The Maintenance Read

There is a person whose social media I read twice.

The first read is the read of a working adult looking at a colleague’s announcement. A post comes through, an accepted paper or a new role, and I register what is in it. The work she is doing is good. I have no quarrel with the first read.

The second read goes looking for something else. It scans for tone. It looks for a sentence that might be inflated, a self-presentation that might not quite ring true. The small overclaim. The photo staged a beat too carefully. The second read is hungry. It does not want the post to be simply good, because if the post is simply good, I have nothing to do with it.

I have been doing this for ten years.

She is not someone I see. We met once, at a conference, before either of us had become whatever we are now, and we have not had a conversation in more than a decade. What I have of her is not a person; it is a feed she controls and a story I have been telling myself using the feed as raw material. The story has been running long enough that I no longer notice when I am inside it.

For most of that time I assumed the second read was about her. That it was envy, maybe, or some kind of competitiveness. Something I would grow out of. What I have started to notice is that the second read is not about her at all. It is about keeping the structure functional. If the posts are simply good and she is simply doing her work, the apparatus I have built around her has nothing to attach to. The second read finds the thing the structure needs to keep running. Without it, what is left underneath is a thing I have been keeping the structure on top of for ten years precisely so I would not have to look at it.

I do not yet know what is under there. I have some ideas. I know what failure of mine it is built around, and I know which version of myself I am not, that she gets to be instead. The second read is what keeps that version of me visible. On a screen. In the form of someone else’s career.

I am writing about this because what the second read does, most people in a long-running rivalry are also doing. We do it with the friend who moved away, reading her updates the first time as a person who loves her, and the second time looking for evidence that her new life is less than ours. The sister who got the thing we wanted. The version of our parents we have decided to hold a grievance against. The first read is the read of a person. The second read keeps the structure running.

The second read is private. Nobody sees us doing it. It does not feel like a behavior. It feels like noticing. And it is doing real work in our lives.

I do not have a way out of it that I have personally completed. What I have is the observation that the routine exists, that it goes by mostly unnamed, and that naming it changes what we can see.