This Year I'll Be Different

Who are we behind the curtain?

I’ve been learning to trust my instincts, though often I don’t like what they tell me. I knew it would be a rough summer. I could feel it in my bones. There was an anxiety I couldn’t shake off. The sun was too bright and hot, and things felt out of my control. I had a hunger I couldn’t shake. August brought some kind of beacon. The smell of sunscreen and summer camp. The end of something, or the beginning of everything else. It’s an idea I’ve carried since middle school. A new school year starts, autumn arrives, and I can be something different.

One night recently, I stayed up until 2 AM reading my old emails. I entered middle school in 2010, a time when the internet was blossoming, and after-school communication came through u online? instant messages with friends who were doing homework on their family’s computer. There was no algorithm. The attention I wanted was the attention I received. The only question was whether or not people cared. They usually didn’t. So I tried on different personalities until someone did.

An email I sent to a boy I liked.

Once I had scrolled for a while, I felt a strange form of transformation, as if I had — through the space-time continuum that is the modern internet archive — regressed into my preteen self. It was as if I was experiencing everything again for the very first time. The desperation, the need to be liked. My Google Buzz status at one point (does anyone remember Google Buzz?) was lyrics from Taylor Swift’s “Mean”: someday i’ll be living in a big ol’ city…. and all ur ever gonna be is MEAN! It was at this point in my life that I was convinced I could be an actress. I performed in musicals at summer camp. I did community theatre. I convinced my mom to put me in acting classes. I was never very good, but now that I’m older, I understand that it was due to a combination of two things: a need for validation, and the opportunity to be someone else. I grew up as the oldest daughter of immigrants, a trope I’m sure many who have read my writing know intimately. I was a pleasure to have in class. The background score of my life was full of words like potential and gifted, in the way a film’s soundtrack is more of an instruction than accompaniment – it dictates how you feel, and often you don’t notice until you’re greeted with silence.

I was very much a performer, and there was nothing I wanted more than to be the main character. I was usually in the background, but one year I was cast as Ursula in The Little Mermaid Jr. – it was a big role, but I had auditioned for Ariel. My biggest fear was being disliked by everyone, and here I was, cast as the villain. It was a small heartbreak in the grand scheme of things, but it was permanent. I stopped acting. Still, I performed in other ways. The internet made it easy to test out various personas, some that began authentically and others that allowed me to masquerade as someone completely different. Maybe this is why I always felt like I was chasing something, like trying to catch up with a conversation that started before my arrival. Even now, I wander through the world feeling like an imposter. A ghost of my potential.

When I ran out of emails, I looked through my iCloud. At one point, deep into the digital camera photos from 2007, I accidentally clicked the Photo Booth on my desktop bar when I was trying to switch to Spotify. I was faced with a mirror of myself, all dishevelled and glass-eyed. I moved the app window next to the photo I was looking at – my young self, writing in my childhood bedroom. I flickered my eyes between them both. Am I the girl you hoped to become?

The first stanza of “April Morning” by Jonathan Wells:

You are living the life 
you wanted as if you'd known 
what that was but of course 
you didn't so you'd groped 
toward it feeling for what 
you couldn't imagine, what 
your hands couldn't tell you,
for what that shape could be.

Since I wrote about it a few months ago, I’ve been away from social media, primarily by reducing my posting to nearly zero. It’s been interesting, and it’s been very difficult. So many (if not all) of my adult friendships have been made or reinforced through the internet. It’s a natural icebreaker. I never post on my Instagram story anymore, and most feed posts I make are scheduled in advance. Months of this have opened the doors to two primary questions: Have people forgotten about me? and Who even am I?

I’ve wondered, with a new crippling fear, if the people I’ve become friends with via the internet have ever really known who I am. If we just met on the street, would they even like me? Do I even like me? Maybe I carry my whole being in my hips or my upper arms or my belly, all things I actively choose to hide from the internet, but that I can’t hide in person. I’m always trying to match the idealised version of myself that I show my friends online. If I’m not keeping up that performance, will they even see me at all? I’ve been curating my online persona for so long that I struggle to understand myself beyond it. From the creation of my first Instagram account nearly 15 years ago, I no longer needed to send embarrassing emails to people in my life, directly asking for validation. That came easily, in the form of likes and comments and views. I could be whoever I wanted, and the line between authenticity and performance blurred so much that I can no longer find signs of either. We’re all amalgamations of the people around us, but in 2025, how much of my identity is made from the people I love, and how much is made from the people I want to be?

by Joey Yu

I’ve never been more myself than I was in the second grade. I had hairy legs, protruding front teeth, and eyebrows that reached my hairline. I wrote stories in my math notebook. I made characters out of the Goldfish and fruit snacks I had at lunch and bothered everyone at my desk pod with imaginary scenarios. Once, I took up 35 minutes of class time by reading a 20-page novella written on blue book paper about a neighbourhood of sentient stuffed animals. The assignment was two pages. Nobody told me these things were wrong or unusual. But over time, there’s an innate urge we develop to put ourselves in boxes of belonging. If that box hasn’t been built yet, you scurry around until you can find a place for yourself. Like an existential game of musical chairs.

“Crackerbell” by Mary Ruefle:

I grew up

I became myself and 
was haunted by it

and I loved to wander, utterly alone

listening to the sound of tears 
striving to guess my own secret 
and racking my imagination for 
a dream

meanwhile,
everybody else knew my story 
and there was not one of them 
who would give me so much as 
a bird dropping

so on I wandered
with arms and nitric startled eyes, 
nitpicking my way through the world 
when the electrical current 
that runs in all directions 
deep beneath the earth 
shook me

and at once I felt
there are so many years to fail 
that to fail them all, one by one, 
would give me a double life, 
and I took it.

Most of my memories in middle school have faded, except a few. One of them is after lunch recess, when my friend and I shovelled food into our mouths at top speed so we could go play outside. I often felt like he was the only one who understood me. Everyone else stayed inside, and I arrived back in my classroom to hushed whispers, no teacher in sight, and two names on the whiteboard. One of them was mine, and it had an overwhelming amount of tallies underneath it. Above it, the question: Who’s the weirdest in the class?

When I would doom-scroll before bed until my eyes started drooping, these were the memories I avoided thinking about. It came back to me last week in Geneva while I was staying with my aunt. I had to charge my phone outside of the room, and I was forced to confront things like this before I fell asleep. It arrived over and over, each time more vivid than the last. As I remembered the heat on my face, the unaffected fake laughter, the tears in the bathroom and the wiping of the mascara I was far too young to be wearing, I just felt a deep sadness. In that moment, it was everything. I wanted to remove each of those tallies, one by one. I don’t know if I ever stopped trying.

The bridge between weird and normal doesn’t exist on the internet. Whatever you are, no matter how strange, there will always be a place that will welcome you. Sometimes that’s problematic, sometimes it’s comforting. But these places are no longer the safety nets they once were – things intrude and make you feel incompetent or lonely or unsuccessful, because they’re supposed to. Where else is there to go? Well. Inward. Back to yourself. That bridge doesn’t exist there, either.

Mary Oliver writes in “Dogfish”:

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

In the fifth grade, after tuning my clarinet in band class, I spoke to the girl next to me about something I can’t recall, but I had made her laugh. This I remember. The sound of it echoes in my memory, and I know if we ever ended up in the same room, I could place it immediately. You changed over spring break, she said. I had never felt so proud.

My attempts at fitting in over the years led me to do things I am not proud of. I left people behind, including a version of myself I have yet to reclaim. There was a point when I was receiving anonymous hate messages in my Tumblr inbox from a boy in the year above me. I don’t remember much of it, but in one, he called me a poser. The whole thing absolutely tore me apart. To this day, I’ve never felt as isolated and vulnerable. But the thing that hurt the most was being called something that I always tried to hide. Someone saw me behind the curtain. Maybe if you stopped trying to be someone else, he’d told me, people would actually like you.

I no longer want to be different. I want to be familiar and worn, like an old crewneck or a childhood stuffed animal. I’m going to become myself, over and over and over again. Naked and unfiltered by blue light, I’m slowly building a mosaic of a mirror from pieces I’ve left behind. There’s nothing left to do but believe in its beauty. It’s starting to feel less like isolation and more like freedom.

---

I’ve been walking home from work on the days I’m in the office, and trying to avoid looking at my phone while I’m still in bed. It’s in these forced moments of reflection that I’ve had to confront parts of myself I’ve avoided for years, and rebuild trust and acceptance with them. Andrea Gibson writes in “Lord of the Butterflies”: I think the hardest people in the world to forgive are the people we once were, the people we are trying desperately to not stir into the recipe of who we are now. When was the last time you saw yourself as three-dimensional? It had been a long time for me.

Hope you’re all well and taking care.

<3

Tara