At first, I was just curious. I swear! I was at that yoga retreat up in the Hudson Valley this past weekend to clear my head and this woman, God she was annoying. Such a Chatty Cathy! I used to love the company of women like that, who I could kind of nod along and listen to.

Anyway, point is this woman could not stop talking about herself the entire retreat. And she mentioned a daughter who lives in the city. She said she’s running a fashion brand, that she’s becoming a big deal, that if you google her name, it shows up on the first page of Google. Those were her words. She kept bragging and bragging about this daughter of hers, so finally, I asked for a name and she was all too eager to give me it. She kept right on chatting away, almost looking through me. I swear if she saw me again, she wouldn’t know who I was. That’s how self-involved this woman is.

I got bored that night and technically we weren’t even allowed to have our phones, because this is a tech-free kind of place, but who the heck listens to those rules, anyway? I mean, the place has Wi-Fi for God’s sake. I looked up the daughter on Instagram, and I swear to God three hours went by and I was still scrolling. She’s everything. Everything I aspire to be. It’s like she’s wormed her way into my head and I can’t stop thinking about her. How, I don’t know, polished, she seems. With her perfect outfits and perfect face and perfect poise. And her feed, it doesn’t seem curated at all. It’s like she has this well-oiled confidence to know exactly how to post and when.

Looking at it, I don’t know, she makes me feel alive again. Like there’s something out there to aspire to, like maybe if I try hard enough, I can be just like her. It’s a tantalizing feeling, isn’t it? I want to be her. I want to be her so badly it’s scaring me a little. I won’t even follow her from my personal account because I don’t want her to notice me, to notice how small and sad my basic little life is. Not that she would notice me; she has enough followers that one more wouldn’t even alert her. But the idea of her coming across me, of looking through her follower list and judging me with disdain, is too much to handle. So I just check her profile every day and see what she’s up to. She’s public, so it’s easy. And she needs to be public for her job, so that setting won’t go away anytime soon.