On reinventing yourself
Self-mythology, internet addiction, Madonna in the '90s, and the rehabilitation of my nemesis
The first sign that I have had too much to drink is that I try to calculate your numerology numbers so I can put them on my numerology spreadsheet; the second is that I counsel you about how you should have a nemesis, like me, and that it will change your life, a bit like a course of CBT. ‘It could be anyone,’ I say. ‘You just have to choose someone at random and it will still work…’ I once told a very nice mother that her adult son could be her nemesis; a close friend was just betrayed by one of his friends and in an attempt to cheer him up I presented the new enmity situation as a potential pro. He was fine about this because nemeses had sort of become a running joke; throughout the course of our friendship I had had three1 and he had always teased me about them.
There is something other people find very funny about being a young woman with a nemesis. I play it off as an affectation but mine was once actually a real person, although she eventually grew into one of the faceless parts of my personal integrated stable of archetypes. Last year I wrote a Spectator article on my Theory of the Nemesis: I thought it was a travesty to sell the TikTok ‘main character’ culture to young women without actually giving them an overarching storyline (everything else was just fashion and candles), and that positioning yourself against an oppositional force could do a lot for your sense of purpose and resolve. I had only just started freelancing successfully after a period of pitching like mad: that commission was the first time an editor had actually emailed and asked me to write for pay, rather than the other way around. I felt this to be a spectacular triumph over my nemesis, who had never actually tried to begin a freelance writing career and was at that point a symbol far more than she was a human woman.
Immediately after making the commission, my editor told me to leave ‘Every Woman Should Have a Nemesis’ for a few weeks because another writer had just submitted ‘In Praise of Catfights.’ I was certain the other writer was Julie Burchill; I ended up being right. We both coincidentally did an analogy about Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. I became fantastically excited about the prospect of All-About-Eve-ing Julie Burchill because I saw her as the very last vestige of the exact kind of journalism I wanted to do; it would have meant a period-appropriate ‘in’ to the bitchy post-Dorothy-Parker authoress circle I had admired for years. I thought about orchestrating and somehow getting the Spectator to print a second round of the legendary 1993 Fax War, with Julie Burchill playing Julie Burchill and me playing me. Then she sent me a really nice message out of nowhere so I had to give up.
One commenter under the article begged Fraser Nelson to stop giving teenage Tumblrinas login access to the Spectator site. He had a point. The entire affair happened on Tumblr. The details on my end were true; my nemesis actually did approach our friendship in ways that made me feel chronically paranoid, uncomfortable and ‘used.’ If I ignored my own feelings on the matter I would be doing myself a disservice. Other friends who saw the chat logs thought they were bizarre. She questioned me repeatedly about things that seemed innocuous, like music and hobbies, and then things that were more serious, like career plans. She was rarely satisfied with my answers for reasons that never became clear; I started out feeling flattered and ended up more like a prisoner under interrogation. I thought at the time that she was doing it deliberately, and that she planned in some way to ‘usurp’ me, even though she had far more followers. But she was also open elsewhere about having obsessive-compulsive and anxiety disorders; with hindsight I think I must have seemed like a safe person to approach for ritualistic reassurance about her own taste and status, and that my eventual exit likely caused tremendous psychic injury. This was made worse by the fact that I absolutely refused to acknowledge it, ever.
I could never have kept being her friend without actually losing my mind, but I was also just as online as I accused her of being, which meant I had no idea how to manage tricky situations other than through the eyes of a lurker on one of the worse gossip forums. I went scorched-earth with what I thought was a sense of showmanship. I blocked her on every single website I could think of; she logged into an old Tumblr account to beg me to talk to her and I blocked that one too. I posted loads of stills from All About Eve (I was Margo) and photos of Lauren Bacall because she starred in the 1970s musical theatre adaptation. (‘Omg Virgo,’ I said, to prove my affinity). At one stage I made a post that went ‘Some of you on here are being awfully McCarthyist…’ (she wouldn’t talk to people who were still friends with me); at another I did the Tumblr version of a subtweet and tagged it ‘#Girl you will never achieve anything,’ even though I had also not achieved anything. (I remember it sounding nicer in context, but my memory of events is very likely skewed). ‘You shouldn’t have to be friends with someone who is suspicious of you,’ I said in a rare moment of clarity. I wanted her to stop sadposting about it, but I didn’t want to let on that that was because I felt terribly guilty and actually regretted burning the bridge at almost the moment it went down.
I was very particular about having the narrative upper hand at the end of the affair because I had just read four different Madonna biographies; I wanted to be Madonna, who always found a way to control the past. I disregarded the fact that there were hordes of people who knew Madonna - managers, songwriters, designers, relatives - and who eventually hated her because they felt like stepping-stones on her predestined path to stardom. I liked that she came from nowhere and had no contacts, like me, and ended up giving herself meaning by writing herself into a regular rotation of pre-existing institutions: Studio 54 and Old Hollywood and the French New Wave and John Schlesinger and Martha Graham. I was obsessed with the idea of a 45-year-old woman going on something called ‘The Reinvention Tour,’ and even more obsessed when I found out the name was a dig at journalists who could think of no other word to describe what she kept doing.
Part of my transformation from hapless Tumblr nano-influencer to Madonnaian Übermaedchen included a systematic shedding of my ‘old’ self, which was mostly shaped online. I fantasised (you can see it in old blog posts) about shaking off all the speech patterns I had picked up from the internet; I made a point of consulting old Sight & Sound movie polls because I didn’t want to have ‘memetic’ taste. I got off all my social media for about seven months. I stopped really drawing, even though I previously thought of it as a vocation (I was an Instagram art prodigy as a teenager) and started trying to get writing work off my blog (I only started writing for fun as an adult).
My hypothesis: this is not unusual. The business model of the corporate internet involves deliberately suspending large numbers of people in a state of ‘depressive hedonia’ (thanks Mark Fisher). Your pleasure centre gets so numb that it’s difficult to get anything out of things that aren’t the internet. Hours creep away from you and so do old hobbies; you lose touch with the capabilities of your body because you spend an awful lot of time lying down or crouching in front of a PC. But bingers must eventually purge. When regret becomes a noticeable part of someone’s daily routine, they are more likely to try to seek cleanliness and absolution. This explains the online popularity of r/nofap (men swearing themselves off porn and masturbation) and of extreme self-improvement challenges like the 75 Hard. You can also link it to the overarching intellectual transformation promised by the charts on 4chan /lit/. ‘Aesthetic’ culture originally came from Tumblr, but in 2020 it moved successfully to TikTok, where still photos are no longer enough to retain attention. Visual trends now also demand total behavioural change: ‘that girl’ revolves around Californian minimalism and ‘Wonyoungism’ around K-pop pastels, but both promise to reorient you towards the sort of life in which you never eat junk food and always get straight As.
Like Madonna and various Chinese emperors, I bolstered my own reinvention by making a claim to people and traditions I admired offline. I found a way to do this while also asserting myself as the opposite of my remarkably-online nemesis. There were many parallels between our (entirely one-sided) feud and another one, between my favourite writer and the intellectual starlet who formed the core of my nemesis’ online personality. A lot of this oppositional process was really about wresting back control. As a person, my nemesis behaved in erratic ways that freaked me out; as a symbol, I could make her stand in my head for all the traits I associated with being ‘too online,’ and therefore also with my old self: subjectivity, naivety, performative earnestness, resourcelessness, inaction, helplessness, pretension, desperation, long-windedness, self-consciousness.
I found myself placing special emphasis on activities I knew my nemesis struggled with. I raced her on Goodreads and generally won, because she had no idea I was doing it; I tried to get as many job and writing rejections as possible, and to leave the house for hours every day. I could see my daily routine diverging from hers, and eventually my life path, too. This felt good, but I kept the act up even when it became unnecessary. The situation was that of an unstoppable force pushing against a moveable object. If I finished reading a long book or made a contact or succeeded at public speaking or got another essay published, it was always ‘my nemesis would NEVER do this!’ But most of those activities were enough in themselves - I felt like I was giving myself participation certificates. A nemesis is helpful if you feel lost and are simply working out how to climb the ladder out of depressive hedonia and into a self-sustaining creative habit, or a sense of career security. When you get there, you should drop the act: you can’t out-achieve another person at any pursuit that really means something. I am writing a book. My nemesis could write a book too, but the result would mean nothing to me unless she stole my actual plot and sense of style.
Eventually I realised Madonna doesn't have a nemesis because nobody could ever be the opposite of her; the whole point of Madonna is that she has a million contradictory aspects and visions. I hope to be the same in that way and perhaps not in the other way. She would never shape herself in opposition to anyone else. She had that brilliant mirror fight with Courtney Love at the MTV VMAs in 1995, but the two women are not reciprocal, warring forces - they’re frenemies. In the early ‘90s Madonna actually tried to recruit Love to the record label she ran. Very few know that their music once sounded really similar, and that they have the same fashion contacts and poetic leaning toward Anne Sexton.
My emancipation came when I worked out I didn’t need to play around with history to get to the top. My favourite writer - the one who had the parallel feud with a parallel nemesis - actually knows who I am. I would never have got there without my nemesis, but I no longer have to act like the founder of a rhyming Chinese dynasty because I have been inducted into the literary world I wanted to be inducted into all along - she reads my work and believes in my career. In November she liked one of my articles so much that she complimented it by repeating a quote from All About Eve. She had no idea that the film had always been a sole frame of reference for my career, with all of its scheming and usurping and industry accolade-ing. A year ago I’d have assumed her allusion would push me deeper into a quasi-Buddhist cycle of reinvention, where up-and-coming female writers fight ad infinitum to see who can win feuds that have already been fought hundreds of times over. But it felt more like reassurance: she freed me from the pressure to orchestrate anything with any other people and let me zero in on my actual creative pursuit. I’ve reached nemesis nirvana. Nothing ever felt as good.
I have just discovered 70s Thai singer Buppa Saichon and I feel that it has changed my life…
If you’re nemesis #2 from Canada: this isn’t about you and I still stand by everything I said in that email
brilliant as ever
Staggeringly brilliant