barbiesdisciple.me

Tag: art

  • Just Get Off Pinterest. Create from void.

    To Designers and Artists.

    Let’s be blunt: lock the fuck in. You have no choice if you actually want to be a designer who creates something real. Why? Because we’ve somehow collectively decided that before we even trust our own opinion on what looks right, we run to social media to figure it out for us. We go on Pinterest or Instagram and recreate what’s already been validated, what’s already got the applause. And honestly, it’s embarrassing. We’re acting like human versions of generative AI—taking the aesthetics that already exist, stripping away any real nuance or soul, and calling it creativity.

    If you can’t sit with your own ideas, if you’re constantly jumping from one borrowed trend to the next, then you’re not designing. You’re just remixing someone else’s work and slapping your name on it. Even AI can do that, and you know it. This should alarm you. If you’re dressing up as a designer because it seems cool but you’re not doing the real work—if you’re not willing to let ideas simmer, to give them meaning and intent—then what are you really creating? Nothing that’s truly yours. And that’s the wake-up call. Because the world doesn’t need more empty-ass designs with no story. It needs your real voice.

    So let yourself fall flat on your face. Why are we so scared of that? What’s going to happen if you fail? Maybe ten seconds of embarrassment, max. And if you’re that terrified of those ten seconds, what real thing are you ever going to achieve? Are you not more afraid of living your life hiding behind stripped-down aesthetics that mean nothing?

    Fall flat on your face. Fail miserably. At least then it’s your own voice leading you, and that’s not failure—it’s growth. It might feel weird, but in the grand scheme of things, it dissolves into pride.

    And hey, once you know this, you can’t just go back to scrolling and pretending you don’t. If you read this and still run back to social media to let it decide things for you, shame on you.

    Peace.

  • Stay with yourself

    On creation, presence, and not performing

    This idea came to me while weaving for the first time. It was a school assignment, which meant it would be graded, which normally means I would be strategizing, polishing, performing. I’m obsessed with image and coherence, with finishing things until they behave, until they know how to sit properly in the world. And yet, for once, I allowed myself to slip. To do something unresolved. To make something a little ugly. Strange how unsettling that felt. But at the same time, so freeing.

    The piece is all black, built from different textures in a plain weave, interrupted by a few sprinkles of pistachio-green glossy embroidery thread. They aren’t neatly placed, not intentional in the way that earns approval. They’re just there. Nothing clever. Nothing impressive. Probably not an A+. But my heart was allowed to breathe.

    For the first time in a while, I stopped trying to achieve a look. That phrase has always unsettled me, because it’s never just about aesthetics. It carries an undercurrent of escape, a desire to be somewhere else, someone else. Please, just anywhere but here. Anyone but me. This time, I stayed, and staying was hard. As I worked, things I hadn’t made space for began to surface. Tension I’d been holding together with taste and control loosened. There was no concept to hide behind, no justification to rehearse, just my hands, the material, and the discomfort of not performing refinement but practicing it.

    As all creatives eventually learn, whatever you make is a manifestation of you. Not metaphorically. Literally. Your work speaks your mind, your soul, your dreams, your fear. And it’s kind of fucked up how the environment teaches people to fear and resent their own self-portrait, to distrust what comes out when they’re being honest. I have moments like that too, where I try to make my work resemble me less. Anything to soften it, to make it less revealing, more digestible, something people can consume easily and live with comfortably. Diluting the self starts to feel like responsibility. Learn the rules before you break them. Make sense first, then become yourself. In this world, that logic holds.

    But at some point, I found myself in a different world. Mine. And there, the idea sounds deranged. What a strange way to think. If you’ve reached that level of exasperation, congratulations. That’s the beginning. That’s where you start molding yourself from here, not into something else, but into the only version that exists. Refining the one and only you. The you that isn’t encouraged to show up, that hesitates before saying hi, that feels like a liability in polite spaces.

    This is where the work becomes staying. Learning to sit in the void of yourself and speak into it, instead of scrambling for references, scrolling endlessly, outsourcing your center of gravity. It’s hard. It always feels unbearable right before it becomes inevitable. There’s a moment where you know, deeply, that it has to be done. You can’t betray that voice forever without paying for it somewhere else.

    At first, the things you make when you stop diluting yourself can look messy. They can even disgust you. They feel like a bug in the system, something that exposes too much and refuses to behave. But if you keep going, if you don’t abandon that place out of panic or shame, it becomes home. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s yours. And once you live there long enough, refinement stops being a mask; it becomes care.

  • I’ll choose to look pretty no matter the circumstance. Beauty is my clutch.

    Welcome to my rant everyone.

    To me, the desire to beautify myself has always been intrinsically mine. Not a reflex conditioned by patriarchy, but a discipline I chose — almost religious in its regimen. I do it out of self-respect, out of the petty satisfaction of standing a little above the ordinary – mediocrity offends me. And because it is the only thing that can soothe my own fastidious senses. Beauty, to me, is not compliance. It’s control, taste, and the quiet arrogance of caring. I worship beauty because I give a damn about my life.

    I’m so incredibly put-off by people, men and women alike, who have this defeated attitude when it comes to beauty and refining oneself. Why is careful, accurate word choice deemed redundant? Why is good manners and etiquette archaic and uncool?

    It is weird to me that in this climate, we’ve made effort the enemy. Somewhere along the way, society decided that beauty only counts if it looks accidental — that to admit you tried is to confess weakness. Women are expected to glow without labor, to bloom without water, to be effortless yet immaculate. But effortlessness is a lie; it’s just another performance, another cage. I’d rather be accused of vanity than of apathy. At least vanity implies vision — a refusal to rot.

    Self-respect can masquerade as vanity,
    that devotion can look like pride, and that tending to yourself — meticulously, stubbornly —the most elegant form of rebellion left, is scorned upon and women – goddesses who commit to this practice can be so easily downgraded as men pleasers?

    People call it superficial, but that’s because they’ve forgotten that the surface is where light lives. We read faces, gestures, fabrics, glances — the world is built on appearances. To polish your exterior is not to betray depth; it’s to acknowledge that the soul deserves a fitting frame. When I paint my mouth red, when I trace my eyes with precision, it’s not to attract — it’s to announce. To say: I am here, and I care enough to be seen.

    Meanwhile, we’ve built an age addicted to irony — the art of not caring, of caring ironically, of performing fatigue as intelligence. The new virtue is dishevelment, the new sin is sincerity. But I’ve never trusted the cult of apathy; it reeks of fear. People hide behind disinterest because they’re terrified of wanting too much. I, on the other hand, am shameless about wanting. I want beauty, control, awe — the small godlike power of looking how I choose to look.

    My standards are my own and I don’t need validation – the ritual itself is enough.

    At the end of the day I’ll always come home to myself and Beauty. Ultimately, these are what consoles and grounds me.

    So yeah go out there and be as pretty as you can be. You owe no one “humility” 🙂