The bird in my palm stirred in her sleep and I cupped my other hand around her like a shield.
“I’m sorry,” I told Maren. “I’ll put them all back. I promise.”
But she wasn’t listening. Maren was kneeling on the floor, eating the sparkly black shards like a dog.
“Self-care is putting yourself first,” she said quietly, dark blood rimming her split lip.
When I jolted awake, I checked my Fitbit: 4:52 a.m. Heart rate 107 bpm.
I promised myself I’d talk to Maren last week, but it never seemed like the right time and now she was at a Devin-sponsored healing retreat in the woods. Each passing day gave me another excuse to wait, but my relief sat next to mounting unease, like staring at the subject line of an email you’d rather die than open.
I had two tunics that still fit, one pair of maternity jeggings with a black waistband that stretched as high as my underwire. There were a couple of dresses I once wore with belts that I now wore like sacks, with flat shoes. Most days I wore a headscarf and loud lipstick to draw attention away from what was happening below my neck.
My pitch was practiced. Richual could be doing more to reach pregnant and postpartum millennials. I designed a mock-up for a new content vertical. “This is about teaching self-care to the next generation, building a movement beginning with babies,” I’d say.
But what if Maren was like, How are we going to launch a new content vertical if you’re out on maternity leave? What if you just work from home three days a week?
Or, I thought we were friends. Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to have kids?
I had fucked up. I’d made myself too indispensable.
* * *
...
I met my first boyfriend on BlackPlanet when I was fourteen. Hey girl, just dropping by to show some love, he wrote in my guestbook. It was the summer I listened to “If I Ain’t Got You” on repeat, the perfect soundtrack for catching feelings. I didn’t even care that he’d posted the same thing in a dozen other guestbooks. There was someone out there who wanted to know what I had to say. Little Khadijah couldn’t have seen it then, but she was preparing for her future career as an internet writer, using all her available free time to type her thoughts into little boxes for strangers to read. This is when she first started to look at her life—embarrassing moments involving period blood, totally justified rage over who got the solo in choir, the joy of a major H&M haul on a limited budget—as potential content.
I memorized the boy’s page on the Planet and consulted with my friend Ashley, who could vouch for him IRL because his family went to the same church as hers. Exactly once, I saw him, in the stands at a basketball game. Hey, we said, like we’d been practicing our inflection. But we hadn’t rehearsed any words to come after.
It made zero sense that he held the title of “first boyfriend” in my mental archive. More like he was the first guy whose digital attention set too high a bar for future face-to-face contact.
I deleted my page on the Planet once I realized there were other ways to be online, where I could write beyond the borders of a profile. On a blog, you could exist through lists and opinions, ideas about the world and your place in it as informed by Erykah Badu lyrics, good poems by June Jordan, bad poems by you. You could change your avatar. You could stop wearing your old clothes when they no longer fit or went out of style.
I grew up in New Jersey, but I came of age on the internet. I started and abandoned blogs, went through a Tavi Gevinson phase where I meticulously documented my outfits (without ever showing my face because I was self-conscious slash paranoid a family member would find my blog), and then a vegan phase where I made a Tumblr to promote awareness of black vegan celebrities and share recipes and data from PETA.
By the time I was in college, it wasn’t enough to make something online. If what you made was any good, people wanted to know who the maker was: “About Me.” I watched as the self became what you made. You linked your Facebook and Instagram and Twitter accounts. You were the sum of every vacation photo ever taken, the quantity of birthday wishes you received, the amount of followers you could count across platforms. There was no such thing as IRL. Your body might sleep, but your profile stayed up all night like a lit marquee.
About Me: Khadijah Walker, digital girl in a digital world.
For my gender studies class at Rutgers, I started a new Tumblr called The Panopticon, where I documented what I saw to be the prison of personal branding that put women in their own private cells (their social media profiles), under constant surveillance to remain beautiful (but real), strong (but vulnerable), unique (but authentic), vocal about their beliefs (but only the ones that everyone else agrees are worth believing in). We were both the prisoners and the guards.
I posted screenshots of accountability coaches and fitness influencers and YouTube stars and aspiring rappers and moms and women who were “just on this personal journey called Life,” leaving vital information, like follower count, but blurring their identities. I made collections of screenshots of women who were all told stay in your lane. Another series on accusations of being fake. For every mom with tens of thousands of fans for her cute kid photos, there were hundreds of haters who said she was a human disgrace. Being a guard was irresistible.
The Panopticon went viral and that’s when the internet became my job.
By the time I graduated, I was writing about women and digital culture for Jezebel and The Hairpin and The Toast. At night, I waited tables at a vegetarian restaurant in the East Village and wrote weird headlines as they came to me on the notepad I used to take orders. The next day, I’d crank out a couple of thousand words to match. “The Best Worst Time I Had Having My UTI Mansplained to Me on Reddit,” “I Met My First Boyfriend on BlackPlanet and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next,” “Questions I Would Like to Ask the White Women Re-creating the Antebellum Lifestyle on Instagram.” My regular column was called “What I Regretfully Googled This Week.” Lena Dunham DM’ed me in 2013 and asked if I wanted to get lunch, and I kept blinking at the screen, thinking it must be a joke, and never responded. I did screenshot her invitation and made it the header image of my social media profiles. BuzzFeed offered me a job on their social team, and within three months I was a staff writer.
My only hobby had become my career. Every day, I scrolled until my eyes blurred, searching for the next Doge, trying to come up with a hot take about the most highly funded potato salad Kickstarter in world history.
The dudes I met on dating sites googled me before a first date. They had formed an opinion about who I was hours before they asked if I wanted to Venmo them for my grain bowl. “I thought you’d be taller,” one said. “Are you going to write about us?” another asked, as if there was ever going to be an “us” to write about.
I wanted to find a DeLorean that would take me back. Naming myself as the creator of The Panopticon was the mistake that made me known. What would I do once I had plundered every mortifying moment of my youth for a personal essay? What was left for me to say about how women constructed their identities online? I wanted to escape myself; at the same time I wanted to level up. I watched as the girls I was blogging with at twenty-two were offered staff positions writing about pop music and millennial culture at The New Yorker, or about the intersection of race and tech at the Times. What, was my meme beat at BuzzFeed not highbrow enough? Was Foucault, like, over? I knew what Shine Theory was, but I couldn’t help feeling envy and resentment that they had achieved something before I even realized I wanted it.