When I was 14 and unwell, I made a lot of lists. They were lists of things I could do, or buy, or become, in order to get ‘better’ – not just better from what I was unwell with, but better in the sense of self-development, of becoming. The lists looked something like this: Shower every day. Read more. Wash face. Journal. Paint make up on in a certain way. Buy this dress. Learn that instrument. Listen to this album (and love it). I, of course, completed none of them. All I’d done in constructing them, in hoping they’d provide me with the structure and blueprint for an upwards trajectory in my life, was fall prey to commodification culture – and I wasn’t even really on the internet yet.

Downloading TikTok only made it worse. Social media is to self-expression what porn is to sex; a simulacrum, a method of cyclical, phoney gratification that briefly satiates a base desire for intimacy and connection, but in reality chips away at our own conceptions of ourselves. I don’t wear blush, I am a tomato girl, I’m not lonely, I’m having a sad girl summer, I don’t just like Buffy’s outfits, I am a fairycore/Y2K/dream-punk/indie-sleaze/nymphet/coastal grandmother girl. I consume and consume and think the void is being filled. I am getting ‘better’, I am becoming loveable, I am ‘becoming’. I am re-inventing myself every day, I am on an endless journey of eternal girlhood, I am constructing a self, I am having a ‘glow up’.

“Social media is to self-expression what porn is to sex”

Every new aesthetic, every instance of consumption or categorisation is like a porn-provoked orgasm; satisfying and elating and so, so forgettable. I keep lists of everything I read, every arthouse film I watch. I read and watch so I can add to those lists, so I can post the lists, so I can be perceived as someone who reads and watches for the sake of reading and watching. I am eating words and excreting buckets of self-actualisation.

Except I’m not. Except there’s nothing there and we’re an emotionally underdeveloped generation. We don’t date, we have ‘situationships’, we are ‘casual’, we are ‘working on ourselves’ before finding love. We date ‘for the plot’, we hook up for the stories, for the experience. We do these things hoping our selves’ will be handed to us on a platter once we’ve done enough living. We attempt self-reinvention in easily articulable ways, consumptive ways, ways that make the parts of ourselves we wish to re-invent more palatable. It’s not ‘new year, new me’, it’s ‘new season, new me,’ ‘new semester, new me,’ ‘new paycheck, new me’. Everything is packaged for Instagrammable distribution. What we really mean by ‘reinvention’ is that we desire a more marketable self. Because love is linked to palatability, to commodity, to easy and materialistic articulation of identity. Because of course it is (it’s not).

“Everything is packaged for Instagrammable distribution”

Do not reinvent yourself.

You do not need to be born anew, to ‘glow-up’, to begin a new ‘era’ (a kid I was tutoring asked me a few months ago if she could use the phrase ‘Victorian era’ in an essay or if it would be considered slang. I laughed so I didn’t cry). Instead, develop yourself, the self you’ve had since birth. Develop it emotionally (break up, be honest, watch a Mike Mills film, talk to your mother), physically (create a recipe and repeat it until perfection, something you can give to friends to show your love alongside a comment on their post), creatively (write something then bury it, take a photo without posting it). In her Substack essay Notes from the end of summer, Rayne Fisher Quann states that love should be ‘generative and consuming’. Bell hooks sees ‘love’ as a verb. When we begin to see things as verbs, not nouns for consumption and display, our selves develop, and we glow (up).

Oh, but I love a list. Some things don’t change. Here are some things I’m forcing myself to do this season which can’t be packaged or sold or posted.

• I’m trying to eat more eggs. Not in the way my male housemates did last year that was vaguely psychotic (read five for breakfast, five for dinner – I do not believe bulking season requires that much sulphur) but in a way that makes my mum, endlessly worried about my health, proud. Moral: consume in a way that actually fills you up, not in a way that looks pretty.
• I’m forcing myself to be disgustingly earnest. As someone who’s been told time and again that they’re ‘too direct’, I’m finally leaning into it. Being truthful about your feelings is horrendous, genuinely. But it’s better than concealing (most of the time… act on this with your own discretion).
• Lying outside with as much skin exposed as possible. Not to show anyone but to absorb as much vitamin D as possible before we’re plunged into Autumn

• Finding things to do with my hands that aren’t smoking. So far crochet and photography are strong contenders for a replacement activity. My room is covered in bits of yarn and prints but it’s worth the clear lungs.
• Refusing to engage with anything BRAT related. Have not listened to the album. Many millennial colleagues have asked me to explain BRAT summer to them and I’ve had to respond disappointingly with, “I genuinely have no idea. I think it’s something to do with the colour green.”

And if all else fails, cook a really good risotto. I’ve found out this year it cures basically everything.