The person in the post

I posted a few selfies on TikTok and then, somehow, the internet looked back.

At first it felt small: a few notifications, a few strangers leaving heart-eyed comments as if beauty were something simple enough to name and hand over. Then the numbers kept rising. Ten thousand views. Fifty. A hundred. By the time I stopped pretending not to care, the post had reached more people than I could imagine. Now it sits there with 102,300 likes and 790,000 views, as if that version of me—the one arranged inside a few photos, caught in good lighting, held still long enough to be admired—belongs a little more to the public now than to me.

It is still strange to write that. Nearly 800,000 people saw my selfies. I say the number to myself and it still sounds fake, like someone accidentally added an extra zero, then another, until my face became an event.

What does it mean to be looked at by that many people?

I ask because I have never really known what to do with attention once it arrives. Before this, attention was something I could control by keeping quiet whenever I wanted to, by moving through the world without insisting on being seen. But the internet has a way of making even a small gesture feel theatrical. You post a face, and suddenly it is no longer just your face. It becomes content, something others can admire, desire, judge, save, scroll past, or forget. For a moment, you become not just a person but also an appearance.

Maybe that is what unsettles me most, not that people liked the post, but that they liked a version of me so flattened and clean.

A selfie is never really just a selfie. It is a decision. An angle. A draft. It is me, yes, but only in the way a reflection in a window is me: recognizable, but thin. Curated. Lit just enough. Cropped before the clutter begins. What people saw was a face arranged into legibility. What they did not see was the room outside the frame, the mess on the table, the fatigue, the overthinking, the moments before posting when I wondered if I should delete the whole thing and disappear for a while.

This is the strange part of being appreciated online: the appreciation is real, and yet it lands on something partial.

The internet looked at my selfies and decided things about me. Maybe they thought I was confident. Maybe they thought I was comfortable being seen. Maybe they thought the version I posted was the whole truth. And who can blame them? The post does not show hesitation. It does not show insecurity, boredom, hunger, unpaid bills, or the absurdity of checking a post’s performance while also worrying about money.

Because 102,300 likes is a lot. It is ridiculous, honestly—enough to make me stare at my phone and laugh. Enough to make other people think something substantial has happened to me. But likes are such flimsy currency. I cannot pay for law school with them, for the future I keep trying to picture for myself. I cannot buy groceries with them. I cannot turn digital admiration into rent money just because the comments were kind. Sometimes I look at that number and think, sana pera na lang.

That thought makes me laugh, but it also reveals something sad about online attention: how quickly it teaches you the difference between visibility and value.

What is clout, really, if it vanishes into the same feed that made it? TikTok is a place where attention arrives with astonishing speed and leaves just as quickly. One day your face is everywhere; the next day the algorithm has already moved on.

I know this. I know how temporary it is. And yet I am still astonished by it.

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The mystique of impunity

Maybe that is what this small burst of TikTok clout has made me confront: how easy it is for an image to travel farther than the self that made it. The post is me, but it is not all of me. It cannot hold the disorder, the off-screen life, the contradictions that make a person human.

So yes, I am grateful. I am amused. I am still laughing at the sheer absurdity and scale of it. But I am also left with this uneasy wonder: how strange it is to be seen by so many people and still feel, underneath all that visibility, partly hidden. Partly misread. Partly alone.

Maybe that is the real lesson of momentary clout—that attention is not intimacy, that visibility is not wholeness, that a curated image can travel farther than the messiest and truest parts of a life ever will.

And still, somewhere inside me, a more practical voice keeps saying the same thing: 102,300 likes.

Sana pera na lang.