Is it true love, or is it parasociality? Part one
An honest exploration of a toxic phenomenon thanks to Chappell Roan's provocations.
Excerpt from “The Flies of the Marketplace” by Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
“Flee, my friend, into your solitude! I see you defeated by the uproar of the great men and pricked by the stings of the small ones.
Forest and rock know well how to be silent with you. Be like the tree again, the wide-branching tree that you love; calmly and attentively it leans out over the sea.
Where solitude ceases, the marketplace begins; and where the marketplace begins, there begins an uproar of the great actors and the buzzing of poisonous flies.
The hour presses them; so they press you. And from you they require a Yes or a No. And woe to you if you want to set your chair between For and Against.
Flee from their hidden vengeance! Towards you they are nothing but vengeance.
They want blood from you in all innocence, their bloodless souls thirst for blood - and therefore they sting in all innocence.
They buzz around you even with their praise; and their praise is importunity. They want to be next to your skin and your blood.
They flatter you as if you were a god or a devil. Flee, my friend, into your solitude to where the raw, rough breeze blows! It is not your fate to be fly-sway.”
I am afraid of my audience.
I am afraid of my following.
I am afraid of the fame I’ve built, however small and humble it may be.
This feeling has done nothing but grow over time, and become more complicated.
I crave total obliteration, to throw gasoline all over my ‘brand’ and torch the fucking thing.
On my birthday last year, when I turned 40, I dyed my hair back to its natural colour (I am a raven, not the copperhead I’ve been flaunting for a decade) and changed the name of my brand from Serpentfire - which took me from anonymity to niche internet public figure - to Fae Wolfe.
Fae meaning faery - a tiny, impish, delicate and sensitive being who requires, due to her public persona, to be protected by the mysterious and vicious wolf beast.
This merging of mythos served to be as much of a tabula rasa as my small business and large(ish) digital platform could muster without fully setting it ablaze. And to be clear I couldn’t set it ablaze - I was stuck in it, as much as anyone who has a small biz bolstered by Instagram is stuck. I had to maintain some semblance of what my audience recognized as ‘me’ - aka the brand of Serpentfire - what they had come to expect, what I had entertained them with for many years. If I severed it completely, there would be consequences.
This wasn’t just a fearful idea, by the way. It was tried, tested and true. Every time I stepped away from the platform or tried to show my other talents or interests, my tarot and oracle deck sales would plummet. This meant that if I wanted my business to succeed, I had to be constantly over-exposed in the ways that my audience had come to expect. Cue an ominous stinger.
I am very old. Well, I’m 40 like I just mentioned. Which feels very old in the sense that I no longer know who’s hot and interesting in pop culture. But because I’m on social media, many things pass under my nose as I wretchedly glare at my little black mirror. One of them recently was Chappell Roan’s IG post about setting boundaries with her fans. I didn’t know who she was - but I found her message relatable and compelling:
I just listened to Matt Bernstein’s (aka mattxiv on instagram) most recent podcast on parasociality, which was posted as a response to Chappell’s boundary setting and its divisive reaction. If you have an hour and a bit, I highly recommend watching / listening because it’s an important discussion.
Essentially the question that’s being raised is: should we expect entitled, boundary-violating, crude, predatory behaviour from people simply because we are public personas?
I mean, to me, the answer is very simple: fuck no! But many people are criticizing Chappell for putting this boundary out in the universe - mostly because it challenges their own brazen parasocial behaviour.
If you don’t know what parasocial means, here’s a definition:
We all do it to some degree. I’m thinking about my own excitement when a few of my childhood idols followed me on IG: like Alanis Morissette, Brandon Boyd from Incubus or Daniel Johns from Silverchair - all whom I had the pleasure of connecting with conversationally (albeit briefly). My little reptile brain’s reward centres went off the charts at these interactions and I must admit for a moment I wondered if we could be friends. But I quickly put those notions aside because as kind towards me as they were, to them I am a stranger. It was only me who had thought about them a lot as an angsty teen, revelling in their angry, raunchy music. If you want to call it a ‘relationship’ (and I think that would be the biggest stretch ever) it was one-sided. And that’s what parasociality is.
Something that blew my mind but was very validating: Eliza McLamb (Matt’s guest on the podcast above) suggests that people with lower levels of fame / smaller platforms actually seem to bear the brunt of parasociality even more than “big C” celebs because we are more relatable, more human, and therefore more accessible in a way. So that yoga influencer you like who has 150,000 followers - you may feel a sense of kinship with her because of the real life stuff she posts about. Or that ceramics artist with the cute dog that looks like yours. Or the neurodivergent author who spends most of their day hiding away from the world, just like you do. Relatability goes hand-in-hand with whatever vulnerability people are sharing online, and we can get caught up in the omg, same here! - ness of it all.
I had parasociality on my mind when I re-watched Notting Hill recently. At 0.58, you’ll see a prime example of it.
Willam’s sister: “And I’ve believed for some time now, that we could be best friends. So what do you think?”
Anna: “Lucky me.”
In Chappell’s controversial TikToks challenging what has been normalized in fame, she asks if you would go up to a random woman you didn’t know and ask for her photo, and talk to her as if you knew her? So why is it okay for us to do that with celebrities, or public figures? I mean, imagine going up to a perfect stranger and saying what William’s sister does to Anna in Notting Hill? Think of how absolutely bizarre that would be for them? (And you, for that matter - I mean, awkward).
But we normalize it. If healthy interpersonal boundaries are a house, parasociality and the entitlement that accompanies it is a wrecking ball that lands right in your bathroom while you’re taking a shit. The wrecking ball turns to you, sitting on the toilet in absolute horror and disbelief and says, “Why are you so shocked? You asked for this.”
As I’ve written before - and will again (yes, that is a promise and a threat) - I truly believe that most artists crave fame and recognition on some level. It’s not necessarily a vanity thing, or even an ego thing - it’s borne from being lonely, isolated and starving - not only for money to sustain oneself, but starving for connection. Almost all artists are lone wolves and misunderstood misfits. Our creations are glimpses not only into our ‘individual’ souls but the collective soul. So when this is seen, acknowledged and celebrated by others, it’s a goddamn revelation. We wish to grow that feeling of connection - so we wish, therefore, to grow our audience.
As
writes in a piece about his experience with parasociality, “I wanted this. I didn’t know what this was, this internet fame I was chasing, but I did all I could to make it mine.” Devon’s work on late diagnosed autism and ableism has been deeply instrumental to countless people, myself included. But as work of this nature tends to be - it has meant enduring countless intense, dark moments in order to provide an illuminated path for people to seek refuge in.It must be clearly stated, however, that enduring these countless dark moments - transmuting them and alchemizing them deep in the fires of one’s own being - this isn’t done for the eventual outcome of being a guiding light for others. We endure so that we may survive and hope to come out the other side. Our art, our writing, or whatever creation is the result of this alchemy just so happens to touch others in profound ways. It is a byproduct, not a goal.
But we inadvertently become refuges for people who are lost, who are navigating their own dark voids and need a guiding light. Devon says, “My writing, people say, makes them feel seen. But I have not ever seen them. I have only seen myself, and the handfuls of subjects I’ve interviewed, whose experiences I can render in writing pretty well. My work creates the illusion that I am in the reader’s head, and for this I feel like a fraud. I’ve never been able to understand anyone’s head but my own.”
I cannot tell you the number of times my inboxes filled up with people praising me for my voice, my vulnerability, my rawness, my bravery, my articulation and eloquence, my ability to stand up for something important, my strength, how ‘seen’ I made them feel - most of them spoke to me as if they knew me, like I was a friend they chatted with regularly. Some told me that without my work, they would have killed themselves. Some even messaged me in their darkest moments, seeking help.
I mean, my god, what responsibility! Just thrust into my fumbling hands! It makes me feel sick just thinking about it, let alone recalling what I was telling myself at the time:
This is fine, this is normal, this is par for the course, this is your role…
And finally:
There’s no way you’re experiencing parasociality, because you’re not actually famous.
As the years flew by in my burgeoning art career, with magazines featuring my tarot and oracle decks, people wanting me on their podcasts and writing articles on my work, publishers courting me, big corporations carrying my decks, all the while my social media following growing from 5 digits to 6, I gaslit the living fuck out of myself (and so did the people around me, without knowing better - bless them, curse them) about the growing rattle inside of my nervous system. I felt the rattle, and at times I fully was the rattle, especially if my DMs were particularly raucous or the comments section on my latest post blew up.
But because I wasn’t Angelina Jolie famous, or Chappell Roan famous, I told myself that it wasn’t that big of a deal. At least I don’t have paparazzi or stalkers camped outside my house, I’d tell myself, even though yet again, there’d be the same 10-15 creepy fucking cis-het dudes in my DMs trying like hell to get my attention. These dudes would comment on all of my posts, reply to all of my stories, email me, request me on my private account - and when I’d ignore them, they’d wait a moment and then try it all again. If I blocked them, burner accounts would crop up in their place like the pus in a zit that just won’t stop oozing. If you want to see a truly fucked up cross-section of the shadow side of humanity, open up a conventionally attractive public figure’s inbox on instagram. It’s a fucking circus.
It’s actually pretty scary.
And it’s a strange dynamic. In a sense, you’re in power because they all want a pound of your flesh. But on the other hand, they’re in power because they’re legion and you’re singular. They’re mob and you’re mobbed.
Between that and the constant creative flow that is demanded by the hungry mouths of social media, I was careening towards an abyss. My nervous system rattled and turned into an earthquake, resulting in a total health crisis and burnout.
It was only then that I stopped gaslighting myself and realized that parasociality was actually a daily part of my life - I didn’t have to be Angelina Jolie to know the bites of the poisonous flies.
Part two coming soon.
Until then, love and wolves (and maintaining an air of mystery, and strong healthy boundaries, and blocking people when they don’t respect them).
D xx
P.S. My KICKSTARTER for the second edition of Celestial Bodies Astrology and Numerology Oracle was funded in 5 days! Thank you to anyone and everyone who contributed. If you missed the first two announcements and wish to pledge, there are still 14 days left to go on the campaign.
P.P.S. In case you missed the big announcement, I landed a publishing deal for my decks and they will be available exclusively through Tarot Stack in the coming months. More details forthcoming <3
This essay is so necessary Devany. Thank you for writing it.
Thanks for this, Devany. I didn't know the term 'parasociality' until today - it's a vital lens.