We began taking elaborate selfies during the pandemic lockdown. Surely we were not the only ones who’d become self-obsessed as a way of surviving the sudden absence of all public interaction. Our minds grown too loud in the quiet, we turned the camera on ourselves (the selfie, the reimagined self) as in Anna Tendler and Petra Collins’ work. We explored how the camera can lie. We fell in love with technicolor interiors, melodrama, the curation of self-presentation; with visual pleasure and self fantasy; with digitization and pixelation of self. We experimented with AI art. Grimoire’s long absence (two years!) became an opportunity for reinvention; we worked through our dysphoria and took pleasure in harmless narcissism. We made thirst traps. We wrote a new mirror in which to envision our magazine’s future.
As part of this new vision, we asked the internet and our long-time readers to send us selfies: the quarantine thirst trap you dared to post, the one where you donned a costume that made you feel more like you, the one where you took a risk, the one where you peeled back a layer, the one where you confronted the camera, the one where you’re at your most glam, most monstrous, the one where you barely recognize yourself, the one where you confessed a secret, the one you think is art. People sent gorgeous portraits along with artful write-ups, near-poems of the self. In the end, we were inspired to slip in a few self-portraits of our own. Welcome to the Goth Narcissus issue.
To be human is a performance, the body itself cumbersome costume, and one too frequently in disrepair. In isolation, I watched scabs evolve on my knuckles ran fingers over the cartilage ridges of my ears, tiny stripes of cellulite on my thighs, constellations of birthmarks, permanent creases beneath my ribs, the tight bulge of the backs of my knees. I learned the textures of my skin, the way it’s so easy for the outside to shift, to break down as the inside is wracked with trauma. I found this costume – the self – was not as shapeless as I had once felt. Like a scientist I took to photographing myself. Routinely. Documenting something vague, trying to see myself or, perhaps, trying to see someone I could not recognize and could not fault. I choose defamiliarization, artifice: using wigs and makeup and lights and lenses and the odd corners of a closet to experiment with how much I can reconfigure my own features, turn myself plastic, channel conventional beauty or aberration. I become someone other, routinely, and yet I see myself in these other people, time and again; locating something I didn’t know I had or forgot I can be. Something, I admit, that feels closer to what I think I am. Older. Younger. Monstrous. Glamorous. Not of this world.
— Jessica Berger
Here I am as a green witch: half hidden in the vines of my tradescantia zebrina, just like the one my grandmother had– also called an inch plant, wandering dude, or, as I call her because she is planted in a disco ball– my disco queen. Over the course of the pandemic I learned many things, but perhaps most of all how to grow things, in spite of: with every tendriling shoot, slow-coaxed bloom, with dead parts pinched away. Patience and slowness. That careful but not smothering attention is the love that leads to thriving. Water and sun. Small noticings of pleasure and pain– a burned leaf edge, a surprising aerial root. And then unexpected recoveries from neglect, clustered around the kitchen sink. In all of this I am talking about myself, of course. I wander the world by inches. I stretch my little life.
— Annah Browning
I feel like a ghost most days. Thinned out. Unreal. I can’t quite touch my life. Becoming a mom has disappeared me. I’ve poured what’s left into writing a suicide memoir that keeps trying to kill me. I stopped wearing makeup this year, stealing back time so I could give it to other things–my child, my writing. The violet lipstick, a present from a friend, is the first makeup I’ve worn in ages. The white lace is an antique slip gifted from my oldest unrequited love. I stole the five minutes it took to stage this selfie while my child napped. When I took this haunted picture, I didn’t realize how much of my selves–past and present–it contained. A good ghost is tethered to the world by what it loves.
— Brooke Wonders
Being isolated presents the temptation to edit one’s personal mythology. The stagnant air of boredom gets jostled by shy whispers of an identity that is not ceaselessly shoulder checked by [insert conservative community], [insert the wraithlike voices of childhood bullies], [insert lecherous or disgusted glances—I can never get it right], [insert. . .]. They still live in my head, but their howls lessen with time and distance, allowing the vibrancy of my own delicious being to erode their grit [ice plants are native to the folds of my brain]. Queerness no longer seems so queer when the main frame of reference is my own molten joy. My heart seizes with the hope that I can last in this state [a happy human soup]. The stories we tell ourselves have power. I’ve begun to rewrite mine. I hope I can emerge prepared enough to snarl in the face of the threats to my crystallization [warning—will bite for blood].
— Jamie A.M.
Time always scares me.
I try to crystallize my eternal enemy with this photograph.— Ian Delacroix
If ever a photo could capture and prove my changeling lineage-- this would be it. How strange I look, so like myself and yet unfamiliar! An angle I am too short for anyone to view me from. They say never to take selfies where the viewer can see directly up your nostrils, yet here I am in all my fey glory-- surrounded by pines and the nearness of my blind familiar.
— Kat Finch
A year after having my third child and finally feeling like myself again. Not physically, mentally. Embracing my new curves and stretch marks. Every body is a beautiful one, no matter what shape or size! Take the selfie, you are beautiful!
— Alisha Galvan
The piece is a photocollage, composed of a picture of myself as well as digitally-drawn embellishments and watercolor-painted butterflies and moths that then were added digitally. This image represents the self that I'd rather be, surrounded by nature and a sense of fantasy, like a fairytale princess in her own world.
— Daiana Gonzalez-Videla
City of Roses, as Portland is so named. I never really cared before, but in the past two years on strolls with pandemic-pet-slash-failed-foster dog, I’ve spotted roses everywhere. Going on walks during the pandemic had become a new routine; it broke up the WFH-ing and staring into the abyss. That was, until last summer, when most days I suffered too much pain to even leave the house, let alone pick up dogshit. I’m better now, though wellness is mercurial so I don’t jinx it by saying, “I’m healed.” Still, I learned to seize good days when I have them. Back to the roses: a neighbor has the yummiest shade I’ve ever spotted: thistle-gray (peak My Little Pony Goth Girl shit). So this spring, after rereading Alexander Chee’s essay on roses, I went gloomy-weather garden store shopping, intent on replacement herbs for what the Heat Dome destroyed. I ended up in an existential crisis between rose plants: one called Neptune came closest to the photos from my walks, but it was sold out. After volleying between Love Song (too flamingo), and Floribunda (too Kahlua), I settled on a rose called Silver Lining. Already, just a season later, it blooms.
—Rhienna Renée Guedry
The one before your lidded eyes rests gently on the grave of the forgotten, heavy heart slowly being pulled apart vein by vein. The leaves on the trees sway together, begging not to fall below and become another life to be mourned. Gently so, she'd take them in her palms and kiss them to fly with the seeds of dandelions but she is unaware that her touch only withers them away
— Claudia Isabella
The feeling of a breakup, the desire to run naked in the wilderness, chance encountering a long lost love. The photo booth is a portal to all the versions of myself I prefer locked away, for safekeeping. These developed portions of me serve as memento mori, to be remembered even after they've been outgrown.
— Carissa Jean
no makeup-no filter
view from the peak
of the binge-purge ride,
staged and sickly sweet—
a souvenir shot trying to trap me
in a moment of shameful unawares.
but the smile happens truthfully
knowing the drop was inevitable,
exhausting the view I might not see again.//
The curtain lifted
and I saw my self.
In my vanity I asked my self about
the thing that scares me the most—
if life is no longer painful will I still be beautiful?
Was I only a sugar-laced trap meant
to lure and dissolve?
If I become my own savior
will the spell be broken?— J. Lynne Kearns
Freshly shaved, Nosferatu stares in the mirror. They're going out. Finally, they’re going out.
— Angel Leal
Girl with a Tripod & Front-Facing Camera.
— Haro Lee
The golden light of the creative mind comes in flashes and splashes of color. Unleashed, something powerful will appear: a poem, painting or personal story. Creation doesn’t fit inside a perfect portrait. It colors outside the lines of life, sometimes in sharp black and white, sometimes in the subtle shades of a watercolor. It explodes from lingering pain or quietly unfolds itself inside a new discovery. And if we catch the essence we show something of ourselves.
— Wendy L. Schmidt
Shanghai, China. May 7, 2022. Day No. Claustrophobia-and-Ire of being in lockdown. Spring in this city is notoriously short and striking. I've watched an entire season go by from my bedroom window. I pick fleabane from the unweeded patches of grass around my building; it's the only outside space I'm allowed to be in. I use an empty cardboard box that was filled with emergency food supplies) as my phone tripod. How else can witches cast their spells when they've been locked away from dancing with the equinox?
— Elena Sichrovsky
Exhausted and unshowered, I took this selfie in bed, lit only by a clip-on book light. It was for my husband while he was quarantined in the attic bedroom with covid. My aim was to look alluring, but my eyes betray a terror and darkness within me, something desperate that I recognize but don’t fully understand. Though it is not what was intended, the result is all the more truthful.
— Anonymous
Cove Haven Resort / Lakeville, Pennsylvania / 2020 / 1 Year Before Sebastian’s Birth
It’s funny: all of this time, I thought I was a ghost, but really I’m just a reflection. Not a dying out. A shattering. Not broken, exactly. Here, documented are the pieces of me strewn across the hotel bedroom. Across the next year, they’ll reassemble, grow wide, feed a new being into existence, & one day wind up back in the same bed in the same dress with all of its pieces organized into the same places, but somehow in all my mirror-scrying & open-mouthed applying of lipstick & birthing & lullabying, I will lay there, startled. Not by my reflection, but at all of its apparitions, now entirely changed.
— Kailey Tedesco
Image description: The self as blank slate, revision of past generations.
Alt image text: The head and shoulders of a person against a white wall. The face is obscured by an open palm facing the camera.— Ashley Varela
This selfie I was a day when I was with a very straight roommate getting a drink at a local bar. The addition of the Pride horns was planned, but were just meant as an expression of fun. There's a playful expression in my eyes that says "Folx, too serious". It is less serious than the overtones of the atavistic demon often associated with rebellion, though there are undertones of this. But I associate it more with a tricksy, joyous Satyr, a Greek goat nature spirit that would run around drunk, chase shepherdesses, and play pranks or bawdy games. Combined with the obligatory AFAB red flannel (I now seven of these), it portrays us on a Sunday evening, clinging to one last bit of whimsy and escape from adult expectations.
— Jules Vasquez
As a person who enjoyed dressing up and documenting outfits, I was taking selfies before the term entered our lexicon. I'm shy and a loner so I often don't have the opportunity to ask someone to take my picture. The upside is that I can play with posing and framing the image. This particular photo was taken after coming back from a Renaissance Festival with a Nikon point-and-shoot. I borrowed a dark medieval-style dress from my dorm’s theater closet and was able to experiment with gothic make-up that appealed to me. My roommate was asleep so the room was dark. Our opposite sleep schedules created much stress, but in this moment, I found an artistic inspiration in the darkness and turned the mirror selfie into an Evil Queen-like photo. Even though this photo is 17 years old and my make-up skills have definitely improved, I’m proud of my creativity and ability to adapt to an inconvenience. It was a highlight from a tumultuous time.
— Jennifer Wang
There’s a Greek myth where a nymph named Paeonia attracted the attention of the god Apollo. However, when Aphrodite noticed the pair, Paeonia turned red in the face from embarrassment. An angry Aphrodite turned the nymph into a red peony for her actions, which led to the flower symbolizing bashfulness.
In my selfie, I offer a peony for other angry hearts to reach out and claim this flower, to shed the petals of past hurts and betrayals, and find some of the other meanings behind its lush beauty: prosperity, happiness, and empathy.I’m on my own journey where I’m outraged at the belittlement and degradation I received from family members when I was outed as bisexual. I have shed them from my life, and I am working on moving towards all the good things the peony represents. I will never again be bashful over my sexuality. I will never again accommodate someone else for their internalized hatred and discomfort. And someday, when I am healed, and all my petals have fallen, I want to show the kinder face hidden behind this peony.
— L.E. Wraith