Edition # 146: Who Do You Think You Are

Plus, live closer to your friends, a stellar poem, and an app I use every day

A Note From the Editor

Recently, I was on a date with a man I met in the wild. There I was, bare-faced and profusely sweating, attempting to tire out my friend’s dog whom I was watching for the weekend at my local dog park. Sitting on a nearby bench: him, with two dogs, one of whom nuzzled and licked me like I was her mother. My dog seemed to take to him, too, and we got to intermittently chatting about nothing. Later, as I gathered my dog to depart in a frenzy after a spat with a much larger dog, the stranger asked whether I was single—yes—and whether he could get my number.

We are always living but we are always viewing our own lives from a distance, too. We imagine the stories we will one day tell. "I met him the very first day I arrived in town," or, "I was just minding my business at a dog park when he asked whether I came here often." Perhaps that afternoon I was calculating the appeal of the narrative, the unlikely scenario in which you meet a person in real life and end up dating them.

Here, a pause: why is it better, more appealing, to meet someone in real life than digitally? I remember discussing this with a friend a few years back when she insisted she would not meet “her person” online. Meeting in the world suggests the possibility of true romance. It is as close to a Hallmark situation as we can get in a big city in our modern lives. So, swept away I was by his boldness, I obliged, offering this stranger my first name and my phone number though I’d hardly gotten a good look at him and, at that point, I didn’t even know his name. Who can resist a real meet-cute? It couldn’t be worse than giving random strangers on the internet my number. At least I’d already heard his voice.

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It has been a few months since I've been logged off Instagram and, effectively, off social media. I have not become smarter. In fact, I have probably become less smart if intelligence is measured by one's knowledge about the general state of things. Off Instagram, I am swaddled in a cocoon of my own making. I get to control what I let in. Off Instagram, my mind gets a refresher on how it feels to process things in the real world just as they are, not in anticipation of how they will seem to others. When working on a farm a few weeks ago, I felt the callouses forming on the beds of my palms. I tuned in to the lull of the casual conversation, I inhaled the sharp scent of freshly chipped wood. I was not thinking about how I could frame this day on my Instagram story. I was just living. Sometimes, I want to be just living. I don't want to know that anyone is watching.

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Back to the date. We’re at a sexy neighborhood bar; a bar where I’ve had an astounding number of dates. So many dates that, if this were a movie, we might choose this very location for the "montage date scene," playing just before our heroine finds her match. Drink, laugh, drink, laugh, drink, look at yourself in the bathroom mirror and think, when can I go home?

Not so far into the date, I talked about how I’d recently spent some time in Costa Rica. Here, an admission. "Yeah, well, I know you're a travel writer,” he said. And color me naive, but I was taken aback, for all I shared with him upon our initial meeting was my first name and my phone number.

A pause—the audience, watching this scenario play out on their small screens, laughs over a laugh track. "She's surprised?" they say."Does she know how the internet works?" She does, folks, but she sometimes likes to pretend she is less accessible, or that people are less interested.

I ask how he knows this about me, one of those questions I could easily guess the answer to. Some response about an old social media app I forgot I ever had. When you add someone's number to your phone, he says, they are pulled up on the app. He got my last name, and from there, it was easy. “I just Googled you.”

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On the 26th floor of a landmark office building in a world where pandemics were but a distant foreshadowing, I Google "Meghan Palmer writer." The results are not me, this Meghan Palmer, but another one someplace else. I scour her digital presence, wondering what decisions she made earlier in her life to get her here, along with the other Meghan Palmer, a high-achieving ivy league consultant. Of the three of us, I suspect I am definitively the least impressive. And, I’m convinced, the most unfulfilled.

At this point in my life, I feel like a writer—I have been writing, consistently— but to the world, I have not yet claimed this title. I have been working on it in therapy for about a year. I tell my therapist that I want ot be a writer more than anything, but that I also don't want to be broke. I tell her that want to be a writer, but my sister is already a writer and can there be two writers in one family? I want to be a writer, but, but, but, and I’m writing all the while.

That day, in the office which felt like a hand closing around my throat, I decided I would take over this digital space. Meghan Palmer writer. Because, fuck, I was a writer! I always had been, but I had ignored it because I had made my decisions based on money and expectations and a healthy dose of fear. I thought, I know this world we live in. Speak it into fruition. Do not sit back, young thing, and wait for some unnamed God to anoint you into whatever it is you want to be. Grab it with two hands, pull it close to you. Speak it aloud. Scream it, if you must.

A full year or so later, I Google Meghan Palmer writer. There she was, my little avatar. Look at me now, I thought. Through the airwaves of space and time, I sent the other Meghan Palmer writer an apology—I’m sorry for taking your place.

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My date revealed other discoveries about me throughout the evening. I was a travel writer, sure, but I also had an attitude about corporate life, according to his calculation based on a minor line of copy on my website. He’d read all of my work, he claimed, though I didn’t actually believe this.

We never know how we might react in these situations and my own reaction surprised me. I was not flattered, as I might’ve expected, my ego not stroked. Instead, I was agitated at this person, this stranger, for digging too deep too soon. I looked forward to this date precisely because I knew nothing about this man. I wanted the two of us to unspool the mysteries of each other through conversation, to seize each other up based on the person we encountered across the table.

Instead, I got another tidbit of information about myself an hour or so in, between bites of omakase. He knew I had once been Miss University of South Florida, he admitted with a sly grin. I cannot claim to be shocked by this, for I had posted a photo of the experience on my Instagram at one point and my profile isn’t private. Perhaps if he had read all of my writing, he would know what that expereince did to my mental health. I knew he hadn’t, though, for his tone changed when he discussed the pageant. It was part teasing, part admiration. A glaze over his eyes as I insisted I had never been a real pageant girl. Sure, I hadn’t, he said.

it was only then that it hit me—he had drawn his own conclusions about me prior to our meeting. And that is normal, we all do that. About him, I had concluded he was wealthy—he had two dogs and lived in an expensive neighborhood. I concluded he was confident, or cosplaying confident, based on his bold inquiry for my number. He was a good communicator via text, complimentary and not too overbearing. The rest, I expected, would be filled in slowly as I got to know him, for this wasn’t another app date. This was an old-timey meet-cute. Or at least that was the story I told myself.

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At a very funny stand-up comedy show the other night, a comedian wound up for a that made me wish I had access to my locked-away phone so that I could take notes. The sentiment was along the lines of, “Your reputation is what others think you are; your social media presence is what you think you are.”

I’ve thought about this all week, for it is objectively true. We control our social media presence. We get to package up the version of us others see, and that is what makes the platforms so appealing, so ego-stroking. If our data has become compromised because of the lack of digital privacy, we have given the key to the house right over to those who want to rob us. We’ve created these findable, easily classifiable digital personas and we must walk with them.

Lately, on Facebook's app, I've been getting those "from a year ago today" reminders. They are often in the form of Instagram story, which, in recent years, I had been also posting to Facebook with the idea that scale is always better. The more eyeballs, the higher engagement. I scroll back through these old Instagram stories from a year or so ago and my whole body cringes. It is me and it isn't me at all. My Instagram story persona was a distant echo of my true self—silly, attention-seeking, gently self-deprecating.

My stories were unimportant, as all of ours are. One was a roundup of the writing I'd done in my first six months as a freelancer. A girl I once knew replied to one of those slides, I remember. She was a former coworker who happened to be in a long term, committed relationship with an ex of mine. She told me she was impressed that I got to interview a certain chef, for she loved him. I was glad to have shared the information, glad people from my old life got to see me now, got to see how far I’d come.

The final slide of the Instagram story was a picture of my face. Several text bubbles danced around my head—being a freelancer isn't all glamour, I confessed, it is hard work. Paying for your own health insurance sucks (still true), I never know when the work is coming (still true). I was trying to offset the previous slides of humble bragging, I suppose. Trying to assert my down to Earth personhood. In a smaller-sized font at the very bottom of the image, I wrote an unrelated text bubble: Here's me after a particularly bad date last week! Fun!

When I look back at that story, I see what I was going for—a reminder to all 1,500 of you: I Am A Writer Living in New York and I Am Single and, maybe you'll agree, I Am Decently Attractive. I get it, but today, I hate it. I can't help it—scrolling thorugh that story, I can taste the ash-flavored desperation on my tongue. The need for attention, for validation. If you google Meghan Palmer Writer and I don't show up, am I even a writer? If I write this cool article and my exes’ current partner doesn't respond, does it even matter? If my skin is clear but no one notices, am I even pretty?

You step back—you should always step back—and see yourself from a distance, see the world from a distance. A year and change later, that girl posting the humble brag Instagram story is somewhere, but she isn’t here. Part of me hopes I don’t meet her again, another part of me feels her return is inevitable.

From the distance you can more clearly see what you always knew; that this internet self is so fleeting, so meaningless. But perhaps necessary, in some ways, for who can you be without a witness? Who will remember you? I wouldn't have known of her sickness, that girl I once knew, had I not kept up from a distance, with its progress. Had I not been online as she retreated from the Earth.

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After my date, I debated the merits of deleting my Instagram profile. I wondered whether it would be possible to wholly erase the better portion of my online presence, what that erasure would look like and how it would affect my life. If your social media is what you think of yourself and I know myself to be in a constant state of flux, then I will never keep up. I will never be my fully realized self online—you're probably reading that saying, no shit, who is?—yet, there will always be people who are tracking that lag, who are sizing you up based on whatever information they can gather, no matter how out of date that information is, no matter how little it reflects the essence of who you think you are.

I think, I hope, that I am so much more interesting in real life than I could ever dream of being online. I want to emerge on another planet, fresh-faced, clear-eyed, with no digital baggage following me around. I do not want to fabricate the who in "who are you," but I was to let it be revealed slowly, naturally, the way flowers begin to sprout in the heat of the sun, small green pores opening to soak up the morning dew. I don't want to be a travel writer or a girl from Florida or single or an avid reader or a social butterfly or a good friend or a scared daughter or a New Yorker. I want to be whatever emerges outside the confines of the stories I've told myself. The stories I've told you.

Cheers, my dears, and as always, thank you for reading. It was been a true hellscape of a week for me, so I’m hoping to spend the weekend recharging, taking a few deep breaths, and attempting to find some flexibility with myself as all of my plans for the becoming months have shifted overnight. Next week, I’m road-tripping from NYC to Atlanta with a dear friend and her pup. I’m very much looking forward to spending a week with people I deeply love and to being outside of the noise of New York for a moment. I hope you find a bit of quiet this weekend.

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Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming

1. Live Closer To Your Friends. Reading this made me simultaneously happy and sad. Many of my friends have departed from NYC in recent times; times continue to change and more of us will go. Still, I cannot agree with the piece’s sentiment more. We’re happier when we live near our pals. If only we could convince our pals to move to the cities where we want to live!

2. Bald Eagles in a Field, a Poem. I’ve been slowly making my way through this collection of poetry—slowly only because I restrain myself from reading 10 poems every morning the way I want to. Instead, I practice self-control, reading just 2, or 3, slowly, then again, sometimes aloud. This isn’t always the case with collections, but this book of poems, in particular, is delicious—beautiful imagery of nature and birds, conveyed feelings of anger and lust and a body not complying with your desires. There are two poems from the collection in the link, both of which I loved, but the ladder speared through my heart. I’ve read it over and over again this week.

3. What To Do With Climate Emotions. If you’re like me, you might’ve read that headline and thought…yes, but no. The recent coverage of the ongoing climate disasters this summer is bleak and, in my readings, one-dimensional. The number of articles that start with the doom list of disaster after disaster, ending with—it’ll only get worse from here, enjoy the coolest summer of your life—doesn’t inspire me to continue reading on the subject. This, however, isn’t that. I am sincerely curious about what to do with those doom-laden feelings, and when I saw this one was penned by Jia Tolentino, I knew her thesis would be something interesting that I hadn’t considered before—I was right. Give this one a read. Would also be a cool piece to discuss in an article club / over dinner with friends

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Perhaps You Should… Let An App Tell You About Yourself

Pretty sure I’ve recommended this app before, but it’s worth a bump. I like this app because it gives me little tidbits about what I might expect from any given day, but it also suggests ways to think about various periods of time and how to ask yourself better questions to go deeper with whatever it is you’re experiencing. If you have any daily apps you love to use every day that are purely ancillary, I’d love to hear about them!

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**Bonus Content** (The Natalie Portman Rap)

I forgot how good this iconic digital short was until I recently re-watched it. Natalie Portman will always be one of my favorites.

Also, this New Yorker cartoon is too good. When I say I haven’t stopped listening to this song for the past three days, I am not exaggerating.

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A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them.”

-Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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This newsletter is best served with a side of conversation, so drop your opinions, reflections, and thoughts in the comments below and let’s get to talking.

Or, share the most thought-provoking piece from today’s edition with someone you love, then call them up to discuss, debate, and percolate. As a wise woman once said, “Great minds discuss ideas.