✧･ﾟ𝕄𝕚𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕣 𝔾𝕚𝕣𝕝𝕤･ﾟ✧

Emily Leibert

The mirror girls always go looking for themselves. They are looking at their reflections in an Alo storefront, in the trio of lenses on the back of an iPhone, in the cyborgs that star in the videos they post on TikTok. The big lie is that it is vanity which keeps their heads down, busy with all this obsession, this excessive self-recognition. That’s fiction, too — that girls of the technology age used all that information potential to stare dumbly at themselves with puppy dog ears and strawberry freckles and doughnut-glazed skin. That’s not how it is. The mirror girls have been poked through with holes. They are trying to stave off the emptiness. They are looking to confirm that they are still real. When they're not drenched in all that blue, I don’t know. I just don’t.

Emily Leibert is a writer and dancer. She is currently on staff at The Cut, where she writes about girlhood, desire, and culturally elite bimbos. Previously a staff writer at Jezebel, her work has also been published in Dirt, Mountain Gazette, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Allure, and more. In fits of madness, she is working on her debut novel. She lives in Brooklyn with her sister and their four cats, but will always be a Valley Girl at heart. 

Instagram: @emilyleibert

photo credit: Taryn Segal