DIARY ENTRY .03

I have two addictions: food and my phone. I haven’t really said much about the first one, but I am a girl who really does love to eat.  It comes like weather, sudden and senseless, a mood where I want to inhale everything in sight. Sometimes I’ll spray perfume over the food to stop myself, but I’ll still eat it, tasting Chanel no. 5 through the salt.

Today was better. I’ve been doing MWH every day for a week, so the guilt feels lighter, almost ornamental. My friends are all 2005 tabloid thin and yes, I know — I am too. But lately I’ve been slimming not just my body but my face on Facetune. There’s a setting for that, btw!

This is such a depressing way to begin my diary entry but I promised you very vulnerable writing so that’s what we’re doing.  I’ve been in the Hamptons ten days now, in a beautiful house where the air smells like chlorine and cut grass. I spend afternoons in a bikini, a book splayed open beside me, though mostly I’m filming reels, refreshing views and likes, toggling between the same two apps that ate whole hours without me noticing. My screen time is criminal. My phone feels less like a tool and more like a drug: heroin for the restless, Tito’s for the alcoholic, wine at noon for the mother who swears it’s just “a glass.”

My old money Lana Del Rey coded ex boyfriend is moving to Indonesia indefinitely. (Big is moving to Bali.) Isn’t it wild how bored the sons of the ultra wealthy are? He did me the dirtiest of any man I’ve dated, objectively — and still I don’t hate him. There’s something almost tender about a man who doesn’t deflect, who owns the mess, who leaves not because he wants to but because he knows it’s the right thing to do. 

I’ll think of him sometimes the way you think of a discontinued cereal from childhood: vivid, sweet, a little unreal. A taste you don’t crave anymore but still remember like it was yesterday. He is the polar opposite of my boyfriend now, who is steady in his perfection: tender, sweet, gentle. His eyes are the color of long grass in a southern meadow, green and soft. With him I feel safe, and apparently, I make him feel safe too. I haven’t heard that from a boyfriend in years. Usually, men tell me the opposite — that I scare them, that being with me feels like walking on eggshells. It feels nice to be a good girlfriend to someone who actually deserves it. 

My views are low again. They’ve been low all summer, tugging me into a dull depression, the kind that makes me brittle, snapping at anyone who looks at me too long. TikTok feels like it’s burying me, so I’ve turned to Reels, which only makes me feel cringe. Every time I post, I want to hurl my phone across the room. It’s a full body ick, seeping in like humidity, and sometimes I wonder if other people can sense it too. I’ve almost shed the shame of it, but it creeps back, like mildew in corners you can’t scrub away. Three years since I first went viral, and now I’m flopping. I tell myself the project I have coming in the fall will change things, bring me back. Or maybe everyone will decide to hate me. The internet does that—every day, someone else gets chosen.

I’ve stopped trying to force strangers to understand me. For so long I wanted Kardashian-level fame. Now the thought makes me sick. To be watched that closely, to think before every gesture. I’m too impulsive for that. Too flawed to be anyone’s role model. 

I started Play It As It Lays, though I’m only on page thirteen and don’t yet know where it’s leading. I like the cover. I like Joan Didion. People sometimes tell me my writing reminds them of hers, which is very kind and very untrue.

I’m emotional, though I can’t tell if it’s my period or the moon. My back aches. The room is damp, the air swollen with heat. The world feels swollen too, overfull with pain. Last night I dreamt of a date with a novelist in his sixties, short, gray haired, round black glasses. I was adapting one of his books into a screenplay. He flirted with me then pulled out a rifle and shot the waiter. I woke up. The night before, Sydney Sweeney shot Chappell Roan in an auditorium.

The dreams feel like symptoms, proof of how online I am, how saturated with violence and suffering. Everything seeps in, and I wish I could do something (anything) to release it. 

On the bright side, I’m seeing my boyfriend tomorrow. 

Xo IsabelUnhinged