stop existing to be consumed

At a fabulous fashion party at an enormous Chelsea warehouse with dark red padded walls and Mark Ronson spinning the greatest 90s hip hop hits, I ran into a group of former coworkers at the bar. We immediately fell into catching up, the typical exaggerated affection people perform in Manhattan after not seeing each other for years. They asked about my career, congratulating me on all of my success, which I appreciated but of course downplayed (I am terrible at accepting compliments). They filled me in on everything that had happened in the four years since I’d worked there.

“It’s so boring without you” one of them said. “You were so entertaining.”

I’d been comedically bad at the job, working PR at a luxury fashion house, something that required a level of organization I simply did not possess. My responsibilities involved arranging racks, organizing the fashion closet, preparing samples for fittings and scheduling messengers, all tasks I approached with the incompetence of someone whose mind was permanently elsewhere. The only thing I seemed capable of contributing consistently was myself as a source of amusement. I told chaotic stories about dating and nightlife and whatever humiliating thing had happened to me the night before, usually involving some beautiful LES drummer I convinced myself was the love of my life. I loved these moments at work, all of us vaping and whispering and drinking iced Matcha latte’s. Their laughter and attention made me feel, in an environment where I so often felt like a useless moron, somewhat valuable.

By midnight the party had dissolved into the usual Manhattan blur of air kisses and influencers sitting in dark corners on their phones., At some point I ended up taking shrooms with a male model who looked exactly like Smith from Sex and the City, sitting in a dive bar a block away while he talked mournfully about the burden of being so lonely and so beautiful. The hallucinations hit suddenly. The bartender had three heads. The walls took on a sickly breathing quality. I became fixated on Model Boys’ Alice in Chains tee and overwhelmingly certain I was about to projectile vomit all over it, but thankfully did not.

Later at home, standing at the kitchen sink eating saltines in the dark waiting for the nausea to pass, I had the realization that I did not want to be this kind of person anymore. I did not want to be the girl who sat in sad dive bars with random strangers at 4am. But more than that, I did not want to be the entertainer. I did not want to be the girl who exists to be consumed.

For most of my life I’ve understood that turning yourself into a caricature made other people feel more at ease, and that loving yourself too openly (especially as a girl) made you a delusional idiot. There was a comfort in diminishing myself or acting shocking and also a logic to it: if I volunteered my own humiliations before anyone else could reach for them then nobody could weaponize them against me. (Or at least that was what I believed then).

This instinct did not begin in adulthood, or even in my teenage years as the certified “class clown.” When I was seven, I pretended not to know who George Washington was, despite obviously knowing. I guess I already understood, even at that age when I was tiny and still decapitating my barbie dolls, that there was a social currency in becoming a spectacle of your own making. It felt closer to a compulsion than a personality trait, this reflexive need to mock or diminish myself, to sand down anything too sincere before somebody else could react to it first. If there is a single word for it, I guess it was performance, though that makes it sound more intentional than it felt. Most of the time it happened automatically, like flinching or biting your nails.

When I was twenty-one, I started a jewelry brand with a friend and almost immediately fell into the role of the unserious business partner. She was deeply insecure, so instinctively I began diminishing myself around her to compensate. I joked constantly about being disorganized and incapable of professionalism, exaggerating my own incompetence. When the company collapsed, she threw it back at me. “It’s hard to work with someone so unprofessional” she said. “Even you admit that about yourself.” How could I explain that I had only ever said those things to make her feel safer beside me? That I intentionally made myself smaller because female friendship so often seems to require this careful management of envy and insecurity?

Of course this impulse bled into my romantic relationships too, especially with the younger pop musician whose success made me feel, irrationally, that I needed to become smaller around him. I performed inadequacy compulsively, told him my writing was stupid and that I didn’t really care about work., That my real interests were rotting in bed and vaping. I exaggerated how much I drank. Sometimes I even ordered drinks I didn’t want because sobriety felt too exposing, like accidentally showing someone the wiring behind the walls. It felt weirdly safer to become a self destructive caricature than risk being seen honestly.

We broke up soon after, mostly because of his constant belittling and the way I never felt real around him, only lesser. Every concern I brought up was brushed off or reframed as irrational or immature. His final line to me was: “I never thought I’d be saying this to a 26 year old, but you have a lot of growing up to do.”

And maybe he genuinely believed that. Or maybe I’d spent so long performing immaturity out of some reflexive need to soften myself or keep the atmosphere nonthreatening that eventually it became the only version of me he could see. Which is maybe the real danger of these performances: if you repeatedly insist you are chaotic or incapable of being taken seriously, eventually people stop searching for evidence against it.

When I started posting online under the name IsabelUnhinged, the performance intensified. The self deprecating, unstable hot mess persona became exaggerated because exaggeration is what people reward online. No subject felt off limits: jealousy, cheating, hookups, all of my worst qualities laid out openly for the world to digest. I was brand unsafe, which felt radical in its own way. I would never be one of those girls linking a blouse on her Instagram story or talking about a new mascara or even showing my outfits, (despite how fabulous they were). Instead, I became the girl who said what everyone was too scared to say. And because I’d always possessed this pathological instinct to turn myself into something consumable, monetizing it felt like the obvious next step.

When I started going viral, people would constantly ask whether I was the same in real life. And the answer was always yes, of course I was. But also no, because after a while the performance started feeding itself and I could no longer tell which reactions were mine and which belonged to the version of myself I had created for other people. Very few saw the real me. Because the second I entered a room, especially one filled with people I wanted to impress or who made me nervous, something in me automatically reorganized itself around entertainment value. Any intelligence or seriousness or vulnerability seemed to retreat instantly, like an animal backing deeper into the woods. My priority became making people laugh or giving them a story to leave with. And because self destruction has a way of seeming charming in a woman, especially when she stays pretty and articulate through it all, there eventually stopped being any clear limit to how much of myself I was willing to hand over. I was never able to predict how far I would take it. The only thing I knew for sure was that the next morning I would wake up feeling crippled by whatever I had revealed, the shame already settling over me before I even opened my eyes.

There is something undeniably seductive about the “that would only happen to you” girl. People are drawn to her because she makes life feel briefly less dull. She is the girl everybody turns toward at dinner. The one whose stories get repeated later. Attention accumulates around her almost automatically and for a while, it feels a lot like love.

But eventually those same people begin using that version of you against you. Ordinary mistakes, the kind most human beings make constantly and are usually allowed to recover from, start hardening into evidence of some deeper personal defect. Getting too drunk at a party. Sleeping through something important. Getting fired. Getting broken up with. Having a panic attack in public. All of it becomes absorbed into this larger mythology of who you are: unstable and incapable of handling your own life. And suddenly you are no longer allowed the full range of normal human emotion. You cannot be sad or angry or overwhelmed without it becoming further proof of your instability. Because you created the character first. Because even you admitted that was who you were.

At a certain point I was forced to realize that I’d spent years volunteering myself for the role of the jester, confusing being entertaining with being loved. And there was no real reason the role had to belong to me. I’d built entire social interactions around anticipating other peoples boredom, arriving prepared to perform before anybody even asked me to. Compliments were immediately dissolved into jokes and every insecurity of mine became material. Somewhere along the way I began mistaking self deprecation for honesty. But being funny does not mean reducing yourself into something smaller and easier to consume. Maybe that’s what growing up actually is: learning to leave something of yourself, for yourself.