This question is a daunting one to answer, and quite frankly, one that I struggle to answer. Everything I can possibly say about myself is based on some outside force, be it another person, a place, or a thing, but when you strip all of that away, what do you have? Then I realized that I can’t know myself without knowing how other people think of me. Indeed, Sturken and Cartwright write that “we cannot know what it means to be a human subject outside of the discursive practices through which subjective experience and representations of human subjectivity are enacted” (p. 102). My interactions with other people, places, and things have shaped who I am today. Without them, I cannot answer the question of who I am.
So, then I asked myself, what do other people think of me? The thought of other people secretly disliking me for some reason or another, or of me letting someone down, has always terrified me. So, I have isolated a trait I identify with: I’m too concerned with the opinions of others. The next question I had to ask myself was, why is that?
At first, I thought of major fallings out that I had with former friends. From middle school up through high school, a girl my age had unrequited feelings for me and refused to take my feelings into consideration. She harassed me for years when I cut her off, stalked my social media, and in my junior year of high school, even made detailed, graphic threats against me and my family. Around sophomore year, I went through a rough break-up with a manipulative boyfriend who had a whole speech prepared for me, listing the reasons why I had messed up the relationship. From the latter half of junior year up through senior year, I was friends with a boy who only ever talked about himself, prioritizing his own needs and interests over my own. Last semester, I lost contact with a woman eight years my senior who depended on me for emotional labor. She felt so romantically entitled to me that she wanted me to move to her state and marry her, even becoming malicious when I entered a relationship with another girl my age.
Then, I realized it doesn’t stem just from the events in my life that could be episodes of a television drama. I remember things that people I still consider friends have said to me in the past, even though they meant well. In fourth grade, a couple of my friends called me “bossy.” Another time, those same friends said I was “going insane” (overly fixated) on a new interest of mine. I’ve had friends poke fun at me for being extremely active in anime fan communities and on social networks, which have gained a bad reputation as being full of strange, socially inept, inconsiderate people. Even my mom has made similar comments. The term “social media” always seemed to have a negative connotation when my mom said it.
I realized that I remember a lot of the negative things people have said about me quite vividly, and I have internalized these negative sentiments. Perhaps they have made me into a nice and selfless person, but I have come to believe that the needs of others far eclipse my own in importance. As Sturken and Cartwright put it, “‘I’ exist to myself only insofar as I can imagine myself in a field in which I appear in the light of others … who make me apparent to myself” (p. 102). Naturally, I want the me that appears in that field to be one that other people like. This is something we all want, I believe. However, in order to achieve this, I have put others on pedestals and lowered myself to the point of passiveness, breakdowns, and too-frequent apologies. Similarly to the prisoners in the Panopticon Penitentiary, who “[modified] their behavior as subjects under surveillance even when in fact no one was watching,” I modify my behavior to the liking of others to minimize the chance of ever hearing these negative sentiments again (Sturken and Cartwright, p. 107). I aim to explore the idea of the internalized gaze in this project, by portraying the way these encounters have shaped my thought process and affect me to this day. It is something deeply personal and intimidating to examine, but articulating the feeling is also strangely therapeutic. I hope that it might have the same effect on others that may feel the same way I do.
Mitsuishi, Kotono. (1992). Fall in Star [Audio file]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0691XFQR_g
Sturken, Marita, & Cartwright, Lisa. (2001). Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP. Print.
