I’m taking a break from writing talk this week.
Writing is lonely work. Being lonely is hard. And lately, loneliness has made me do that thing where you revisit your own personal “director’s cut” and wonder: Which scenes did I delete, and was I right to cut them?
Which brings me to a man I’ll call Eric. (Not his real name. If your name is Eric and you’re reading this: congratulations, you’re innocent.)
This was a few years back, when I was still living in the city and pretending I enjoyed “plans.” Eric and I met at a social thing and started dating. He was genuinely nice—funny, bright, and the kind of social person who has a group chat that’s active every single night. He was also very online. Not in a scary way. In a “maybe I could be an influencer?” way.
A few weeks in, after a couple dates, Eric told me some of his followers wanted to see a photo of me.
This should have been my first clue that we were living in different ecosystems.
I gave him permission to post a picture of us together. He did.
Except… he didn’t post me. He posted an altered concept of me. A me-shaped idea. A me-flavored smoothie, maybe?
He filtered my face so aggressively that I looked like I’d been carved out of cream cheese.
I don’t have the original, but I do have another picture from that same month—different pair of glasses rotation, but same face. And the difference is… bold. In Eric’s version, I had no pores. My skin tone had shifted several shades. I’d apparently lost 20 pounds and gained a jawline that could cut glass. I also looked about ten years younger, but in a way that wasn’t “healthy glow” so much as “recently unboxed mannequin.”
I couldn’t stop looking at it. I kept clicking back to his social post like it was an autoplay ad left running. Again. Again. Again.
It bothered me enough that a few days later, I asked him about it. No accusation, just curiosity.
Eric’s explanation was… well-intentioned, at least in his mind. He said he’d edited the photo because I “didn’t photograph well” and he didn’t want anyone to comment something mean and hurt my feelings.
But I’d seen the original photo. It wasn’t the most flattering picture ever taken of a human being, but it was still recognizably me. My interpretation was simpler: he liked me, but he was embarrassed by the way I looked.
I couldn’t get by it. I’m not proud of it, but I ghosted him in that slow fade way polite people try to use.
I declined an invitation. Sent a few vague texts. Then I told him I’d met someone else. There was an attempt to pivot into friendship, but we didn’t really share a world. His social life was a carnival; mine was a quiet room with a book and a cup of coffee.
I’m not sure there’s a lesson here. No grand moral.
It’s so weird because many of his IRL friends had met me. I didn’t walk around with a Vaseline-smeared glass box around my head.
Sometimes I do wonder if I should have sat down with him and had the hard conversation. Explained how it made me feel. Given him a chance to actually try to understand why I felt the way I did.
But even now—years later—I can’t stop thinking about that dumb photo.
Because it was bad, right? Like… objectively? Even if you connect intellectually, if someone feels the need to sandblast your face into a dairy product before showing you to the internet… that’s not nothing. Right?
Tell me I’m not the only one who would have taken that personally.
Leave a Reply