Why Am I Like This? is an essay collection published in monthly segments. It is written by Hannah Dylan Pasternak, whom you can learn more about here. If you want, you can follow me on Instagram here. If you’re not already on the crazy train, subscribe below.
At first, I didn’t mind the stain. This is par for the course, I thought while checking myself out in the backseat of a Lyft. Technically speaking, it was not par for the course: I’d had the same procedure—a simple nose cauterization—done several times prior, and never left the doctor with so much as a five o’clock shadow. Appearance-wise, this was much worse than that. At least I am used to a five o’clock shadow, which I get, well, at five o’clock, and on my legs. This was different: it consumed the lower part of my face and was in the shape of South America.
When I got home, my companion, Andrew, was gravely concerned. “It’s just dried blood,” I supposed while he stared at my lip. Over FaceTime, I told my parents this too, because I thought it was true for somewhere between, oh, six to eight hours.
By hour seven, the mark on my face had darkened and grown in surface area. My skepticism increased. By hour eight, I realized this so-called blood was not coming off, not even in the shower. I began to accept that this was my fate. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror: I had ointment oozing out of my nose, my wireless bra was doing absolutely nothing for the appearance of my breasts, my hair made me look more or less like Larry from the Three Stooges, my South American stain was there, and a quickly-darkening Hitler mustache was beginning to form in addition. So I said to myself, “Well, I guess this is who I am now.”
When you are a millennial and you come to any conclusion about who or what you are, you might experience a deep tug to share it on social media imminently and profoundly. Usually, we feel this most when we want to announce something positive and exciting: a relationship, a relocation, or a job. But sometimes who you are is a new stain on your face that wasn’t there this morning, and you feel the need to share that too.
So I posted an account of this ludicrous tale, perhaps because I thought it was hilarious, perhaps because it was the most exciting thing to happen to me in several months, perhaps because this was my way of connecting with people, my Instagram Face.
Immediately after, I regretted it all: that I didn’t post it on Instagram stories and make it less permanent; that it may have come across like a call for attention; that it wasn’t clear enough that I was okay. The people who responded in the comments section were disturbed, to put it lightly. I received a dozen texts. My parents called it “traumatizing.” No one understood I was making a joke. Besides, Google said it would come off in a few short weeks. I was fine!
The next day, I laughed about it to my therapist on the phone. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Of course,” I said. What was so traumatic? It’s just my face, after all.
I have gotten good at familiarizing myself with variations of my face. This is because I have seen my face at its very worst, which is worse than an accidental front camera selfie, post-wisdom teeth removal, or one’s typical bad side.
I have seen my face with a black eye and a long, rusty scab. Other people have seen my face like this too. A couple of weeks after my face began to look like this, I went to the Governor’s Ball, which is a music festival infested with tri-state area teenagers and dads in tie-dye shirts. I was standing at the exterior of a crowd. A woman who may have only been a few years older than I was pushed through, heading towards the pit. She stopped next to me, looked me up and down, stared at my black eye, and said, “You fucking bitch.” And then she just kept walking.
I went to the West Side Market on Third Avenue and 12th Street. While searching for yogurt, a firefighter asked, “Who won—you or the other guy?”
In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., describes depersonalization, or losing one’s sense of oneself wherein “the self can be detached from the body and live a phantom existence on its own.” “Traumatized people… feel separated from their bodies,” he writes. He also maps out two concurrent systems of human self-awareness: one that tells the self its own story, and another that copes with its existence in the present. “One system creates a story for public consumption,” van der Kolk says, “and if we tell that story often enough, we are likely to start believing that it contains the whole truth. But the other system registers a different truth: how we experience the situation deep inside. It is this second system that needs to be accessed, befriended, and reconciled.”
Immediately, this reminds me of a classic Joan Didion line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Five years ago, I was one of three women randomly attacked by a man whose name I know now but did not know then during a brief spree of his in New York City. When I say it like that, it sounds like he woke up and decided to go shopping, or hit the town. I suppose, in a way, he did. I have googled him four times since. It was June first. It was 9 a.m. on a Wednesday. I was the third.
I was heading to work with my headphones in on a busy avenue. My sunglasses were on. He was walking toward me, which I did not know then. In New York, it seems like everyone is walking toward you, all of the time, and this felt no different. When there were five feet between us, he hurled a two-by-four at my head. I did not know that then, either. I just heard the thump. I still hear it often—when pigeons come too close; when I walk beneath a scaffolding or another precarious building object; when I make the wrong kind of eye contact with a man on the sidewalk.
Do you know what the first thing I did was? I stopped for one very brief moment, considered the situation, shrugged my shoulders—like a cartoon character—and thought, New York, baby! Then, I went right back to walking toward the subway.
After a few steps, the haze sunk in. It suddenly occurred to me that something bad had happened, though I still didn’t understand what. I felt people swarming towards me, but couldn’t make out their faces. I didn’t realize my sunglasses were broken on the ground, cracked from the impact of the wood. I didn’t feel the gash on my face, but my whole head stung and buzzed. I told myself to speak, rattled myself with the sound of my own voice, a sound I didn’t know was mine.
“Can someone help me?” I heard myself say.
Then, after a short pause: “What should I do?” I cried and shook as the strangers poured in.
“Instagram Face” became canon in a viral Jia Tolentino feature published in a December 2019 edition of the New Yorker. In “The Age of Instagram Face,” she argues that there is an increasing presence of a “single, cyborgian face”—Instagram Face—that people, largely women, contort themselves into. To do so, we use everything from plastic surgery (permanent) to Facetune (a photo-editing app; ephemeral). The face, Tolentino writes, “is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic.” It has “poreless skin… catlike eyes… a small, neat nose.” It is none of us, yet could be any of us. We are all becoming the same, and an algorithm only encourages it.
When I post a photo of myself on Instagram, I am almost always yearning for it to be an Instagram Face, whether I realize it or not. That is the influence of Instagram Face—its very effect. That the constant regurgitation of something that looks nice has convinced me on a deeply subconscious level that this is the way for me to look nice, too.
When I post a photo of myself on Instagram, I am almost always yearning for it to make me seem like someone else. My job, my eyelids, my language, my lighting. This is also subconscious—I am not an intentional copycat, and I think many people who use the app aren’t. It stems more from a lack of knowing who I am, or listening to who that person is, than a true desire to emulate an other.
When most people post to Instagram, I don’t think it’s because they are trying to be desirable or cool, or at least not just those things. They are really just trying to be happy.
Right after I was attacked by a random man in New York City, I went home to my parents where I could neither eat nor emote much of anything. I was very blank, except for the voice in my head kept that kept saying, Why me why me why me. I felt stupid for thinking that—I was fine. I was lucky. It could have been worse.
A few days later, still home with my parents, I decided it was time. This was my face now—my swollen black eye, my ugly scratch—and so this was what had to be done. Because Instagram exists, because I had some unholy obligation to be true to it, or maybe because I was looking for a refraction of myself, which was easier to consume than all that light.
I took a selfie. I captioned it something nonchalant that had nothing to do with what actually happened. I clicked “post.” Then my high school boyfriend’s father drove over and dropped off homemade soup. I don’t think anyone who saw that post knew what really happened. Why would they? I didn’t say a thing.
When I am stained with silver nitrate, and that stain is in the shape of South America, I do not have Instagram Face. Nor do I have it when my face is a puffy black eye that everyone at my magazine job gawks at; when my face is evidence that two uniformed policemen photographed against a brick wall. “Is this you?” the A.D.A. will ask me in my Grand Jury testimony. Then, I said yes. But I don’t know—is it? It’s just a face. Sometimes I look at myself and I think, How’s it going in there? as in, how is my soul doing in my body, and I only recently discovered that this is not something everyone else does, too.
In van der Kolk’s words, I am constantly seeking a way to reconcile myself with my face, often by putting it on Instagram. But what happens when my face cannot be an Instagram Face, no matter the angle or lighting? Am I supposed to share it then? And if I don’t, how will I know what to point at and say, “Me”? More often than not, the very vehicle I use to drive myself closer only takes me further from where I started.
I forget that when you do this—put yourself out into the ether for other people’s consumption—you are no longer yours. And when you make yourself look just like everyone else, I would venture to say that it’s not really you, either.
Perhaps I forgot my face, my whole truth. Perhaps I never knew it at all. Just as well, I will never know what came first: the chicken or the egg, my splitting in two as a means of self-preservation or a means of getting rid of that very same self. But what I do know is that they have both teased each other out and enabled this strange life to continue, leaving me here, staring at myself in the mirror.