{"id":172893,"date":"2026-02-13T10:00:52","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T15:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=172893"},"modified":"2026-02-13T10:58:50","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T15:58:50","slug":"how-to-be-that-girl-when-you-feel-dead-inside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/02\/13\/how-to-be-that-girl-when-you-feel-dead-inside\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Be THAT GIRL When You Feel Dead Inside"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"

\u201cSlim-thick\u201d mannequins. Photograph courtesy of the author.<\/p><\/div>\n

1. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation <\/em>(1994)<\/strong><\/p>\n

My mother is a strong proponent of batting your eyelashes in sticky situations; her mother preferred a strong drink and a withering gaze. Like hers, mine harbors vices and makes convenient excuses for abruptly leaving rooms. Evidence of sudden flight and ruthless pleasure-seeking accrues; she leaves a trail of chewed Nicorette all over her house and hides the metallic sleeves in the side pockets of car doors. She flirted her way out of quitting smoking during pregnancy in a Manhattan OB-GYN\u2019s office in 1994, the year Adam Phillips published a collection of essays called On Flirtation <\/em>that would change my life, or at least the way I tell my life story.<\/p>\n

Flirting, it turns out, is not the acquired skill that the teen magazines wanted me to think it is, but rather an orientation toward desire, rigor, and deferral; it requires both the conviction to remain unconvinced and a skepticism about narrative cohesion. I first read On Flirtation <\/em>in a fit of severe insomnia, on a stunning and astoundingly uncomfortable couch in my flirtiest friend\u2019s apartment. He flirts with the truth\u2014though, to be fair, he currently claims to be in recovery from pathological fabulism\u2014but is also known to flirt with chaos, credit card debt, and discipline. To Phillips, a flirt is a charming rebel, drolly doubting our culture\u2019s cherished, constricting notion of the \u201cgood life\u201d as a linear project of becoming one\u2019s \u201ctrue\u201d self, which usually means a spouse, parent, and worker.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

On Flirtation<\/em> describes a paradigmatic flirt in love with uncertainty, pleasantly mired in the enjoyable agony of curiosity. She isn\u2019t ashamed to admit that she doesn\u2019t know what she wants, and worse, that she knows that you very well might have it in your back pocket and could keep it there. She has no clue where she\u2019s headed\u2014you\u2019re the one living like you\u2019re trapped in a noir, anxiously eyeing the exit\u2013but has a skip in her step anyway. The worst part is that she\u2019s in such a good mood. Sorrow is no stranger to her, as my mother would say, but she wears it well, with convivial commitment to the bit. She knows she has great aim, she just has a thing for moving targets.<\/p>\n

Phillips observes that flirts \u201care dangerous because they have a different way of believing in the Real Thing. And by \u2018believing in,\u2019 I mean \u2018behaving as if\u2019 it exists.\u201d In an early chapter, titled \u201cContingency for Beginners,\u201d he writes that the flirt\u2019s future \u201cis not only the home of wishes but also the resort of accidents,\u201d a not-so-sleepy vacation town populated by people who take chances as often as they give them, relying on ellipses instead of periods. The flirt spies a fork in the road and sits down until she spots a car worth sticking her thumb out for. There\u2019s a cerulean Volkswagen in my neighborhood with a vanity plate that reads LIMINAL<\/small>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2. Skims flagship, Fifth Avenue (opened 2024)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mere blocks from Rockefeller Center\u2019s shrine to shopping and Saint Patrick\u2019s Cathedral, the Skims flagship store is well located to hawk the vestments of body fascism. Skims, founded by Kim Kardashian in 2019, is a \u201csolutionwear\u201d company selling Spanx-adjacent compressive clothing and undergarments. I recently visited Skims with a violently heartbroken friend, freshly excised from the life she’d thought was hers.<\/p>\n

Now she was flirting with wrath, catharsis, sleeping pills, friends\u2019 brothers, and grace. Ejection brought with it accidental, angular relief. New roles require costumes, and Skims sells constriction in the name of liberation, so really, where else could we go? The mannequins were all \u201cslim-thick,\u201d so we knew the material would stretch across multiple possible futures.<\/p>\n

In the lobby, a headless-girl David<\/em><\/span> stood three stories tall, her delicate smattering of sculpted pubes facing the second-floor windows. Girls scurried around while women trod lightly, looking over their shoulders, afraid of running into an acquaintance while buying indulgences, in both the Catholic and capitalist senses. They scrambled up the stairs, swarmed the \u201cSeamless Sculpt\u201d table, and stood, fidgeting, in line for Communion (free gift at checkout).<\/p>\n

In the dressing room, hiked spandex and hitched breath: a microexorcism in front of the curvilinear mirror. Each floor\u2019s high ceilings belied the shallow back stock. We couldn\u2019t find our size in anything we were looking for. Up another spiral staircase, on a quest that was starting to feel more Sisyphean than stylish. On the third floor, I was heartened to see two brunettes dissolving into hilarity around a panties table, slingshotting thongs across the pawed-over display. Another woman appeared to be pasting her friend back together by the bathrobes, heaping silk over her heaving shoulders.<\/p>\n

When we left, after spending unspeakable and therefore redacted sums on garments, most of which easily fit in the palm of my hand, one of the handles of my friend\u2019s Skims bag immediately broke. I tried to tie it to the remaining ribboned handle, and suddenly we were the ones dissolving into hilarity. \u201cPeople organize their lives to avoid the imagined catastrophe of certain conversations,\u201d Phillips writes. My friend had survived a dialogue that derailed her life story as she knew it, but flirts aren\u2019t daunted by a jump onto or off a moving train and know that \u201cpersonal history is an elusive god.\u201d Such skepticism is easily mistaken for superstition, but in fact, it can \u201cprotect[s] us from idolatry.\u201d<\/p>\n

A suspect is herself a poetic figure, flirting with the slow reveal, and usually a decent excuse for a sex object. Girl David<\/em> might have a perfect body, but a real femme fatale takes the files with her. In tears, I once misheard a friend and thought he had coined the term informationship<\/em>. Another friend is an archivist, an avid FOIA<\/small>-er who\u2019s developed a sort of Stockholm syndrome with respect to redactions, which has, in other friends\u2019 opinions, infected her love life. But missing plot points and censored storylines encourage reading between the lines, scrawling marginalia that might end up in someone else\u2019s mouth. We realized that we didn\u2019t want to worship at the altar of girl David<\/em>\u2019s immobility, that solutionwear implied that our bodies were problems to be solved instead of vessels for our laughter, so we went to get dim sum.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3. Fabulous app (founded 2013)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This all started around a year ago, when a cartoon skull with a bow in its nonhair repeatedly accused me of being dead inside. He\/she\/they appeared in my feed as I swiped through Instagram stories, insisting that my heart rate was irrelevant to my rizz ratio and that my dopamine quotient was in my control: I could learn how to be \u201cTHAT girl\u201d if I downloaded an app called Fabulous. Admittedly, I didn\u2019t know whether I\u2019d beat the dead-inside allegations at a tribunal of my loved ones, though I wondered defensively if someone dead inside could drive an escape vehicle from a psych ward in a T-shirt that said ANGEL<\/small> or convince a roadside mechanic to discount a tire while his wife glared laconically from a lawn chair, both of which I\u2019d managed recently.<\/p>\n

As fabulous<\/em> is a word I will admit to overusing, I was vaguely intrigued by the potentially fated impact this app could have on my inner life. My phone was haunted by the girly skull even as I swiped frantically past its sponsored stories. It smiled and implored me to disappear for six weeks and come back completely rebranded, and when I didn\u2019t take the bait, it began exhorting me to disappear for eight weeks and come back as the woman I needed as a girl.<\/p>\n

When I finally broke and decided to find out what @thefabstory was actually selling\u2014retreats, spa-like inpatient programs, girlboss training camps?\u2014I learned that Fabulous is a subscription-based cognitive behavioral therapy app that promises to help users build healthy habits and in turn achieve their life goals. Redditors argue it is an impossible-to-cancel service preying on the neurodivergent that \u201clove-bombs you with crap.\u201d<\/p>\n

I downloaded the free version, which kept glitching when I tried to click into any of the home screen\u2019s offerings, so I cannot report on the efficacy of meditations ostensibly inspiring \u201cBlistering Focus\u201d (demanding an astonishing 122 minutes) or \u201cMeaningful and Deep Work\u201d (a slightly more promising 48). When I navigated to the app\u2019s About section, I learned that it was developed in the Department of Economics at Duke University\u2014specifically, a subsidiary institute called the Center for Advanced Hindsight, which, according to yet another about page, \u201cwas created out of [its founders\u2019] love affair with the hindsight bias, a phenomenon where people find things to be more predictable after they have occurred.\u201d<\/p>\n

The app operates from the premise that if its users employ its CBT exercises to accomplish tasks, they will fall prey to, or ideally\u2014like Duke\u2019s behavioral economists\u2014in love with the hindsight bias. Their achievements, once unimaginable, become predictable, and subscribers will pay to stay in this storyline, becoming the people they pretend to have predicted all along. This fetish for retrospect evinces a refusal to acknowledge that we all end up, in Phillips\u2019s view, \u201cliving too few of our lives,\u201d a reality that flirts find romantic, if daunting. Fabulous\u2019s CBT tactics not only make the story you\u2019re already in livable but also insist on its inevitability, rendering the user-protagonist a hero simply for surviving and a genius for seeing it all so clearly. I\u2019d rather wear sunglasses at night or try on your prescription.<\/p>\n

\"\"

A Fabulous-sponsored Instagram story.<\/p><\/div>\n

Phillips contends that \u201ccoincidences belong to those who can use them,\u201d so I interpreted the app\u2019s refusal to let me use it as one such useful coincidence: I had no choice but to make my own choices. Rather than rely on its calculations and storybook structures, I had to flirt with fate and my own impulses. Flirts aren\u2019t afraid to refute the piety that \u201ca secure self-image is something we all want\u2014or more absurdly, could even have,\u201d as Phillips puts it, because we know we\u2019re made by the people we\u2019d try on any lenses to see. It\u2019s \u201conly when two people forget themselves, in each other\u2019s presence, that they can recognize each other.\u201d Flirts know that a person who catches your drift will likely end up knocking the wind out of you. You\u2019ll be someone new when you manage to get up.<\/p>\n

Flirt with the story you\u2019re telling yourself and you might find an alley previously unphotographed for Google Street View\u2014like the one my friend lives on at Beach Eighty-Seventh Street in the Rockaways, with a dog she found on a sandbar in another country\u2014or a potholed road on which to drive recklessly, because who knows who you might meet hitchhiking after the tire blows? I saw a Hasid hitchhiking the other day, but the only person who would have imagined it right does not speak to me anymore, so I didn\u2019t tell anyone about the man\u2019s calloused thumb in the gloaming.<\/p>\n

Once the skull realized it couldn\u2019t get me to cough up $49.99 a month, it shape-shifted into a lavender fairy who spoke to me more softly, in cursive, insisting that \u201cyou don\u2019t have to kill your darlings to get things done.\u201d This new AI-generated glistening golem wanted to \u201cglow up [my] mindset.\u201d I reframed an old abandonment: someone who only told me their secrets in the ocean was always going to take a tidal approach to knowing me. The skull and the fairy followed me for a while, but eventually those animated faux messiahs realized they had nothing to offer a girl more interested in insight than hindsight or foresight. A woman I met on a Brutalist balcony once insisted that a doctor X-ray her arm after a night out, because she thought someone\u2019s exhale had gotten stuck in her shoulder. I didn\u2019t believe her, but I nodded earnestly, and then I took that show on the road, not without additional color.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m neither the girl I once thought I should be nor \u201cTHAT girl\u201d Fabulous thought I could be, the smug one who saw it all coming in the rearview mirror. I like my car\u2019s side mirrors, where objects are closer than they appear. Flirting, Phillips writes, is the \u201cart of making ambivalence into a game,\u201d of playing a bad hand with panache or playing for time because the countdown clock\u2019s buzz gets grating. If the app hadn\u2019t been so glitchy, perhaps it would have gamified my life according to rote rules toward reliable, foregone outcomes. But let yourself off the hook and see what snags on the metal. Pocket the cards, Irish exit, make a raucous run for it\u2014escape artists aren\u2019t as lonely as you think. Houdini was in love with at least one of his accomplices. Suspense can be a form of invitation rather than a kind of caution tape, which is never as sticky as it sounds. I asked someone to teach me a game recently, and then I listened closely and lost badly. Also: I had a great time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Emmeline Clein is the author of <\/em>Dead\u00a0Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. She covers books at\u00a0<\/em>Cultured.\u00a0Her writing has been published in\u00a0<\/em>The Nation, The Yale Review,\u00a0and\u00a0elsewhere.\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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