let the person kiss the mask instead.

This slow death is what allows for change: take control of it, encourage it. Murder yourself to make room for yourself.

To understand what it means to be self-compassionate, think about what it means to treat another person compassionately, and then turn that same orientation toward oneself. Viewing one’s problems through the lens of common humanity also lowers the sense of isolation people sometimes experience when they are suffering. It helps to remember that we’re all in this together. ​ Getting older brings undesired changes, many of which involve lapses or failures, as when people can’t remember things or have trouble performing everyday tasks. Even though they would treat their friends’ struggles with kindness and compassion, many older people become intolerant and angry, criticising themselves and bemoaning their inability to function as they once did. Others, meanwhile, seem to take ageing more in their stride, accepting their lapses, and treating themselves especially nicely when they have particularly bad days.

She looks like an Instagram – which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal. ​ Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project – a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach. ​ The ritualization and neatness of this process (and the fact that Sweetgreen is pretty good) obscure the intense, circular artifice that defines the type of life it’s meant to fit into. The ideal chopped-salad customer needs to eat his $12 salad in 10 minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a regular $12 salad in the first place. He feels a physical need for this $12 salad, as it’s the most reliable and convenient way to build up a vitamin barrier against the general malfunction that comes with his salad-requiring-and-enabling job. As Matt Buchanan wrote at the Awl in 2015, the chopped salad is engineered to “free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?” ​ It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time. ​ Barre was much too expensive for my grad school budget, but I kept paying for it. It seemed like an investment in a more functional life.

With Instagram, self-defining and self-worth-measuring spilled over into the rest of the day, eventually becoming my default mode. I would keep scrolling as though the cure for how I felt was at the bottom of my feed. The landscapes I once Photoshopped my way into were materializing around me. There were a million versions of all of us running around in one another’s heads.

My book is coming out in the UK this week. I thought rather than just begging you to all buy it, I would do a tiny thread about one part of the publishing process—The author photo. Whenever I read a book, I flip to the photo. It isn't to see if the writer is cute or what their cat looks like. It's because a long long time ago, I could barely believe that ordinary humans got to write and publish novels. I became familiar with various author photos—author plus bookshelf, author plus dog, author plus tree. Sometimes they smiled. But not often. Usually, the women were wearing make-up. Often the men were frowning. When we were choosing a photo for Starling Days. I sent off a whole parcel of photographs to @FrancineElena and the @SceptreBooks team. They chose one that I almost hadn't included. It was taken on the beach near Margate at the end of last summer. My hair is wind tangled. I was tired. I was temporarily living with my family again. Some minor health problems had come up. My partner was working very late a lot. I had poured all of myself into the new book. All of this shows in the purple crescents under my eyes. I was a bit worried when they chose it. Surely this wasn't sophisticated enough? My friend, the photographer, offered to retouch it. He wanted to make me look fancier. But my editor @FrancineElena said, she liked the unretouched better. It looked more like me. And after a while, I realized she was right. The person who wrote this book was sometimes tired and frazzled. She wasn't the most glamorous. And I didn't want to be anyone else.

I recently stumbled upon this tweet from Aaron Lewis: “what if old tweets were displayed with the profile pic you had at the time of posting. a way to differentiate between past and present selves.” ​ I’m going to set aside for now an obviously and integrally related matter: to what degree should our present self be held responsible for the utterances of an older iteration of the self that resurface through the operations of our new memory machines? ​ What I’m reading into Lewis’s proposal then is an impulse, not at all unwarranted, to reassert a measure of agency over the operations of digitally mediated memory. ​ Yes, that was me as I was, but that is no longer me as I now am, and this critical difference was implicit in the evolution of my physical appearance, which signaled as much to all who saw me. No such signals are available to the self as it exists online.

We can be all of these things as we grow into adulthood, but I experienced them so much differently as a father, watching my girls live them. ​ I'm not sure how thinking about this distinction will affect future me. I hope that it will help me to appreciate everyone in my life, especially my daughters and my wife, a bit more for who they are and who they have been. Maybe it will even help me be more generous to 2019 me.

That thought — Do I like who I am while I’m doing this? — has visited me a few times a year ever since, and I’m finally seeing how crucial a question it is. ​ Years can pass before you notice something’s wrong ​ This deficit only intensifies the need for comfort and gratification, and you gravitate towards more of it, when what you really need is more of the alternative. ​ We all have those moments where we feel like we’ve gotten away from our best selves. We might not know what’s gone wrong, but it’s clear something’s gone off, and we know we have to step back and reassess what’s important. ​ Self-esteem seems inextricably linked to the specific feelings of identity we get from the activities that make up our days. ​ Often, the healthy, fulfilling things we’ve drifted away from are things whose significance probably wouldn’t occur to us, until we start doing them again and see how much they contributed to our well-being ​ Compared to admonishing yourself to smarten up or try harder, this is like navigating life with a map and compass, rather than simply moving toward whatever terrain looks most inviting from where you are.

With a new project called Selfie Harm, photographer John Rankin Waddell, better known as Rankin, wanted to see the role social media played on self image in young people.