I am Caroline Calloway and Natalie Beach.

And I think a lot of us are.

I’m completely fascinated by the Caroline Calloway drama.

Until five days ago I had never even heard of Caroline Calloway. I don’t know influencers — that’s not a brag or a put-down to those who do, I just have a bad memory for faces and names and no interest in being a voyeur into a kind of life I will absolutely never lead — but I saw a friend tweeting about it so I hit Google and got immediately sucked in. When that essay on The Cut went live, I burned through approximately five hours of 24 on Caroline Calloway content. I am way more absorbed in this than I was in the Anna Delvey scandal or that guy who was responsible for Fyre Fest who has a football-player name I can never remember. I definitely have a thirst for third-hand drama — I’ve always hungered for gossip about the poor behaviour or social misfortunes of people I don’t know, friends of friends whom I’ve never met and couldn’t even pick out of a crowd. I think that’s an essential part of human nature, but I also think that when you love a good story you love a good story, and you want to hear it even if you don’t know anything about the characters. This aspect of my personality may also be why I love to lie, why I’ve spent my whole life making up little stories about interactions I’ve had with strangers, augmenting them to be more interesting than the truth. This and my deep hunger to be a writer are what draw me to the CC drama — I too want to bear my soul creatively and receive accolades. I too am desperate to be a writer. I too believe I have hidden depths, and the necessarily narcissistic opinion that my perspective is somehow different and special and therefore my words matter enough to be published and read. With a little more moxie and money, I could have been Caroline Calloway.

(As I typed this I wondered “should I make a Medium account?” so I can have a platform to share my opinions with the whole internet. Clearly I’ve come to a decision on that.)

I’m also intrigued by Natalie Beach, Calloway’s former friend and ghost writer. I ghost write now as a part of my day job — just a small column in our local community newspaper, but it feels really good to see that column go into print every month and see what I wrote, with my boss’ name and picture attached to it. It feels like a little secret, and as Beach notes, it feels important. This is genuine writing work; you can put it on your resume and include it in your writing samples when you apply to actual writing jobs! The act of pushing yourself to the margins to build the voice and narrative of/for someone else is one I’m familiar with, though my ghost writing isn’t accompanied by the bitterness that Beach feels about being the “foil to the hot girl” as she puts it. I also know that bitterness, the feeling of being the quaint accessory of your hotter, smarter, funnier, more popular friend(s), and as I’ve gotten older I know that bitterness is almost always self-created and based upon deeply held insecurities that you’ve grown so used to you’re loathe to let them go. Who would I be without this self-imposed victimhood? Surely someone much less tragic, and therefore much less interesting.

I don’t delight in these public unmaskings because I delight in the suffering of others. Any unmasking must be public in nature, but to live your whole life online — as Calloway does — and then to be unmasked through the same medium — as Beach did — leads to a highly visible conflict where two people can’t help but crash into each other, as obviously as two cars on the highway. It doesn’t help that Calloway has felt the need to get out ahead of it, so to speak, by posting ad nauseam about the guilt she feels for how she treated Beach; nor does it help to read an interview of Beach in the New York Times where she admits that she feels tremendous guilt over the pain she’s causing Calloway. A part of me thinks “good God, just call each other and hash it out and stop accepting interviews.” A bigger part is desperate to know more, to know everything. It’s like racing to the end of a mystery novel — I know whodunnit and now I need to know why and I need to know how. I don’t relish the hateful comments I’ve seen while combing through Calloway’s instagram; I’m not here to watch another thin white woman so secure in her privilege get ripped to shreds for trading on what she has, which is a head full of dreams and depression, some okay writing, and enough money to fund “adventures” that can be turned into Instagram fodder and again transformed, alchemy-like, into a devoted following of equally aspirational young women willing to spend $165 for a chance to meet. There’s nothing particularly special about this story, when you get down to the particulars. What is special is that it’s all unfolding in front of us in real time, simultaneously delivering on Calloway’s aborted promise of a memoir and destroying the genre of memoir, as Beach observes is how Instagram really functions — a memoir without remembering.

So why do I care? I care because I’ve been hungry for writing success without doing much actual writing for the past three years. I care because I fear I am wasting my MA in English literature when I don’t come home from sitting at a desk and typing into the blue-lit void all day to immediately start doing it again because I’m “passionate” about “my craft” or whatever. I care because I am both Caroline Calloway and Natalie Beach — I am the hot rich white girl desperate to be recognized for my zany brilliance without wanting to actually make an effort, and I am the downtrodden ugly sidekick finally breaking free to tell “the whole story.”

There’s something really exciting about seeing all of this attention generated over two women who in the end want the same thing — to be “authentic” (whatever that means these days) and to tell a good story. Two things that are often at odds with each other.

Ultimately though, I want to thank Caroline Calloway and Natalie Beach. Because beyond being fascinated, I am also inspired. I wrote this, didn’t I?