A peek inside the dollhouse.

The Week in Selfies: 6/15/20 - 6/21/20

Jun 19, 2022

For this month, I’ve decided to keep the donation project going. At the end of June, based on new free and paid (new or converted) subscriptions, I’ll make a donation to the National Center for Transgender Equality.

If you are new here (welcome!) or need a refresher, you can always find more details of the project on my About page.

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And thank you, as always, for being here.

Do you ever think about what your life looks like from the outside?

We get and give some glimpses of life through social media, of course. It may be good, bad, or ugly but it is curated. Sometimes it’s what we like. Sometimes it’s humor. Sometimes, authenticity. Sometimes, incredible vulnerability. Sometimes, it’s a character we play and anyone who actually knows us knows that that is not us. Whatever or whoever it is showing up in these arenas, it’s an active choice. And as any number of adages and memes will tell you, there is always more to the story than what is shared and what is seen. You can’t compare other people’s outsides to your insides.

Still, do you ever think about what your life looks like from the outside?

This might feel like interrogating your own “main character energy” which is something that sprung up on TikTok, I believe, and like most trends, entered the cultural zeitgeist quickly. Mind you, I am 35 years old and mostly use TikTok for receiving cake-making, funny, or mental health related videos and consuming Our Flag Means Death content but, from what I understand, this energy is acknowledging that you are the protagonist of your life and acting like it. It’s a recurring theme song as you pound the payment. It’s the swell of the wind when something major, or dramatic, is happening. It’s romanticizing the world around you. I think it can be a very activating way to approach life. I also think it can be a good way to put a wall between you and yourself.

So, aside from our public consumption of others and ourselves, do you ever think about what your life looks like from the outside?

As these rhetorical questions probably tell you, I do. I live alone and, especially in the last few years, have spent an inordinate amount of time alone. Obviously, I’ve learned about and developed some weird…let’s call them endearing…habits with no one to answer to but myself. The longer I live alone, the more my curiosity of what my life looks like from outside of me grows.

My day-to-day tends to exist in a muted palette. I’m largely a creature of habit. I have created a routine, at least during the week, and stick to it. When I say the “same old same old” is going on, it is. There are well worn trails from my bedroom to kitchen to living room and back again. If my apartment were a dollhouse and someone lifted the roof off for a peek in, they would see someone passing the hours in simple and quiet ways, just trying to make it from one day to the next.

I started to think about this in terms of this week’s selfies because there is nothing particularly arresting about any of them. During this time in 2020, I was newly moved into my apartment and there were no routines. I slept on an air mattress for a week. My internet was a phone hotspot. It took me weeks to unpack. Well, actually, it took me months to unpack as I waited for things to be delivered. And there was a whole thing with my couch which is a story I’ll save for another day. My world was chaos.

But, what really strikes me about these photos is, actually, they just show more simple and quiet moments. I was excited about fancy salt. I met up with the old roommates at the old apartment to toast each other and these new (if not, considering the world circumstances, forced) adventures. I worked. This week really shows that I do, in fact, have basic hygiene skills.

I was living my life the best way I knew how. That’s everyday. And I don’t know if that’s what my life looks like from the outside. But that’s what it is inside.

Monday, June 15, 2020

I was certain this hat belonged to my old roommate but when I texted her she said it was mine. So anyway, I have three of these hats in different colors.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020