Negation Aspiration vol. 134

For people with low-level social anxiety, a common piece of conventional wisdom is that you should stop worrying so much about what other people think, because no one is actually thinking about you. In fact, this isn’t true, even if you haven’t had a story go viral. Almost everyone we encounter thinks about us. Bad hair, they think, as they pass us on the street. Annoying voice. Nice legs. Gummy smile. Stained shirt. She looks like my third-grade teacher. Why is she taking so long to order her coffee? I hate her stupid face. The problem is not that other people think about us but that their thoughts are so flattening, so reductive in comparison to our own complicated view of ourselves. Here I am, having this irreducible and mysterious set of human experiences, and all you think when you encounter me is, Her hair is weird. Many horror stories revolve around this theme: if we could eavesdrop on all the quick, dismissive thoughts that other people were having about us, we would go insane. We are simply not meant to see ourselves as others see us.

What It Felt Like When “Cat Person” Went Viral

By Kristen Roupenian

January 10, 2019