This work is also a response to digital surveillance culture and the strange violence of becoming visible. It explores what happens when people construct narratives about someone they do not truly know, and how those narratives can take on a life of their own.

I have often found myself confronting versions of myself that I never created. Projections, assumptions, rumors, expectations, and misunderstandings accumulate until they begin to feel more familiar to others than the person standing in front of them.

In the age of social media, identity is no longer experienced solely through the self but through countless interpretations made by strangers, peers, and audiences. The result is a fragmented self, split between lived experience and public perception.

This work examines the frustration of carrying stories that were written without my consent. It questions the pedestal as much as the accusation, recognizing that both require a person to become an object onto which others project their desires, fears, and assumptions. Whether idealized or demonized, the individual disappears beneath the weight of collective imagination.

Rather than attempting to correct these narratives, I am interested in confronting them. If these versions of me already exist, what happens when I reclaim them as material? What happens when I gather the unauthorized copies, the distorted reflections, the imagined selves, and place them in conversation with one another?

This is not a search for the “real” self hidden beneath perception.
It is an acknowledgment that identity is constantly negotiated between who we are and who others believe us to be. By multiplying these versions rather than rejecting them, I transform them from evidence of misunderstanding into sites of agency, authorship, and self-definition.

Read more https://substack.com/@sublimewrld/notes