Online Overcompensation

In high school there was this silent classmate who always caught my attention, a magnetically beautiful girl. She had skin that seemed impossibly unblemished for a teenager, long ringlets of hair and the kind of body that I coveted at the time. Like me, she was beloved of English teachers, in her case for her plays, and she was excellent at computer programming and it was said she had a gorgeous singing voice. I’d never heard it myself.

When the teacher called on her in our shared Literature class, her voice was meek and the fingers of her opposing hands found one another gingerly. I always wanted to lean in to catch the wisdom rising up from the well of her mind.

Whenever somebody else spoke in class her eyes wavered up and down with what seemed like intense thought, and sometimes she would smirk at the exact same moments that I was smirking and turning toward my friend Emma to make some kind of nasty comment about how stupid everybody else was. I assumed that meant she thought like me. I wanted to catch the cruel, smart thoughts this magnetic girl’s brain was shimmering with.

Timidity made her personality exclusive, like the vintage clothing she doctored to fit her tiny frame and posted photos of on her Myspace. I visited her profile lots, but it wasn’t until I started posting snarky essays about politics and atheism after graduation that she approved my friend request.

I wanted to be let into the club that she never lifted the rope for, and get to know what was inside of her.

I went away to college and got myself a Facebook. The magnetic girl stayed in our home town and added me. On Facebook, she became a lot more vocal, posting long reflections nearly every day. I was almost immediately disappointed. None of the mirth that I had projected onto her expressive face was there. Just a self, constantly rehearsing its expression.

I picked some violets from the back yard and placed them in this vase I found at the Antique Mall. The color combination is unexpected but that’s just so me. I should paint it some day.

Road rage absolutely terrifies me. I cannot imagine exploding at another person over something as meaningless as a metal death machine.

I was meant for an era where people surrounded themselves with loveliness. Everyone is so harsh.

I had to teach my high school computer teacher how to use Flash. I made an animated adaptation of Rilke poems, but he didn’t understand it.

When I straighten my hair and pose against this wood-paneled wall, I look just like Fiona Apple.

Still the outfits she constructed were stunning, and her face dismayingly beautiful; still she wrote one-woman plays, but this time she posted them online. I found them to be so-so. Her favorite subject to write about was herself, and not in a way that gave my brain anything to chew on, just what she looked like, what she had been up to that day, how elegant her clavicles looked in her wool-knit blouse, and how wonderful her hollow-eyed, much older boyfriend who never smiled at the camera was.

She had a small retinue of online fans who complimented her appearance and affirmed that she was so very talented and sorely underappreciated. But she didn’t have many friends. There was only one other girl from our graduating class who was ever in her comments, but I knew they didn’t hang out much. She said she only saw the magnetic girl once or twice a year.

A few other friends back home had become a bit enchanted by the silent girl’s verbose web presence and looked at everything she had to say, and occasionally they’d see her watering the plants in her front yard before disappearing inside to her dark house and her boyfriend and the world that her posts had created where she was heard, and recognized.

When anybody did try talking to her in real life, she turned away, seemingly bored by the back-and-forth of a conversation. What had registered as a fragility and shyness in her youth now seemed like a refusal. She became a mother and started chronicling the way she raised her twin daughters on the internet.

I still didn’t know her. But me and my friends, we read every post. Her daughters’ tantrums, the diabetic coma that one of them nearly slipped into, their changing bodies that she felt did not suit the sleek, tight fashions that she picked for them, their demands to stop being homeschooled and getting to go to a ‘real school’; the magnetic girl made all of this about herself. It stole so much time away from the creation of her art, this thing she seemed to want to be doing. She was much too sensitive for all of the crying and hospital stays and to have children who did not appreciate beautiful things.

I judged it but I could not stop looking. And any discussion of her kids or the much older boyfriend was drowned in the deluge of posts the magnetic girl made about herself, her clothes, her body, her new haircut, and what an artist she was.

She didn’t seem to make much art anymore. She didn’t have time with the kids and their needs, and she didn’t have the motivational structure a job or school can sometimes provide. Those were my guesses, plucked from the shadows around the photos of her. It seemed possible that what was going on was more sinister, that she felt as locked away in a cage as her daughters did.

But one day when the girls were about eight, the magnetic girl did post a short, dimly-lit video, in which she played multiple characters all talking to themselves.

The caption on Facebook read:

I could have won an Oscar, but I’m too shy.

My friends and I absolutely dined out on her delusion! She could have won an OSCAR?? For what?? Did she not understand how much work that was? She who would not speak to anyone, and never leave the twinkling world of the web to interface with any of reality’s hard demands?

Did she think she deserved good things simply falling into her lap? Did she really think she had the sauce?

It drove me nuts. I found it hysterical. This tiny girl whose silence I had found so intimidating, whom I had been scrutinizing all the time hoping for a glance at something beautiful within, when I finally got to look at the innards she felt comfortable sharing, it was nothing but a reflection back at me of what I’d already wanted to see. Wasn’t she so gorgeous to look at, so sensitive, her potential so untapped, she said. In her isolated form, she could give only the longing for greatness, not the assumed greatness itself.

And of course, at that time, my not-so-secret Tumblr blog was full of the exact same kind of egotistical shit, and that was why I hated her. I shared art that I made all the time, sure, but I never sent it to magazines. I had serialized and self-published many ‘novels’ but there wasn’t an editor or agent on the planet who knew my name. I took interest in other writers and made an effort to be friends with them, but only on the internet. In real life I was tight of jaw and tense of lip, always eye-rolling at the mediocrity of others (including the magnetic girl) but doing very little to make my supposed excellence manifest.

Anybody who had followed my blog could have said I was self-obsessed, overly dramatic, entitled, certain of my own importance, and vomitting my thoughts out where anyone could view them instead of doing actual relational work. That I was so certain I was a creature distinct from the rest of humanity that I never tried connecting, not really, not for decades, and so I failed to, and I suffered.

Alone in my apartment with my laptop on my knees I kept writing, but I never attended any workshops, applied to any MFA programs, laid my throat out enough for anybody to either kiss it or slice it. And even when I posted, I wasn’t directing it at anyone, not even an audience that I had any appreciation for the psychology of. I was speaking to myself in a way others could see.

Because English teachers loved my personality and a few people had said long ago that I was charming, I thought that I deserved the world without having to search for it.

And then, weirdly, I got it.

I have been thinking a lot lately about those withdrawn personalities who overcompensate on the internet.

There are people who try to make up for how unheard they feel in actual life by making a lot of bombastic posts, and swallow their daily anger only to extrude it into comment sections. You probably know a person who operates like this, all polite when you’re face-to-face, but whose story posts are filled with lava for all the slights they have experienced and the wrong-headed opinions everybody else has.

Online, they are loud and certain, but if you ask them about any of their posts in person, they become very uncomfortable and seem to want you to pretend their digital avatar does not exist. In the frequency, density, and intensity of their posts, they seem like a beast clawing out for connection, but in their interpersonal behavior, they only prevent it.

If you try telling them that you enjoy their opinions or you resonated with some anguished story that they told online, their eyes take on a hollow look. They seem to either be uncomfortable with the heat of your presence, or just waiting for your words to end so that they can escape back into the ongoing internal monologue that really keeps them company, and which you’re only witness to.

If you try including them in some kind of creative endeavor — asking them to submit to a magazine, offering them a slot at a performance, asking for their input on some project, they seem weirdly put off by it. They are overwhelmed by the stress, panicked at the exposure, and also offended that you would think you’re in the same caliber as them.

Liking the online overcompensator’s digital footprint seems to make them suspicious, as if you are solely using them for their clout, but so does taking any interest in who they are as a person off-screen. No matter how you might try to approach them, you keep getting stuck on all the stories they tell themselves about being too othered/damaged/intelligent/special to ever be understood.

They do all of this while making seemingly no effort to understand you.

When I was in graduate school, I was taught that the hallmark of a narcissistic personality was holding a public view of the self that is quite grandiose, while harboring very negative self-esteem in private.

Of course I don’t put much stock in that kind of thing. The boogeyman figure of the narcissist hides the fact that anyone is capable of abuse, given adequate power and incentive to use it. The label of ‘narcissist’ is often lobbed at the most profoundly socially disconnected among us, who are so starved for social attachment that they inflict all the highs and lows that usual come from loving somebody entirely on themselves.

But I do love playing with concepts and words. And in the online overcompensator there is a funny mirror of the so-called narcissistic defense. Instead of preening around people then wallowing in private self-loathing, the online overcompensator projects into their digital self all the achievement and connection they feel they’ve been denied by the outside world, but their fantasy collapses the moment they have to be a person regarded by somebody else.

The online overcompensator is usually a person who has been excluded by others for a very long time. They tend to see people by default as their enemies and captors — the voices that have always spoken over them, the crowds of cruel children who bullied them, the abusive parents who never permitted them to go out with friends, the legions of more abled, confident, fast-moving types who snapped up the jobs that they really wanted. Their fear around others and their desire to be recognized as special are basically impossible to reconcile. How can the very beings that torment them also be their escape?

The only place where hating people and begging for their attention at the same time really works is on the internet. There, the online overcompensator can position themselves as what they’ve always fantasized being: an unappreciated artist, a shrinking beauty, a political firebrand who could lead the masses into a new world.

Every conversation they failed to jump into gets to rehashed in a lengthy Substack post. Every instance that they didn’t stand up for themselves during a conversation can become a sleek infographic about neurodivergent etiquette and why it’s actually wrong to slap your knees and say “whelp” when you want a houseguest to leave. You get the idea. Instead of learning how to actually get into the muck with people and have the thousands of unfulfilling conversations that make the good ones possible, the online overcompensator remains forever frozen on the staircase, rehashing what wasn’t said.

I understand this psychology because I operated from it for a very long time. It is, in fact, a manifestation of online overcompensation that makes me think I have clocked the so-called magnetic girl. When I was in high school, I was envious that so many people found her bewitching without her even trying. Compared to her I was loud, a try-hard. I got on people’s nerves by making big activist announcements during lunch period about the U.S. Military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and I angrily threw a binder at my debate partner’s head when he showed up late to a meet.

I thought that it was bullshit that this quiet girl got to be admired just because she was so thin and pretty while I had to crane my neck and shout out insightful comments about aphorisms in AP Literature to assert to everyone that I was smart. I had respect from teachers and a few other nerdy friends but still felt sidelined. I thought that I deserved better. I wanted everybody to admire and fear me. Really, I know it sounds like some cartoon villain shit, but in my head that’s how it was.

I dug deep into the places where I felt powerful, which were mostly the debate team (where I was more experienced than the other students), the gay-straight alliance (where I was older than everyone else), and later, on the internet, where I could use the rhetorical ability and air of authority that I’d learned in those other spaces to get people to listen to me.

I learned to be a pretend-lawyer in high school, but online I never really stopped prosecuting cases. In a blog post from college, I ranted about why my boyfriend’s skepticism about biological materialism was foolish, and somehow didn’t expect him to ever read it or be mad at me (he did read it, because he was proud of me being a writer, and then he was very hurt).

After years of pretending to respectfully disagree with my mom about her conservative politics, I began dragging her and the rest of the family on the internet, and so, instead of having long, philosophical conversations with her during car rides about abortion (during which we could often find some kind of common ground), she started withdrawing from any serious conversation.

Because I actually did become pretty powerful on the internet, people started to be fearful of me. I disagreed with a friend of mine in a public comment section and she apologized to me. Normally she was the type to tell people they were full of shit. My DMs and mentions were filled with admiration, and people offering me things. It really embarrassed me when I started being treated that way in person. No mater how much I collapsed on myself physically, people looked up to me.

Being internet famous didn’t feel like friendship, or love, or being any less lonely. Instead of learning how to be a regular person in the world I had developed a nuclear weapon that forced others to be nice.

Posting is a strategy for connection that does not require mutuality. People who get in this confessional habit think that what they need is to be heard, but what they actually need is to be affected by other people and to have some interpersonal effect they can see and feel the consequences of.

In a real-world community, if you speak only about yourself all the time and resent everyone, people will eventually turn away from you. But online the only consequence for a social foul-up is even more attention.

The online overcompensator mistakes having a lot of attention for mattering and belonging. But to really matter to someone is to put your needs aside that you can attend to them. You can only belong when you see that your pain is not at all special. Most of the people around you lacked emotionally present parents and were unpopular in high school, too. Many of them still taught themselves how to actively listen, and chip in for dinner, and admit they are wrong on occasion.

The psychology of the online overcompensator is mostly a trauma- and attachment-dysfunction-based one, and there are plenty of versions of it that don’t happen online. If you move through queer circles you’ve certainly met variants of the person who believes their trauma is foundational to their personality, the type of guy who can latch onto any conversational topic and chart a path immediately back to the horrible things their parents have done to them.

When people act like this, they make themselves conversationally impossible to penetrate. They refuse the same comfort that they seek. When you try to bond with them over shared issues, they cannot hear you. Behaving this way is often a temporary phase that a person passes through when they’re newly in therapy, have just gotten safe from an abuser, or have joined their first community and haven’t figured out how to respect others yet. Being really wrapped up in how hurt they are is an attempt at validating for themselves that something wrong even happened, and in trying to understand the effects their trauma had, they get a little bit obsessed with it.

Eventually a person like that will meet someone who was assaulted and neglected and mind-fucked worse than them but who copes better, and it’ll humble them, or somebody will call them out for self-absorbed behavior that really hurt. These are loving gestures, and they help.

Online, though, a person who is entirely wrapped up in their traumatized self-image may never get to learn that other people need the stage just as badly as them. They can dispose of a digital friend-fan the moment the person makes them feel bad, and create virtual communities with their selves at the center instead of having to meet the needs of anyone else.

Because they have probably received some unfair criticism online, the online overcompensator can also disregard any pushback whatsoever as hate, or cancellation, or the work of bots, and in a way they are right to do so, because their online relationships are not true ones worthy of investing in very deeply.

There is no accountability there, and no willingness to take any real social risk. Everyone has the time to compose their responses, which will be public and performative. There can be no raw, crying confessional friend-fight on the internet, not of the kind that defines a connection, where you’re huddled over cigarettes on the porch until four in the morning and saying what you’ve always been too terrified to let out. You are being watched and have to act like every mistake was on purpose. If things go sour all you can do is block or deactivate.

In the most obnoxious phase of my internet fame, the only people who really kept me in check were the friends who never read my stuff. One of them was Melanie, an old Tumblr mutual turned real-life buddy who had fallen into friend-love with me as a fellow fiction writer, and never really understood my self-help nonfiction schtick. She knew I wasn’t the haughty supervillain I acted like on the internet; she kept telling me that I was a regular person, and her friend.

Another one was my sister, who cackled in my face when I complained that I couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized. She never stopped seeing me as the awkward kid who became a storyteller in order distract her during the twilight hours before Christmas morning when we were small. She celebrated my successes, but always told me when I got a story from our childhood wrong in my books.

The more intimidating my online persona became, the more it lit me up when my friends mocked me or did not believe everything I had to say. The online reality I had created for myself was unchallenged and intangible, but other people could push right into me and prove that I was real. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, my friend Jess was the only person who would tell me that my anti-electoral position was ridiculous, and could convince a dangerous number of people not to vote. When I shared the details of my dating life with Maddie, she would suggest that perhaps I needed to stop pursuing volatile people and laugh but show genuine worry.

Through this kind of love that challenged me, I learned that there was a version of my life that existed outside of whatever story I could tell about it on the internet. I was affecting people with my choices, influencing others’ behavior and worrying those that cared about me.

I had to get out of myself. The easiest way to do that was trying to help people. Everyone that I know is a disabled trans person, pretty much, so there was always someone who needed a meal, a phone call, or advice for managing rights with former roommates and metamours. I liked showing up and helping, it was another way of placing myself into a position of authority.

And then my friend Cloud told me it hurt that I never let them give me presents. They said they knew a lot about my opinions but nothing about what my life looked like day-to-day. They just wanted to see me and hear about my routines. My roommate complained that I always looked sad but never told them what was on their mind.

I had to drop my defenses. I asked Cloud for a ride to a distant MRI facility in the suburbs on short notice. I cried to my roommate about how desperately I longed for love, over and over again, ashamed at how childish and repetitive my fantasies seemed but saying it anyway. I began taking singing lessons and practiced absolutely sucking at something front of another person.

I started telling people that I loved them, and when I was angry with them, and shared some of the most paranoid, out-of-touch-with-reality with my friends and my partner. I saw that they weren’t scared of me. What people had been scared of was a version of me with no physical presence, who would smile benignly to their face then post a three thousand word rant about their politics the next night and never admit that I was vaguing them. It was far scarier and more unsettling when I would not admit that the digital dragon I’d made of myself was not the real thing, and that even I hated him.

I learned from other online overcompensators who were also trying to get better. I’d sent a bunch of free books to a TikTok-famous girl whom I considered a friend. She messaged me to admit she’d thought we were enemies. We were able to broker a peace.

A woman that I’d known since the AOL days reached out when I was getting hate mobbed by Zionists, to make sure that I was okay; I’d thought that she hated me. We talk regularly now. A middle-aged mom that I used to flame on Twitter showed up to a book signing with a gift. Now that she knew I had some kind of profound social disability, she could understand why I’d been so forceful during our disagreements. I emailed a former colleague whom I’d vagued about in dozens of mean essays, and told them that I’d known for years now that I was wrong.

None of it seemed important anymore. And it felt easy to say that my digital self had been crazy and overreacting all along. Often, that was all it took to get someone to forgive me. I felt I didn’t deserve that grace, but I took it, a spell broken, an online bubble popped by genuine contact.

I got into an online beef with a girl who shares many of my IRL friends. Online she posts attacks at perceived enemies that become the talk of queer social media; in person she bends so far forward it’s like she’s trying to be sucked inside herself.

Instead of hating her and wanting to eat her up the way I once did with the magnetic girl, I feel warmly toward this woman’s in-person presence. I think that the version of her that bends forward and can barely speak is the truer version. That is a person in desperate need of a defender. Instead all she has is a voice of outrage and paranoia online.

The real her has never been able to tell me to my face what I’ve done to upset her, and won’t be able to hear my perspective until she does. The real her has been passed over numerous times, it sounds like, and pushed out of spaces where she deserved to be, and she needs to be told once or twice that she’s being a demanding asshole, maybe, because we all eventually need to hear that. She is young and very good at making cruel memes and to her that feels like contact.

She needs to make hard decisions as part of a committee and experience compromise. She needs to help someone who is hurting and then be told she did it wrong. She needs to get angry in person, to get lost in her fears and tell a loved one that she does not trust them and thinks they are a fool, and to learn that some people don’t go away when they hear that. She needs to be loved in the unwellness that only the internet is allowed to bring out. She needs to take a social risk and feel the world pressing back against her, holding her and knocking the weapon out of her hand.

But I think that she is lovely. She gave one of my very best friends a massage they called very healing. She makes wonderful paintings and it is the drama involving her does better numbers than her art. She dated an old friend of mine, and she was the correct one in the breakup. She is a person and she doesn’t have to overcompensate for that on the internet, she can be so much smaller and wholer than the the shimmering hologram she’s made of her image.

The woman that I am describing is not real. Neither is the magnetic girl. These are composites, made from splinters of my reactions to various women, because it is so often women who have to trade in vulnerability to find love online. The stories that I’ve told about them can only reveal me. The isolation of social media flows in both directions, you see. It is just as isolating and reality-bending to be in the audience.

And so you shouldn’t believe a single thing I say.

Previously on:

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