is anyone else perplexed by child stars/what's the deal with airplane food

     I nearly opened this post with "is anyone else perplexed by child stars" but as that statement has about the same intelligence as the statement "what's the deal with airplane food" I think I will rephrase.

    Is it a regular feeling for most to feel as if cameras are set up in their home most of their childhood? When I saw the Truman show (at roughly age 10) for the first time I felt... validated, in the most bizarre of ways. My melodramatic existence is one that feels like it has to be scripted, or for show in some way. I have a lot of trouble conceptualizing that I exist within my own bubble and all agony is of no relevancy, really, but personal. 

    This is the case for everybody as well with their own angst. That's fucking awful, isn't it? You will be spoon fed reassurances of being surrounded by people but it will always be a lie. You are forever and always the only bearer of your experiences, nobody sits down to watch through them with you. I think I wish I had cameras in my eyes, the loss of privacy is one I have already learnt to deal with through phone trackers and cars pulled up with tinted windows whenever I would speak to another about my life. This way, maybe I would finally feel a little less of this isolation. Maybe someone would finally witness me.

    Growing up on the internet and constantly having the blue light of a device bouncing off my retinas has for sure played a large hand in my upbringing. How could it not, when a child is entierly a sponge that absorbs their surroundings and regurgitates what sounds right by the filters they've been taught? I think that, too has contributed to this pathological cinematic view. What do I mean by that? Well, we are all taught to perform. 

    We are all never finished performing as the world is arranged now. Even those in public who are in love are publically shamed on TikTok or Instagram. People will tell on one another at the drop of a hat, tattle tailing to mass audiences for a brief moment of attention on a matter that doesn't even involve themselves. Lying in wait, observing the likes and retweets of a celebrity to feel a taste of what said person built for themselves.

    This attention seeking, publicity driven existence is the bane of my own. I too am consumed by it. We are the generation of "notice me", the reaction to a generation that spent it's last days of maturing in full and total isolation. The worst part is that it entierly is a profitable system. We've captialized on teenage angst, marketed loneliness and some small percentage of O.W.M (old white men) are rolling in dough over the whole thing. 

    I think the song "some things cosmic" by Angel Olson puts this whole feeling alarmingly well in a single lyric. It goes as follows "I want to be naked; I don't mean my body". I too want to be stripped bare. I want my skin rended from bone, from muscle. I want my flesh on display.  I want to be regarded as an art piece in a museum. I want to be special, to be other, to be interesting and it's all because if this is what the collective experience is, if this is the common experience of life for humanity then I think we should likely all be wiped from the face of this here Earth. We do not deserve it, do not desire it and do not treat it well. 

"So, Jiffy" I can hear you, the invisible viewer, asking "what in the hell does any of this have to do with that cold open about child stars?". A valid question, one that I hope you see i'm building to.

    With everything I have just said, everything of my experience of reality and viewing my own existence as a cinematic expereince I ask you "So how in the hell does a child star view the world?". "What the hell is that experience?". Do they simply... feel the way I do but on unparanoia induced foundations? They have valid reason to feel the way I did, that much is for sure. This whole cinematic existence I am plagued by but also rescued by, I wonder if that's one that they wrestle?

They must. I have to imagine they do.

    This starvation for attention, despite being the centre of it. Being both the epicenter and an afterthought of your own world. There's you, and then there's marketable you and marketable you really does have to be the one behind the wheel unfortunately as there's no single time when the cameras are well and truly gone now. People have gone too far in their performances, now calling people out for a single mistep and losing their gague of human error in favour of drama and headlines. We are all walking paparazzi, with cameras for eyes and we are telling on each other for the sake of a chance at clout, or just for our own amusement. We ruin, revamp, change, destroy at the drop of a hat and we are so far removed from our own reality that we don't even realize the true implications or consequences of that sort of thing until after its come to pass.

I fear for us, well and truly.