A Punk Contextualized
Artwork from Gossip Girl Tours
This essay was published on April 10 of 2026. It has been expanded into a forthcoming novel adaptation by C0n71nuum, slated for publication approximately two years from now. Further information, including release timing and availability, will be shared at a later date.
When I was little, I used to pretend I was Alice in Wonderland, which in retrospect feels like an early sign that I was already drawn to strange realms with unstable characteristics, theatrical authorities, and the overall feeling that the “rules” should not exist, which may be why the story is tattooed on my brain — I definitely have a small dose of Peter Pan syndrome in my chemistry and never have I ever supported the “way things are.” I used to make up fibs for fun, not at all because I was some miniature con artist… it was because, in a dim and private way, I had this sneaking suspicion that the world was lying to me, or at least presenting itself through staging, omission, and absurd performance. Lying back felt like a proper retaliation, a way of testing how reality reorganized itself when I altered the story by just one inch and waited to observe someone’s reaction — what will this new summer camp friend think if I tell them I have twelve pet wildebeests? What fun that would be!
Around the age of thirteen I discovered the internet, which was close enough to Wonderland to make immediate sense to me, and I became obsessed with the idea of being an elite hacker, though not in a technical sense since what I really wanted was not mastery in code so much as access to the hidden panel, the side entrance, the trapdoor that led to a secret room. The fantasy never came to pass because I never became the machine whisperer of my adolescent cyber-fantasy, and for a long time I assumed I had failed my own ambition, though what I see now is that the instinct itself never disappeared and instead changed in medium, because in reality what I wanted was never code — it was the Dan Humphrey entry, leverage, and some punk-ish way of reaching into the concealed mechanics beneath digital and societal fabric.
The fantasy was eventually replaced by an interest in literary webs and plot twists, since over time I found myself far less interested in breaking into systems through computation than in Poking & Prodding them via subtle trickery with totally pure intentions, implication of mental instability through mixed media journalism as a way of exposing larger stigmas embedded within the public mind, an abstract flavor of humor, some yummy bait, and a false persona, which is actually a deeply mortifying sentence to type if you wish to sound balanced and sensible, though it also happens to be the truth.
That is part of why the recent posting sequence (a Highlight identified with an eight ball) mattered to me, because from the outside it may have looked like an odd blur of childhood photos, Alice references, Dan Humphrey stills, shots fired at Meta, theories, self-mythology, and a few remarks that probably made me sound either unserious or unwell depending on the viewer, while from the inside it felt like a loose exercise in changing the weather and then standing still long enough to notice which deep sea creatures decided to bear with me, grow legs, and enter the sunlight after the storm.
Dan Humphrey material belonged there for a similar reason, though I realize that citing Gossip Girl as a conceptual influence does not drape me in dignity, because what interested me was the deeper premise that someone without full access to a gate-kept world can sometimes enter through writing, tone, circulation, and learning the dialect of a scene so well that she stops inhabiting that scene and begins to manipulate the terms by which the scene understands itself period. The idea has real estate in my soul because it captures something embarrassing about social life online, which is that people still speak about posting as though it is a way of expressing oneself, when in fact it is often kinda bound up with theater, self-invention, classism, eroticism, policing, and all sorts of other malarkey that has very little to do with sincerity and rather a lot to do with placement, angle, and who gets positioned where.
I made a radical attempt to add some variety to the scene and watch the response, which is why the eight ball story sequence may have appeared to be an erratic performance instead of a stable persona seeking approval, as I wanted to see what happened when my work mildly threatened the platform, when childhood wonder fused with adult strategy, when humor was contrasted by critique, when confession was accompanied by an authentic book reveal, and when the whole thing refused to settle into a ripe snack that the audience could digest and shit out without feeling their own interpretive habits exposed.
I love the idea of showing us to ourselves.
I am not trying to cast this as some grand act of control, because it was much messier than that, driven as much by instinct and curiosity as by intention, with vanity of course mixed in, as it always is. Still, there is a difference between posting to deliver a fixed image of oneself and posting in a way that throws enough obscurity into the ring for the setting itself to start giving something away. What interests me is what happens next, because people love to imagine themselves as tolerant until something refuses to hold still like a toddler with severe ADHD (I still am one) at which point they begin lunging for a category with a pathetic haste. That human reflex is often more revealing than the material they are reacting to, since one quickly learns how badly many viewers want a woman online to resolve into one intelligible thing, whether muse, clown, fraud, victim, flirt, narcissist, genius, train wreck, theorist, or joke, and how irritated they become when the figure in front of them keeps slipping one inch to the side of every label.
That is the point where the eight ball sequence becomes a way of watching classification happen, which is a less classy practice than it may sound, since it involves instinct, accident, miscalculation, and a certain willingness to look foolish in public. The point is to stay inside the platform long enough to see what kinds of images it favors, what kinds of femininity it can process, and which viewers come rushing in the moment a sensitive yet confident woman declines to make herself easy to perceive.
Years ago, a trusted professor gave me the best advice I have ever received, which was basically that whatever happened in the course of the creative process, the one thing worth doing was finding a way to surprise the reader with your narrative skillset, and that stayed with me because surprise is a cosmic means of slipping around the prepared route, a way of making something stale reveal the fact that it had become stale in the first place — refer to my earliest Continuum essays for context. That advice also explains why humor matters so much here, because humor is often treated as hot sauce when it can actually function more like a solvent, dissolving false solemnity and creating just enough uncertainty that a first draft manifests, which is one reason I have never been interested in the pious version of critique that arrives looking morally perfect, since what I trust a lot more is the crooked smile, the backhanded comment, the ugly little trickster who reveals a wider hunger within the system.
Even so, I do not want to flatter myself about any of this, because the whole enterprise was compromised from the start since the person who pinches the environment is still breathing the same air, and the person who studies a platform through her own posting is still feeding that platform material, risking projection, liable to miscalculation, and capable of producing effects that exceed her own intentions and make her look much sillier than she had originally planned. For that reason, I do not think the piece should claim that I outsmarted the platform or anyone else, because I did not. But I do think I found a way of entering it that felt more alive to me than self-promo or denunciation, which are the two dead dialects I am least willing to speak, and if there was any method in the chaos, it was probably as follows — the child who played Alice, then fantasized about hacking, grew into a woman with more dangerously catlike curiosity than technical discipline and stumbled into a practice that was, arguably, more mischievous.
