But I was listening when I should have been talking, acting, fighting. I’ve been this way since girlhood. Before Instagram when there was only Myspace, Facebook, the old capital I-Internet, I was stuck typing terms into Firefox or Safari: “fall fashion,” “model blog,” the name of whatever celebrity I admired, “Scarlett Johansson,” “Megan Fox,” women I looked nothing like, had no possibility of resembling. I listened to the culture’s silent songs about who was desired and why and I believed them. I believed that Instagram, the filtered aesthetic it popularized—Instagram face, we called it—was true. It was how people had always wanted to look, would always want to look: high cheekbones, cut jaw lines, frozen brows, fish lips and perfect symmetry. I thought that was an everlasting ideal. When after some years, it shifted—girls, women, people, going filterless, makeupless, foregoing injectables, drugs, social media itself—I thought the world had changed, that from then on everything would be different. Culture seemed to think so, too. Then the ideal changed once more, as it was always going to.

Today, post pandemic, dictatorship, social justice revolution, anti-wokeness revolution, and everything that followed, Instagram has been made almost obsolete by the next thing. It survives solely thanks to old folks, CGI influencers, and mega-famous, multi-platform content creators like Erin and Jake. We real people are supposed to be beyond aesthetics again. Again, morality is what we’re supposed to have arrived at, an obvious, absolute morality we can all agree is right and good, pure and natural. The collective over the individual, the collective over the #cancelleds, the Karens, the ableds, the incels, the long-haul Purells. The collective agreement that only certain stories deserve telling, while others should stay untold, punished for the privilege they once had. Of course, there’s always the fact of the self, that complex organism; the fact of the soul which wants to tell itself. At the time I created @annawrey, the most popular soul belonged to a beautiful girl with a dead father and domineering mom, a girl with a heart-shaped face, a sex tape, reality show, celebrity wedding, and slim, ribless waist, giant ass. When she declared she wanted to be a lawyer, to fight for the rights of the wrongly accused, people said it was impossible. But impossible is what we loved her for, followed and paid her for. It was only when she wanted to be smart, useful, that we wondered if she could.

I CHARGE BREAKFAST to the Princess Suite, move the decimal point and double the number like my mother taught me to leave a decent tip. Then I open my phone, call a car. Arriving in five minutes, it says, Look for Gary in the blue Infiniti. I gather my mushrooms, palm them to my mouth, kill my coffee to swallow them down. They’re covered in gel and still I taste the shit they grow in. I walk toward the lobby to wait.