i think we’re all daughters who’ve had a thought

The term "wunderkind" has been democratized to include any young woman in her early twenties who curates the articles she reads into TikTok slides or Substack round-ups, accompanied by selfies showcasing an instagrammable lifestyle and a thin body. These articles, written by nymphet social critics and glamorous online philosophers, often blend first-person essay with cultural criticism, delving into themes of mental illness and feminine sadness.

Too broke to be Carrie Bradshaw and too old to be a wunderkind, I become an essence, a vibe. I squeeze myself into this canon of glamorous online philosophers and nymphet social critics, where our mediocrity is conferred with specialness and our contradictions are viewed through the kindest eyes. I perform this identity for maximum approval. I transmute unmet needs and buried desires into value through that performance. With each bit of disclosure, efforts and failures curated for relatability, I make a version of myself more legible to people I wasn’t put on this earth to be witnessed by, yet find myself in close proximity to because of the social internet. They are always in the room with me, witnessing me glamorously aestheticize and philosophize.

It's an "aww shucks" performance, a shrug. I don’t know how any of it got there—the Sandy Liang bows, the bohemianly strewn books, the images accentuating my waistline. It looks like I am working smart, not hard, evading the fate of my contemporaries, who write breathless Instagram captions as if being chased. In the faildaughter costume of baggy pants and a tiny shirt, they diminish glamor, weakening its signal. They’re omnipresent—so everywhere like the song. I, however, am candid, like Vogue’s 73 questions, surprised by the cameraman and interviewer I strategically placed to document my glamorous life.

Even if you’re not explicitly performing your identity for capital and exposure like I am, to be witnessed on social media makes you part of the matrix. You are both an online and an offline self, constantly managing these competing versions in others' minds. There is always subtext to analyze and react to. Our identities are fragmented and flattened into endlessly consumable fodder for someone else’s unauthorized narrative.

In that narrative, people draw logical inferences about you, not merely projections, based on what you've shared and also what is unseen. You are as much what you like or don’t like across Instagram and Twitter as you are what you post or don’t post. You are both your curated and uncurated self, the text and the subtext, the context and the coconut tree, the summer and the brat. One isn’t more real than the other, nor any less impactful. Pretending otherwise is part of the beautiful tapestry of contradictions that abound online.

-Princess Babygirl