Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

If I told no one about it then, when it did completely drop from my mind, it would be like it never happened, and I’d be restored to myself. Like if I put up a post, but no one Liked it or even saw it, then it basically never existed.

That’s how fame works—it’s like love without the personal connection. Since fame means having a bunch of people love you without ever knowing you, being known is therefore antithetical to it. You are only adored where you are absent, in a permanent form of dissociation,

I realized then that everybody was pretending, all the time, but that for most people, for the people we call “normal,” the pretending part eventually falls away and the act simply becomes their life.