#mise en abyme

What is satisfying about social media is the ability to constantly recreate ourselves. We can change the images in our profile, cultivate a certain persona, have it adjust with trends, we can curate who we are and our hobbies, and then redo/undo it almost just as immediately. 

Do you ever catch yourself looking at your profile, something you’ve written, perhaps even your reflection, imagining you were looking through the eyes of someone else? Perhaps a particular person, thinking, “what do they see…of me?” When the underlying question we are really asking is “what do I want them to see of me?”

Social media also lets us do that, and it’s so brief and perhaps unconscious, but we look at ourselves at a distance, and get away with indulging in a kind of agency of creation that normally only artists get to do. How nice it is to see who I’ve created of myself so immediately, rather than waiting seventy years to live the life I’ve lived to see who I really am.