The Tamesis
Another thing I’ve been thinking about lately is, when Instagram launched, or when people started creating profiles, I remember being really intimidated by how much your avatar represented you. I’m trying to figure out how, in people’s brains, you allocate time between avatars and real life. Speaking of which now, it makes no sense at all. But when we didn’t have that, it was a very scary, foreign concept to me.
Well, it’s really a psychedelic concept because if you think about it, you’ll see that none of them are actually tangible or real. At the end of the day, there is nothing you can really hold on to.
Yes, exactly. It’s just in our minds. The other thing I’ve been thinking about – and I think this is something that’s very early on in cyberbullying on Instagram – I remember thinking, it’s crazy to post a picture of, say, your body and have so many people comment on it. At the time, I thought – if those people said that to you in real life… now we can’t separate it anymore because it’s so common. We are truly in an age of criticism and criticism, and it has become the norm. But it freaked me out because I thought – what’s stopping people from internalizing this and then realizing it in real life? That really, really scared me.
Again, a lot of people who become stars are young, and your brain isn’t equipped to handle that. So much already. I was talking to a filmmaker last night and we were just talking about how crazy it is to be on stage—to have so much energy directed at you—and how to deal with it.
Even though I have very limited experience on stage, even just the feeling of seeing those bright lights outside of people looking into your eyes, it’s really weird.
As humans, this is not normal for us because we naturally view it as a threat. So if you’re constantly experiencing this on your phone, in venues, and in person, I just don’t know what it’s like to live. This is very scary.
I think now that we’re talking about this, I’m thinking of the deer in the book – the doe. I feel like that’s actually representative of what we’re talking about: this feeling of being captured and perceived.
That’s intentional. This is one of my favorite visual references because I love the idea of deer caught in the headlights on the road and how powerful these animals are, but then the car drives towards them and that’s it. This is a great metaphor for what happens to these guys or these girls. They were contained in this very horrific way. And, the other part of the deer is that it’s seen as a magical creature, and that’s how I saw the girl in the book. So that’s a very sad symbol to me.
Photo: Petra Collins
