Beyond the Looking-Glass Self
On the self the internet made while the internet was being made
A reader orientation:
This is a personal essay and cultural inquiry into the construction of the online self — tracing thirty years of internet history from early game avatars to AI image-making, through the lens of one woman’s life and the psychological architecture beneath digital identity.
Estimated reading time: 20 minutes.
AI use: this essay has been written entirely through the body, with help from Claude as research assistant and footnoter, final editorial sweep, and thought partner on essay subtitle and the creation of Aldric—our early internet avatar. Claude also wrote the above reader orientation.
In December 2022, I joined the viral throng of people creating ‘Magic Avatars’ on the AI app called Lensa. In its funhouse wheel of possible filters (Cyber punk? Kawaii? Fairy Princess?), remixed with a selfie to produce fantastical—yet recognizable—self-portraits in a matter of minutes, I felt a powerful creative opening. Characters grew from the images I saw; I took pen to paper and sketched out holograms for entire worlds and storylines. For Christmas that year, I gave my brother and his girlfriend a book of love stories with their ‘Magic Avatars’ as the central characters of little vignettes. The funhouse wheel and its neon-colored ride came to an abrupt halt when it turned out (to absolutely no one’s surprise?), that our $5.99 and faces had been fed to a Russian developer rife with murky data terms, stolen work from artists, and the harvesting of biometric data. With this awareness, the magic ended, or, maybe, this was the larger effect of the real magic I felt: it lifted the app into the bright light of the collective gaze; the lens opened to illuminate the obscured underbelly.
Real magic decentralizes what we think we know through direct experience. Its presence simultaneously widens the aperture of what we see, and refuses to land on a singular answer for the security of ontological primacy. Humans like to cast themselves, and their creations, as both authors and actors in a larger story. The social media feed is the ego’s narration of our main character energy made worldview. Lensa no doubt pinned its success on a good product and a clever market strategy. But imagine, as Bayo Akomolafe names so clearly, if we are not actors, but the acted upon? Anthropic’s most powerful current engine, eerily precisely named ‘Mythos’, is upending this material-and-psychological security in real time on a global stage.
The word ‘Avatar’ comes from Sanskrit, avatāra, meaning the descent of a deity into earthly form. In the Hindu tradition, Gods incarnate as humans or animals to intervene in this world; in 1985, Richard Garriott, creator of the early internet game Ultima, took the Sanskrit meaning to apply it to an on-screen player representation of you descending into the game world: “Ultima VI was the first game I wanted the player to respond to what I called ‘moral dilemmas and ethical challenges’ as they personally would… The avatar was the physical manifestation of a god when it came down to earth. That’s perfect, because really, I’m trying to test your spirit within my fictional realm.”[1] Game-worlds offer entrance to a mythic landscape, where selves can be re-imagined across genders and bodies and species, diverse narrative arcs can unfold without consequence and be re-written with the push of a ‘play again’ button. In games like Ultima and its descendants, game-world avatars gave you an image-body, a character, and a story to enter—whether it be a sandboxed test of the spirit as Garriott imagined, or simply escape from the real world and its weight.
When Lensa dropped its app, the mood that is the market was ripe. Whether we were applying a filter on Instagram or Snapchat, Facetuning a headshot, or hiring a photographer for a polished shoot to broadcast our new ventures, our new babies, our aspirational lifestyles—we were already obsessed with constructing and feeding our image-selves to the public eye. Every online act was an act of personal mythmaking; until AI’s speedy synthesis of archetypal images into a singular, intimate mirror-image, we were always gesturing towards the myth, but never quite arriving. Forty years after the invention of the online avatar, ‘Magic Avatars’ marked its return to the soul of its linguistic essence:
In the game world, you descended into the mythic; with AI, the mythic descended into you.
In 1989, you could login as a ranger-wizard called Aldric on MUDS, go north, attack an orc, and move through the world on your own terms. Then, you’d logoff and make pizza bagels in your toaster oven, and call your mom about whether you’d be coming for lunch on Saturday, while driving your (shall we say a tan Honda Accord?) to your job as a systems administrator at Midland Mutual Insurance. In this dual existence, the early internet was more mythical than real: a place to enter through the tap of some buttons and arrive in a form that was completely disconnected from your actual lived reality. But, as the internet developed, the ether became, over time, less world-apart and more world-among.
With the launch of GeoCities in 1994, internet territory became claimable and constructable by individuals, not just institutions. Coming home after clocking out at Midlands Mutual, you might spend the evening finalizing your Geocity page for Aldric: complete with character sheet, backstory, and a description of his tower. You’d get inspired to draw a map in MS Paint, would design the page with a tiled parchment background, dark green text, and install a MIDI file of something vaguely Celtic that played on load. When that was done, you’d think, ‘what else can I make?’, and your ginger cat, Tabitha, who had been purring on your lap, would stretch and provide you the answer. By 1am, Tabitha would have her own Geocity shrine: a table of low-resolution photos of her, slightly blown out from the scanner, a list of her favorite treats and tendency to request them in the middle of the night, and a guestbook where, by the morning, your buddy Axion (who you’ve been chatting with for three years on MUDS but never met in person) would have written, “cute cat!!”. With Geocities, the self that lived on the internet shifted from inhabited character to a self organized around the heartbeat that animated the avatar in the first place: personal interest, even obsession.
By 2004, Myspace had organized around this principle, its name—my space—clearly marked the planting of the individual’s, not the avatar’s, flag on the internet. The flag came in the form of the face: not a wizard, not a pixelated monkey, but a photographic self uploaded as a profile picture, not a picon or a userpic or a fictional character. The etymology of ‘profile’ comes from the Latin profilare, to draw in outline, and entered English through profile and the French profil in the 17th century, meaning: a face drawn in outline as a side-view portrait. The profile psychologically is not a full self, but the edges of one. Facing sideways, the profile allows the viewer to gaze upon, rather than inviting direct encounter. With the advent of Myspace, the photographic self entered the public gaze of the internet, but only from one conceptual angle, as curated (consciously or not) by the uploader. I viscerally remember the horror when my best friend, at age sixteen, replaced my Myspace profile picture with a photograph of me sitting on a toilet, pink underpants by my knees, holding her cigarette in my mouth, silver shoes on the dirty floor of one of the East Village bars that didn’t card. She put it up because it was sexy. I took it down because it was her cigarette, and I refused to smoke, and everyone could see my pink underpants, and this rubbed up against the good girl that I was. I said no, this was not the angle I wanted to be seen. Now, I recognize her upload as a form of truth-telling.
Born in 1988, my selfhood was shaped as the self on the internet was being shaped.
The unselfconsciousness of boomers blasting their personal megaphones on Facebook is an entirely different kind of blasting than the Gen Z Youtuber telling you to ‘like here’, ‘subscribe here’. Both may be irritating, but for different reasons: one has seemingly no perception or regard[2] of the social gaze within which it blasts, and one has too much. Us millennials, we have no moral high-ground: we live in the perpetual anxiety of perfecting the balance of the in-between, and then periodically detoxing from our phones because we can’t actually figure out the balance.
Modern psychology has long discussed the development of the ego as relational one, as part of the natural path of individuation. In 1902, sociologist Charles Cooley developed the idea of the ‘looking-glass self’, which held the self as a responsive, relationally-constructed entity, formed by others’ perceptions. The ego, encapsulated in the function of “I”, holds a selfhood that is something made in-between me seeing myself and me seeing how you see me. In 1949, Lacan canonized this phase of the infant, seeing itself in the mirror, as the first time it recognizes itself as an image outside the body, and called it the ‘Ideal-I’ for existing beyond the felt reality of selfhood. I am interested in how this image-self, held spatially between the felt experience that drives the pre-conscious, somatic and instinctive Self, and the gaze of the world, becomes the apparatus for an architecture of survival to modulate the subject’s experience of the world by creative construction of, and necessary psychological identification with, an image-self held in the mirror.
Roland Barthes in his 1980 meditation on photography, Camera Lucida, showed how the subject becomes object as the image-self is crystallized in the time-locked and distributable mirror of the photograph: “In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.”[3] To come of age is to shape the image-self within the collective gaze; technology has, at speed, transformed how much animating force that collective gaze has. The still photograph, developed weeks after its capture, imprints a moment in time—a self that has already passed is reflected back by the time it is publicly consumable. The online selfie, shared moments after capture, imprints a relational influence while the self is still warm and in the making: thumb print on soft clay, where the thumb is engagement metrics. Now, what happens if the clay of your identity is already soft, simply from the developmental arc you are in? And what happens when the developmental arc of identity on the internet is at an equally soft and moldable stage? In 1999, two clays imprinted and molded each other in tandem: my body in this story is a site that speaks.
When I first logged onto my family’s blue iMac (*pause here for four minutes of dial-up modem, if you know you know*), my chosen screenname was Bluemouse0, a riff on my best friend’s screen name, Pinkmouse4, which, in turn, was derived from her favorite stuffed animal. By this moment in time, the objects of selfhood that had decorated the altars of early Geocities had become common-place stand-ins for the selves that lived on the screen. As a middle schooler, my first publicly named and performed selfhood was already a reflection of the self being shaped vis-à-vis the social eye. Is middle school, and high school after that, the ultimate looking-glass moment?
In 1992, Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan published ‘Meeting at the Crossroads’, which examined the “meeting place between girl and woman creates an intersection where women’s psychological health comes into tension with the regeneration of male-voiced societies and cultures.”[4] The self that is re-made at this crossroads clay time is shaped relationally to the wider culture at hand. Brown and Gilligan perceived and researched the detrimental effect on girls at this age of becoming by having to modulate the self (or, erase it) vis-à-vis the (male) gaze and its dominant ideology. For my own crossroads in 1999, I logged onto AOL Instant Messenger and for the first time saw my image-self animated in social relationship with other image-selves, at the exact developmental moment when my consciousness was actively negotiating the boundaries of the selfhood.[5] These image-selves, just like Aldric and the avatars before them, behaved in an environment disconnected from real, bodily consequence, but of real, social and psychological consequence. You could flirt with someone and then ignore them in the hallway. You could look up dirty search terms and be fed back explicit images before you had even kissed someone. The architecture of selfhood, initially drawn to survive familial and close relational dynamics, now had to evolve for a different kind of survival: in classrooms, it learned to defend against ideas like ‘vaginas smell disgusting’ or ‘this choice of hairstyle is ugly’; in chatrooms, it learned to defend against online men asking for A/S/L and the brutal experience that words (and later, images) could be shared without consent and manipulated once posted into the ether.
When, in high school, my pink-underpants photograph was uploaded onto Myspace, to build off Barthes, I became at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one I as selfie-photographer shape myself to be, and the one I employ as agent to disseminate this self into a public space where, like the photograph as consumable art-object before it, is intended for the social (*patriarchal) gaze, fed to the collective image-consuming body, built to drive mass relational perception, while at the same time being imprinted upon by the projections of those who meet it. That’s a lot, right? As anyone who has gone viral or been cancelled knows, the online gaze is not a passively receptive one: the image-self is molded as much as it broadcasts, and, may, once out there, become a puppet for ideologies completely outside the control or consent of the subject-self. I am thinking of a friend who is a decorative painter and female entrepreneur, whose Instagram images of her in long dresses with her three fairy children were co-opted by voices of the tradwife movement to uphold a worldview that she does not ascribe to or defend.
In my personal story, Bluemouse0 was the online avatar for a girl who had recently transitioned into a new friend group, guiltily leaving behind the girls who cast spells in her parents’ basement and made handmade comic books, in favor of the lip-gloss laden girls who ranked boys, via code name, for crushability. My best friend was my ‘in’ here; I looked to her for cues on how to shape my new identity, a construction designed for tribal belonging. She guided me on what color braces to get at next month’s orthodontics appointment, what Sketchers platform sneakers to buy, and what to say when one of the geekier guys wouldn’t stop messaging me on AIM. This new social-self was its own kind of avatar. The deity I was summoning into my body was the most aspirational Ideal-I a fifth grader could hold: the goddess of Strawberry Smackers Coolness. Unlike the liberation of the fictional internet avatar, this socially-constructed one quickly became a chokehold, suppressing real expressive impulses in a defined relational costume. For the fictional man who logs in as Aldric and off as the system administrator, which one is actually more ‘him’? Does the social avatar of acceptability, the one who has a job and calls his mom and shows up in society a certain way, become a mask that hides? Does the internet avatar of the ranger-wizard liberate his selfhood beyond the established frame? Rhetorical questions, y’all.
When Livejournal launched in 1999, interior space became public space by design. Gone was my super-secret journaling practice from the first grade, where a tiny key opened the lock on a fuzzy diary to reveal my most inner thoughts to an audience me and my stuffed animals. Now, my fifteen-year old angst landed onto a screen where my friends could read and comment, watching me wrestle with the social-mask I had built for ownership over my selfhood. The intensity of this struggle was expressed through burgeoning poetry that poured itself through a Tracy Chapman-inspired handle and modeled itself explicitly after ‘The Wasteland’ by T.S. Eliot. Through Livejournal, my interior sought to become visible beyond the mask, even changing the visible markers of the mask in hopes of casting it off: when I dyed my blonde hair brown for the first time at this moment, I wrote on my Livejournal, Maybe now that I’ve changed, I can change. But when the mask is not just decorative, but architectural, you can change the wallpaper without fundamentally changing the layout of the rooms. In my later adult life, two decades of ‘inner work’ became the devotional practice of a conscious reconstruction of this architecture.
The Livejournal-Myspace era shifted by the end of senior year. Soon, everyone had migrated to Facebook, where the profile-self was now the central organizing principle of social relationships; once again, the function of the platform was evident in the name. We were faces, to be published in a book, and our primary mode of communication was in its original design… a wall. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found walls are generally not so good for authentic connection. And yet, we have interpersonal walls for a reason. They do a good job at what they are meant to do: hide us in the name of safety. In doing so, they also prevent true contact and ensure that the authentic self, hidden behind the social mask, is calcified into an existential loneliness as necessary byproduct of this function. I would go so far as to say this architecture of survival—walls to protect the true self against exposure, plastered with profiles designed to manipulate the gaze of the other towards a specific, controllable perception—has since Facebook become the dominant psycho-emotional UX of public space on the internet.
In the fifth grade, that I was a cool girl with a pale blue Baby G watch was its own fiction born from survival architecture. At fifteen, that I was a good girl who didn’t smoke cigarettes was an evolution of that myth. The first was performed through my body and its adornment, and then, that performance transferred itself, along with the rest of my object-self, into the mirror that began to hold the full story with that first (slow) upload of a photographic self onto the collective mirror in the making: the internet. With social media, Cooley’s ‘looking-glass self’ was fed, in real time, by likes and comments and shares and pre-teen girls taking selfies on sleepovers and collectively vetting the hottest ones for each person to post. The specific, algorithmically-designed architecture of online relationships, the terms of engagement which were quickly adapted by its makers to turn social value into market value, constructed not just a funnel from awareness to conversion—but from the construction of personal identity to the construction of personal brand. As Jeremy Bullmore, lauded grandfather of advertising, named in the 1973 paper, What is a Brand?, a brand is neither owned by the company nor the consumer, but something that is created in the dialogue between. The looking-glass self becomes the object-self of the photograph becomes the animated internet avatar becomes a marketable image-self encapsulated in the surgency of the personal brand.
The upload of the photographic self onto Myspace, and the potential for the widespread distribution of the image-self with digital technologies, simultaneously uploaded the relational construction of selfhood away from the intimate and physical known sphere of friends, family, and school—to the disembodied, impersonal sphere of everyone who had an online presence. The stakes became higher: a misstep in the messy process of defining the edges of self (hello, every young person) could lead to being cancelled or shamed at scale by other image-selves, rather than having to metabolize a human confrontation in person. It is a landscape of survival architecture meeting survival architecture, where everyone is in eternally acting out fight, flight, or freeze in a performed image-self rather than embodying vulnerable presence, which bodily encounter often cuts through. Without precaution, and sometimes even with, visibility of self could be handed to the online horde: something could go viral, or be shut down, in tandem with the moods and whims of the masses. In the era of personal brand, identity became something to sell or consume with the entitlement of capitalism’s embedded logics: do I like this? Does it serve me? If it doesn’t, let me complain loudly to get a refund on my investment (here: the investment of attention).
No wonder so many of us are fucking miserable on the internet.
When Lensa dropped its ‘Magic Avatars’ in 2022, the internet was already the primary studio for the construction of fictions of selfhood, at scale, especially among the generations living the developmental moment of exploring and defining their selfhood. But, as I have laid out, the construction of the internet self—and its hero of the selfie photograph—was essentially an amplified version of Lacan’s Ideal-I, not just me-out-there, but an aspirational identity to reach toward. The internet self was always a narrative of personal mythos: me the influencer, me with my highlights reel. This Ideal-I is seen, claimed, applauded, fed by attention and maybe even by money, to live in the freedom the myth imagines is waiting for me, if only I can get there (always reaching, never arriving). And then ‘Magic Avatars’ dropped and the mythic was no longer out-there, but instantaneously merged with the image-self with uncanny fluency and visual palpability.
AI avatars make visible that selfhood is a construction.
Its counter-logic then lies: if selfhood is a construction, then reconstruction is also possible, not just as aesthetic choice through filters and Facetuning, which, without conscious investigation, will always be wallpaper on the walls of the survival architecture beneath it.
If the architecture itself is a creative act born of necessity, to reconstruct it can therefore become the ultimate creative act, born of courage.
For me, my Magic Avatars helped break the unconscious imaginal frame that said this constructed self had to be the survival-architecture determined one, simply by making it visible, a real and unintended magic. Lensa’s harvesting of biometric data in the name of ‘magic’ was a mirror that showed us the harvesting of selfhood already at work. This is the accidental gift of these technologies: they allow us to see what has been living among us all along; turns out many of us don’t like what is here.
My Lensa experience seeded in me a creative obsession with the deliberate construction of mythic self-image on the internet. In February 2023, I started photoshopping my face into paintings of divine feminine archetypes (Mary Magdalene, Mother Mary, and the tripartite goddess Luna-Hecate-Diana).
When I was introduced to Midjourney as visual medium, I cried happy tears because I felt like the ideas of my mind could finally find their way across the bridge into reality. In the pattern recognition of the machine, my Art History degree was rich fodder for prompt engineering. My collage-like tendency, pulling existing signals and weaving them together in relationship to offer meaning, was given new singularity: one image, made from many, directed by explicit intention.
I took my interest in mythic avatar making to this new arena. But the arena did not exactly cooperate. The machine uses the uploaded face as a ‘conditioning signal’, running it through hundreds of millions of images to return not the angle you chose, but every angle the collective archive has statistically mapped onto yours. It’s a roll of the dice: you can try and roll two sixes, but basically the best you can do is hold your breath and watch the faces turn on the table before you. The prompt is akin to shaping the wind that rolls the dice: a little more this way, a little more that way… will you land? To make a self-portrait was to sift through sand looking for gold. I found a lot of plausible cousins.
After hours of this, I thought to myself, why insist on the self-portrait? I was searching for the true reflection in a funhouse mirror that kept splitting in new directions. Was I literally re-enacting the myth of Narcissus? My friend Claire Austin has told me that in her interpretation, the problem was not in the act of gazing, but in the attempt to cling to the reflection that was returned — and then falling in. Why was I clinging to some sort of recognizable representation within the mythic mirror? Wasn’t this the quest of the object-self rendered to a fetishistic point, seeking to employ a new fancy medium in the service of the Ideal-I made personal brand? What if I simply surrendered to the nature of the medium? When I released the intent for a specific outcome, something more interesting emerged. In this kaleidoscopic feed of machine-generated image-making, the Ideal-I was no longer something I was solely making and projecting on the internet; now, the machine was gathering and rendering visible the other side of the composite—what the collective read and returned of my image, and projected in turn onto me.
The existence of a collectively-projected image of the Ideal-I had begun to bloom in my awareness in the fifth-grade, when mothers of classmates or friends of my mother suddenly began to comment on my physical appearance: “your eyebrows are amazing, don’t touch them”, “don’t ever dye your hair, women pay thousands of dollars to have the hair you have”. The mirror they held up was a ‘positive’ one, an ‘aspirational’ one, and already-tuned as I was from my family dynamics to perform well, to please, to perfect myself— this blossoming consciousness of an image-self that could hold relational prestige grew into the primary driver that led to the Baby G, the horror at the toilet photo, and the deeper mold that embedded itself in making unconscious choices for twenty years that architected not just an image-self, but an image-life that overrode felt experience. Even if, and especially when, that experience was harmful.
In early 2023, the act of summoning ancient archetypes of the divine feminine and overlaying them onto my image was a creative reclamation of this image-self from the frameworks that had, at the onset of puberty, sat me on the pedestal with specific terms for its claim. This is also the moment when I first began to name, quietly to myself, the dead-endness of the marriage I was in. Up until this point, the idea that ‘this might not last’ had not even entered my psyche, so deeply rooted was the internal architecture that held the Ideal-I, which this marriage depended upon, in place. To leave the marriage in spring of 2025 was not only to leave a relational dynamic, but to break the entire survival architecture that had held it together: the Ideal-I from my childhood.
Because this is the paradox. This clever architecture, created early by necessity as a systemic internal organization to protect from the gaze of the other, ran on a design function that required the continued subjugation of Self vis-à-vis the gaze of the other. To uphold the protection was also to uphold the necessity of a relational other that would feed its double-dance. It is not just an Ideal-I, but an Ideal-Us, a composite fiction of who we project and even believe ourselves to be until the architecture is consciously examined, stripped of its authority, and taken down. The Ideal-Us holds latent violence in it: should one of the Selves begin to question and dismantle the composite architecture, if the other is still reliant on it for protection, this dismantling will be received as a threat.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice walks through the mirror and finds herself in an inverse world, with nonsensical logics and physical laws that scramble her orientation. The Self that consciously walks through the looking-glass self, inverts the logics that uphold the Ideal-I, which in this process becomes a doorway into a new reality. At first, this is a disorienting landscape: everything looks familiar but the logics of how things work no longer apply. The relationships that were fed by the broken architecture can no longer hold. Your friend who you have over-given to may tremble because you are no longer pretending that everything is ok, but in the ending of that pretending you give that friend a chance to offer to the relationship and hold you in return.
To consciously unwind yourself from the Ideal-I and begin to identify more with the Self behind it eventually requires a relational other that can meet the Self, and not the Ideal-I. The reconstruction of one party’s survival architecture of selfhood establishes by metaphysical law a new dynamic: the other must either retreat in order to maintain their own architecture, finding someone else to dance with, or they must themselves unmask and come forward in true presence. It is in this place of Self-encountering-Self, beyond the image, where true connection, which is inherently intimate, can be found. I have a lot to say about why people hate dating apps on this note (ask me over a glass of wine).
Having to re-write relationships based on this identity-shift, while ultimately liberating, is a disorienting and uncomfortable process. Those who enter the new relational paradigm do so either because the love is greater than the image between, or because they have done the work of disengaging enough from their own survival architecture so as not to require that in another. The subsequent meeting is a meeting anew. I stop holding up an Ideal-I that doesn’t need help from others, and I start saying yes to help in all its imperfect forms. People find a way to offer because I have sat in the truth that I need help; receiving their offering is a form of receiving them truly in return. I no longer uphold the image-self that has a plan for dinner, and now my mother fills the freezer with Trader Joe’s samosas to fill the gap. With each safe relational revelation of Self in this way, the internal architecture loses its authority, for the internal system begins to rewrite the script that the gaze of the other is a danger from which we must protect. The relationships that remain are strengthened. We say things plainly to each other. We don’t hide our feelings. We know that whatever happens, the ground beneath us is deeper than any form of identity.
On the same day I ended my marriage, I symbolically disconnected the Instagram that bears my real name (my profile-self) by uploading a grid of old TV static with the words ‘Channel disconnected. Signal Lost’. The architecture, the profile, and the connections built upon it are now dead links in the etheric spaces of psyche and internet. I transmuted the handle that had held my arts account, initially called sagainthemaking, to the main home for my digital signal. By that time, I had landed on the primary mythic archetype that felt most aligned with my authentic expression: the Pythia, Oracle at the Temple of Delphi in Ancient Greece. In summer 2025, I christened my Instagram with a new name. thresholdsinger is a self-chosen avatar, harkening back to the early internet and game-world behavior, where digital fiction becomes a geography for authentic self-expression to roam free. Unlike Bluemouse0, whose function was to borrow the signals of coolness and ensure tribal belonging, thresholdsinger is shamanic. To wear this mask permits a deeper creative current its expressive emergence, without manipulating it for the gaze of the other by making it legible, likeable, or even comfortable, but simply by letting what wants to move move. In this way, it is a real Magic Avatar. The relationship that co-creates it is intentionally a mythic one: made not from the relational-self of early attachment and survival, but the relational-self within a broader, animate world that is fundamentally mysterious.
In spring of 2026, I attempted to make a fairy-self on Midjourney, her wings folded into the spiderwebs and mycelium of the forest floor. I fed the generated image back into the intelligent machine to describe what it has been trained to read. The fairy, it said, was Russian, beautiful, ethereal, and angel, a female warrior, a middle-aged woman, a white blonde female, a woman. This is the machine repeating the societal message ‘your eyebrows are perfect, don’t ever touch them’ in new form. Does she look like me? My children are upset when I show them the image. They both recognize their mother, but more so, they recognize the distortion laid on top of her. I see what they see, but after so many years of living inside it, the seeing is the freeing. The moment the architecture we are standing in becomes visible is the opening where exit becomes possible. The collective construction—mirrored back by the machine, generated by inheritances that are older than our conscious minds—becomes available as material for reconstruction.
I upload my image now as offering, an intentional merger with the collective consciousness in its beauty and shadow. Just as my body is the site of both microplastics and “migratory cells from our mothers, grandmothers, ghost twins, and sometimes elder siblings” (Sophie Strand [6]), so too is my image the site of complex inheritances that are larger than me. When I die, I want a mushroom suit to offer my physical body to regenerate the earth. While I live, can a looking-glass self that is consciously constructed do the opposite of survival? What is it to willingly receive and consciously choose the mythos that enters my body? Can I offer back an intentional avatar for forgotten gods to re-enter the soil of the archetypal imagination? This essay is a spore.
[1] Critical Path Project, Coining Term ‘Avatar’ (2013), criticalpathproject.com/video/coining-term-avatar/
[2] Holding both threads of seeing and caring for—to watch, to keep
[3] Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida (R. Howard, Trans.). Hill and Wang, p. 13.
[4] Brown, L. M., & Gilligan, C. (1992). Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s psychology and girls’ development. Harvard University Press.
[5] “In metapsychological terms, we would say that not until the termination of adolescence do self and object representations[5] acquire stability and firm boundaries”, Blos, P. (1967). The second individuation process of adolescence. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 22(1), 162–186.
[6] Sophie Strand, “Microchimerism & Migration,” Substack, sophiestrand.substack.com