to chronic illness, as well as the themes I’m most interested in. I actually wrote most of the piece in the spring of 2022 right after Ketamine Infusion Therapy and right before my brain stopped working due to actively starving myself.
This one didn't really do much here. I was intentionally vague because my brain still wasn't functioning well enough to write, but I needed to get unstuck and back on track.
I began writing this before I started starving. I restarted it last summer in Brooklyn (during my last week there), but when I tried to get it coherent enough to post, I gave up. My brain still didn’t work well enough.
What's in my bag? I'm in my bag
This post contains material that actually belongs in Hyperreal Individualism. However, my brain couldn't perform the critical thinking necessary to include it there, so I left it up to the readers to make those connections themselves. Meanwhile, I've been focusing on my health so that I can eventually make these connections in what will become the final piece.
on erasure, snl after parties, weight loss and more…
None of this constitutes "the work," but much of what it means to be a writer today, as my meta-commentary reveals, is not "the work." An influential figure in this ecosystem mentioned that this post intrigued them about my rebrand more than any of my actual writing. This makes sense given who they are—a writer with high competency but low POV legibility, typical of many who are weighed down by the social dynamics of the internet and the writing world. Their frenetic posting style isn’t that glamorous, yet they’ve achieved status, so they’ve earned the right for others to play pretend with them. They are aspirational to those whose identities are similarly absorbed by that unreality.
I keep learning the same lesson: none of the aspirational models are truly aspirational. I need to trust myself and be my own aspirational model, even if it means forgoing the chance to play pretend with everyone else. I initially justified everything—especially the embarrassment of middle-class striving in public—as part of the Princess Babygirl performance, for the potential rewards it could yield. The praise, which was the only reward, was intoxicating for awhile, but in retrospect, I feel foolish for indulging in it as much as I did because it was empty praise. Most praise is.
on weirder together parties, tweet-and-deleters, "hate reads" and my first upcoming paid post
This is the closest I’ve ever come to acknowledging sublimated conflict. I will never break the fourth wall like that again. It was kind of fun as a character—like most of my attempts at this kind of digital performance in the last nine months—but not as myself.
From Self-Optimized to Self-Actualized: The New Era of Empowered Women
The paywall created a sense of FOMO and led to an increase in paid subscribers. This topic is particularly relevant if you haven’t achieved social and economic parity through online hypervisibility, which you might feel somewhat entitled to, as I do. Media criticism that addresses the digital performance of womanhood has helped me process the last decade of freelancing, but I won’t have much else to say on the topic after Part 2.
Why James Blake Should Date Me Instead of Jameela Jamil: A Jungian Analysis
A fun little throwaway I wrote in 20 minutes that hardly constitutes writing, and yet has the most comments of any of my other posts.
Same but this is sort of an unofficial part 1 to something else I’m writing.
Boyhood is trending, according to Jessica DeFino. I only published this so it could get out of my drafts and so I could start introducing other voices on my blog. I can’t wait to share the second installment of this column because it won’t be me!
Here, I’m expressing a desire to return to authenticity ("i am done looksmaxing, girlbossing, and being pretentious"), after experimenting with different personas and emulating aspirational models (all while criticizing others doing the same, LOL), so this is me sort of crashing out.
The more I have tried to uncover and excavate who I really am, the more estranged I’ve become from who I thought I was, and more importantly, who I wanted to be. I feel closer to accessing authenticity, but I am still the assumptions ascribed to my being, the accumulation of my traumatic experiences, the simulacrum of my tastes, a composite of my mimetic rivals.
I am also an essence, Princess Babygirl, which I can manipulate to represent me however I want. The performance of identity–of womanhood–is just that: a party trick. A gimmick.
And this is me picking myself up after crashing out, finding the silver lining. Life is kind of beautiful? I feel closer to reconciling all of the unreconciled parts of myself now because of the chaos of my digital performance in the last year. It was necessary for the plot and for my character development.
The alienation and fantasy of modern femininity
I wanted an excuse to tease imagery from my first Youtube video essay. (This post is doubling in the same way.)
My Year of Clashing Identity Performances and Hyperfixation
I initially planned to have only two offerings this month, but there will definitely be another post before the end of July (paid). Then, I’ll switch gears to nourish other hyperfixations.
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IG: @princessbabygirlforever / Tiktok: @princessbabygirlforever / Youtube: @princessbabygirlforever
And that’s why you’re one of the most impressive writers on this app. You ooze honesty and good faith from every pore. Thank you for being you, whatever the performance was, I’m excited to discover all the unexplored corners of your art, of Princess BabyGirl. Through this kind of genesis + explanations (which are brillant I’m afraid) you reminded me that healing can only be beneficial to the creative process, and you have no idea how much I needed it.
If it’s a sort of announcement for a rebranding of yours, I’m utterly into it !!
Remember that they’re nothing better than artist demonstrating ipseity. Princess Babygirl forever and ever.
loving the meta-intertextuality! and the dress you made is fabulous 🌸
I also liked MYRR but felt a lot of resistance regarding the hype a couple years ago when people would aspirationally relate to the narrator, as there was nothing to admire about her. . In my reading, the narrator was driven to such an abject state because she never experienced or given love or warmth in her life. And she finds Reva, the one person who ever tries to show her compassion, distasteful and pathetic. She felt a lot more screwed from the onset. I think there was a part of me that wanted to gatekeep that feeling because i wanted people to find the hope in their own situation, realize they had friends or family who cared for them, not just in a parasitic way.
I felt with Reva there was always more hope, even with her hilarious dumb oprahisms. Reva was insecure and silly and always trying to make sense of her life like it was a hallmark movie, but I thought her persistence was brave and admirable, only possible because she had, if nothing else, love and roots.
i felt similarly, sort of an inverse situation? about the catcher in the rye where people were mad that holden was a whiny white rich boy without acknowledging he was deeply disillusioned and traumatized as a grieving brother and a witness to many forms of abuse.