Who Am I If (Not Trying to Be) Palatable?

By Stella Speridon-Violet

I stumbled upon one of those hopecore videos on TikTok, except instead of hope, I felt dread. It made me question my reality, who I’ve become, and who I used to be. 

I’m 22, and I still don’t have anything figured out and feel like I’m still constantly trying to keep up with the Joneses. 

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At parties, I scan myself the way I think other people might. I look at my outfit, my hair, my makeup, and wonder if I look like I belong here at all. If I’m saying the right things. If everyone in the room has silently agreed that I’m slightly off.

I go into the bathroom and stare at myself for a little too long, and start feeling like I’m staring into a stranger’s eyes. But, to be completely honest, I’ve never been quite sure what I look like to others. 

I don’t know if I match the version of myself that exists in my head, or if I’m just an older rendering of the girl I used to be. 

My mom tells me she only dreams of me in a version of when I was five, and I wonder if that’s how I’ll always be in her mind: innocent, full of curiosity, a time when nothing bad had really happened to me yet. 

I sometimes ask myself if she stopped loving me after that age, after I learned how to be cruel, after I learned how to hide a sword in my mouth.

It’s stupid, I know. There are so many people who love me—including my mom, my friends, and strangers who stop me on the street to say they like my outfit or the little niche thing I’m carrying around—but I still feel like it’s not the truth. 

Maybe it’s because of how cruel kids were to me when I was twelve that makes me still, at 22, feel like everyone is just being nice out of pity (it’s definitely that). Some things you never truly grow out of. 

That summer, I learned how to be calculated. I’ve grown too good at reading a room, from the way you said “Thanks” with an uppercase T and a period over text, to the way a girl’s eye twitched when I made a joke to a crowded room. 

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I’ve always wanted to be liked. I think everyone does, even those who performatively say they don’t care what others think of them. They do. Everyone does. 

I tried to change my appearance, cutting bangs that were way too short to fit in with a certain crowd. Hell, I’ve even gotten tattoos I don’t necessarily love, just to prove that I was cool enough. 

If I see people by themselves at a party, club… fuck, even the sidewalk. I make sure to strike up a conversation because I so badly wished someone would’ve done the same a few winters ago when I was at my loneliest. 

I try to pretend not to care when I do care; I care about everything, all the time. 

That’s a quote from the movie Palo Alto, which I watched in 2016 because it was free on YouTube and labeled as an “indie film” directed by a Coppola. 

That’s cool, right? Tell me that it’s cool that I watched the movie twenty times, trying to mold myself into April, mysterious, cool, sleeping with an older man because there was no way high school boys were going to understand me. 

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Standing out is one of the scariest things a person can do, and sometimes I do it too much. I want people to look at me, but not to perceive me. Don’t assume you know the kind of girl I am because I have pink hair, but tell me it looks cool. Let me show you this niche punk song that was recorded on an iPod in 2008, one that you can only find on BandCamp, but don’t assume I don’t love listening to Sabrina Carpenter on the radio when my phone won’t connect to my bluetooth. 

I want you to like me so bad, but I won’t tell you that I hate it when we go more than eight hours a day without talking because I don’t want to be “too much.” I don’t want to be the girl men roll their eyes at.

The irony is, I studied for years on how to be like other girls, while simultaneously trying to prove I wasn’t like them at all.

And I still overthink everything. I share my writing online, then obsess over one negative comment for a year. I replay conversations in my head. I analyze tone. I anticipate abandonment.

Maybe this is relatable, or completely cringe. Maybe those are the same thing. 

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I think I try so hard to fit in that I end up sticking out. And, I do it to myself, so I shouldn’t be embarrassed when I’m getting stared at in public wearing an ironic shirt that says “tattoos are for felons.” 

Maybe secretly I like the attention that I was never given as a child, but deep down wish I could just be like everyone else, which is impossible internally.

I can’t undo years of therapy or pretend that nothing bad has ever happened to me, because it has. But I also don’t have to let that define me as a person, like I used to.

These days, I’m working on being more loving and toning down my bitch-iness, tearing down walls I placed, to let people know there is a person who actually wants to connect with them underneath this giant faux fur coat and sunglasses. 

Maybe the goal is to accept that I care deeply and that caring doesn’t make me weak—it just makes me alive.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully stop feeling like I don’t fit. But that’s just life, and I want to make a mess of it and clean it up and do the same thing again tomorrow.