emperor's clothes
envy, entitlement, lilly moscovitz sickness
meditation on: being lilly moscovitz
Mid-June and New York really resumes itself. Abrasive, drooling, mindless. The air smells sick and spittish and in some spots it stinks like an animal or human death very recently power washed, so you catch your breath short of properly smelling.
In my neighborhood, posh and London-ish, full of babies and wine bars with seats spilling out into the closed streets, the Monday and Tuesday morning street sweeping has disrupted all the dried piss on the sidestreets so it wafts through the air with the pollen. The vibes today are skittish. Everyone is asking for money in soaked-through t-shirts. The babies are screaming in their strollers. The dogs are ugly, and slobber hangs from their mouth in muculent threads.
People dig through trash and speak to themselves—one man next to me on DeKalb and Washington pulls things out and puts them into his torn paper bag, screaming intermittently “FUCK YEAH” and “Ooooh this is good, this is good stuff.”
Trucks are running red lights and honking at pedestrians trigger happy with their right of way.
I find myself locked in pace with a similarly cunty woman beside me, her Madewell pants swishing in the off-beat of my sticky Gap flip flop sound. While texting on my phone and walking, an old woman feeling punitive and disappointed in the spoiled youth of Gentrified America beelines for me and shoves me with a piggish grunt. There are 3 feet of sidewalk on either side of us.
It’s my cheekily monogrammed boat and tote, isn’t it, I think. My iced latte. My pale halo of privilege, the disguise of a woman dressing as if her parents pay her rent. I’m sick, I know, I’m sick. Something about the heat makes me even more aware of it.
Once in a while, and I can’t pinpoint the exact reason it happens, I walk out my door and the second I do I’m overcome with a dark feeling of failure. I’m 27, I think, I am working, still, in Admissions. I have only failed relationships behind me, I just saw a meme that ruined my week, undermined my crush, made me feel frantic and unsure of myself. I feel as if any moment I take to myself, my relationships fall apart. Everyone is hanging out without me, everyone is liking my friends more than me. I don’t have money to get out of here, I don’t have a place to go. My sister met her boyfriend when she was 26. I hate all my clothes right now. I feel that I am working to be lovable and it’s not natural for me. My chin pimple is back.
Once in a while, I remember that I don’t actually feel seen at all by New York, don’t feel that my ideals align with it, that it recognizes my value. I remember that we are locked, really, in reciprocal admonishment. I dislike what it stands for and it dislikes that I hang around in it disliking what it stands for. I could go somewhere else, I guess, if I didn’t have a beautiful apartment and friends here and love it in that sick and sort of arrested way.
I was so elated this last month, so pleased with my life, and suddenly something happened where I realized I’d forgotten how to swim and I spent the next four or five days mostly silent and in bookstores and underlining Alan Watts. Forgotten how to swim as in forgotten how to live wholesomely, and aware that I’d spent a few years drinking and socializing and dancing and falling in love and drowning myself in it, and working in Admissions. I thought I was going to write, and land in my life here. I’m writing now, a little, and I’ve landed my life, in the important ways, and the result has been: oh, I don’t think this can be my life for much longer. I don’t know that I can be 30 without having grown my own tomatoes, sustain a life of four to six social martinis a week. Work in academia. Stay out of the water.
Some of it—this withdraw, which is not so much a repulsion as a wary backing away—is also this: I had to unfollow the only influencer I like on social media this week because I became so jealous that she writes for publications I’ve pitched a dozen times, jobs I’ve applied to a hundred times, quite simply because she’s an influencer. No credentials other than a mass following of people who adore her sweaters and her Salter House clogs. There’s an uptick of this recently, as we should have presumed our culture would guide us toward: the influencers are getting the jobs the meek and middlingly talented and uncelebritous are also after (in other words, myself). They’ve built their empires and brands are hungry for those empires. It’s a hire that comes with 50k+ heads, its own commerce appendage. It’s just quite simply a brilliant move for an industry (I mean media here), struggling to keep itself relevant and afloat, one with enormous, instantaneous layoffs and no severance.
In The Princess Diaries, its protagonist, Mia (Anne Hathaway), is an awkward introvert, an unrealized beauty. Her best friend, Lilly Moscovitz (the fact that I can’t recall this actress’s name nor has she been in anything else only serves to elevate my point) is an activist, artist-type, with a forsaken radio show called “Shut Up and Listen.” Mia learns from a reemergent grandmother that her absent father was prince of Genovia, and Mia is the natural heir to the throne. Upon learning of Mia’s royal ties, Lilly despises Mia, momentarily, for wandering leisurely into influence. She was the artist, the activist, the worldly one. How could something of such grandeur and importance happen to Mia?
Then Mia gets really hot and chic and makes out with a man that would reveal to youthful America that actually, yeah, we kind of fuck with a unibrow.
I am Lilly; the influencers Mia. My turmoil, should I bare its sharp, yellowed teeth, is this: I am the Artist, and these women merely Market Folk. I want to see and speak of the world where they want to see and sell it. (This attitude reeks also of a line in Dirty Dancing where Baby’s father (Baby, only five minutes into the movie has made a personality from wanting to join the Peace Corps) says to a waiter “Baby’s going to save the world,” and when he asks what her sister, Lisa, will do, Baby says chidingly, “Lisa’s going to decorate it.”)
In my cover letter to these publications influencers are writing for, I’m saying no, I know, no publications, no newsroom experience, but really, I have an eye. Their response, had AI not filtered out my résumé in the first place, would be this: yeah? Where is it.
What I would say if I could be honest, is dear hiring manager I’m not even on the bench, dear hiring manager I’m the fucking Water Boy but I’ve been doing my push-ups and I really think, if you gave me a chance, I could do something special! And the dear hiring manager is like kid, shut the fuck up. The school is literally desperate to cut our funding, they’re looking for any way to cut our funding, and we need this win or it’s over for us. (Someoneeee watched one episode of Friday Night Lights, yeah.)
There’s a great deal of debate flying around on Substack notes about Substack’s outreach to content creators to usher in a new kind of Substack—the Substack team is hoping to expand into video creation and asking content creators to lead the way. The network of Substack writers are feeling very gatekeepy about this new venture. Because what Substack created, either accidentally or intentionally, is a network of Dreamers who couldn’t get published elsewhere. What it’s become, however, through really intelligent marketing strategy and outreach by Substack into the DMs and emails of micro-celebrities, is a place for us to get to know our idols—live in their culture of recommendations: what are the New York it girls wearing, doing, seeing, listening to, smelling like?
Does it sound envious, my saying this? It’s because it absolutely is. It’s because my gifted child is in tantrum-mode, tearing my nerves to shreds with its serrated, snaggled nails. At a certain point, your effort becomes humiliation—doesn’t it feel this way? My crush said something pacifying recently while I cried to him on the phone about my inability to swim, which is that our culture is hard this way: you have to sell yourself without ever looking like you’re selling yourself at all.
The influencers are getting the jobs because they are selling themselves, found money and fame and aesthetic in such a business, and all we can do is buy it or judge it. In my sickness, I hate them for it, I am so livid they found a way around the same grind as me. Because I felt entitled to, as it turns out, what they landed. I thought having been told I was talented I could puncture The Industry. I thought with no connections and a great deal of central Virginia gumption and a liberal arts degree I’d really do it. And the paid partnerships with Seed probiotics are saying babes, no. No, absolutely not. There was a way to circumvent such a grind, and it was to market yourself, to spend less time being sullen and self-effacing and instead buy into your own character, your own tastes. Or have an absent father who is the prince of a small European country.
And perhaps the trickier thing is I’m half there—anyone with a newsletter and perennial Instagram story is a woman not so self-effacing at all, it’s a woman marketing herself and her experience. But it’s almost like putting the cuvée back in the fridge after your second glass—something is telling you to stop just short of the effect. Some awareness that that’s just not quite what you’re going for.
And maybe the trickiest thing? The articles aren’t bad. At all. They’re completely fine—helpful, even. I’m thrilled to know there’s a Buck Mason t-shirt dupe for $80 less at Old Navy. These same influencers that stir vicious envy in me for their publication are also making me aware there’s a Rachel Comey sample sale on Mulberry Street, giving me a 20% off code for my HUM vitamins, baring their low-cost skincare routines on The Cut.
But if mid-twenties can teach you anything, let it be this: envy is a dead end, because it does nothing to propel us forward; instead we sink into our own pallid skin. Grind on, if perhaps, in a different direction. And maybe, when it’s time—and you will know the time—in a different place. Shut up and listen.
recommendations:
Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel was just…..insanely good, acute, apt, amazing. This is and will be one of my favorite books of the year
My June playlist is here and uhhhh a really weird vibe, sorry
This article on this woman who can smell Parkinson’s was so interesting and scary and now I can’t stop smelling everything super hard
Fire of Love (2022) is a documentary about two French volcanologists in love and while the narrator is pretty obnoxious in the way she tries to milk the story for philosophical sound bytes, the story itself is amazing
I saw Bnny in concert recently and she was perfect and I want you to listen to her new album
Loved this essay. It perfectly captures how I felt when I was 27 and in New York (and beyond)
The chin zit…. Wildly relatable (as was a lot of this!!!)