Visibility and Its Bitterness
personal essay
I’ve always said I have thick skin, if you can believe it. But I actually think I was better at taking criticism growing up than as an adult. Maybe I was more open-minded, less defensive about my life choices. Naturally, in high school, I joined the debate team where I competed with my peers in group settings and speech performances for as many medals and trophies as humanly possible. All while wearing oversized suits and ties, clacking my Macy’s dress shoes extra loud in school hallways and empty classrooms.
These expensive purchases, not to mention expensive fees, were not justified most by any trophies I won, but the sheets of feedback I got. “Judges,” which could be anyone from a parent, another school’s coach, or a random college kid picked off the street. Twenty bucks is twenty bucks. I would hold these feedback sheets, always in neon-colored paper, like they were scripture. What did people love about me? What did they hate? What did they criticize? What did they ignore? What did they misunderstand?
Over the course of maybe a few hundred of these papers, I learned that I derived joy from packaging myself for others. The positive comments were savored, remembered like scents. The ugly comments were stamps, tattoos. Several years later, they’ve blurred together. But a few have stood the test of time in my memory.
For example, one guy said I was “too camp” and “a little too feminine” and therefore ranked me last in a competition round. Another said my voice was “kind of grating” and I should work on sounding less nasally. “You aren’t funny.” “Your tie was crooked. It totally distracted me.” Dead last in that round, too. So on, and so forth.
Of course, these comments fueled me, intoxicated me when I came home with piles of silver anyway. My parents never saw the ballots, never mind the comments. I wanted them to see the awards, to see that what they paid for me to do with our spare change was paying off in some way.
It felt good to be visible. It made me feel complete. When people describe me as sensitive, I like to say that I’m attuned. To what people think of me, to whether I reached my standards.
Yes, I have been to therapy. The feminine comments have indeed stuck out strongly enough for me to remember as an adult. “Feminine” has always been meant as an insult, used to degrade another. That’s no surprise. Same with “gay” and same with “camp.” But when those same ideas land positively, as exciting, fun, or offbeat traits, it’s deeply satisfying. Individual terms, I could spin their associations the other way.
My skin stops being so thick, however, when I realize I deliberately put myself for constant reaction. I’ve centered these identity categories so much that they’ve become the first way others engage with me, and those labels in turn become my chance to defy expectations and establish my individuality. Ask for a reaction, prove my worth by complicating it. I have honestly never known any other social setup. Getting trophies for it made it better.
As a high schooler, it wasn’t worth pointing out that I noticed the private school kids and their Banana Republic suits, their new iPhones. Family and friends would’ve said to ignore it, because frankly, they were right. It didn’t matter because now, when I look at those people and their LinkedIn profiles, I’m astonished how many missile companies pop up, how many gigantic banking institutions emerge in their headlines. Weren’t these the same people winning debate rounds with anti-capitalist theories and gender criticism jargon?
I’m not ethically perfect. I have worked for organizations that capitalize on the issues facing the communities they serve. I haven’t always spoken up in response to someone’s blatant cruelty towards others, when those might have been the precise moments to engage my voice. But I also wasted a lot of energy being jealous of people who were articulate more than they might have been serious. They had the theory, but those same guys—yes, the ones who eventually became college men showered with scholarships—would turn around and form boys’ clubs. They would make fun of gay guys in the competition circuit. They would talk about the girls they would bang if they’d just shut up for once.
That was their authenticity, I’ve come to realize. Their sense of authenticity came from that kind of one-upping each other, if those one-ups were artificial themselves. They valued appearing dignified but popular, smart and bound to make six-figure salaries someday. Call them vain, and they would have laughed. Exactly, aren’t you, too?
Yes, really I was. I liked having trophies. You might even be wondering how many of these awards I have. But they could pay off beyond bragging rights. Maybe a good scholarship from a university. A sense of confidence to pursue opportunities I wouldn’t have otherwise. In any case, I ended up getting my college funding on a need-based assessment rather than a merit-based one. I also went on to work minimum wage jobs that didn’t exactly require a degree. But the point couldn’t have been clearer. If those guys were allowed to be so loud and maximize their benefits, then why couldn’t I have been loud, too?
In some ways, it served as an excuse to play a vanity game. I loved spending hours rewriting my speeches, trying to tweak the humor so that it was just a touch less camp yet funny enough to get the whole classroom laughing. I loved the high rankings I would get in congress-style debates where I intentionally flexed my wrists overtly so, let my gestures be exaggerated regardless of how true it really felt to me. I had no issue with putting myself up for performance to the extent that it put me at the same table as my peers from country day schools, from private college prep academies.
It was a caricature. I’m sure I’ve said that one to a therapist before, too. The rambunctious gay guy. The nerdy, wiry dude. The annoying one. The funny one. Phrases wrapped in progressive, intelligent words. If debate sounds like a pretentious culture, though, you’d be astonished to hear about my “youth activist” days. It was small-time work, but also some of my most honest. Debate was all for show; at youth advisory council meetings, I got to talk face-to-face with real, actual leaders. City council members, county supervisors, congressional candidates, administrators. Sometimes, they validated us in return. On one occasion, I stood with the county school superintendent for a video, who I understood as being in charge of my region’s public schools. After walking around scorching downtown, in the middle of the pandemic, I got to hold up a certificate for three minutes while he praised youth commitment to civic change. He was up for reelection, albeit unopposed that year.
I’m not too confident he remembers my name now. But I liked him, from what I knew. Taking a day off from school, I went up to the state capitol with the rest of the advisory council each spring. Our goal for our field trip was to advocate for stronger public education funding. Lots of meetings, pictures, pizzas. Lots of odd conversations, shocking comments that we laughed about. Anecdotes, personal hardship spelled out as a plea for change. And of course, there was the state senator who, out of genuine kindness, interjected during our memorized script.
“You’re preaching to the choir,” she had said. “I’m not the one you need to be talking to.”
I liked her because she wasn’t late to our meeting. We were their optics, in fact. Social media blasts, newsletters, great photos. Now they sit collecting dust on various corners of the internet, a slew of election campaigns long since completed.
Why did I let myself be used for their agendas? Public education funding has continued to plummet since then, for what it’s worth. We advocated. We did. It’s painful to work in a classroom now as an adult, to be in the same places I devoted hours to speaking up for. Places I was accepted, welcomed, challenged, engaged, questioned, invited. It’s very cheap, after all, to prop up young faces in a campaign. You get to use their likeness, image, and aesthetic to meet political goals. Stakeholders and donors want their activities to seem contemporary, of the moment. Teen activists who have been aggressively platformed by adult politicians become scrutinized, ignored, or simply instrumentalized for a broader political goal. For their sake first and foremost, I don’t want any more teen activists. I wonder whether youth activism should even exist at all.
At least, I don’t want to participate in its celebration considering the unfairness of how it’s framed to begin with. What astonishes me, most of all, is how little we recognize that youth are civically engaged by default. No youth is uninvolved in society’s issues because they belong to, live within, and rely upon a form of community in the first place. Youth are the ones who cannot formally participate in that system, so why do we demand them to be impossibly vocal when they’re hardly the ones in charge? That’s lip service. Why do policymakers leave vulnerable communities without proper safety nets if youth are so precious? That’s real apathy.
My best memories with the advisory council were the times we talked to other youth, spent time with ourselves, if quietly, if through roundtable discussions about mental health or trips to the library to share information on college financial aid resources. If I could give one piece of advice for my 17-year-old self and his insecurities, I would tell him that the more of himself he gives up to others, the more he exposes himself to vitriol and an unfair burden to create change, whatever the cause. I would tell him that he is allowed to be opaque, allowed to be silent. That it’s okay for his peers to be quiet as well, or even to post “pointless” infographics. It should not have upset him so deeply. That was the competition instinct speaking. After all, engaging in the visibility competition is enticing and offers rewards economically and prestigiously. The more you make yourself legible and distinct, the wider your access is to elite institutions.
I seek class mobility, including its luxury and its honors. That requires some kind of performance; how long does it take in order for loving that performance to become believing in its inherent necessity? In a world so defined by noise and image, I want to believe that the most radical action might sometimes lie in refusing engagement. There’s no one to impress; they’ve decided you were unnoteworthy from the moment they picked up a bright green sheet of paper and wrote that your voice is far too shrill and campy to be taken seriously. The addiction of recognition is rarely worth it: if I say it out loud enough times, I think I can finally believe it. But where competition is inevitably staged, my solution might end up being to thicken my skin a layer further, emboldened to incite others’ criticism as my own weapon. The expense might only be clear in retrospect, if there is one.
