costanzapolastri

[costanzapolastri]

When love feels like a debt: on neurodivergence and attachment.

Dedicated to the people I didn’t love enough, and to the ones I loved too much.

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I’ve suspected for years now that I might have ADHD. I haven’t been diagnosed with it, and I have very mixed feelings about self diagnosis especially for people like me, who could afford an assessment with just a few months of saving up, but at this point the label ADHD explains so much of my life that even just in an Occam’s razor way, I think I can use it. ADHD is a terrible name for a slight variation in brain development, that causes people to have a severe difficulty in regulating their attention, remembering things, long and medium term planning and regulating emotions. Everyone has some occasions in which they forget things, can’t focus or misplace stuff -and we would all benefit from a society where missing one bill doesn’t compromise your ability to buy a house for years- but ADHD people have difficulties in almost every aspect of life because the world is fundamentally not built for them. Living with ADHD, especially when not diagnosed, often means internalising incredibly toxic -and completely false- narratives about ourselves: we get called lazy, selfish, unreliable and uncaring so many times before we even hit puberty that by the time we figure out who we are, we have already made it part of our identity.

ADHD people, despite having a reputation for being social butterflies, often struggle a lot with interpersonal relationships. Many other conditions that sometimes fall under the umbrella of neurodivergence -which is surprisingly nebulous and vague- also bring difficulties in relationships: autism is the biggest example that comes to mind, but folks with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder), DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) and many more, also have a hard time forming deep and lasting human connections. Neurodivergence in general makes you “bad at relationships”, mostly because our model of relationships takes for granted abilities that neurodivergence is hindering, and the fact that the fundamental fabric of your being is labeled as a “disorder” probably doesn’t help. The book Sorting Things Out was a refreshing read, about the ways in which medical categorisations can be a form of preserving the status quo, labelling people who are different as disordered to reassure ourselves that we don’t, indeed, need to change a single thing about the world. I have mixed feelings about this viewpoint, but there definitely is something true there.

Neurodivergent people will miss out or misinterpret social cues at a rate significantly higher that the general population, often from a very young age. These involontary mistakes often get interpreted by the people around us as a personal attack, a sign of our flawed personalities or a deliberate attempt at messing with people. I often lost and forgot things when I was a child -books, hoodies, pencils, jackets, hairclips, my entire backpack, everything- and this was routinely framed as my deliberate action, with the specific intention to upset people in my life. Look what you did, now I have to go back to school and fix the mess YOU made. You always do this. You’re always like this. You know how it makes me feel, why do you always do this? You don’t care about the things you own. You don’t care how this makes me feel. You do this on purpose. You actually enjoy that I have to fix this mess, you enjoy hurting me. Why do you do this to me?

Growing up, I often realised I missed a social cue when it was way too late. I thought everything was going great, until I suddenly realised I had done something wrong -forgot I was supposed to call somebody, realised I accidentally did something that was going to make the people around me lash out, realised I was supposed to be somewhere else and I had missed a date, told that something I did or said was offensive and I had no idea, et cetera. As a result of this, I often feel like I'm walking on eggshells, like it's just a matter of time before I'll disappoint people and mess up. I got good at apologising for my mistakes throughout the years, but never at not making those mistakes. I also got good at charming people, at being bubbly and funny to make up for the rest of my personality. I’m a catch, as long as you don’t talk to me for more than 3 hours. It’s normal to bring your best side to the first stages of a relationship, but what I do is more profound than that: I actively hide the core parts of my personality, I see them as mistakes that must be fixed before the other person finds out. When someone starts to develop a crush on me, before I even have time to think, I fall into the script of putting up my best facade -manic pixie dream girl cranked up to a thousand- and in the meanwhile I secretly stress out beyond words and try to “fix” my personality. I tell myself: ok I have 2 weeks before this person will want to see who I am really, I can keep up this facade for a while, and in the meantime I must become someone who never forgets stuff and is 100% reliable or I will lose them forever. I justify this toxicity to myself by saying that this person deserves the best version of me, that love is a verb not a noun, that love is effort, that I’ve always wanted to become more reliable anyway, that love makes you want to be your best self, that no one will ever put up with the human I am right now. Deep down, I believe all the horrible things that were told to me: I am lazy, unreliable, selfish. It’s only a matter of time before I disappoint them. People deserve better than me.

I feel like I owe more love, like I am constantly paying a mortgage on my relationships. I feel in a love debt.

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Attachment theory is the idea single handedly holding together the pop-psychology-girlies industrial complex. If you’re not familiar with it, I envy your Instagram feed. Here is what attachment theory says: in relationships, especially romantic ones, we often mimic the way we were treated as children. Children who were supported by their parents and felt secure during their development, usually grow up to be securely attached adults, who don’t fear intimacy and can easily trust their partners, who don’t feel a need to rush relationships and who can communicate effectively. Children who weren’t so lucky -and mind you, not because their parents fucked up or were horrible people, but because of a network of complicated reasons, mostly outside of anyone's control, neurodivergence often being one of them- can fall into two different categories: the anxiously attached, who feel like love is never enough and are constantly “chasing” the other person, and the avoidantly attached, who have a hard time being intimate and showing affection and are constantly “fleeing”. As you probably guessed, when an anxious and an avoidant meet, it can become pretty toxic pretty fast, with the first one always feeling like they want more love and demanding it with sometimes manipulative means, and the second one constantly feeling like they are being trapped and tricked into giving love, and therefore clamming up. Couples like this are not necessarily doomed to fail, but the amount of therapy and self reflection necessary to make it work is incredible, and most people are just not up for the challenge.

If you read that and went I feel like I’m neither of these, or rather I’m all of these depending on the relationship yeah, it’s called being a human. What the instagram therapy girlies never seem to mention is that we all have the capacity for all three of these attachment patterns, and what we end up doing usually depends on the person we’re dating. I’ve been the anxious partner quite often, clingy and needy, but I’ve also being the avoidant one, distant and cold. I’ve also been in a bunch of situations where I was demanding a perfectly reasonable amount of attention or personal space, and I got told to go to therapy for my non-secure attachment, to which the only appropriate response is a giant fuck off.

This is a problem that all people have to an extent, relationships are complicated in painful ways, but since it’s very common for neurodivergent people to grow up being told by the world that we are fundamentally wrong and defective, I suspect that neurodivergent people have non-secure attachment styles at a percentage higher than the general population -but take everything I say with a grain of salt, fact checking is for pussies. We come to perceive relationships almost like tests: this person has the misfortune of having a crush on a mess like you, are you gonna screw this up like you screw everything up? Or are you finally gonna get your act together and be a person worthy of love? We can respond to this narrative by constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, feeling like our partner is going to leave any minute now and we’re allowed no mistakes -that’s the anxious response- or we can avoid thinking about it like the plague because I can’t hurt them if I don’t talk to them -that's the avoidant response.

While both of the non-secure attachment styles are very painful, full of shame and fear and self loathing, anxiously attached people get a lot more sympathy. They are usually the ones who read books about attachment theory, who talk openly about this with their therapist and friends, who consume endless content about personal development and journal and do self reflection, breathe work and all the other million things that are sold with a subconscious message that this will finally fix them. In the words of Clementine Morrigan, they are the ones for whom love always feels like an emergency. Anxiously attached are the ones -usually- with the panic attacks, the crying sleepless nights and the soul piercing pain, so they are way more likely to look for solutions. In the logic of capitalism, they are the ones who are doing the work and therefore deserve someone who treats them right and shows empathy for their pain.

But avoidant people are a lot harder to show empathy for. Since they clam up, reject and suppress their pain, since talking about relationships is difficult for them, since they tell themselves that it’s no big deal anyway, no one really sees how much shame they carry around. Avoidant people are often framed as the problem, because the reaction of their anxiously attached partners are a lot easier to empathise with and it must always be someone’s fault, and look how much your partner is hurting, you could be a bit more [insert thing that comes difficult to them]. It doesn’t help that women tend to be anxiously attached a lot more then men -and viceversa men tend to be avoidant a lot more than women- so there’s a layer of gendered stereotypes that gets in the way too: if you’re a man, you’re already expected to sort your feelings out completely on your own, and protect your female partner from your own fucked up emotions, all while not being given basically any tool to explore those feelings by society. The avoidant people -often men- I know are devoured by shame, they often ruminate on what they should and could have done differently in this and that love story, they fixate on the “hurt” they have “caused” to people, but their tears look so much like guilt tripping that they skip them all together.

They feel like they owe more love, like they are constantly paying a mortgage on their relationships. They feel in a love debt.

What I want to tell them is the same thing I want to tell my inner child, that scared little girl that was guilt tripped so much into being something she can't be: you aren't in a love debt. Respect is owed to everyone, but love is owed to no one. The truth that anxiously attached people can’t fathom -at least when they haven't googled protest behaviour yet- is that no one changes because their partner wants them to, and no matter how much one feels like they are owed a relationship, they never are. No matter how much they’re doing the work. If my partner constantly feels like they are not doing enough to make me happy, that’s not a good relationship and I don’t want them to be in it. This thought feels like a dagger through my heart, but that’s the reality of it, and no amount of working on myself can change it. No one was ever changed by shame.

It is not normal or healthy to enter in a relationship with the mentality of this time I won’t screw it up. It is normal to not want to love someone, if we feel that person is demanding affection at gunpoint. And most importantly, just because we feel hurt, it doesn’t mean someone is hurting us.

Love is not a debt.

[costanzapolastri]

Bashing women over the head with a thinkpiece

Remember when Contrapoints has that whole phase in which she wanted to be Gigi Gorgeous, and she would critically analyse Gigi’s videos, and she would say hey how are you Gorge? every other sentence? It was weird and great and cringe and iconic. I have the same exact relationship with Chrissy Chlapecka, a 22 year old tiktoker -and now wannabe popstar too, stream Head Bitch.

Chrissy rose to fame on Tiktok during the pandemic for being the face of the Gen Z bimbo trend, which faced a weird amount of interest from the panopticon of feminist think pieces -scrutiny that I have partecipated in, of course. I am aware of the inherent hypocrisy of loving a trend that calls for making oneself dumber and writing numerous think pieces about it, and I embrace my contradictions with my face held high and covered in glitter.

There is only so much parasocial hyperfixation that a woman can have before she has to ask herself what the hell is going on, so I have to face my desires: why am I so enticed by the tiktok bimbo trend? Well, for starter, Chrissy herself has a magnetic personality and tiktok trends were a way to feel a sense of pseudo-community in a time when we were all stuck inside going slowly insane. But for me there is also more at stake, because I think I’m using this trend to build my own answer to an important question: how do I wanna live my life, as a modern woman?

The ways in which we feel allowed to answer that question are shaped by where and when we grow up, and gender definitely plays a part into it: I feel like being a woman biased me towards my looks, so much of my answer to this question has subconsciously to do with how much I feel conventionally attractive, desirable and desired. I feel fondly towards Chrissy Chlapecka, because I feel like the answer she is giving is similar to the answer I was giving at 22: I want to be hot and sexy. Mind you, Chrissy doesn’t do it for men and doesn’t dress up for the male gaze -as I discussed in my other essay I do it for myself, and that's my curse, I do not perform for men but rather for an audience of one, that lives inside my head, who is influenced in her taste by what men like but is ultimately separate from them. No, it’s more of a search for control: makeup and clothing are things that I choose to put on, and that I can take off just as easily if I feel like it, so when I dress and doll up I feel like I made myself hot and sexy and therefore I feel in control, and that is where the felling of being valuable comes from.

I have a soft spot for Chrissy Chlapecka and for young women on Tiktok in general, I feel like they -much like all the things that young women do and say- have gotten a lot of public scrutiny and a good amount of unfair criticism. We saw an endless stream of Tiktok trends -watertok, the Fleabag era, the being feminine the way boys are trend and a million others- be submerged in thinkpieces. A quick search on youtube for Chrissy Chlapecka interview will give back a plethora of hour long podcast episodes and radio appearances where people 10 years older than Chrissy ask her complicated, nuanced questions about the role of the Gen Z bimbo trend in the broader feminist discourse, about the efficacy of reclaiming slurs for marginalised communities, about the relationship between social media and the male gaze, and while Chrissy always manages to put together an appropriate answer that doesn’t make her look nearly as dumb as she calls herself, there is a big part of me that just wants to shout she’s 20 years old, leave her alone!!

There definitely is a general societal trend of questioning everything that young women do, which is a tendency that dates back to at least the invention of the printing press and is loosely rooted in a bit of misogyny and a lot of general human curiosity. But I also think the reason why Tiktok trends get so much scrutiny, is that we are all trying to answer that impossible question: how do I wanna live my life, as a modern woman?

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Feminism brought us an incredible degree of liberation from oppressive gender roles that, up until the generation of my grandma, trapped women in terrible lives and abusive marriages, and confined them to a lifetime of servitude and misery. I am and always will be a feminist, because I oppose workplace discrimination, gendered violence, stereotypes, unequal pay and the devaluation of domestic and care labour. In no contradiction to this, I recognise that modern women are faced with the emotionally difficult task of caving a path for themselves, and choosing how much they want feminism to influence their lives, and since there are no sure answers to this -mostly because it’s all very new and weird- a lot of us feel lost. We want to be good feminists and live lives that empower not just ourselves but also other women, or at the very least we want to do stuff that doesn’t harm anyone else. But there is also a lot of traditionally feminine stuff that is appealing to us, for one reason or the other. A lot of us feel like we have an angel and a devil on our shoulders, one yelling at us that not shaving our legs is disgusting and the other telling us that by shaving we are enslaved to the patriarchy. One voice is telling us that if we choose not to have children we are failing as women, the other voice yelling that not having children is the only way to be liberated and truly reclaim our time -all of this, of course, while the cost of living rises to the sky and our wages stay the same. So what do we do? We freeze, we feel shame for any choice and we criticise other women for their decisions, many times in the name of feminism itself. We bash each other over the head, using feminism as the stick, because we need to feel productively engaged in the gender debate, but we really have no idea what the hell we’re supposed to do.

This tendency comes from an understandable but wrong idea of what feminism does: feminism is not concerned with what you, as an individual, decide to do. Some public figures will tell you that you should do this or that in the name of feminism, but that’s not quite right, because feminism is nothing but a set of academic tools to criticise and change society at large. For example, our society sends the message -through advertisement and other media- that women have to shave their armpits, and failing to do so is disgusting and extremely unattractive. Feminism then comes along to point out that this idea is a construct of advertisement, that the pressure to conform to beauty standards directly benefits the beauty industry, and that beauty standards are really socially constructed and made up. But what you decide to do, as an individual, wether or not you want to shave your armpits… that is and always be your choice. You are condemned to be free, in a way, because feminism can only go so far and it can’t really tell you what to do. Feminism points out that not shaving goes against the societal beauty standard, but it doesn’t really tell you not to shave. You are always, ultimately, the ones who takes the razor to your own legs. Society’s gender roles are the devil on your shoulder, feminism is the angel -or viceversa, depending on how you see it- but who you decide to listen to, in the end, is your choice to make. And with the mainstreaming of feminist talking points that we saw in the last decade -it really is that recent, even if it doesn’t feel like it- now many young women are faced with a lot of dilemmas, they have devils and angels on their shoulders for all sorts of small life decisions, from how much they want to diet and shave, to what kind of man they want to date, to how much makeup they want to use. This often happens more for young women, and this kind of low level feminist silent judging of our own action becomes another way in which we scrutinise our own behaviour. I doubt there is a single woman out there below the age of 35 who doesn’t feel extremely confused in this sea of personal pseudo-theory, which is at the same time incredibly intimate and intellectualised to the point of inhumanity. I don’t know what the fuck is the right thing to do, and I bet you don’t know it either.

With all this confusion, a quick but efficient way we have to find answers is to copy them from someone else: women -and recently men too- become feminist icons online when they start answering the question of how do I wanna live my life, as a modern woman? in a public way. What we regard as feminist icons are just people who are sharing bits and pieces of their answer. We’re all trying to reconcile our tradition -which is incredibly sexist but still have a massive weight in our society- and the disruption of this tradition, brought about by feminism. The women who become feminist icons take some elements of tradition -maybe they present in a stereotypically feminine way, maybe they rock a hijab, maybe they wear makeup or long hair or feminine clothes- and combine them with some elements of disruption -maybe they don’t shave parts of their bodies, maybe they are opinionated or blunt or physically strong or business oriented, maybe they shave their head or wear their hair a crazy colour, maybe they have lots of piercings and tattoos, maybe they decide to not have children and to not get married- and if we like the compromise that they found between tradition and disruption, we take inspiration. We use their answer to construct our answer.

So because we are all looking for answers, and because we inevitably will borrow ideas from other humans, living a public life as a woman means, to an extend, to be subjected to the scrutiny not just of society at large, but also of feminism. If you make your answer to the question how do I wanna live my life, as a modern woman? known to the public, even if it’s just by barely existing, that answer will be scrutinised, criticised and probably in some way deemed either too radical or not feminist enough. When Chrissy Chlapecka yells at the camera listen baby! if you want to dress like a little slut, dress like a little slut! she seems to say that, at least in my opinion, primarely to herself: she is very obviously a young woman who is still in the process of figuring out how to love herself, and working through a lot of trauma, she has most of her personal development ahead of her and she has found comfort in bleaching her hair and doing her makeup. But because we’re all starved for direction, suddenly she is tasked with the responsibility of giving a perfectly feminist answer, almost to justify her existence, or she will be accused of choice feminism and pandering to the male gaze. Despite being a profound lover of overthinking internet trends, I think this is unfair. Sometimes it feels like feminism is a tool to intellectualise away people’s struggles, to call other women stupid or vapid or whores in a way that won’t get us called out.

Because if the answer of some woman becomes popular enough, and enough people start copying her and taking inspiration, then the think pieces panopticon takes notice and -usually- denotes it a movement and gives it a name. This is where the criticism starts pouring in, albeit with good intentions, usually for not being feminist enough. Dissociative feminism was called out for allowing white women to tune out from the troubles of the world; Gen Z bimboism was pandering to the male gaze, the childfree community is deemed misogynistic for not calling out the ineptitude of fathers enough, girlboss feminism wasn’t class conscious enough and so on. Mind you, all these criticism are fair and reasonable, I agree with some of these points, but it’s also undeniable that putting pressure on women who stopped being teenagers 5 minutes ago to be perfect feminists is absurd. So many of these weird internet offshoots of feminism were just born from a few people’s answer to the question how do I wanna live my life, as a modern woman? -for example girlboss feminism was the answer of Sheryl Sondberg and Sophia Amoruso. Oftentimes some women are just living their lives, they don’t even know they’re answering a question that we are all secretly asking, and they are a bit shocked to find out about the discourse surrounding them once they become famous enough to be branded a “type” of feminism. Like Chrissy Chlapecka, who was just putting together cute little pink outfit and acting like an idiot on Tiktok to have fun and distract herself from the existential horror of dropping out of musical theatre school during a pandemic, and fast forward 365 days and she’s being asked about the reclaiming of slurs on national TV at the age of 21.

One of my favorite video essaysts, Broey Dechanel, wrote a wonderful thinkpiece about this phenomenon applied to the Fleabag era. I’ll quote her:

"It seems that women's art tends to be self cannibalising these days. We're at a point where whenever a piece of women's media, created by women [...] breaks some sort of structural and perceived universal recognition, it's immediately stripped of all context, detail and originality and then placed into a sub-category of feminism, which then can be picked apart for its failure to be adequately feminist." Broey Dechanel, Fleabag is not a femcel

In our perpetual search for what it means to have value -as a woman, as a feminist, as a person- we pick apart other people’s answers to the same question, but we often forget the empathy somewhere along the road: these women who shave the body parts that we don’t, that wear the makeup that we don’t, that show the cleavage that we don’t, they aren’t our enemy and they are definitely not trying to tell us how we should live our lives. No one can do that, no matter how much we want them to.

Despite the fact that I call it think pieces panopticon I actually do enjoy critically analysing online trends precisely because, in the midst of all the noise they generate, I find bits and pieces that can tell me how I want to live my life and be treated by others. But I have a responsibility to recognise that whatever woman I’m criticising, she is answering the same impossible answers as I am, and she is navigating the same cruel world as me. Maybe, it’s time to think before we think piece.

[costanzapolastri]

What if all my dreams come true?? This is terrifying, I want to leave!

The concept of fear of success has always sounded pretentious to me: how can one be afraid of being successful? I refused to relate to it and dismissed it as bullshit excuses for people who do not want to put in the work. Like my father told me when I was 10 -a completely appropriate age to be having this talk, of course- I never understood why some people blame anxiety for doing bad in school. If you know the answer, why wouldn't you just say it? I think it's just an excuse for people who do not study enough.

Now 27 years old, binge watching Netflix for 10 hours a day instead of working the literal job of my dreams -which I landed in less than a month after starting to apply, exceeding my rosiest of expectations- I am afraid my judgment was rushed.

In March 2023 I came back to Italy with barely any hope for the future: I had just been broken up with, I just had a massive fight with a dear friend that led me to lose the majority of what used to be my friend group, and my dream of moving to London -something I had worked 3 years and made countless sacrifices for- had shattered. But unlike every other rock bottom I've been through, this time I buckled down and was determined to transform this disaster into the best thing that ever happened to me. I know it sounds cliché, but it really felt like a rebirth, a change happened in the privacy of my head so profound that the only thing I can compare it to was the months in 2018 when I decided to take a long break from alcohol. Hoping not to offend actual alcoholics and addicts, I refer to this change as sobriety.

I don't want to normalise this use of the word sobriety to just mean a generic profound change because if the self help girlbosses ever get their moisturised hands on this expression and it ends up becoming the new synonym for detox I will never forgive myself; so I don't use it in public basically at all. But I do like thinking of myself as sober now. Sober from... it's hard to put my finger on what exactly, because it feels like I'm just getting sober from my former self. I don't drink now, but it feels bigger than that. I left Twitter, probably for good, so I guess I'm sober from the cursed bird app, but that also doesn't capture it.

Things are going great, externally: I have a new job as a freelance video editor, I'm getting better paying gigs with every new client, I write about machine learning for a podcast (hello science communication skills that I accumulated throughout the years and can put to use in a way that makes me feel safe and appreciated), I'm enjoying the freedom that a remote freelance job offers and traveling around the world, I'm saving money, I write a lot, I have new and exciting videos coming up this year, I'm working on a book, I will move to Montréal very soon. It's crazy to think that just a few months ago I was struggling to see any future or reason to get by, and now I'm doing the best I've done since I was in college.

But there is always this uneasiness, this lingering feeling of impending doom lurking in the shadows of my mind: I keep feeling like something terrible is about to happen. I'm constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. A part of me is convinced that I'm gonna screw this up, because that's what I always do. I get something good in life, but then I fuck it up and it goes away, and I'm back at square one. I'm starting to think that screwing it up is what I want to be sober from.

I dabble in many different ways of self sabotaging -I am, after all, a multipotentialite- but my favourite one has to be procrastination. I cancel all my plans, sit at my desk to work, and then watch youtube for 8 hours straight until I am so full of disgust for myself that I just have to leave the room. The occasional stress cry comes once a week, after I completely self isolate, ignore all my responsibilities, switch my phone off for like 10 hours straight, ghost half of my clients, and watch a tv show I can quote from memory for the entire day. And then it's time to tell myself that I'm gonna try again tomorrow, a finale so predictable and demonstrably false that it feels like a joke on a 90s sitcom.

I become terrified when I see the early signs of procrastination and self sabotaging, because I've seen the train of my life derail so many times, I know the pattern so intimately, that a part of me is convinced this is always how it will end. I am paralysed by the fear that I haven't changed at all as a person, it wasn't but a 2 months fling with sobriety from myself, and now that things are getting tough and I don't have the initial honeymoon motivation anymore I will slide right back into my old habits. A part of me is convinced I am intrinsically, cosmically destined to be a good-for-nothing.

It's about damn time I challenge this narrative, hopefully to a duel, so I can shoot it in the chest. I am in control of my own destiny. Not entirely, but enough that I can make myself take a deep breath, write a short essay, do something to calm myself down and then get some work done. It's not gonna be the 8 hour super productive day I've decided for myself is the only acceptable standard for good enough, but I'd be an idiot not to take that over doing nothing and giving up on my dreams entirely.

My commitment to myself is not an iron fist, punishing me for the slightest transgression, but a gentle hand on the steering wheel. 1% every day. I will get all the second chances I need, and every time I take one I'll be a step closer. As that scene from Bojack Horseman -the show I'm binge watching instead of working- goes: It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it everyday, that's the hard part. But it does get easier.

I love myself enough to try again.

[costanzapolastri]

Rayne Fisher-Quann and the power of deliberate art

Rayne Fisher-Quann is a 21 year old Canadian writer who is very good and I like her a lot. In fact, she’s not just good, she’s excellent, every single one of the works she’s put out has been a beautifully constructed piece of art. Yes, especially the Tucker Carlson talking about woke M&M ironic lip sync Tiktok.

But jokes aside, what really surprises me of her body of work is the consistency of incredibly good work that she is able to put out. She rarely speaks -at least when compared to everyone else on my Tiktok feed, who seems to think they might instantly combust if they don’t post for more than 10 hours- and yet, every time she says something I stop and listen, and without fail it’s an interesting and new perspective.

I wanna be like her when I grow up, despite being 6 full years older than her. And I don’t mean it in a vapid she looks so effortlessly pretty kind of way -although she does have the tumblr effortless gorgeousness that I’ve been tried and failed to embody for the past decade- but rather, I want to have the courage of being deliberate. The courage to shut up when I have truly nothing to say.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with posting content that is not deep or smart, mostly because I think that when sharing stops being fun it becomes a ticking time bomb before burnout. So I’m all for sharing an occasional picture just because I though my makeup looked nice in it, or making a silly joke on Tiktok, or allowing myself to explore a topic that won’t get YouTube clicks just because I adore it. But I think I never found a balance between deliberateness and play that felt authentic.

Rayne Fisher-Quann once said she craves attention, but she definitely doesn’t look like it. The confidence to walk away from your platform until you feel like you have something actually valuable to contribute requires a profound pride in one’s own work, more unique than rare. Most of my youtuber friends lack this courage, I am slowly building it up and I can feel the lack of it screaming at me every day. This is why she’s a huge inspiration to me: because she isn’t afraid to take some time away from the spotlight to come back with something truly excellent. She understands the power of being deliberate.

In a recent interview she says that the reason why she started her Substack -a platform where people can publish their writing, usually behind a paywall, similar to how I’m using my Patreon- is that she needed a place to discuss more in depth her ideas, where there wasn't an incentive to take everything in the worst possible faith. This was an excellent choice and the numbers speak for themselves: in less than a year, Rayne has amassed over 60.000 subscribers, I think she now makes more than 6 figures a month just from her writing. And even after Canadian taxes have axed those numbers, it’s enough not only to live comfortably, but also to save for bigger and more ambitious projects, like the pilot episode and the book she’s working on. I'm rooting for her. She is living proof that truly good ideas take time, and value is only provided when there’s space to think.

She said in the interview I mentioned before that comments on social media hurt more when you don’t believe strongly in the value of your work, and I know this to be true first hand. Most people handle the stress that comes with hostile comments and “haters” either by disappearing from the internet, or by doubling down on their message. Both reactions are very human, and come from a very reasonable fear of not being liked, but Rayne was able to win over this fear and understand that there is a third way: making your work truly excellent, so that when the comments inevitably arrive -the idea that you can perfect your way out of hatred will kill you, if you let it- she can borrow confidence from her own work, and ignore them. If you know you’ve made something good, truly good, your confidence becomes unshakable by the winds of the audience’s opinion. When you make excellent things, you tell them what to think of your work, not the other way around.

I wonder if I went in the other direction. I don’t like to think about it, mostly because I don’t like to remember how much it hurt to feel misunderstood by thousands of strangers. I suspect that the lesson that you shouldn’t care what other people think is one that can only, truly, be learned through some degree of pain.

I really do want to be good. Truly good. All writers have this idea that if they make a work that is excellent enough, then they’ll be cured of their inherent badness, and I’m not immune, but there is also immense value in excellence. I want to deliver bliss not just because of the little part of my ego that wants me to be the author of that bliss, but also because I genuinely believe humanity is slightly better when we strive to do our best work.

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So, how does one achieve excellence? Well, the way I see it, there’s two parts to excellent work: production and filter. Generating the ideas, then choosing which one of those ideas are good enough for the world to have. The generation part I have very much figured out, if anything I constantly feel like my mind is populated by too many ideas, constantly battling over my limited time and attention. There are so many of them, it would be quite the statistical anomaly for them to be all terrible.

But I need better filters. I've known it for a while. I’m working on it, I really am. I wish my writing showed more of the work that goes into it, it's embarrassing to be so much of a work in progress. I know I can do better, it's never not been the case, and maybe it's time to start the phase of my life in which I select more. Excellence is worth the wait.

[costanzapolastri]

Ways of being seen: chapter 2

I don't do it for men, I do it for myself. And that's my curse.

This series of essays borrows its title from John Berger’s work Ways of seeing, a collection of short films about art history and philosophy, aired on BBC in the 70s. The films have been turned into a book of the same title, a lovely collection of essays which is very accessible and makes for a great short read. Essay number 2, Women and Art, calls out the hypocrisy in a common art history trope:

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.” John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Via art critique, John Berger shone a light on the societal pressure for women to act sexy and provocative while simultaneously be ashamed of that very behaviour. The hypocrisy of this way of thinking is so blatant that all Berger had to do to discredit it, was just to explain it.

This essay stays in the hearts of feminists to this day, to the point where Emily Ratajkowski started her memoir My Body with another quote from the same essay:

"Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male : surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - an object of vision : sight." John Berger, Ways of Seeing

solidifying John Berger as a fan favourite for intellectual girlies who also have great tits, a category that I am proud to be a part of.

What John Berger describes in his essay -the process of stripping a nude body of its agency and personality, and depicting it as a mere sight to be consumed- is known as objectification, and it’s at the heart of today’s media environment just as much as it was in the 70s, only now a million times more intensely. The most blatant representations of this idea are those depiction of female bodies in advertisement, movies and media where the female body is taken out of context, placed almost as a decoration, and it doesn't invite the audience to consider the woman attached to that body as a full person, but rather to observe judge and gawk at her figure as if it was an ornament.

All sorts of bodies get objectified on occasions (the most blatant example of male bodies objectified that I observed growing up, was probably the Abercrombie&Fitch shopping bag with a print of a very muscular male body) but most of the time the bodies we see on display in advertisement and movies and Tiktok feeds -and that we are subtly invited to look at- are young slim bodies with conventionally attractive, smooth faces. Since the ratio female-to-male bodies in advertisement is around 10 to 1, and my body fits the requirement of being young and slim, I will focus on the way in which constant objectification fucks with my particular mind, reserving the discussion about the pain of being invisible for another occasion.

This objectification of women's bodies is all over the media, and it bleeds into our day to day life, exacerbating and creating gender stereotypes. Women and girls are treated as objects from scaringly young ages: we get thousands of subtle but very consistent messages, decades before our prefrontal cortex has fully developed, that reinforce the idea that looking conventionally attractive is of massive importance. One of my early memories is from the age of 7, having to stand still while my long hair was being brushed: when complaining about the pain I was told that those who want to be pretty have to suffer a bit -a cute little sentence, that rhymes in Italian- but when I asked, impatiently what if I don’t want to be beautiful?? I was met with laughter, ridicule and sometimes anger. Don’t be silly you do want to be beautiful, you say that but it’s just an excuse to not let me brush your hair, don’t say that stupid thing. So over time, I came to expect comments and assessments about my physical appearence, firstly from older relatives, and eventually from friends and boyfriends, and I learned all the complex rituals I was expected to perform to make sure those comments were positive. I still have not received a convincing answer to my question -what if I don’t want to be beautiful?- because it is still ridiculous for me to not want to be beautiful. So the practice of looking at myself in the mirror, stepping outside of my own body and evaluating its desirability is as natural to me as taking a walk, because I have learned them literally at the same age. And this is where the mindfuck starts.

It’s easy to call out objectification when it’s outside of us: for most adult women it’s not hard to recognise that the jackass yelling at us from a car is in the wrong, and we have a fundamental right to not be treated like things to be looked at when we are just existing and going on about our day. In the movie Transformers, the camera panning along Megan Fox’s body is a very deliberate choice on the part of director -and lowkey creep- Michael Bay, and as such it’s completely fair game to call it out as objectifying.

But what if the camera is in our own heads?

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I have a complicated relationship with self-objectification, because it is often -and wrongly- used to justify women’s mistreatment: the common narrative is that if a woman is complicit in her own objectification then she deserves all the abuse that usually comes with that objectification, because she was asking for it. After all, if you post those kind of pictures, and dress like that, what do you expect? I am reminded of the 36 year old photographer that shot some erotic photos and videos of me when I was 19 and then -when the morning after I decided I wasn’t comfortable with the material being published- yelled at me on the phone because, in his words, I knew what I was doing and I couldn't just change my mind like that. Spoiler: I could. Always think twice before signing anything, and always wait until you're sober, fed and rested.

Men the age of my father would ask for explicit pictures when I was a teenager, ignore me or insult me if I’d say no, and then use the fact that I’m even considering a yes as the reason they can tell themselves for why they’re still allowed into Heaven. The idea that I must (secretly) enjoy the attention is always used as an excuse to give me more grief, so anything that feels like I'm admitting to enjoy that attention feels like an admission of guilt. It’s the same trick of the male painters John Berger was calling out: we pressure women into objectifying themselves, we teach them every little psychological trick to step outside of their own bodies, we compel them to evaluate themselves as things to be looked at, we punish them verbally and sometimes physically when they don’t perform beauty labour, and then act completely oblivious when they comply, calling them vain and superficial and using the fact that they have internalised this messaging to watch them more, judge them more, strip them of their humanity more.

It feels good to post a picture where I look attractive, because I’ve been told that it’s the most important thing for me to be attractive since I wasn’t even old enough to walk. I have gone to great lengths to undo that messaging, and demonstrated resilience and self compassion that most people envy, but I still get a little high when I do my hair, in the same way that a second glass of wine on an empty stomach makes me high: I relax, my shoulders are less tense. Thank God, I am still desirable, death can wait another day.

What the misogynistic trope of she’s objectifying herself so what does she expect?? fails to aknowledge is that women are demanding not attention, but control: the beauty standard is so everpresent that for a lot of women getting closer to the beauty ideal -maybe by doing our hair and makeup, dressing in sexy clothes or getting plastic surgery- is a pretty secure way to cheer ourselves up on a grumpy day, but that doesn’t mean we wish to be trapped in a hell of our own making forever. I am allowed to set boundaries that are contradictory in the eyes of men. I still deserve compassion, even as a work in progress.

Internalising misogyny is not the same as justifying it.

A decade after asking that What if I don’t want to be beautiful?? question, society has managed to give me an answer, once again in little but consistent bites of messages: I should do it for men.

I am reminder of a quote by a character in Margaret Atwood's book The Robber Bride:

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it,” Atwood wrote. “Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

The self-objectification, dissociative watching of myself is imperative, if I want to find a man. At the cost of sounding like a bit of a conspiracy theorist -I have put tinfoil on my tits for a photoset in the past, after all- I don’t like the way we are sorted into the categories of men and women, boys and girls, often from weirdly young ages. Gendered expectations colour all parts of life, but one that has always weirded me out is how these expectations make it actively harder to have romantic relationship with the opposite sex: we are encouraged in adolescence to see the other sex as a weird foreign land, who operates on a different frequency. Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars logic applies, and we’re also told that friendships between men and women cannot happen, which doesn’t encourage having actual deep conversations with the opposite sex that makes us get to know each other as people, or at least not as much as we could, especially when we’re young and insecure.

This lack of understanding of the opposite sex makes it possible to sell to women a version of men that simply doesn’t exist: we are convinced by magazines and advertisement and movies that men want a woman who is super skinny, young, pretty, shaved and can rock perfect hair, abs, teeth, skin and hands. We are told over and over again that men only want one thing, which is demonstrably false, but we still believe wholeheartedly. Naturally this message is just floating around in society and some men do internalise it too, there definitely are men out there who genuinely do have a sense of entitlement over women’s bodies: I am reminded of my ex boyfriend, who on more than one occasion yelled at me for not shaving my legs often enough, because in his opinion I wasn’t taking care of his sexual needs. If a grown man with a Master's Degree in physics needed to be told that my right to bodily autonomy comes before his sexual pleasure, The Lord only knows what worse men do and say behind closed doors.

But it is also true that so many of the insecurities are drilled into our brains by female relatives, media and advertisement: they are literally designed to make us feel insecure enough to buy face creams and botox injections and hair products. These things have less to do with men than we think. We are sold a version of men that is not accurate, that does not make us happy, but that makes us buy more. And for men it’s the opposite: they are sold a version of women that wants them to be selfish, atomised, productive, muscular, macho, and reinforces all of their already existing insecurities. There are women out there who have a worrying sense of entitlement, sometimes they are delusional enough to justify this with feminism, it’s true. But by and large, I suspect the demands of the opposite sex are imagined, or rather a result of internalising the toxic media messages that tells us that men are always watching, examining, judging, and that we owe them a worthy sight. We are told men want you to have smooth skin and if you don't diet no man will ever want you and... that's just demonstrably false.

I suspect young men go through something similar, if they have the misfortune to hate themselves as much as I did back then: they feel an insane pressure to act and look a certain way, to prove their value through gender roles, but they also resent the women who value them for those same things that they so desperately are trying to achieve, like money or status or a muscular body or a stoic attitude. It’s always very painful to be loved for the wrong reasons, to feel admired publicly and misunderstood privately is the typical experience of those who live outside of their integrity, and it feels like there’s friction with your very soul. My soul, at the time, was calling me in another direction: it’s hard to say what I wanted because my compass was so lacking, but I suspect I wanted to be an intellectual and an artist, a person with which to have conversations and not a thing to be touched and possessed. But I had been told so many times that boys only care about one thing that I couldn’t trust reality to be different even when it was in front of me, and I kept feeding my little monitor the perfectly constructed image of myself that it demanded, and I exiled from my dating pool any man that refused to put my body before me, because I wasn’t capable of accepting that someone could love the real living Dorian Grey instead of just the painting.

I am ashamed to admit this, but I like myself more if I'm more conventionally attractive. On a deep, fundamental level, it's easier to be my own friend when I'm looking skinnier, it's easier to love myself when my hair is done, easier to accept my flaws when there's less of them, easier to show up for myself if my skin is smooth, easier to say no to other people's bullshit if my teeth are straight. It shouldn't be like that, but it is, and sometimes -in a very Fleabag manner- I'm scared it makes me a bad feminist. Rationally I know that's not the case, and the idea that I should just magically undo a lifetime of patriarchal conditioning just because I read a handful of books with complicated words in it, is ridiculous and cruel. But there are people out there -women and men- who seem a lot more interested in using feminism to police others, rather than look inwards and undo patriarchy within themselves. My vanity feels like feminism is taking an L, in my darkest moments I used to think that maybe the manosphere baffoons are right, and I am biologically programmed to keep myself skinny and demure to attract dick. Then of course I snap out of it, and remember that having to date the kind of men who only go for 21 year olds is a curse I wouldn't wish upon anyone, and I have deliberately laboured hard to keep those men distant from my body. But it is an inner battle that never 100% resolves, it feels more like a tightrope where I have to keep focused on not losing my balance, and not a puzzle that is cracked and solved once and for all.

When I try to explain this internal psychological battle in 30 seconds, without the feminist vocabulary, I often resort to saying that I don’t dress for men, I dress to look at my own image in the mirror when I walk by stores. I feel like a lot of people perceive a contradiction between dressing up in a sexy and feminine way, and not enjoying the attention. oaside the sapphic erasure going on 20to respond as someone who has been there: it is not the attention of men I am aiming for -to be completely honest, I have never enjoyed it, and in every single incident Iwanna post this, men are gonna 0This is only about male attention in a very roundabout way. If all men vanished from earth tomorrow, I’d be devastated but I’d also probably be wearing a bikini to the funeral, finally free to be my most slutty self. The unwanted attention of men is more often than not what holds me back, and makes me go ugh I c think of where I was given attention by a man I didn't know, it was upsetting, annoying or scary- but I am instead putting up a performance for an audience of one, the little monitor in my head I keep getting asked by the world to separate my own identity into an object, a sight, being watched, and a ruthless subject, a cruel monitor, doing the watching. This isn’t fun. Doing it for myself doesn’t mean that I will be happy in the end, or that I am empowered through the process.

The I am doing it for myself! mantra often has a connotation of almost forced positivity -like that scene in Euphoria where Kat is bullied by perfect-looking influencers into “loving herself". But we always must remember that it goes both ways: what happens, I ask you, when myself doesn’t like me? I keep getting asked by the world to separate my own identity into an object, a sight, being watched, and a ruthless subject, a cruel monitor, doing the watching. This isn’t fun. Doing it for myself doesn’t mean that I will be happy in the end, or that I am empowered through the process.

I behave for the male gaze, but I am not trying to impress men. Rather I’m trying to please the voice inside my head that constantly tells me that I should strive to be more beautiful. And that voice got told that men are the ones to impress, but there is a level of internalising this rhetoric that complicates everything. I’m not doing it for men, I’m doing it for the idea of men that I’ve been sold all my life. And I'm not having fun.

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I'm going to try not to make some phones-live-in-a-society style observations, but I do have to talk about social media and how my online presence was shaped by this internal battle: my online portfolio -hosted uncensored on Tumblr, back when female presenting nipples were allowed, and censored on other platforms- was a digital embodyment of the part of myself that is being observed. I finally had access to a version of me that I could, quite literally, edit as I pleased, and if I couldn’t be that perfect girl in real life, damn it, I was at least gonna cosplay her online.

My portfolio was a collection of the modelling works that i preferred -aka, that were the most flattering- and there was a rush, a potent high in looking at my own pictures. I'm ashamed of admitting this, because staring at your own image is a behaviour that has been condemned since the days of the myth of Narcissus, but it's true. I could constantly scroll a selection of moments in which I was the most attractive I've ever been, and remind the little monitor in my head that I am, indeed, hot.

I started posing for nude photography in 2016 and loved it, for all the wrong reasons. If I arched my back and pushed my chest out enough, and maybe skipped a few meals in the days before the work, I almost felt like my body looked sexy enough.

A lot of my early nude works portray me as beheaded, an anonymous body belonging to... well it doesn't matter, she's fuckable enough and that's what counts.

To the men who will inevitably ask me where they can see the uncensored version, I say: no where. You do not have my permission to see these photos uncensored. All you will find under the censorship is an underwhelming pair of tits, which looks exactly like the billions of tits you can see on the internet, for free, right now, from women who consented to it.

I know some men will go look for them anyway, I can't stop them because these photos are available on the internet, but those men still don't have my permission. If seeing my nipples is more important than respecting my boundary, this is an excellent time to get the fuck out of my life and never come back. Please and thank you.

I'm posting the censored version of these pictures in part because Patreon doesn't allow NSFW content, but also because, to be honest, I do not want to show my naked body. I do not regret these works, but I would be lying if I told you that I'm not terrified someone could use these pictures to harm me, or justify harming me. If you want more pictures of tits in the world -a goal which I support wholeheartedly, of course- protest not my behaviour, but the one of terrible men who make it unsafe to be sexual.

More beheading. More separation of body and mind, not for intellectual cartesian purposes but to barter the body -my body- for approval. The little monitor in my head is never happy, no matter how much I suck my stomach in and arch my back.

It was easy to make fun of the pictures I took in the first year or so, like I did in the first essay in this series, because it's evident to most people why those pictures suck, and I can share a sense of camaraderie with my audience when I point and laugh. But these? I am just embarrassed.

I'm scared because I do not trust people -especially men- to see a person in these pictures. And how could I? These pictures are my attempt at recreating a type of media that specifically asks the audience to not see female bodies as full people. I am using the times in which I was saying, visually hey can I please be objectified for attention? To make the case that i don't want to be objectified for attention. I have seen more believable stories. But I don't think acceptance should be earned, not by good people anyway.

You'll just have to forgive me for being a walking contradiction. Somehow, I did.

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Ways of being seen is a collection of essays exploring my relationship with my body, beauty standards, other women, self objectification and acceptance. Through the lens of the works I did as a model in the past 10 years (ahah get it? The lens?).

I hope you’ll enjoy :)

xoxo

Costanza

[costanzapolastri]

The time you have spent with your rose (or: on love addiction)

My first 2 months of 2018 were completely engulfed by a situationship with a guy that I’m gonna name E. He lived in the UK and was 8 years older than me, I lived in Italy (with no money for travel) and I was 22, the age at which grown men will say I'm way too young for them, until I signal that I might want to suck them off. E. and I were talking all day, every day, about everything: we spent hours on Skype -back in a time when Zoom wasn’t a thing- and most of the rest of the time texting.

I had just moved to a new city, I was living outside of my parents’ house for the first time in my life, I was trying to get through a Master’s Degree in theoretical physics, I was incredibly burned out from rushing through my Bachelor’s Degree in physics and I received the biggest heartbreak of my life just a few months before. In other words, my life sucked, and I had all the symptoms of what I now know to be clinical depression. My brain craved a distraction more than my body craved oxygen, so talking to him quickly became my favourite part of the day: doing anything during my day created a little anticipation, I couldn’t wait to tell E. about it later that night. The activity itself didn’t matter at all, the fun part came later when I would tell it to E., and enjoyed being perceived as interesting, smart, sexy, fun, carefree by this loser which at the time seemed like the coolest man I had ever met.

I was addicted to this guy’s attention. I couldn’t get enough. Not talking to him for a few hours made me fidgety, messages like “I can’t Skype today, see you tomorrow!” made me want to cry and scream. I performed what I knew to be the correct answer, I told him I understood everything and I crafted my responses with intricate words borrowed from my therapy sessions, because I believed in good communication. Externally I was as much of a good understanding “girlfriend” as a 22 year old with clinical depression and an anxious attachment can be, but I felt like there was a little princess in my mind constantly screaming for more attention, throwing a tantrum non stop every time I was not speaking to him. After two months of talking non-stop every day, I found out he was talking to some other women. He was polyamorous and warned me that he wanted an open relationship, but when it came time to handle my own jealousy I just didn’t have the mental space for it, and I dumped him a few days after. In the loneliness of my rented apartment, unsure that this romantic story had even happened for real, I cried for days.

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I thought I had learned my lesson when in 2022, right before leaving Italy for what I thought was gonna be the rest of my life, the name of M. pops up in my Twitter DMs. I respond, we talk for hours, they message me again that very evening.

They’re funny, wholesome, kind. They have a warm personality and wear their heart on their sleeve. Physically they’re not quite my type, but I am very happy to be their friend and talk for hours about art, politics and how messy and wonderful it is to leave one’s home country. We quickly fall into the habit of texting most of the day, every day. Despite the fact that I am moving to Northern Ireland and starting the drama school of my dreams, the best part of my day is talking to them, and once again the biggest reward for doing anything is telling them about it, and look interesting, smart, sexy, fun and carefree in the eyes of a person 7 years older than me. When someone that much more mature than me appreciates me, and finds me capable and smart, I can reassure the little princess that I am indeed bright enough to make it to my 30s. I feel secured by M’s attention and their compliment taste like making the right life choices.

I can’t get enough of them. I go from oh I should probably tell them that I’m not interested in *that* way so I don’t lead them on to I guess I could flirt with this person a bit, even if I have no intention to do anything, what’s the harm in the span of a day; from this person is really cool to I think I’m developing a crush for them in the span of a week; and from I really like them to I’m falling in love with you in less than a month. They don’t know about all this of course, until I drop the L word on them during our second time seeing each other in person, two months into texting all day every day. They say it back, then barely text me the next two weeks, then break up with me after 10 days. I try not to wonder if they really meant it, because one answer is heartbreaking and the other is humiliating. I cry for days.

The early stages of a relationship, combined with long distance, are a lethal cocktail: when every time I pick up my phone there could be a text from my crush, the little black rectangle in my pocket turns into a powerful slot machine. I check my phone all day, every day. I don’t want to talk to people around me, I don’t want to take time off to journal and focus on my feelings, I don’t even want to look at where I’m walking: I’d rather bump into a pole than miss a text from him, and then another one, and then another one. I crave the illusion that I know what I’m doing with my life, my heart races at the thought of going back to my boring life without the constant validation that a new crush offers. When in my phone I am the sexiest, newest, kinkiest, most interesting person who’s ever existed, and in real life I am at a loss for any semblance of answer about the future… wouldn’t you get addicted too?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both these people are polyamorous. They have as little in common otherwise as two people can have, and my sample size is way too small to find any kind of pattern, but I know one thing for sure: I love being the new toy. I can’t get enough of it. Polyamorous people embrace the so-called New Relationship Energy as unapologetically as humans can, I suspect it’s precisely NRE that people crave when they open up a couple.  And if they’re not careful, it’s easy to assign all the “fun” roles to a new partner, and ride the wave of new feelings and get high together. Polyamorous people take your hand and jump into the deep end from the very first text, because they have the parachute of their other relationship(s). I am an escape from the boring monotony of their long term relationship, the new relationship with me nourishes the old one, with the woman who actually got chosen. Polyamorous people make you feel like it’s you and them against the world, and it’s wonderful, and too much, and I can’t get enough of it. It’s impossible to walk away from that kind of intensity when I crave connection: where else am I going to find someone willing to be together, really together, from day one? On dating apps, where everyone has internalised the insane logic that pain is a sign of how stupidly vulnerable you allowed yourself to be? Where every ghosting is more proof of how everyone will break your heart if you let them? Let’s not be ridiculous: I’m ok with being their other woman because at least I’m someone’s woman. At least I’m held at night. At least I get a goodnight text. Sometimes, if partner number one doesn’t vet me out of the arrangement, I might get a “I love you” and I’m willing to squint until it looks like a real promise.

The borderline maniacal levels of communication that polyamorous people tend to have -which is actually my favourite thing about them- give me the illusion that everything is fine and under control, and no little princess is screaming in anyone’s mind. Communication is a wonderful thing, the foundation of any relationship worth being in, but after years of dating in polyamorous circles -and being heartbroken by them, in ways that are difficult for monogamous people to empathise with- I can't help but have a sinking feeling about the slogan that communication solves everything. Communication solves... I'd say 50% to 90% of problems, depending on how many of them stem from systemic issues. But the remaining 10%? Well, that's when the new toy starts cracking the egg of their role and demands more commitment, and things don’t work anymore. And when I date these people I, on the other hand, get to embody the perfect fantasy: I get to be seen only in my most bubbly and shiny aspects, long distance and deleted texts airbrush away any flaw or insecurity. I am writing my own self insert fanfiction in real life, and I still cast myself not as the protagonist, but as the manic pixie dream love interest.

When it’s all over, I’m left feeling guilty for falling in love, even if no one is there to shame me. I police my own feelings because those are precisely what cost me the role of New Toy, director said I was “too human” and they decided to go with another girl, two years younger than me. I feel gullible and naive and ashamed, because I tell myself I should know better. But most importantly, I feel like none of this even fucking really happened: when the little princess is done throwing the little pocket slot machine across the room and screaming and crying… what am I left with? Fucking nothing. Fucking. Nothing. The boring walls of my rented apartment are still exactly the same. My life is still overwhelming, my future is still uncertain, rent is due, my mom just texted asking why I never call, and I want to scream at the thought of how I’m going to get through this when everything is shades of grey when they don’t text me.

So I go get another high.

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K. and I texted for 3 hours before I told him to buy me a plane ticket to go visit him. He did it, and sexted me all night. On our first date I met his mom, who asked me if we plan to live together when I move to London; his sister said she was happy K. was dating an Italian girl so she could practice the language, and he said he couldn’t wait to impress my parents next summer when he visits us (it was November). He broke up with me over text two days after our fling, saying he “didn’t feel the romantic spark”.

On the plane back to Belfast, I knew deep down that he didn’t want to see me again, but I knew it in the same way I know my parents are gonna die one day, where the fact itself has the ability to destroy me and so I don’t allow it into reality. Maybe he was just stressed from work I told myself. When I saw the wall of text he sent me two days after our “first date”, I knew what it would say before reading it, and yet it still felt out of nowhere. I felt like I saw the ground getting closer to my face after accidentally jumping from a building, I flailed and braced for the impact, I bargained and told him that we could take things slower, and it hurt incomprehensibly when he inevitably said no. A wave of unprocessed heartbreaks came over me and drowned me, I felt myself gasping for air amidst the sobbing, I threw up and cried until I gave myself a headache. I attributed the stomach cramps and the headaches to period pains: it didn’t occurred to me at the time that what I was going through was a form of withdrawal.

There is such thing as too much love, if I go dumpster diving for it instead of taking the time to build it together. In a way I am grateful to K. because hooking up with him was so intense and so fast that it messed me up enough to force me to take a break. In mid December 2022 I deleted the apps and decided to pause this whole dating thing.

Two weeks passed. I cried a lot, created a Spotify playlist titled badass song that are NOT about love -Yes Mom by Tessa Violet is an underrated banger- and listened to it for 12 hours in 5 days. I allowed my mom to cook me my favourite dishes over the Christmas holidays, I patchworked my heart together into something that could be squished again, I went to therapy and learned that sustainable relationships are not what makes life bearable, but rather the opposite: they are possible only when our cup is already full and we give from a place of love and don’t take from a place of need. Otherwise, what happens when you can’t keep up the distraction anymore?

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Newfound balance came in baby steps, every week patching up a bit of my soul, taking it back from the men who I so eagerly threw myself at, lots of crying and hoping for the best while fearing the worst. I wish I could say I didn’t throw myself into another relationship right away, but that’s not quite what happened: the 2 months fling I had with P. -a sweet guy from Ontario that I started flirting with around New Year’s Eve- was a leap of faith. Our relationship blossomed out of a genuine friendship, but it was also an accidental step in the right direction. It could have been another adventure at breakneck speed, but it actually healed me in ways I didn’t think I needed: protected by the difference in timezone I was forced to fill long chunks of my day with anything that didn’t involve a response from him. Balance was forced into my routine by the distance, and it was very needed and very welcomed. He was oh so patient with me, with my habit of writing lengthy messages in (what was for him) the middle of the night and then deleting them. I was yet again burned out, heartbroken, with an unhealthy attachment style, and yet this time I didn’t get addicted, I just was… happy. Serene. Balanced almost, at times. The same kind of happiness I get from realising how tense my shoulders have been for hours, and finally getting to relax them. I think I got as close as I could to being my annoying self with him, and he didn’t run away from it, and that was an important datapoint for the little princess in my head.

We met in person, eventually, for a week in Paris -which does indeed look exactly like in the movies- and we got tipsy on overpriced french wine and took turns being the little spoon. It was fun, and awkward, and romantic, and real, and nourishing, and gorgeous. But like all delicious things, it had to end: we slowly realised we didn’t want to pursue a serious relationship when the distance between us was so giant and the future felt, for me, so cripplingly uncertain. In hindsight, we never could have worked out, because in order to have a mould that the other one could fit, we were deforming what we want from a partner too much. Once again, good sex and good communication are great, but not enough.

I cry a lot, yet again, in the solitude of my room. But this time I'm not wondering if it actually happened and if the L word we threw at each other was real. There is a faint light of joy in the pitch black of the breakup: the little princess in my head isn't screaming this time. When I'm done mourning the relationship that could have been -an idealised version of reality, a possible future warped by the smoothing filter that love puts on people- I breathe in the newfound freedom and I realise that the stillness I am experiencing is not boredom, just stability.

The ending of this story is in itself a new beginning, because I’ll always be a work in progress no matter how much I try to cast myself into a finite product in exchange for admiration. The lessons from therapy are not like a pill that can be swallowed once and fix the problems, but rather like a play that has to be rehearsed hundreds of time before it becomes second nature and still requires me to be present and improvising at every show. I cannot synthesize a perfect relationship out of thin air, I cannot will my way out of vulnerability.

I’m probably swinging a bit too much in the other direction, because the happiness I am enjoying right now is rooted almost only in solitude. I am single, happily so, with some hermit tendencies, and I have a feeling humans are just not built for that. I call it my girlboss era, which is just a fancy way to say I'm scared of trusting someone else to make me happy, so I might as well just do it myself. I clench my fists around my life and enjoy the sense of control and independence, but I know love is made of letting go and eventually someone will rock this fragile joy. I can’t count the calories for love without starving it.

But I can be cautious. I can demand for love to be built together, not found or expected. I can slowly open up, laying the bricks for a life worth living and invite someone in, rather than demanding to be fixed by affection. Intensity is not a good measure for affection, loyalty and sustainability are. And nothing but time builds love. It’s the time you have spent with your rose that makes your rose so important. I have a feeling I’m gonna have to learn this over, and over, and over again. I hope it will be taught to me by kind souls, with patience and humour.

Next time, love won’t be different. I will be.

[costanzapolastri]

Ways of being seen, chapter 1

(CW: graphic discussions of eating disorders)

Never skinny enough.

I was born right at the cusp between Millennials and Gen Z, in 1996. The Buzzfeed quiz says that I’m “definitely Gen Z” but the fact that I went to Buzzfeed to find that out might be evidence of the opposite. Since both generations seem to equally struggle under late stage capitalism, I don’t tend to care too much about it.

One experience that is distinctly millennial for me, however, is growing up under the crushing weight of 2000s fatphobia. From Reneé Zellweger’s size 6 being labeled as “fat” for over 90 minutes in The Diary Of Bridget Jones, to Britney’s unbelievably flat stomach being plastered on the cover of most magazines, the message was inescapable: be skinnier. You’re not skinny enough. Why are you not skinny enough? You should care about this. You should want to be skinnier. Everyone wants to be skinnier. Be skinnier. I have no memories of the turn of the millennium, but I can recall my grandma commenting on my sister’s armpit fat when she wasn’t even old enough to crawl.

Fatphobia was fed to us by benevolent mothers and unknowing friends, hating ourselves was expected of us from our favourite celebrities. Diet culture is water and we are the fishes. “It’s just the way things are” was the thought terminating cliché of choice for my family tree, beauty and diet labor are just expected of everyone and not putting in the effort calls attention to the water in a way that nobody likes. You’re supposed to be skinny, otherwise you’ll be cast aside as undesirable and untouchable, and no one will have permission to be attracted to you. And if you can’t be skinny -mind you, not because society has crafted a definition of skinny that purposefully leaves out the vast majority of us, but merely because of your unique personal failure- you should at the very least want to be skinny. We are all failed flat stomachs and 6 packs.

This is the water that coursed through my gills all throughout an otherwise ideal childhood. I enjoyed more than a decade of not really thinking about my body, not caring at all what I looked like -with a sprinkle of NLOG energy that made me feel superior to other women for “not caring about superficial things like diets and makeup”, which is ironic considering I was caring incredibly about other superficial things, like video games and internet forums. Until one day, I did care about what I looked like.

2012 was the year I landed on Tumblr.

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Tumblr is a platform where users can create their own blog, post original content and share posts from other blogs. It has never reached the popularity of Facebook -the social media that sucked away most of my time, back in those days- but this was more of a strength than a weakness: the vague aura of exclusivity and it being one of the few pseudonymous places left online became an asset. We grew to love the borderline dysfunctional mobile app -which to this day barely works- and we accepted that our chronological dash was going to regularly give us emotional whiplash by serving us ObamaxBiden shitpost erotic fanfiction right after a 1500 words essay about the history of lesbian bars in New York. By the way, this was great and non-chronological feeds have singlehandedly created more damage to the fabric of society than any other invention from the last 15 years, you cannot change my mind.

While I will sing the praise of feeds that are not ruled by slot-machine-like algorithms any chance you give me, there is a big drawback to this: wholesome posts by our online friends were inevitably going to be right next to pictures that romanticised self harm, depression, suicidal tendencies, and my drug of choice, eating disorders. Welcome to the fucking Pro Ana community, a place where women encourage each other on the path of anorexia -and the adjacent and only slightly less popular, Pro Mia community, which encouraged bulimia. A thing that unfortunately exists. Every woman my age knows what this community was, and every person outside of that demographic looks at me like I’m talking about walking all the way to Mars when I inform them that there is a community of (mostly) women who reinforce each other’s eating disorders. So for the second group, let me briefly illustrate what the Pro Ana community looked like: angsty pictures of dangerously skinny women tagged as #thinspiration, motivational phrases like “Rome wasn’t built in a day, don’t give up” or “push, push, until your thights don’t touch” or the now infamous Kate Moss quote “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, weight logs (aka girls posting how much they weight, how much they lost in the last weeks and what their weight goal is), incoherent ramblings from starved women where one can almost see the tears falling onto the keyboard while they type, and occasionally girls encouraging each other’s “success” in incredibly unhealthy weight loss journeys. It was addictive. It was hell.

We bought right into it because this community was repeating the message that was already so familiar to us: be skinny. You’re not skinny enough. Why are you not skinny enough? You should care about this. You should want to be skinnier. Everyone wants to be skinnier. Be skinnier. Self violence was always, at some point, just violence. Pop culture and loving almond moms corkscrewed hatred into us, like the tip of a nail effortlessly slips into the wall one millimiter at a time and before you know it there’s a hole in you.

The Pro Ana community reminds me a lot of incel forums. I’m probably not the first one to point this out: in Contrapoints’s video Incels she compares incel online communities to TTTT, a section of 4chan where trans women reinforce each other’s insecurities and act cruel to each other, aka the places that she used to browse at the beginning of her transition. One of the comments under this video agrees with me, and wishes for an equally thorough breakdown of the Pro Ana community. I obviously could never stand a chance in a comparison to our Dark Mother, but I’ll volounteer my 2 cents on the topic: I suspect all communities which foster unsupervised self hatred follow a similar pattern, mostly because humans have a lot more in common than they think and the arbitrary lines we draw for each other -like gender or race or sexuality or gender identity- live in the social world and do not actually capture something deep inside our nature. Gender essentialism was always going to be a scam. Eating disorders are not a girl thing, incels don’t hate themselves in a way that is cool and intellectual and manly -despite what they might tell you- and we really are all trying to survive in a world that makes billions of dollars when we despise ourselves.

I think Pro Ana forums are a form of toxic femininity, in the same way that incel forums are a form of toxic masculinity. They both are communities that take the gendered messages piled upon us by our society: for men it's the idea that sleeping with lots of hot women is how you prove your value, for women it's the idea that you have to be skinny and petite and that your contributions to the world matter nothing in comparison to how conventionally attractive you are, and for everyone it's the idea that men and women are the only two options. These communities bring those assumptions to the extreme logical conclusion, creating a powerful psychological self torture device. Both communities were born out of good intentions: incel forums were originally created by a lonely bisexual named Alana as a safe space for people of all genders who struggled with relationships and intimacy, Pro Ana forums were initially intended as a space to teach harm reduction techniques to people who have an eating disorder but don’t feel ready yet to start a path of recovery. These were good premises, after all someone has to tell the anorexic girls that dry fasting -aka starving yourself without drinking water- is life threatening and you can’t avoid drinking water for fear of weight gains, or you’re gonna be dead in 2 weeks. Someone has to tell the bulimic girls that the cycle of starving yourself, binge eating and puking up damages the internal mucosa of your digestive systems, and if you have a particularly voluminous binge you risk rupturing the walls of your stomach, in which case you have about 5 minutes to be rushed to an ER before you’re gone forever. Your therapist is not going to tell you this because that would be seen as enabling, these are all pieces of information that another anorexic girl gave me, over black coffee with no sugar.

But these communities, without the supervision of a therapist to gently rewrite the collective thoughts into something hopeful and positive, spiralled very quickly into despair and anger and self loathing. The toxic air of these forums drives away any attempt at self improvement both from inside and outside the community. We know this is wrong but it’s our choice so if you judge us you will be banned reads the head of a Pro Ana forum, in blingee sparkly letters. This is the place where we come to hate ourselves, keep your self love reasonable bullshit to yourself.

Both communities also have an adjacent community that is equally toxic but defines itself in opposition to the first one: for incel forums it’s the pickup artist or redpill community, for Pro Ana is the #fitspiration trend. In both cases, this second community brands itself as “self improvement” and promises a solution to the woes of the members in the first community -solution that it cannot possibly deliver upon, because what’s wrong with Pro Ana is in the premise too, not just the conclusion. Pro Ana says “being skinny and attractive is the only thing that matters, so we will starve ourselves” and Fitspiration comes in and responds “no don’t starve yourselves, go to the gym instead!”. The premise that being skinny and attractive is the source of human value is never questioned, it’s just given a different solution that is slightly more socially acceptable because branded as “healthy”. Because the idea that our value comes from looks is so deep into our subconscious that even scratching it feels like shaking the entire floor, which is unacceptable for a community based around control. And equally cruelly, the incel community says “women only want men who are rich, tall, attractive and have massive cocks, so there is nothing we can do to have love or sex and we should just LDAR (lie down and rot)” and the redpill community -aka, the pickup artist grifters who prey on insecure young men and try to sell them weird courses on how to speak "womanese"- yells at them like a bad Gordon Ramsey impression “I have the solution, stop crying and man up: here’s how you become rich, tall, attractive, and grow a massive cock”. The premise is never questioned, because the premise is the whole point. If you’ve ever wondered how a group of people who are all about self hating -incels- can get along so well with a group of people that claim to be all about self improvement -the red pill- it’s because they share 99% of their worldview. Including the idea that pills bought on the internet can actually grow your penis, for some godforsaken reason.

Pro Ana is not just a place where you can browse pretty pictures and get some inspiration for your summer beach body. It’s not a community one can engage with on casual terms, because it evolved to hook you in and worsen your insecurities. Seeing other girls’s weight goals create an innate sense of competition, and if your weight goal was [insert dangerously low number here] before, now that you’ve seen a girl saying she reached [insert even lower number here] you brain can’t let go of that new number. These forums move your goalposts endlessly. If you think you’re gonna be so happy at [number] just wait until you get to [number - 5] kilos! Also, you are always alone when you browse these places, which means anything that will fit your already existing self loathing narratives will stay in your memory, and replay in your head long after you’re closed your computer. You will intellectualise the parts that hurt the most as true: that girl’s post about how no one cares about you if you’re not skinny? You will not see it for what it is -the incoherent ramblings of a literal starving child- but rather you will reblog it, thinking to yourself you finally found someone brave enough to tell it like it is. You share your pain and inflict it upon others, because you are blind to your own self narratives. You subconciously cling to these self narratives because you crave control.

What I have a hard time explaining to people about eating disorders, is that this is not a little story I used to tell myself, it is a profound rewriting of my own psychology that goes as deep as I am: I really did believe that if I allowed myself to consume carbohydrates everyone would be extremely disappointed in me and abandon me, in the same way I did believe gravity points down and the sky is blue. It’s a degree of removal from reality that most people are, thankfully, alien to. I was operating on a different code, and I was imposing it on anyone frail enough to listen. We weren’t tragically misguided little girls who are oh so skinny, and if they only realised how pretty they really are everything would be ok. We were self love black holes, who sucked the joy out of everything around us, disgusting monsters who cleaned the puke off the toilet seat after spilling a piece of their soul into the bathroom every morning. And when that wasn’t enough we vomited the black bile of our rage onto other women on the internet, because if I can’t be happy, then no one can. We weren’t just victims, we were also perpetrators. For my fellow sad girl weebs who have seen Puella Magi Madoka Magica: turns out the witches were magical girls all along. Pro Ana is not just a bunch of little girls posting on their little girl blogs, it isn’t cute, it isn’t romantic, it isn’t pretty. Pro Ana is a dangerous and sometimes fatal ideology. Pro Ana is a cult.

In her book The Beauty Myth feminist author Naomi Wolf talks about how images of beautiful, young women that are plastered all over media hurt women. To this day, I have yet to find a text that better articulates the systemic barriers placed in society to prevent me from feeling skinny enough to exist. The message that not having a flat stomach is a unique personal failure is so radicated in me, that the mere mentioning of the systemic issues behind it make my eyes tear up. I grieve when I think of all the pain we could have avoided, if only we knew. Things are better now, indubitably: #proana #promia #thinspiration are treated with the same seriousness of vaccine misinformation and Qanon nonsense, as they should be. We learned that this is a death cult and we silence it as such. But we are little people, we are fighting a Goliath with a billion dollar budget named Loréal and Pantene and Glossier and Valentino and some other european-sounding pretentious bullshit. We have nothing but a piece of fabric and a stone. And, maybe, if we’re lucky, each other. When women younger than me on my FYP criticise the mind numbing nightmare that is plastic surgery Tiktok, I want to cheer for their self awareness. But I also know that self awareness is not enough, on its own, and in fact it can become a way to intellectualise away your needs without addressing their root. I really wish not getting into an online cult was just one essay away. I wish it wasn't so easy for capital to profit off of our self loathing. I wish there was more that I could do for them.

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At 17, as I was slowly crawling out of eating disorders, learning how to eat intuitively again and starting an incredibly long journey to self acceptance, I started posing for private photographers. My first photoset was with a friend of a friend, who put me in a bodycon black dress with “Tim Burton-inspired striped stockings” (his words) and photoshopped away all my pores. The mustache-shaped sparkly earrings were my idea, because this was 2013 after all.

By the way, the person in these photos was literally a bulimic teenager so I trust there will be no comments about the way my body looked. Positive or negative.

Just be fucking normal, ok? Thanks. Anyway.

This one was instead from my second ever photoset, about 6 months after the first one. And yes, the BMO dress was my idea, which I'm sure comes as a surprise to absolutely no one.

The first works of any artist are always clunky, ugly, clumsy, borrowing too much from someone else’s vision. In one word, cringe.

I now laugh at the 12 inch heels on stone pavement -male amateur photographer moment- at my attempt to sexily stare into the camera which just makes me look constipated, at the embarrassingly bad photoshop job that was done by some guy who hates body hair with a burning passion. And you have my permission to laugh too.

Also, anyone involved in putting a woman in high heels on top of a piece of furniture should be charged with crimes against humanity.

But I think it’s also interesting to elaborate on why these first works were dogshit: these photos communicate absolutely nothing. The body -my body- is placed in a vacuum, not only the sole subject of the photo but it’s the only source of enjoyment one could possibly get out of the image. There is no attention to aesthetic, no emotion, no message, nothing besides here’s a hot 19 year old.

I understand why a 32 year old straight guy who bought a DSLR camera just to see some titties might find that interesting, but I fancy myself a bit more sophisticated than that. So why was I so happy, at the time, to have participated in these works? Why did I enthusiastically post them on my portfolio and all over my social media accounts, when they look so bad?

The answer is simple: I looked skinny. My stomach was almost flat. Oh me oh my, I felt just so skinny. So so skinny. Look at my stomach wow I look so skinny so pretty this is what I've always wanted.

The only metric of value that i was allowing myself to have for my work was how the photos made my body look. Fuck light, fuck composition, fuck story, fuck emotions, fuck everything I’m finally skinny oh finally FINALLY I made it! Look everyone, I’m skinny! Look at me I’m skinny please look at me please tell me I’m valuable now!! It’s what you wanted, right? It's what you've been asking this whole time, right?

CJ the X once said that you are not the protagonist. Art -or God, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call it- is merely materialising through you. And ugh, CJ has this nasty habit of being correct all the time. Art is bigger than me, and it’s definitely fucking bigger that wether or not my abs are showing.

I try not to take away regrets, only lessons. And the lesson I learned here, is that you can't expect to make something meaningful if you're worried about looking skinny while you do it. Give it up, it doesn't serve you. The code is not fixed in stone.

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I want to share with you all the long journey that I took, from self loathing to self acceptance. Ways of being seen is a collection of essays exploring my relationship with my body, beauty standards, other women, self objectification and acceptance. Through the lens of the works I did as a model in the past 10 years (ahah get it? The lens?).

I hope you’ll enjoy :)

xoxo

Costanza