Selena Gomez Has a Face for Everything

There’s a photo of Selena Gomez mid-sob—red-faced, mascara situation, fully committed ugly cry—that someone decided was the perfect reaction image for every minor inconvenience known to mankind. They were right.

The @CryingGomez account on Twitter was pairing that single image with the full spectrum of petty human suffering: your pencil tip breaking right after you sharpened it, checking yourself out in a window reflection and realizing the people inside the building have been watching you do it the whole time, drinking orange juice right after brushing your teeth, your friend saying something in front of your parents that was absolutely not supposed to leave the room. That one face, perfectly calibrated to each situation without ever changing. The genius was that the image is so complete—so fully, sincerely devastated—that it covers everything from genuine heartbreak to discovering your side piece just walked into the same class as your main one.

Memes like this work because they identify something true: that we cycle through the same expressions for catastrophe and mild inconvenience, that the body doesn’t scale its reactions to the actual stakes. Selena Gomez apparently made a face at some point that captures the entire range of human distress. The internet found it. The internet did what it does. For a brief window it was the only language that mattered, and I was completely fine with that.