On parasocial intimacy.

Stanning comes into my life so easily, spanning itself across the breadth of my prickling adolescence, embroidering its stitches on the rough canvas of a soul who knows nothing better than single-minded aspirations and easy distractions. It consumed me before I even knew the weight of my conventions and the symbolism of my own projections. It was easy because it was much much more realistic than the buzzing paracosms that I would indulge myself in day and night to cope with the familiar, episodic hormonal fluctuations. From being distant celebrities, “stars” that have nothing to do with my life other than to induce envy turn into objects of projection, or better said, vessels containing wishes I dare not wish upon myself.

It wouldn’t be fair to classify stanning as some sorts of completely unique phenomenon that never existed in humanity’s thousands of years of civilization until now. Perhaps adorned with newer postmodern inventions, the unchanging spirits of idolization is only returning more invincible, more intricate and complicated to unpack.

Would one consider the onset of idolization, or stanning, as the real/staple beginning to one’s coming-of-age experience? If not, why would we then define the moment when one comes out of such experience as “fully grown up”? What does growing up mean to a person who claims to have never experienced idolization?