DO YOU LIKE ME
A forthcoming book by Holly Wilson to be released in 2027.
Titled ‘Do You Like Me’ this book is a cultural and philosophical examination of visibility, desirability, identity and the effects of overexposure.
Developed alongside the multidisciplinary exhibition of the same name, ‘Do You Like Me’ examines what happens when the self becomes something continuously displayed, assessed and performed.
Published below are the dedication, epigraph and introduction from the upcoming release.
DEDICATION
‘For all the women who mistake visibility for love’.
EPIGRAPH
We learn to see ourselves before we learn to know ourselves.
INTRODUCTION
There was a time when the idealised version of success belonged mostly to distance.
It was produced and circulated through fashion culture, film music industries, advertising and the carefully constructed world of celebrity.
The people represented within these spaces appeared untouchable, unreal and removed from ordinary life. Their images were constructed so completely that we could still recognise the illusion within them. They occupied another world entirely.
Then suddenly, it no longer did.
Comparison did not begin with social media. People have always measured themselves against images of beauty, success, status and belonging. The algorithm did not invent insecurity, aspiration, the desire to be seen or admired. What social media introduced was scale, immediacy, influence, persistence and the fact that it rarely leaves us.
The people we began comparing ourselves to looked like us. Their lives resembled our own, and suddenly normal life became a form of curated content.
Unlike the people in magazines, the people online felt attainable. Comparable. Reachable. Which made the failure to become them feel personal.
The distance collapsed.
And with it, so did the boundary between identity and performance.
Somewhere along the way, identity became entangled with visibility. Not simply being seen, but learning how to construct a self that could survive being looked at continuously. A self designed for photographs, captions, strangers, algorithms, desire. For proof.
We learned to document ourselves while still becoming ourselves.
We began existing within an endless feedback loop of observation. Looking and being looked at. Editing and being edited. Curating and consuming. We became simultaneously the audience, the performer, the image and the critic.
This book is not an argument against social media.
Social media has created connection, careers, communities, businesses, art, humour, intimacy, visibility, political movements and entirely new forms of creativity and self-expression. It has allowed people to find one another across impossible distances. It has given many people greater autonomy over their own image and identity in ways previous generations never possessed.
But it has also altered the psychological architecture of everyday life in ways we are only truly beginning to understand.
What happens when identity becomes inseparable from performance? When it becomes a form of labour? When self-worth becomes entangled with evidence of desirability, success or belonging? When Intimacy and emotion risks becoming aestheticised? What happens to the body when it exists permanently beside enhanced, filtered and curated versions of other bodies?
Ultimately what happens to our sense of reality when other people’s lives are presented to us as continuous, edited evidence of a good successful life?
And perhaps most importantly:
What happens when people begin experiencing themselves primarily through observation?
Within that contradiction is a more personal question:
How do we truly feel about ourselves when nobody is watching?
This book begins, simply, with my own experience of being a woman in the world. A woman who has experienced moving through intimacy, desire, attachment, comparison, identity, rejection and the human need to be seen and admired. This over time lead me to ask deeper questions.
I did not arrive at these questions academically.
I arrived at them slowly. Through mirrors. Through girlhood. Through performance. Through comparison, self-surveillance, longing, photographs, social media, validation, loneliness and through my own eating disorder.
I grew up before algorithmic culture became inseparable from everyday life.
I think often about girls now growing up inside those pressures. I struggle to imagine what it means to become yourself while simultaneously watching yourself become. To experience girlhood beside a continuous stream of unattainable beauty made to appear ordinary.
These questions are not exclusive to women. They are recognisable to anyone who has felt pressured to present a more attractive, successful, interesting, desirable or coherent version of themselves than they feel able to inhabit privately. The loop of perceived versions of success through the online gaze of others.
Because the truth is, many of us wanted this. We wanted to be seen. We wanted beauty. We wanted attention. We wanted desire. We wanted recognition. We wanted to become unforgettable inside a culture that continuously teaches us that to disappear is to fail.
And yet visibility can become its own kind of isolation.
This book exists within that contradiction.
Not as a moral panic.
Not as nostalgia for a pre-digital world.
Not as a rejection of femininity, beauty, success, performance or self-construction.
But as an attempt to understand what the constant performance of the self is doing to us emotionally, psychologically, culturally and spiritually—and to consider social media not as a transparent reflection of ordinary life, but as a new iteration of the idealised cultures we once consumed at a distance.
For those of us who recognise ourselves within this experience, this book asks:
What could life look like if we reclaimed our individuality from the constructed ideals against which we have learned to measure ourselves?