The Selfie Spiral

On vanity, insecurity, and the lengths we will go

Relaxed eyebrows and a deadpan expression, like I am sleeping or dead. Cut the bullshit to get the real tea on what the fuck I look like.

Snap.

Damn girl, rough...

Snap. Snap. Snap.

Ew, oh my god. I’M SO CHOPPED…

Somehow, when the front-facing camera flips the photo, my asymmetries and fine lines sharpen into focus. My eyes aren’t just hooded, they’re cloaked. My features droop off my face like they are ready to slide into my lap. Has my hair looked like that all day? Unable to bear my RFF (Resting Fugly Face), I raise my eyebrows, softly smile, and tilt my head to the left like Nara Smith.

Snap.

PHEW. A little better. Spiral averted.

I am sitting on the M train, taking dozens of selfies while commuting home. I’m sure I look self-absorbed to the innocent bystanders. The middle-aged lady next to me gives a nasty side-eye when our arms brush. The high schoolers across from me are trading glances, looking at each other's phones, and giggling. I imagine they are sharing notes app messages like:

girl what is she doingggg😭

poor thing thought she ate 💀

is that a boy or a girl lol

Fair. I’m aware that I look like a deranged narcissist, but I can’t stop. As embarrassing as it is to say this out loud, I have a crippling selfie compulsion. Not because I’m trying to get my influencer bag – honestly, I wish that were the case. I’m face-checking: the obsessive ritual of selfie-taking to temporarily quell my insatiable insecurity with my appearance.

It’s embarrassing to talk about my insecurities so openly. Self-deprecation is gauche. You have to manifest your life and be delulu, or whatever. In reality, face-checking and facial dysmorphia are all-too-common afflictions for the social media-rotted brains of young women. In a recent piece from The Cut, social media influencer Nika Mottie says, “Whenever I’m invited to go to plans, my first thought is: What do I look like today? And then I often make a last-minute decision based on whether I think I look good enough to be seen by others.” Oh girl. Been. There.

My friend Hayley has been trying to get me to WFH with her at a local kava shop, but I have yet to join because my WFH days are designated ugly days – day-old sweatpants, five o’clock shadow, greasy hair, the works. I stay locked in my remote work bunker on those days, except for the occasional bodega and dispensary run. I save my everything showers and cute outfits for hot days when I have real plans. In this way, my life is crippled by binarism – I’m either hot or chopped. Full-beat or bare-faced. Glasses or contacts. Maybe I didn’t give The Substance enough credit. She kinda ate me up.

I try not to pose in my face-checks because I need the rawest image. Sometimes, I intentionally use bad angles to thrust the most brutal, bizarre truth of my disfigured visage onto myself. I bathe the wound in alcohol. The outcome can be truly horrific and destabilize my self-image for weeks. Y’all probably think I’m being dramatic, and I would post photo evidence to prove it, but I would rather post a full-frontal nude than have everyone see the monstrosities I’m capable of on an ugly day.

There are two wolves in my deranged self-perception. One is mangled and rabies-infested – I see her in train reflections, fluorescent overhead lighting, dirty gym mirrors, and, mostly, my iPhone’s front camera. She is unkempt, bricky, chapped, and need-a-bag-over-her-head-esque.

The other wolf is glamorous and airbrushed – she appears in low light, caught in film photos and the Snapchat/Instagram cameras (which are much different than the iPhone camera app.) I flirt with her in the bar’s bathroom mirror, three drinks in and early enough in the night for my makeup to still be buoyant. Arms gripping the sink for stability, whispering to myself, “Ugh yess bitch you look so good.” Kicking my feet and twirling in my vanity – until an impatient knock breaks the spell of my vapid gooning session. I apply one last swipe of lipstick, gather my scattered belongings, and whisk back to my friends with newfound confidence. I love that fab, elusive bitch, how she moves through the world with ease. How her doting cheeks create space for me to be weird without judgment (when a hot girl is weird, it's cute and quirky.)

Most days, I see the ugly wolf.

I can easily identify how attractive other people are—a skill honed through decades of meaningless swiping. Left, Right, Hot, Not, Ugly-Hot, Average-But-Rich. I don’t love how quickly I can mentally catalog faces. But when faced with myself, that ability short-circuits.

Understanding where I sit on the hotness scale requires meticulous analysis—pulling at my face to see what I would look like with a mini-facelift, leveraging my paneled bathroom mirror to inspect both profiles. When I try to see myself holistically, I fragment into a disparate hodge-podge of features, like a cubist portrait. My fully formed face refuses to coalesce. I don’t know what I look like to the naked eye, untainted by my neuroses.

Weeping Woman by Pablo Picasso

I recently spent hundreds on a Red Light Therapy panel on the recommendation of my friend and various Reddit forums. On day two, my fine lines have yet to evaporate, but it feels nice. Which, I guess, is the point – less the result and more the shoestring of hope I am white-knuckle gripping to pull me out of my imperfections. I’m doing something, which is better than doing nothing, and maybe this one will change everything, finally, forever.

If you are screaming at your computer, no, the better thing is to accept yourself!!! Well, duh, and I’m reading The Power of Now, so believe me, I’m working on it. But until I reach nirvana, I will cherish my toxins, acids, and chemical compounds like my children. I want their names on a shirt like I’m a pregnant Southern white woman excitedly awaiting Lakynn’s arrival.

Nika Motiie, the student interviewed in The Cut, has 300,000 followers on TikTok and 50,000 selfies on her camera roll. Many of you don’t know this, but I had a pandemic TikTok era. I gained 11k followers by shitposting hundreds of videos that racked up several million likes. I always thought that if I were hotter (during the pandemic, I was drinking every day and bloated as a motherfucker), those millions of likes would have translated to hundreds of thousands of followers. If my nose were smaller and my lips were bigger, my TikTok career would have blown up. I’d finally be pretty and, by extension, happy. But Nika’s inner critic is just as loathsome as mine, even with her Barbie nose, silky hair, and legions of followers.

I know, rationally, that all of this – the skincare, the selfies, the sadistic self-hatred – is moot. Beauty is less of a destination and more of a magnetized force. Like two north poles brought together, it retreats further from my grasp with every attempt to approach. Yet, I persist, doggedly limping toward the blinding light on the horizon. My hands outstretched, begging God to be beautiful.

I don’t pretend to offer some grand moral point about how to overcome this pathology. I’ll probably have Frownies on in my grave. There are so many questions that I need to figure out with my therapist before I can impart any knowledge to you all. Am I pretty? Why am I so vain? Will anyone ever love me? Will I be ugly forever?

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