Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

For all that talk about selling one’s soul, no one seems to be in the market. It’s the body that everybody wants. The body is a currency everyone can understand.

In any case, the fact remains: people see many things in my face, but what they never seem to see is me.

I had been bred for the easy life. And because I was pretty and white and had once known what it was like to be rich, I felt entitled to it, as if I were recapturing what was once mine, rather than taking what I didn’t deserve.

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

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?

The epiphany hung around until I was broke. Yes, it’s immoral to be rich, but it’s worse being poor.

Vodka soda no longer tasted like nail polish remover to me—it tasted like nothing, looked like nothing, and smelled like the void. Drinking it was like drinking emptiness. How many did I inhale over the years? Millions, it felt like. Gallons of emptiness.

I would have gone down on everyone on set if it meant I was one step closer to being famous, loved, revered.

She will give everything, until she is unsure what is content and what is her life.

She does not want to go to that dark, cloistered place, no phones allowed. She doesn’t feel like she exists when she’s there.

On the one hand, I was a little appalled. I looked like a slut, the way I was arching my back, my eyes half-lidded and lascivious. On the other hand, it didn’t matter, because people were Liking it.

I might have thought I’d actually hallucinated it, except for the message I received from Instagram telling me it had been removed for violating “community guidelines.” Worse, I saw that Benoit’s post had also been deleted.

No shit

Everyone knows you’re not anyone on the Internet until someone has threatened to rape or kill you,

If I were your boyfriend, I wouldn’t let you out of the house, one guy wrote, apparently thinking that was a compliment.

But none of my rationalizing or wild conjectures helped when I went to search for her name among my new Followers, as I did every day, multiple times a day, my heart plummeting when, every time, she was still absent.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to copy her at first.

Personality was a cozy way of saying personal brand. Whereas actual personalities tend to be fickle and elusory, personal brands can be depended upon and easily understood. Personal brands are SEO-friendly and searchable. Personal brands can be keyworded. Of course, the process by which a personality is transformed into a personal brand is a flattening one—but I like to look at it as a distillation, rather than an attenuation. Make no mistake, though, both personal brands and personalities are performative.

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.

Without my phone, there was no time.

Immediately, my feed was flooded with Likes and Comments. Each one fortified my sense of self-worth.

“There are ways,” he said, “of making sure. Every man has at least one option.”

When nothing happened, I began to grow angry. Could they really not recognize me through the glass? Couldn’t they tell I was somebody?

“You know, without me you’d be nobody,” he said finally. “I want you to think on that. Nobody.”

I wish I could say that I would have realized this on my own, even if what happened hadn’t happened. I’ve tried to make peace with this personal failing. My therapist says that while, on the one hand, it’s true I chose to be ignorant, it’s also true I was raised to it.

I knew now that she had been discarded, forgotten as if she had never existed at all, and then replaced.

Her, her, her. I still couldn’t remember her name, why couldn’t I remember her name?

Who cared about going online if you didn’t even have a presence? If no one even Liked anything you did?

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

I’d forgotten how good it felt, being someone else.

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.

Even though I had bashed a man’s head in, as a pretty white girl, I was still a thing to be protected.

I’ve no illusions about being liked after this. But at least I’ll be understood.