My Inner Panopticon

The self-imposed voyeurism of the writer

I’m standing in front of the bathroom mirror, trying not to cry, staring into my reflection and carefully taking off my dirty grey sweatshirt, a sort of ritual unmasking. I have just had another argument with my family and I feel disgusting, I feel like a monster. As I’m straightening my t-shirt underneath, my brain starts running, imagining how I’ll imagine this scene later, how I’ll write about it in the heat of emotion and read about it many months later and feel warm and correct. My brain starts narrating the event like I’m writing a book. I’m standing in front of the bathroom mirror, staring into my reflection and carefully taking off my dirty grey sweatshirt…

I feel kind of disturbed as I listen to my inner dialogue narrate the most beautiful version of the scene. It’s not beautiful, there’s no cohesive tone or feeling or message. The moody music in my headphones switches jarringly to a peppy ad for Home Depot, but then of course I think about how that will affect the symbolism. I wish I could stop, but I can’t. I don’t want my life to be a book.

This has been happening my whole life. I almost want to say it’s a defense mechanism, my brain wants to feel removed from the events it’s going through, so it makes them into words, it makes them feel fictional. This curse of the brain is a product of my being an avid reader and writer, but I also think it’s partially a product of my being very obsessed with my own identity and the idea of having a story and a voice. I want to project a life and therefore a vision of myself to the world, so I start building the story of my life in my head, curating its events and making it beautiful, making it perfect and aesthetic and meaningful. It’s my way of processing things, but it’s…. kind of terrifying? I often wish that I could escape it, that I could just live in the moment as they say, and not try to aestheticize and curate and slightly rewrite every event in my life, but it always happens, like the whisperings of some parasite. I am always watching myself, judging myself, I am my own voyeur.

Partially, I also think this is the fault of the internet. Before I got on the internet, this habit was always sort of raw and accurate, kind of just like an internal diary. After I got on the internet and got well into the labyrinth of social media, it started to become sort of… untruthful. I would leave out ugly bits, change things slightly to sound better, add in beautiful but fake details. This is really what disturbs me. Something in my head wants to lie about my life to make it sound better. My own raw life lived isn’t enough for the counsel in my head, my suffering must be beautiful and perfect. This is the curse of the woman, this is the curse of the writer, this is the cure of the aestheteur, the lover of beauty, the lover of beautiful literature. It eats you alive until you are not you, you are somebody different, somebody readable and Pinterest boardable and symbolic. You are a symbol. I am a symbol. In the center of my panoptic tower is me.