2021 was all about trying to be very out of touch: I deleted my Instagram and Twitter accounts, I stopped reading the news, and I continued to not be on Facebook, blah blah blah. But as you know, all of that deprivation didn’t really do much. I crawled back to my friends Twitter accounts — dutifully clicking through prompts that begged me to give up the act and just make my own fucking account again — and I screenshotted posts that I liked, creating a folder that served as a sort of scrapbook of the timeline I no longer had.
2021 was tedious, to say the least.
In 2022, I’ve caved in to my desire to see what the fuck is going on: I made a private TikTok account and began lurking. At first, the algorithm served me videos of random teens dancing and acting out breakups or melodramatic scenarios that they’d certainly never experienced — it was very FaveTikToks420.
As the days rolled on and I dutifully dead-eyed scrolled my ‘for you’ feed, TikTok told me who I am: I’m unemployed, I’m fascinated by home renovation, and I have unruly curly hair. It served me videos about passive income: young people with smooth baby faces claimed I could make $10K a day by dropshipping shitty silicone stuff on Amazon. Straight married women in their 30’s served me endless content about feng shui, IKEA hacks, and removable wallpaper. Beautiful curly-haired 20-somethings detailed daily routines of conditioning, oiling, squishing, scrunching, and plopping — one particularly tan, shiny, and made-up girl told me to follow her if I wanted 2022 to be my year of being “That Girl.” I bit, I scrolled, I got served more That Girl content.
Who is That Girl? That Girl is both accessible and desirable. She’s productive and pretty. She has shiny hair and a capsule wardrobe of a couple perfect pieces that allow her to create an endless stream of put-together looks. She has clean white sneakers and polished gold accessories. She sets goals. She journals. She works out in a way that makes her feel good — she would never simply engage in a random form of torturous exercise in the pursuit of vanity, of course. That Girl does all of these things specifically for her own enjoyment, enlightenment, and actualization. That Girl is manifesting. That Girl is showing up looking the part before the part is ever hers. That Girl can be you if you follow these simple steps.
We’ve met That Girl before. In the 90s, she was a pop princess or a Cosmopolitan piece on how to please your man while getting your dream job. In the early 2000s, she was a good girl gone bad (later, even more literally). The 2010s saw That Girl become the influencer: first she was a reality-star-turned-lifestyle blogger (or she was just getting started), then she was a Girlboss, then she was your friend in your feed. Maybe she was you.
It happened so fast: she was showing off nail art and perfectly-manicured eyebrows with the Valencia filter on 2014 Instagram and then Glossier was sending her products and then she had her first 1000 followers and then she learned how to be something other people could aspire to be. Not a salesperson, just someone who made it look easy — someone who would tell you what they bought. Not a movie star, just someone who might be Internet friends with one — perhaps she’s a podcaster, maybe she’s the subject of several group chats who have no idea what her job is. That Girl is always going to dinner. That Girl looks like she has money, but you have no idea how much. That Girl doesn’t try too hard but sometimes she’s honest about how hard it is to be That Girl. That Girl is vulnerable, but never so vulnerable that she’s not That Girl.
With the rise of That Girl, we’ve seen the rise of ‘men are trash’ discourse: Fuccboi is a much-anticipated (and naturally controversial) novel, West Elm Caleb is the boy who launched a thousand takes (and a hundred takes denouncing those takes). What interests me about That Girl and the shitty guys she dates is the undeniable triumph of individualization, of self-actualization: content about being That Girl seems to stress, above all else, that you can actually have the perfect life you want if you simply engage in the right rituals. And if you speak the language of therapy — gaslighting, love-bombing, setting boundaries, healing traumas — you can somehow categorize the behavior of everyone else in such a way that you might be able to fully protect yourself from it. It seems That Girl can make her own routine so perfect, so behaviorally optimized that she may never need to do the work of actually going to therapy. I feel like when all this weight is placed on the self, the self is bound to fail: it’s never enough for a fulfilling life — we’re social creatures, we can’t survive on manifesting our goals and consuming content alone.
I suppose I’ve been fixated on all of this for a couple reasons, outside of the obvious unemployed TikTok consumption: I’ve been an ‘everyone should go to therapy’ person, I’ve been an ‘I can fix myself by making all the correct lifestyle changes and therefore becoming 100% healthy and desirable’ person, and I’ve also been a ‘men who treat me shitty are my problem and my own shitty behavior is all explained and excused by my various traumas’ person. I don’t love any of those versions of myself.
I deleted TikTok off my phone last weekend — I’m sure I’ll go back for the hair tips and home hacks and stretching tutorials and to diagnose myself with various genetic disorders that I don’t actually have. I’ve since been trying to consume more….let’s say….thoughtful content in order to achieve a more balanced inner monologue: stuff that feels like it’s talking through things as opposed to promoting things. I really enjoyed this pod with former child star Jennette McCurdy (Chelsea is my friend but I remain her fan, lol): in it, she talks a lot about letting go of the person she aspired to be and slowly chipping away at what created that ideal (spoiler: lots of time and therapy). There’s also a brief but refreshingly nuanced conversation about motherhood and parenting that I really appreciated.
Also in content that’s enjoyable and not so self-actualized it feels suffocating is Kreayshawn’s blog. It’s not Web3, it’s not trying to be anything — it’s just her talking about her life, her moss obsession, her son, her whatever. It’s thoughtful enjoyable and easy to read. Kreayshawn is under-appreciated in like, every field: she’s a great producer, musician, director, web designer, tweeter…..I could go on. If you haven’t watched her Masked Gorilla interview, just do — she’s lived a thousand lives. It’s nice.
Abrupt ending, as usual.
Signed,
Person who’s still in bed.