Women [what strange lives] and mirror (pre-mirror reflections and shadows: protected from image of the self)→vanity→workout culture→tropes of historically condescending men inspiring intellectual/physical self-doubt→body image / self-obsession [“humiliations of girlhood”] / self-shaming [unjust system that revolves around beauty and aging]→wanting to escape the form as a ghost “as a woman of ideas everything from the chin down feels beneath me”→splitting yourself in two to maintain dignity through self-awareness [“everything is copy” / two fools]→addiction→seeing yourself through kinder eyes [a life of transparency, truth, freedom]→becoming whole again, a life as one person.

...my meditation practice these days, it’s getting too strong, you know?

do you see, i wanna linger as me. i want to haunt a house, and i know perhaps that’s a quaint dream, you know, unoriginal, but it’s mine, nonetheless. i mean, imagine. to night after night, to night after night just watch television behind someone watching television. [audience laughing] just giving yourself over to their programming choices. i mean, that… that would be a meditation in its own right, the surrender required there, you know. i just, uh… i wanna be a ghost, but if I make it as a ghost, i wanna be a strong ghost, a robust ghost, you know. no blurring away at the edges for me. i want to be 75% opacity at minimum. [audience laughing] i’d say 85 max. i want you to know i’m a ghost, otherwise what’s the point.” — Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees (2024)

Mirror/ing (mutual connection - is there anything more beautiful than relating to someone?, hierarchical violence of mirroring “the disappearance of one,” “I am what I am [ADD] here, amongst the others, and it’s becoming my own failure.” who is the mirror? performing role or not = still in relation to the ideal) → Viewer (looking good or bad in a picture, what do others see? someone thinking you look good when you think you look bad=almost worse knowing that’s their fundamental belief of you [in full-length version: body→the naked form & clothing→norms→identity box→identity politics, populism, purpose→freedoms→mobility, class, intellect, language→partial vs. total mediation and capture, ability to attend, defense of / compassion for the individual against well-designed behavior modification systems]→reflecting via record/ing→the passage of time→”that you’re literally always,” no break from the self, in digital context = exhaustion.

Looking alike-ness/difference (discerning difference within your own [human] species vs. others, instagram interactions: protect your peace) → Comparison (look good for the photos!, mirror vs. picture) → Wisdom for the younger self (“this is an inside job, you are so beautiful as is, you don’t have to change a thing, LOVED AND CHOSEN AS IS”) → Mixed-messaging [all truth is paradox] (cosmetic interventions [often] in service of sameness [standardization=scary], survival of the fittest competition, trends sold as more necessary than ever before “otherwise left behind with your god-given face,” constant looking at ourselves/others selfies, social media, zoom squares = widespread dysmorphia [all truth is paradox] ← cosmetic interventions allowing flourishing for some people experiencing true dysmorphia) → [what/who determines what qualifies as true?] Dysmorphia (violent stigma, revolutions in thought/education/understanding can’t keep up with revolutions in technology) → Value from what others think of you [“perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor”] (eating disorders, iPhone skinny angle, the picture parties!, romantic interests, what activity do people see that you viewed?,  bamboozled by LinkedIn!) → viewing/seeing (embarrassment/jealousy [some personality types more susceptible])…Pray for serenity and to not be an asshole : )

“perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor…” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“i wrote in Bird by Bird that ‘perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, it’s the voice of the enemy,’ and i grew up with a lot of shame; i grew up with pretty unhappy parents who were married 27 unhappy years… so that my solution and something my parents encouraged was the perfectionism…  i had such shaky self-esteem and such a raging ego, this terrible ping-pong game going on... i’m a little neurotic because i’ve also had a lifelong eating disorder, so i feel that if you don’t get 10,000 steps a day you can’t tell where you’re going to end up. before recovery i got all of my value from how other people thought of me. the miracle of being older is that you might go to the same default places. mine is this victimized self-righteousness and this weaponized silence, but you move through it in two or three hours instead of months, and in one case an entire decade…” — Anne Lamott on Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus

adds $10,000 worth of shoes to cart, cannot decide, purchases nothing. precious time lost to the screen. could have walked 10,000 steps. could have been painting. paints shoes from cart and claims she is a painter who uses screen-based distractions to her advantage.

Generational warfare (why are people angry at entire generations? “Hardwork”/chores vs. technology, “someone should be punished for the passage of time”) →  Raising children (how do you raise an ethical child? participation trophies? Empowerment? Protection: alarmist American tendencies [but is this ((social media)) different?, overprotection in the physical world but underproduction in the virtual])→ why the judgement? (tik tok!, every medium modifies you [to what degree and by whom],  Old-Young: A bizarre political dialectic in contemporary discourse. )


<sup>“It does seem to me that all these moral panics—I think that they have a root in guilt feelings. Adults look at the society that they have created and then children sort of act as like this weird mirror of what the feared outcome is...

…All of the sort of violent zeitgeist ghosts that exist in the culture, we sort of imprint them upon the youth, and instead of dealing with them and trying to change the society, sort of saying omg look at these kids who are going to come along and ruin the world that we’ve already sort of ¿so carefully? constructed.”—Vinson Cunningham, Critics at Large: Will Kids Online, In Fact, Be All Right?</sup>

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^{corporatization_of_the_arts}

^ADD_mirror

^{all_truth_is_paradox}

^{a_new_generation_of_fathers}