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I’m not proud to admit this but over the years, during certain periods of nosiness, boredom or thirst for gossip, I’ve spent considerable time lurking in dark corners of the internet. This isn’t the moment I reveal I’ve been sucked down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole – although where I end up on these jaunts is no less troubling: on gossip forums about influencers.

I don’t participate; I’m purely an observer. And what I observe chills me to my core. Women (they’re always women) who follow the same women (always women) I do on social media gather in these forums to discuss influencers’ and content creators’ verbal tics, the DIY projects that go wrong, the hypocrisy in them supporting “clean beauty” one day and shilling for a brand that tests on animals the next. It’s like all my dreams (being an absolutely shameless gossip with no repercussions) and fears (being gossiped about shamelessly by people who face no repercussions) in one place. I can’t explain it and I certainly can’t quit it.

One thing I often see as I click to page 17 of a discussion about what a YouTuber packed in her holiday suitcase is a familiar refrain: complaints that the personality in question has “changed”. Visual changes – a dye job, obvious injectables or even an adjustment in their clothes – are scrutinised and held up as evidence that the person sharing their life online has had not just an aesthetic shift but a moral or emotional one too. Moving house, changing careers, becoming vegan – any minor lifestyle choice is picked apart by followers who pretend to know a stranger better than they know themselves.

Declaring that someone has “changed” carries an unspoken addendum: … for the worse. It can feel like a betrayal when the person we have such a close, one-sided, undeniably parasocial relationship with behaves in a way that affirms that we don’t, in fact, know them.

I was confronted with a new version of myself recently, and it expanded my reservoir of compassion for the shifting tides of public personas. And it’s all because I went on holiday. It’s such an Eat Pray Love cliche to declare myself fundamentally changed by a little time spent overseas, but I didn’t adopt or change religions. I just saw, with clear eyes, how unfixed and malleable I had the potential to be.

It was my first overseas trip since a holiday to Bali in 2018. I was in my late 20s then, a few years into living alone, running my freelance business. I was proudly organised and reliable, but still had plenty of capacity for fun and spontaneity. Cut to 2024: I’d lived alone during lockdown, overworked myself, and become so tethered to my Google Calendar that any shift in plans caused me to melt into an Alex Mack-style puddle.

In order to board a plane to Tokyo, I squeezed more work into each day, but when I turned my laptop off, something settled in me. It’s like my brain was a cheap desktop zen garden and someone had finally smoothed all the sand particles into place.

A few days into the trip, one of the friends I was with commented that he loved this version of me. At home, he’d seen me leave parties early or say no to another drink in order to wake up and hit the ground running. On holiday, I was completely different: I said yes to another round. I wandered without a plan. I slept in. If plans changed, I shrugged.

The person who I was with a clear Google Cal and a smooth zen garden in my brain, I realised, was a completely new version of myself. And seeing that this was possible, at 34, made me realise just how tenuous my self-perception had been. I thought of myself as a person who had to live alone, and here I was sharing a tiny Airbnb with three friends, devoid of drama. Here was the uber-organiser letting others plan the route and not freaking out if we got on the wrong train.

It was a joy to find that I could still adapt and shift to my environment. I’m back home now, tethered again to my colour-coordinated calendar, but elements of my Holiday Self come back to me often. When I meander to a less-convenient bus instead of taking the most efficient one. When I say no to a work assignment so I can have a lazy, uneventful weekend. And it’s made me more empathetic to the shifting whims and choices of other people – both those I know IRL and those whose posts convince me I do.