thinking about myself too much
postcard 21: on self consciousness, the spotlight effect, and are we too obsessed with ourselves?
I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.
prelude
Welcome to postcards by elle! Every week, I send out a weekly postcard, which includes a list of everything I read and watched that week. This is free, so free and paid subscribers will all receive this. To support my work, please consider upgrading your subscription!
He spoke, and returned madly to the same reflection, and his tears stirred the water, and the image became obscured in the rippling pool. As he saw it vanishing, he cried out:
‘Where do you fly to? Stay, cruel one, do not abandon one who loves you! I am allowed to gaze at what I cannot touch, and so provide food for my miserable passion!’
—Metamorphoses, Ovid
I had a tragic mishap during the winter break of my high school freshman year.
I was getting ready to go out and had just put on sunscreen on my face. I began curling my eyelashes, but my hands were still slippery from the sunscreen and my wrist twisted while the eyelash curler was on my eye. And in a split second, I accidentally ripped out every single eyelash on my left eye. It hurt, but I couldn’t even feel it because of the sheer anticipatory dread of the mortification that comes with having no eyelashes on one eye.
Nothing would make the lashes grow back, so I returned to school in January, terrified that someone would comment on it. I was fourteen and incredibly self-conscious, hyper-cognizant of every single thing I deemed a flaw on my face and body. I had yet to grow my self confidence and didn’t completely fit into my skin, and having no eyelashes was possibly the worst thing that could happen to me. I overlined my left eye. I braced myself. If someone makes a joke, makes fun of me, I told myself, I’ll just laugh it off. I practiced it in my head, once, twice, thrice.
Throughout the day, I remained on high alert, but to my surprise, nobody had commented on it by the time lunchtime rolled around. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that no one noticed because of my glasses, but back then I was pleasantly surprised. When I voiced this to my then-best friend, she turned to me and said: “Elle, people don’t actually care that much about you.”
Of course, I later found out she actually had started hating me sometime around then and we fell out soon after. It was meant as a snide remark, but it was one of the most helpful things anyone had said to me. My eyelashes eventually grew out normally again after a few months and everything went back to normal. Two or three people noticed it throughout those months, but it was more out of concern. Nobody ever made fun of me or talked about it behind my back (that I know of). All of my fears, the worst-case scenarios I spiraled about in my head, never happened.
This is known as the “spotlight effect”, which is the tendency to feel and behave as if we are the focus of attention from an ‘audience’ that shares our preoccupations and insecurities about ourselves. We are naturally egocentric individuals. We think about ourselves more than we think about others, and that isn’t a bad thing. There’s a colossal difference between thinking about yourself and being narcissistic. We are always the most aware of what we think are our weaknesses or shortcomings, so obviously we are going to think that other people are thinking that much about us.
I was journaling the other day and thinking about this incident. In middle school, I was self-conscious, constantly scared that people were going to talk about me, feeling like every single part of myself was marked on display in big neon signs. While that ebbed and eventually almost disappeared by the end of high school, one of the things that helped me through moments of insecurity was thinking: “nobody cares that much about me as much as I think I do.”
Reflecting on my childhood and comparing my personality then to my personality now makes me realize just how much I have changed as a person. I’m not exactly sure whether it is for the better or worse (because that is truly just opening another can of worms where I occasionally get upset and mourn the girl I used to be when I was younger), but one thing I have definitely stopped doing is actively caring or worrying about what other people think of me.
My little sister is now fifteen—the same age as I was when I had my eyelash tragedy. She sometimes worries about herself, and how others perceive her (naturally so). Whenever she has days when she is overly worried, I tell her the same thing I told myself when I was her age.
I am not a mind reader. Moreover, I actually don’t want to know everything about what someone thinks of me. So much energy gets wasted when you are constantly anxious about what people are thinking of you, and it almost always ends up putting you in an awful mood. My quality of life genuinely improved when I started taking every interaction I had at face value—I stopped trying to overanalyze and read into things.
I stopped leaning into every mistake I made in front of people and worrying about whether they would remember this years down the line. I told myself that if I don’t remember other people’s mistakes, they won’t remember mine either. And it works—telling your brain things you don’t believe and pretending that you do—because at one point, I just stopped thinking about whether or not people cared about my metaphorical lack of eyelashes.
Of course, this is not to say I’ve found some miracle panacea for anxiety. My anxieties still stem from other things. But I already have plenty to be worried about when it comes to myself and my future—I don’t need to worry whether someone potentially dislikes me or a friend secretly doesn’t think positively of me. Or whether a stranger is going to see me on the street and think my outfit isn’t nice. That is truly their own business.
If someone doesn’t like me for an arbitrary reason, there is genuinely nothing I could have done to prevent it. It’s not a reflection of me or my character by any means. Actually, if anything, someone being nice to my face but talking shit behind my back is more of a reflection of their character. And again, really none of my business.
These days, I focus and worry more about intrinsic things: whether I am acting the way I want for myself, whether I am a good and present person to the people I love, and what I want to improve about myself to be the kind of person I would admire.
I like the fact that we’re self-centered. As long as we’re thinking about what we would like to see in ourselves instead of others, that is. We do think too much about ourselves, and that’s okay.
interlude i: what i read this week
I read two books this week. I read Bad Fruit by Ella King, which was such a beautifully written, heartbreaking book about a toxic mother-daughter relationship and how generational trauma carries. Every character came to life, although I would have liked to have seen depth about the father.
I also read Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, which was great because I love Lorrie Moore. Her short story collection ‘Self Help’ was one of my favorite reads of last year. Her prose is minimalistic but she finds a way to strike a chord in your heart. I enjoyed this one too, although not as much. My favorite story out of the collection was “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens”.
Here is my Goodreads if you want to add me!
And here are ten articles you should read this week:
Does Being a Gifted Kid Make for a Burned-Out Adulthood?
How being labeled “gifted” can rearrange your life — for better and for worse.
Patricia Lockwood’s biography of Vladimir Nabokov, his relationship with writing, and the ebb and flow of his public persona.
Scheele’s Green, the Color of Fake Foliage and Death
Invented in 1775 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the artificial colorant was made through a process of heating sodium carbonate, adding arsenious oxide, stirring until the mixture was dissolved, and then adding a copper sulfate to the final solution.
The race to find four children who survived a plane crash deep in the Amazon.
Modernists and historians alike loathed the millions of new houses built in interwar Britain. But their owners loved them.
What Clickbait Tells Us About the Evolution of Print and Online Media
Holly Baxter on the Virtues and Pitfalls of Journalism in the 21st Century
The Drama Over Blake Lively’s Hit New Movie Has Almost Eclipsed the Film Itself
Co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni are rumored to be feuding. Really, over this?
For Margaret Macdonald, philosophical theories are akin to stories, meant to enlarge certain aspects of human life.
What makes swear words so offensive? It’s not their meaning or even their sound. Is language itself a red herring here?
There have been endless artistic reimaginings of women’s rage, heartbreak, and self-destruction – do these stories keep us in a state of perpetual victimhood, or are they brave and necessary?
interlude ii: what i watched this week
I watched Mistress America, which I enjoyed. I couldn’t help but compare this to Frances Ha, which is also directed by Noah Baumbach and stars Greta Gerwig. I liked the latter a lot more, but Mistress America was also a fun watch. I also rewatched Columbus while I was writing my film recommendations for late summer (will be posted tomorrow!). It is such a beautifully shot, thoughtful movie and anyone who hasn’t watched it absolutely should.
Here is my Letterboxd if you want to add me!
I’m on season 3 of my Grey’s Anatomy rewatch now, and I had forgotten just how good the earlier seasons were. I love the dynamic and chemistry of the original cast (minus George and Izzie), and I feel like the magic of that was lost in the later seasons. I also do feel like it has to do with the inevitable end of television shows that air long after they’ve obviously run their course.
I also watched this video on Monet’s water lilies, this video on The Giving Tree being a controversial children’s book, and this video on rising streaming platform costs.
postlude
things i love: jany perfume from sora dora (smells like apple pie literally), twg’s haute couture tea, tortoiseshell accessories, freshly washed bedding on a sunday night
“If someone doesn’t like me for an arbitrary reason, there is genuinely nothing I could have done to prevent it.”
My whole life I’ve been described as a confident, independent, and intelligent by those around me; the common uplifting words that parents use to make their children, more specifically their daughters, feel good about themselves. As I am a very independent person, I’ve always hated making new friends because of how hard it is to ‘get yourself out there’, and because of this I hold all my friendships close to my chest.
I recently turned twenty, and now as a young woman, I find my thoughts often stray to my friends, and what they might think of me. This whole summer I’ve spent mostly alone-my college town is completely cleared out for the summer- and have had a lot of time to think about my friends, and to think about how they perceive me. My biggest fear is being disliked, I’ve always hated the thought of being disliked ever since I knew I could hate something. It makes me sick to my stomach imagining my friends harboring contempt for me, over something that I’m unaware that I’ve done. The phrase ‘they’re pretending to like you’ is often playing on repeat in my head, along with every little mistake I’ve ever made. This is an incredibly self-loathing and self-centered mental space, and I am actively working towards fixing it.
One of the biggest things that have helped is realizing exactly what your then friend had conveyed, nobody cares. Sure the thought of being disliked sucks, but who cares? I shine this huge spotlight on myself to critique every part of me, when in reality no one gives me a second glance. If my friends truly disliked me, that’s not my fault, it’d be something arbitrary, completely out of my hands.
Reading posts like this help me twist my head on right because I know I’m not the only one thinking like this. As you said, we’re egocentric creatures, forced to always be looking at our faults, maybe to fix them, maybe to pick at them and make them worse, that’s up to you to decide.
I too love tortoise shell accessories, every pair of glasses I’ve had since I was twelve have been tortoise shell <3
i love this so much 💘 i feel this sentiment sooooo deeply and i definitely agree that as i’ve gotten older my mindset has changed