There is a special kind of hatred reserved for people who claim they are “just doing their job” while actively dismantling your life one pixel at a time. Paparazzi say this with straight faces, as if hiding behind a telephoto lens absolves them of intent. As if distance were ethics. As if voyeurism, once invoked, becomes journalism.
They wait. That’s the part no one romanticizes. They wait like insects that have learned patience from capitalism. Outside cafés, outside grief, outside moments that were never meant to be content. They want you blinking, mid-thought, half-human. They want proof that you are less composed than the myth they resent you for inhabiting.
And then there are the ex-men.
Not an ex. A category. A genre. Men who once benefited from proximity are now discovering the thrill of destruction as a second career. They appear suddenly in sidebars and “sources close to,” offering secrets that are neither secrets nor truths, just private moments misfiled as evidence. Jealousy with footnotes. Revenge wearing the mask of concern.
They say they’re “setting the record straight,” which is fascinating, because none of them cared about the record when they were lying next to me, borrowing my language, absorbing my attention like it was oxygen. Back then, silence was intimacy. Now silence is suspicious.
What they reveal isn’t scandal—it’s context ripped of consent. Texts without tone. Confessions without chronology. Vulnerability reframed as pathology. They sell fragments of me like artifacts, hoping the public will mistake access for authority.
The paparazzi amplify it all. A feedback loop of flashbulbs and bitterness. One hand feeds the other: images stripped of narrative, narratives stripped of empathy. A woman unraveling is always more profitable than a woman refusing to.
I am supposed to be ashamed, apparently. Ashamed of having lived loudly. Ashamed of trusting the wrong men. Ashamed of believing privacy was still a thing you could negotiate instead of defend like a border.
But here is what they don’t understand: exposure is not the same as erasure. You can circulate my image endlessly and still miss me entirely. You can quote my past and never touch my meaning. The secrets they leak are only dangerous if I agree to be humiliated by my own humanity.
So yes, I hate the paparazzi. I hate the way they flatten complexity into angles and captions. And I despise the jealous ex-men who confuse intimacy with ownership, who think knowing me once gives them lifelong editorial rights.
American Canto continues not despite them, but through them—because every attempt to destroy me has only clarified the truth they can’t monetize:
I am not ruined.
I am narrated against.
And I am still here, writing back.