we consume so much, now, that perhaps we don’t know what it means to exist as something unsellable. i had to give up journalling because i couldn’t stop writing for the people who would read it after i was dead.

try as i might, i can only seem to understand myself through the fictions of the more actualized — and, just as i reassure myself that i am drawn to this media because of some predetermined, inherent sense of self, i wonder if it is creating me, too. who would i be if i stopped consuming things? what would there be left to feel?

i wonder what romantic love would feel like if i’d never seen a romantic comedy, if i’d been allowed to figure it out before a commodified version was fed to me. i wonder what my own illness would feel like. now, as i put on mascara before crying so i’ll look the right kind of sad when i see myself in the mirror, i think about how nothing feels... See more

we rationalize our own suffering through the romanticization of those who have suffered before us and, in turn, we provide a blueprint for the hot-girl suffering of those after.

i am making sure to eat a square of dark chocolate during my depressive episodes so they’ll sound sexy in my memoirs. even when i am ostensibly at my lowest, i am still filtering my experiences through the eyes of a consumer; the desire to editorialize our own experiences (to romanticize the unseen, to live for our biographies) has become an... See more

it’s easy, as a woman, to compactify illness into a consumable package — to whittle at the edges of pathology until it becomes little more than smudged eyeliner and wild sex. childhood trauma becomes daddy issues, suicidal depression becomes mystique. selling your pain is easier than living with it.