And another thing I was thinking about recently—when Instagram started, or when people started making profiles, I remember being so freaked out about how much your avatar represented you. I was trying to figure out how, in people’s brains, you split time between your avatar and your real-life self. Now, talking about this, it doesn’t even make sense. But when we didn’t have that, it was a really scary, foreign concept to me.
Well, it is a really trippy concept, because if you think about it, none of it is actually tangible or real. There’s nothing, at the end of the day, that you can actually hold on to.
Yes, exactly. And it’s just in our minds. And another thing that I always thought about—this was very early on, I guess, in cyberbullying on Instagram—I remember thinking, it’s crazy to post a photo, let’s say of your body, and then have a ton of people commenting on it. And at the time, I was like—if those people said that to you in real life… Now we can’t separate that anymore, because it’s so common. We’re really in the era of criticism and critics, and it’s normalized. But it freaked me out, because I was like—what’s stopping people from internalizing that and then living it out in real life? That really, really scared me.
And again, a lot of people who get thrust into stardom are young, and your brain is not equipped to deal with that. It’s already so much. I was talking to a filmmaker last night, and we were just talking about how wild it is to be on stage—to have that much energy directed at you—and how to even process that.
Even my very limited experience of being on a stage—even just the feeling of those bright lights, outside of people’s eyes looking at you—it’s really strange.
And it’s not normal for us as humans, because we see that as a threat, naturally. So if you’re experiencing that on your phone constantly, and then also in venues and in person, I just don’t know what kind of way that is to live. It’s very scary.
I feel like now that we’re talking about this, I’m thinking about the deer—the doe—that you have in the book. And I feel like that’s actually such a representation of what we’re talking about: this feeling of being captured and perceived.
That was intentional. It’s one of my favorite visual references, because I love the idea of a deer caught in headlights on the road—and also how powerful those animals are—but then the car drives toward them, and that’s it. That’s a great metaphor for what happens to these people, or these girls. They get contained in this very scary way. And also, another part of the deer is that it’s seen as a magical creature, which is how I see the girls in the book being perceived. So it’s a very sad symbol to me.
Photo: Petra Collins