“This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this—these things are real. I’m real too. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next.”
—Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
“All his portraits of me are lies. They’re all Picassos, not one is Dora Maar.”
—Dora Maar, quoted in James Lord, Picasso and Dora
Of all the artists with whom one might become involved, the most precarious is the writer with a biographical feed on X. Nothing serves as stronger evidence to my point than seeing posts by my “Most Colossal Ex”—a figure who started as a high school romance and blossomed into a deep friendship that turned messy and dysfunctional during our young adult years. We had the kind of relationship that’s defining in some of the worst ways: the kind that goes on too long with too much trauma and ultimately shows you exactly what you don’t want in the grand scheme of things. For me, towards the end of our tumultuous ten-year friendship-courtship, I solidified a long-time suspicion that I wasn’t romantically interested in men. This realization came in the midst of the most serious phase of our relationship when we dated after college. I was lucky, in a sense. He was my best friend so I felt comfortable expressing thoughts and doubts about my sexuality. It was a time characterized by trauma and poor decision-making; filled with tears in my apartment, his apartment, on subways and in cars. I kept vocalizing my suspicion that I was gay but we stayed at a dysfunctional standstill. He didn’t want to lose me and I did not want to ruin a longstanding, if broken, bond. Towards the end, it became clear that I had to face the losses inherent to embracing who I truly was. I had to try and claim my space in the world as a gay woman, no matter what happened to our friendship. Afterwards, we spent some time attempting to remain friends, but it was clear this person, an embodiment of the trauma of living in the closet, could not have a role in my life.
That is, until I caught a glimpse of his Twitter, now X, years later. When I befriended him in high school I don’t think I imagined I was getting wrapped up with someone who, in fifteen years, would become a writer with a penchant for the kind of absurdist personal soapboxing, X and other social media platforms invite. (In fact, I don’t think Twitter even existed back then in the early aughts). Maybe this is why I was completely blindsided when I read his one-lined account of a night we had sex on his feed. In it, I was anonymous—simply called “my gf at the time”—but it referred to a particular election night in the early 2010s and a joke he made during sex that deeply upset me then. He had turned our intimacy, and our conflicts, into a joke, leaving me anything but actually anonymous. Anyone who still knew him and ever knew me or our long and tumultuous history would likely be able to connect the dots and figure out that I was the “gf” to whom he referred.
After some frenzied scrolling fueled more by my own anxiety and upset than any rationality, I discovered other oddly specific mentions of me — always as “an old gf” or “my ex gf”. I found myself wondering more about the politics of these shared histories. How do social media structures allow one party to lay claim to a mutually experienced, and evidently very subjective, history? And what exactly is the statute of limitations on using personal, intimate, and even sexual experiences as creative content online? Sure, male artists have been using the life and experiences of female “muses” as inspiration for centuries, but I somehow felt his clipped reflections tossed into an enduring digital landscape exposed me to a very different experience than Picasso’s discontented Dora Maar. Seeing oneself anonymized can be alienating enough, but seeing a one-sided story of my past emerge through a series of tweets is different than any unflattering portrait or slipshod portrayal. Several of his social media accounts are all peppered with ironically Proustian quips and comments about personal moments between us—even all these years later. The discomfort of seeing deep intimacies of my young personal life, particularly those associated with the pain of being in the closet, reduced to a series of flippant posts on X is something difficult to describe. And yet, once I saw one, I couldn’t stop scrolling.
It’s surprisingly and addictively surreal to see oneself reduced within the digital stream of a social media feed, becoming a thinly anonymous caricature of a woman, a “gf at the time,” existing in the brief character count of a tweet solely because of my past sexual proximity to a person I don’t even talk to anymore. Reading mentions of me in this vein felt like a kind of disavowal of my agency and personhood supremely unique to our strange times. Social media has ballooned into something extremely different than in the early days of the internet when he and I met. Back then, MySpace was the central protagonist in our online worlds and Facebook had just emerged as the Next Big Thing. Outside of this new social media landscape, message boards and chat rooms were still where any connection to the wider world took place. The landscape of social connection online has completely changed since I was a teenager and yet, I suppose back then clues may have prompted me to anticipate his cavalier attitude towards online anonymity years later.
At the beginning of our high school courtship, we quarreled a lot about the internet. I guess it was strange for two teens to fight about something that’s become such a large part of all of our lives but in retrospect, it was so very new. Looking back, the way we socialized online was quaint, even regressive compared to the world we now inhabit of influencers and likes and sliding into DMs. Our first major conflict arose when he requested for us to end our innocuous high school flirtation because he had met someone on the website Livejournal who wanted to have sex with him. He argued he just couldn’t be expected to wait until I wanted to be serious. (If only I had come out of the closet then and avoided years of trouble…) I was distraught. For all the reasons a sixteen-or seventeen-year-old girl might be, but I ultimately felt most upset by the fear that he was a person who would elect for what I saw as an impersonal online connection over the real thing. He would choose a potential sex partner he’d never even met over connections with a real life person in me. With almost two decades of lived experience since, I now realize this whole ordeal said more about the fairly harmless, if unfortunate, desires of a teenage boy than anything else. But the comfort with which he and my peers all started to develop “online friendships” always made me uneasy. This is not to say that real friendships cannot form in cyberspace—but only that if given the choice, I would have (and still would) elect for other forms of human interaction. Back then, I felt the internet was a realm defined by flawed structures of our own lived experiences, where recreations of social mores and norms exist in disjointed formats: a conversation becomes a string of text, a meeting place becomes a chat room, a one-on-one talk becomes a slew of dialogue boxes. Now the results are even more stark, more disjointed, and tinged with the stench of commerce. Content is monetized, friendship becomes capital.
While he was once a sex-crazed teenage boy, my ex is now a published author with a hearty following on X, his online jokes about former love interests peppered alongside press releases and book reviews promoting his latest work. His online content now sits squarely in the specter of capital: he is, after all, trying to sell his books by promoting himself online. And in the midst of the writerly persona he’s fashioned—wry, erudite, well-read, with an air of nice-boy nostalgia—there sit allusions to parts of my deeply private life. While I know his motivations are many, in less forgiving moments I can’t help but read his occasional tweets about the innermost aspects of our shared experiences as proclamations that he has full license to take the fabric and specificity of my own life and use it as fodder for laughs to sell books or self-promotefewer. One of my most intimate sexual moments as a closeted young woman will live on publicly in the form of characters strung together to make a joke on the internet. It’s not lost on me that in every post on X where I exist as a “former gf”, my entire existence and experience as a queer woman is shrouded, overlooked or reduced to a punchline. Most painfully, sometimes I appear as “a girl I dated who is now a lesbian” or “my former girlfriend who married a woman.” In less than 200 characters, the totality of my experience coming to terms with my identity as a queer woman, and the fraught psychic trauma he witnessed firsthand as my boyfriend and best friend back then, becomes a caricature.
What I didn’t realize during years of our disagreements—about what constitutes “real” human connection or about my burgeoning sexuality—was that there is something inherent to the internet that “real” human existence can never achieve: permanence. While the close friendship between us disintegrated and we haven’t talked in a decade, his quips on our sex life will live forever. On the internet, a joke about an ex made between friends becomes a permanent fixture in a one-sided narrative that anyone can access at absolutely any time and, frighteningly, forever. (Or until X goes under.) It’s difficult to contemplate anything stranger than knowing that a private moment in your life will continue to exist as an everlasting digital one-liner. I have no control over the number of retweets it racks up or likes his posts attain. Despite years of therapy, work to accept my identity, and the formation of a deeply loving and fulfilling relationship with my wife, somewhere on the internet I will always be a sad closeted girl in her twenties seeking acceptance by having sex with a man when she knows it’s not what she really wants.
Thinking about it this way, I can’t help but read this act—of typing parts of my closeted sex life into the permanent digital ether—as his ultimate power play after years of tumult between us and bad behavior on both sides. In my weakest moments, I think he’s out to get me, and I chastise myself for ever entertaining a relationship with a writer with a Twitter account. How could I be foolish enough to think that any life I once shared would ever be my own? But after a fair amount of self-flagellating—for not coming out sooner, for carrying on such a toxic relationship, for not seeing the weaknesses in his character earlier —I realize that while I do not have an account on X, I can write, too. And while I could share more about the beautiful queer life I’ve built in all the years since, some things are just better left private.
