Layers

7.1.2025

In our last session, my therapist asked me the question, “when did you start feeling this way?” I tried to think of my earliest memories, working back up to the present, finding half truths in half complete memories, until the obvious answer came once I reached my very early teens– middle school. 

I wouldn’t be able to accurately recount what had gone wrong during those years. Depending on who you are it might seem like nothing went wrong. Sometimes I tell myself, actually quite frequently, that it was fine, it was my fault, nothing was objectively wrong, it was just me. Everyone has a shitty time in middle school. I began antidepressants, therapy, and this long, on and off struggle with “mental health” there, so when examining the inventory of my life experience so far, it makes sense that it would begin here. 

If I had to define it now, nearly ten years later, I’d describe it as an obsessive, dramatic extrapolation of everything– passing thoughts, mundane observations, social interactions, etc. I’d tell the tight, dysfunctional and melodramatic group of friends who’d reciprocate my fears and anticipations that “There’s more to everything.” There were layers upon layers of my observations and experiences begging to be delicately peeled back, revealing a core I could never quite reach before the zoloft, and then prozac, and then lexapro took effect. I channelled this restlessness into an exploration of solipsism and existential philosophy, the most that any 12-13 year old could get through before I was tired of convincing myself I had understood it.

Ironically, during some of those utterly awful moments, I started to gain a digital audience. I posted DIY photoshoots of myself in various makeup looks (this was 2016-2017) which still exist in the pinterest nebula. By the time I had entered the eighth grade, I had around 50,000 active followers on my Instagram. I remember this because I had just switched to a new school – a private school – and during orientation, one of the boys referred to me as “50K.” My unexpected Instagram following gave me an odd type of social armor, which I occasionally (but still embarrassingly) weaponized when someone would hurt my feelings. I used to pour my emotions out in long captions, and these posts did really well, like if my diary graded my entry. 

I don’t think that I’ve been in a state as prolonged, uncertain, and disoriented since then. I also don’t think I’ve been as vulnerable online since then. I’m going into my senior year of college, I’m twenty one years old, I’ve realized that making art is the only thing that gives order and sense to the senseless, I have as many ideas and aspirations as I do self-criticism and fear. 

More and more I’ve realized that there is a relentless absurdity to the steady onslaught of “adult” experiences and encounters. It feels like there is no opaqueness, no reliability to the concepts I expected to be guideposts into an emerging adulthood and independence. Maybe it was ignorance, but the more I experience, the more questions I am left with than answers, and it is uncomfortable, I want to wriggle my way out into a place that makes more sense, but if you asked me I probably couldn’t tell you what that is.