Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

That’s what I thought love was: someone who constantly wanted to take your picture.

It was an anger that was loose and unspecific, a faint tint that had spread like dye in water. It encompassed all men.

The thing most people don’t understand about going out and getting wasted every night is that it’s not easy. It’s not always fun. It can be hard work. It takes discipline.

Men are so gullible; they believe whatever phantoms they project onto your face. I ask: How can I respect a species so easily deceived?

That’s the thing about money. It insulates you from certain truths. If ignorance is bliss, then it’s also the greatest luxury money can buy.

It is immoral to be rich; if being rich means having more money than you need, more money than you know what to do with, who do you think is paying that price?

I was constantly oscillating between desperately wanting his admiration and hating him for making me want it.

It never occurred to me that within those breezy transactions, which I’d been trained to think of as nothing, an act no more consequential than slapping someone across the face, I might also be giving away a tiny, intangible part of my soul.

Woman power, but we—the models—were always called girls. That’s what they were really after: womanhood slipped over girls’ bodies.

I’d been training for this, after all; every girl has. Why else do they teach us to hate our bodies, to treat them as expensive machines? Then it’s easy to do whatever you have to do, since you’re not really involved; everything’s happening on the outside, but inside you’re completely untouched.

though the Internet is endless, our memory and attention spans are embarrassingly finite.