oh no! I'm in love with a hologram (Patreon)

audio for this post available here.

photo from paul sermon's telematic dreaming 

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we are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.fernando pessoa

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in my career two people have thought I was sending them secret messages through my poems. this is funny to me, because, you know, what a coincidence. both of you? when it happened the second time I wondered if it wasn’t them with the problem, but me, unintentionally writing in code or just in a wired schizophrenic way that attracted them like the artificial moonlight of a bug zapper. both fellas messaged me on and off for years. one made muddled allusions to scripture and greek myth and feared for my safety with an eerie graveness, like a ‘word of advice’ from a spooky butler; the other was very interested in the alignment of the planets at the time of my birth and liked to relate what I did and said online to their transit through space. both spoke to me with the familiarity of a friend, or a lover. I never said a word to them. one came to see me on tour; I recognized him. during their active years I joked with friends that I should introduce them to each other as an experiment, or tell them I had indeed left messages for one but not the other and together they would need to figure out which is which (forgive me this cruelty! – it made me less afraid (if you’re here, sorry, lads – I hope you’re doing better)). all – truly, all – of my female writer friends have stories like this, most of them worse. s.s.’s stalker found her on vacation. r.m.’s is now known to the police but hangs in that judicial timewarp-logic purgatory whereby no one can’t act until he ‘does something’. it took us all time to stop thinking of this dark attention as something we caused or brought about by being a certain way. now we know it has nothing to do with us. to be known by strangers is to be an avatar, a prism through which other people’s searching light is thrown.

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I expect we’ll need to talk about parasociality more as the limbo pole which signifies ‘celebrity’ inches lower and people grow more lonely (and what do we call a relationship with a, by nature, nonreciprocal AI?). if you were a burgeoning youtube personality in the early 2010s parasocial was a new and useful term to have in your back pocket, when children idolized children and none of the children knew how to act, especially me, who found myself anxious and imbued with a power I didn’t want, like every time I’ve ever driven a car. by the time I was twenty I was a ‘minor’ ‘youtube’ ‘celebrity’ and my fanbase was comprised almost completely of teenagers, so it felt enormous, all that energy. at my most undiscerning I let hundreds of god’s creatures wait in line to meet me at an event. they wanted to touch me. they wanted a picture. they gave me trinkets, letters, drawings of my face. this is in some ways an incredible earth honor, to be treated like a living altar, to be paid any attention by anyone for any amount of time at all. but I hated the experience. this act that I thought would at least be maybe charitable left me without any satisfaction, only a feeling of having made the world worse.

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here’s some information: before I was someone anyone wanted to know, I was fourteen years old and possessed with love for a youtuber. he was older than me and lived in another country. he was sort of dorky, twig-armed and anemic, interested in niche online subcultures – all traits I had that made me undesirable. but on him they were attractive, or at least tolerable enough to garner him a level of adoring social currency reserved only for the very beautiful. my affection for this person was debilitating. it sat heavy in my body, like a sickness. among my favorite hobbies was collecting personal information about him and memorizing it. when I was bored in class, which was every moment of class, I liked to imagine him watching me – not at the window but metaphysically, like god, or santa claus – and pitying me, thinking poor girl, poor special girl, sitting there, wasting time, and this gave my suffering meaning, and therefore purpose. as I floated around the sterile fuzz of midwestern suburbia, walked into strip malls, walked out of strip malls, I was comforted by thoughts of him in the beautiful town from his videos, his world so dimensionally separate from mine. for a time the pocket of my mind where I stored his transmission was the only glimmer in my life.

vidcon was a youtube convention in anaheim, california (it still exists, but not as I knew it). in its second year of existence my dad took me, not knowing really what it was or what was going on, just that it was important to me (an act of mercy I will be grateful for forever). friends I met online were there, exciting in their own right; so was my special youtuber. from the time we arrived I felt his presence there as an electricity, an earthly force, my heart crackling like a geiger counter. I made sure I looked perfect the entire weekend in case he appeared somewhere unexpected (a pre-event hygiene list I’d made included points like ‘cut toenails’ and ‘clean belly button’ as though anyone would see either of those body parts (okay, I didn’t think anyone would, it was just to be safe)). his meet and greet was on the last day of the event. like many fallen sisters before me and many others after, I thought that if him and I were to make eye contact, even among this conveyer belt of admirers, I would leave an impression on him so profound so as to supercede all those before and after, those pretenders, those fakes, with their merch and their tears, not me; I would be cool and unmoved by his cult celebrity which would reveal how mature I was for my age, making me the most desirable child in line, and he would have to have me . . . and the fantasy trailed off, because what was important wasn’t this person but . . . something else. I had crested over the glossy event horizon of the hyperreal.

at the beginning of the meet-and-greet line it was like . . . I don’t know, there he was. to see him from afar, a sort of animatronic of himself, let me peer through the fantasy’s blinds and find the real world: no matter what happened here there was no path to satisfaction. he, as I loved him, didn’t exist. everything I wanted churned inside the fantasy only. so I didn’t meet him! genuinely, I left! good girl! after this experience that dark and desperate energy towards the youtuber went away, and from then on I’ve been a little repulsed by all celebrity and the impossible equation it presents, aware its dissatisfaction is a feature, not a bug. (years later, as things happen, this person and I became friendly acquaintances. I don’t know if we could have ever been real friends. I will know what his favorite movie was when he was 19 and his blood type forever.)

this is a common teenage-girl-style parasociality: extreme and passionate but largely ‘harmless’, trying on lust like a feather boa, practicing at womanhood, compensating for boredom, understimulation, lack of romantic interest from anyone with touchable skin. it was sort of sexual and sort of not, like making dolls fuck. in this way my fixation was ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’. but running underneath this story was my desperate unhappiness. I was starving myself, for one. I slept with my thighs cocooned in plastic wrap, hoping to get dissolved. afraid of knives, I scratched myself with pens until I bled. hundreds of times did I post pictures of myself on yahoo answers tacked with the question ‘is this girl pretty?’. the tears, the tears, the tears. my one-sided affection’s intensity was only allowed to grow because of the damp and the dark of my loneliness. the youtuber became not a person but a path out of my insecurity, a vessel to hold the love I wanted to give, but no one wanted from me.

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if my friends and I went to dinner with our stalkers we might leave with fewer stalkers. if one of my ‘fans’ could have seen me vomiting, or shitting, or scraping plaque from my teeth with a safety pin, or being rude to a stranger, or giving a bad group presentation, or arguing with my mom, or crying at a pap smear, they would have discovered it wasn’t me who overwhelmed them, or any alleged exceptionality I held within me; it was their own psychic links attached to their notion of me, remembering the dark nights they soothed themselves using me and the relief that followed, the calm they found wearing my face. there was no point in sharing with me this private world they created in my image: it wasn’t for me: I could never go.

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where we spend our attention reveals who we are. if a significant portion goes towards one stranger with strong feelings in tow, there’s information to be gleaned by isolating these feelings and moving them to a curious and non-judgemental desert in one’s mind to see what they really are. an object of idolatry, we can assume, represents a lack one feels in oneself: this person is more beautiful, more confident, more talented, whatever. a negative parasocial relationship, too, reveals a similar motive. when someone annoys us it’s not a proper conclusion that the person is objectively annoying; rather, something in us is annoyed. when I can sense from a public figure that they care about trying to come across as very clever, I'm pricked with dislike for them – but I can recognize it’s not because this person's badness is written in the stars but because they are a mirror. I dislike them because they remind me of the hate I quietly harbor for parts of myself. to encounter them casts a spotlight on the small child-me in my mind, slumped over at the microphone, finally given the chance to speak but having nothing to say, stupid, stupid. I know when anyone publicly expresses dislike for me they’re experiencing something like this and so I’m sympathetic. so much of life returns here: hatred comes from insecurity which comes from fear which comes from pain. many of us aren’t given the tools to move past ‘hatred’. but when the curious follow these roots into their past, through their subconscious, they land at a cool, quiet stream.

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artists are the messengers of their work, not the message.

the young, the very lonely, the unwell: profitable demographics.

parasociality plays a comparable sociological hand to monarchism, or religion. but we know those idols to be symbols, and these are men, just men, and these symbols-which-we-can't-see-are-symbols, then, are used to fill voids in the self which are not symbolic: space we hold for connection, and touch, and true intimacy with other creatures. in this way the soul is eroded.

there is no hierarchy. there never was. for now everywhere there are people all facing one way. a crowd of abysses gawp at another abyss.