barbiesdisciple.me

Tag: authorship

  • Start with Desire, not discipline.

    You aren’t inefficient, just running on dead battery.

    How many moments can you count, in a single day of your life, when you can confidently say: my mind is fully relaxed?

    When we’ve done absolutely everything we could to ensure we suffer a little less tomorrow, and we finally get in bed — why can’t we shut down the feeling that there’s still more to do?

    It’s sickening to realize how primed we are to optimize every second of our lives — scrolling on our phones, hoping to stumble across some better alternative we should have already been implementing. Then that little voice creeps up again: “You should have thought of that sooner, you fucking useless idiot.”

    And of course we ignore it, because this is normal now, right?

    Every day goes by. You can feel the life in you waning, thinning out. The life of your dreams becomes a stranger. We turn into machines of discipline, perpetually panicking about whether we’re pushing hard enough, and we stop being simple creatures of love and desire.

    Desire is not loud. It doesn’t scream productivity metrics at you. It’s the small clench in your gut when you think about the life you actually want — before you start listing all the reasons you can’t have it.

    I implore you to worship Desire again. It is the only real antithesis to the slow, quiet death of becoming a heartless machine.

    You might say: The last time I felt that strongly about life was probably when I was a kid — and only the sky knows who I even was back then.

    Lucky for you, your desire never left your system. It has been there the whole time, buried under fear, restlessness, resentment, and the constant demand to be better, faster, more optimized. And how beautiful is it that this thing — this Desire — is the only thing that is entirely yours.

    Recently, I took a decisive step to fight the ongoing brain fog and anxiety caused by overexposure to information: I limited my access to my goddamn phone. I stopped purchasing monthly 4G.

    Because we never needed this much.

    We never needed to scramble and flit around like this. All we ever needed were our hands, our senses, our presence. Don’t you remember?

    And that has to be the best decision I’ve made in five years. I don’t need much at all — just my hands and my imagination. That’s more than enough.

    I choose to move through my day with my senses again. Who said I need Google Maps at all times when I can get lost and let my heart memorize the streets? Who said I need to watch another tutorial or browse examples of “successful experimentation” when I can just make a mess at home and learn by doing?

    When did we decide that every step must be optimized before it’s taken?Most of our problems are invented in advance. So why should I be scared of opting out? And if Desire is ever going to return to the surface, fear has to be shown the door. Shooed away.

    Confront it, feel it, then fear will leave you for good.

    If that warm, tingling feeling creeps into your stomach, perfect. Underneath it all is simply love. It’s crazy how far we wandered, only to get deeply lost. But it’s okay. Getting back doesn’t require reinventing yourself. It only requires shedding the defense.

    You don’t need to become disciplined before you can love this life.

    Now when Desire sets in, I urge you to let it guide your steps, even when it feels uncomfortable. It may feel like your enemy at first — that’s understandable. This system has been shouting at us for years that desire is reckless, indulgent, dangerous.

    Be brave with it. Be so fucking brave. Or go back to that life you swear you hate so much and never leave it.

    When that zeal — that raw, almost embarrassing zest for life you thought you lost — starts rising again, you’ll find yourself moving in ways that surprise you. The actions won’t feel forced or strained. You won’t need to whip yourself into motion. You’ll think, where the hell is all this ease coming from?

    And then discipline follows.

    Discipline is nothing but the byproduct of following Desire long enough.

    When you force discipline first, you shame yourself into motion. You rely on fear of consequences. That kind of discipline isn’t sustainable — it requires constant maintenance and constant self-attack.

    But think about a time you were obsessed with something — designing, writing at 2am, learning what you actually cared about, even loving someone. Did you need discipline to stay up late? No. You didn’t feel disciplined. You felt pulled.

    That pull is Desire.

    When the pull is strong enough, discipline shows up — but it doesn’t feel like discipline. It’s just there, quietly, and it doesn’t plan on leaving. You show up for what matters because not showing up feels wrong. It’s seamless.

    And Desire isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s quiet. Inconvenient. Unglamorous. But if you follow it long enough, you begin organizing your life around what matters — and from the outside, that organization looks exactly like discipline.

    Early mornings. Boundaries. Saying no. Practicing daily.

    Not punishment. Structure in service of what you love.

    It feels strange, I know. Almost wrong. But remember: this is not an invitation to crawl back into the cage you’ve always known. That resistance you feel is only the echo of an old survival system, trying to stay in control.

    Once you recognize it for what it is, it can’t trap you anymore.

  • 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.

  • Learning Is Not a Public Service

    For the Lovely Few With an Insatiable Hunger for Knowledge and Greatness

    I care about learning. I just don’t care about learning from everyone.

    Sometimes I learn because I’m curious. But most of the time I learn because I’m headed towards a vision and I need specific tools to get there. I’m not interested in learning as a personality trait or a moral performance. Thus don’t have the habit of learning something “just in case”. That to me is That to me is food hoarding, but under the guise of intellectualism.

    I like my life the way it is: I love that I’ve reached a level of nonchalance that offends people who think they knew me and intrigues those who haven’t. I love that I no longer outsource my decisions to other people’s opinions, and that I act—quietly, without asking permission—on what I know is right for me. I love that my life centers around my impulses, because for me, that is the only way it works.

    That is why life doesn’t feel out of rhythm with my body, even though I still go to school and still keep time. To live this way, I had to give up being an overachiever, collecting perfect grades as proof of worth. And that’s fine. Nothing is worth sacrificing my bodily rhythm for.

    So no, I’m not wandering around confused or empty. I’m already busy cultivating my own thing, which is precisely why I don’t invite every opinion into it like it’s an open house.

    People love to say you should talk to as many people as possible because it expands your worldview. That may be true if one’s sole ambition is to accumulate experiences. But I don’t want my worldview expanded indiscriminately. I want my life a certain way. And some people’s worldviews resemble lives I would hate to live. Proximity to that does not enrich me. It irritates me.

    I pay attention to people who are genuinely intelligent in areas I want to be good at. I engage with people who share my values. I show up for people who are actually part of my life in a real way. Everyone else exists, and that’s fine.

    I don’t believe more input automatically makes life richer. Sometimes it just makes it messier. Sometimes it adds nothing except opinions I didn’t ask for.

    I’m not trying to absorb the world. I’m trying to shape mine. If something fits, I’ll take it. If it doesn’t, I won’t. That’s why you’ll never catch me overexerting myself to understand why something doesn’t resonate, as though accommodation were a moral obligation.

    Again, learning, for me, is directional. Sure I don’t expect it to be linear, but I’m not a hippie collecting vibes. I’m that person with a plan, mildly amused, and dancing past conversations that don’t concern me.

    XOXO

    To those with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and greatness: you don’t have to know everything that’s out there. Social media has you convinced that being “disgustingly over-educated” is something to perform, display, and monetize. It isn’t. What matters far more is knowing yourself, really, really well.

  • Deal with your shit yourself. you’re an adult.

    this isn’t a manifesto about doing everything alone. it’s not a bootstraps sermon. it’s not a denial of care, context, or difficulty.

    it’s about authorship.

    the other day after class, i stayed back to work. i was painting, quiet, focused, mind elsewhere. a few students from another class came in and sat opposite me. they started talking — loudly — about how intimidating our class was. how talented we were. how “cooked” they felt. how teachers couldn’t stop praising us.

    it was awkward. not because they were complimenting us, but because the compliments weren’t actually about us. they were about their discomfort. and suddenly, without asking, that discomfort was placed in the room for us to hold.

    that’s the moment i paused. not out of guilt. not out of superiority. but because i recognized the dynamic instantly.

    self-deprecating humor is wildly overrated. not because humility is bad, but because this kind of humor isn’t humility — it’s delegation. it’s a way of handing your self-worth to the people around you and waiting for them to manage it gently.

    the problem is, when you do that often enough, you train people to overlook you. worse, you train yourself to believe being smaller is safer.

    and i don’t bond with people who do that reflexively. i dislike the dynamic. it’s unstable.

    being an adult is a privilege. no permission slips. no supervision. complete authorship. your actions land. they shape the world, whether you acknowledge that responsibility or not.

    someone once said that the people you dislike reveal more about you than about them — usually as a kind of moral warning. especially to women. as if discernment itself is suspicious. as if not being endlessly warm, cheerful, and accommodating is a character flaw.

    i don’t buy that.

    disliking certain dynamics doesn’t make you cruel. it makes you specific. noticing that you’re turned off by mediocrity — especially mediocrity that demands accommodation — doesn’t mean you think you’re better than others. it means you don’t accept it in yourself. that’s not villainy. that’s alignment.

    being an adult, to me, means dealing with your interior life yourself. not perfectly. not silently. but responsibly. it means knowing what belongs to you to carry, even when help exists. it means not making other people responsible for regulating your insecurity just so you can feel more comfortable in the room.

    support is real. care is real. community is real.
    but support is not substitution. being held is not being carried.

    i don’t want to be employed as someone else’s reassurance. and i don’t want to outsource my own authorship either.

    you don’t have to be yippee all the time. you don’t have to shrink to be liked. and you don’t have to accept every dynamic just because refusing it might make you look “mean.”

    sometimes rolling your eyes is just clarity arriving early.

    deal with your shit yourself.
    you’re an adult.

  • On Fairness, Difference, and the Refusal to Flatten

    Life will never be fair — and it never should be.

    Fairness implies sameness. But life is not a courtroom, and humans are not equal vessels. Even if everyone were returned to the same baseline — the same resources, the same starting point — sameness would never hold. Difference is not learned; it is emergent.

    Attempts to flatten difference do not erase hierarchy; they distort it. When contrast is forcibly suppressed, it sharpens underground. Artificial sameness produces exaggerated division, harsher and more brittle than the natural variance it tries to deny.

    You see this lie everywhere.

    “Everyone is beautiful,” people say — until someone is told, you’re beautiful like that obese woman. The recoil is instant. Suddenly, beauty was never about perception. It was a moral placeholder. A word emptied of content so no one has to confront taste, preference, or desire.

    When people say “everyone is equal” but still sort, rank, desire, exclude, envy, and elevate — what they’re really doing is lying about the mechanism while still obeying it. That lie breeds resentment.

    Let ugly be a thing.
    Let beauty be a thing.

    Let mediocrity exist exactly as it is — but never confuse it with excellence. Not out of cruelty, but out of respect for truth. Acknowledging this is not my lane is not self-rejection; it is maturity. Not every space is meant to hold everyone, and not every contribution is inherently valuable simply because it exists.

    Exclusivity has a function. So does rarity. So does discernment. When everything is declared equally valuable, value itself dissolves into noise. Participation trophies do not protect anyone; they only muddy clarity — and clarity is not violence.

    A simple example: I have no literary talent. I would never call myself a writer. I struggle with coherence, I’m naturally clumsy with language, and writing does not come to me with ease. I use tools — including ChatGPT — to refine my word choices and structure because I am, at best, mediocre at this craft.

    Why deny it? Why sugarcoat it?

    Do I feel shame about it? No.
    Do I think I’m entitled to praise or to be called “talented” when there’s nothing to justify it? Absolutely not.

    My worth is not dependent on my ability to write. And I won’t disrespect the literary world by inserting myself into it under a title I haven’t earned. That doesn’t diminish me — it clarifies me.

    And yet, despite the lack of talent, I have perspectives to share. So here I am. Not as a writer, but as an author of my own thoughts — using whatever tools are necessary to say them clearly.

    So find your lane. And if it does not exist yet, build it. Stop demanding entry into spaces that were never meant to contain you – that’s so energetically cheap.

    Be a work in progress without self-contempt.
    Be above average without guilt, don’s feel sorry for the mediocres.

    And stop running away from yourself.

  • If you care about the world you live in, be fucking rich

    people keep saying money and power are the problem. i’ve never believed that. the problem has always been where they land.

    i care about the world. genuinely. and because i care, i’m careful about not giving my power away — not to guilt, not to shame, not to the performance of being small so other people can feel morally clean. i’m not interested in sounding good while nothing moves.

    i care about the ability to say yes without asking for permission. the ability to fund, protect, exit, support, preserve. the ability to move things instead of narrating how immovable they are.

    money and power aren’t corrupting by default. they just amplify whoever is holding them. so yes, i want them in the hands of people who actually care.

    i want to give more to the causes i care about — stopping wars, stopping genocides, protecting children, education, supporting artists and artisans, preserving traditional crafts and artisan communities, preserving culture without freezing it into museums or turning it into pity projects. keeping things alive, funded, and intact.

    none of that happens because someone writes a beautiful paragraph about how powerless they feel. none of it happens because we collectively agree that wanting money is shallow. it happens because someone has enough leverage to write checks, build infrastructure, hire people, fund exits, and keep going without burning out.

    the whole “i’m broke but morally pure” thing is not working. it’s not noble. it’s not sustainable. and it’s definitely not helping the people it claims to center. some of us who care have to be rich — obscenely rich, tactically rich, rich enough to not have to ask, explain, or beg. rich enough to absorb hits and keep moving. rich enough to make long-term commitments instead of one-off gestures.

    and yes — i love material things. i love shopping. i love beautiful objects. i love excess when it’s intentional. i’m a slut for it. handbags, clothes, texture, shine. flame me if you need to. i’m not here to be ascetic. i’m here to do things my way.

    i don’t want to spend my life whining about how powerless i am. i want to spend it being useful.

    i’m not embarrassed about wanting money. i’m embarrassed by how many people pretend they don’t, while quietly resenting those who do something with it. this isn’t about accumulation for its own sake. it’s about custody — about who gets to hold power, and whether they do anything decent with it.

    some people turn caring into a performance. i turn it into capacity.

    special thanks to Paris Hilton.


    that’s hot.

  • please stop calling me feminine

    just thoughts i’m not interested in sanding down.

    this might sound dramatic, but i genuinely hate the word feminine. honestly, i hate that it’s even a word. i don’t know what function it serves now other than telling people with female bodies how to be women correctly — how to behave, soften, present, sacrifice, and somehow still make it look effortless. how to be palatable. how to be sold more things while being tied tighter to a narrative that was never built for our benefit in the first place.

    i miss when these things were just energy, not instructions:

    feminine as yin — retractive, void, cold, darkness over light, rest, subconscious. masculine as yang — expansive, heat, light over darkness, action, consciousness. two halves of the same whole, constantly shaping each other, ebbing and flowing. not separate. not ranked. that’s what actually creates life. humans have always been dual beings. all of us. always.

    somewhere along the way, energy turned into identity. identity turned into expectation. and expectation turned into something you get corrected or punished for not performing correctly. that’s usually where i check out.

    i’m exhausted by the question “what does it mean to be a woman,” especially because it pretends to be neutral when it’s not. it’s never just a question. it comes with an expectation of tone, of warmth, of reassurance. you’re supposed to answer it cheerfully, relationally, in a way that signals you belong. like “woman” is a coat you have to prove you deserve to wear, even though you were born in it.

    there is nothing neutral about that word. it comes with moral add-ons. emotional labor. an unspoken obligation to be nice, giving, friendly, communal, uplifting. and if you don’t perform those things naturally enough, you start to feel like you’re doing womanhood wrong. i’m not interested in playing that game.

    i don’t experience womanhood as a philosophy. i experience it as a set of conditions i live inside. so when people ask me what it means to me, what comes out isn’t poetry or solidarity or something sweet and reassuring. it’s much more literal than that.

    i like being alone. i like shopping. i like being pretty. i like being smart. i enjoy it when I’m prettier and smarter than others. it’s power, duh. i’m not pretending i don’t see it, and i don’t let it defines me either.

    i’m not strong enough to live without beauty, curation, and meaning; that’s the truth. i need shape. i need intention. i need things to feel deliberate or i start to rot. so no, i’m not interested in pretending i’m above being vain, and i’m not interested in being shamed for needing it either.

    if power lands in your lap, why reject it? and who actually benefits when you do? abandoning power doesn’t make you virtuous, it just makes you easier to erase. self-denial has never redistributed anything. it just convinces people with less leverage to give up what little they have and call it ethics.

    i don’t believe in restraint as morality. i don’t believe in humility as proof of goodness. i don’t believe in shrinking myself so the room feels fairer. i believe in leverage, and i believe in being honest about when you have it.

    this is also why i feel deeply uncomfortable with how some versions of femininity get performed now, especially the whole “baby”, “little girl” thing. calling yourself a baby. really? a strategy built on being manageable. docile. non-threatening. that’s not yin. that’s compliance dressed up as cuteness. once something is rewarded, repeated, and aimed at a specific audience, it stops being innocent self-expression and becomes strategy. you ain’t sly.

    what unsettles me most is how desirability gets tied to childlike traits — helplessness, needing protection, being small — and sold as aspirational for adult women. i care about children. i’m a big sister. i understand what protection is supposed to mean. blurring that line for attention doesn’t feel empowering to me, and i’m not going to pretend it does just to be polite.

    this same allergy shows up when people try to neatly label desire. i’m bi-ish. always have been. but it’s never felt like something i need to announce or perform. i don’t debate it. i don’t justify it. i don’t feel the need to explain how i got here. i know who i’m drawn to, and i don’t have anything to prove about it.

    labels flatten things that are alive. they turn energy into admin. and i don’t want to begin interactions by handing people instructions on how to read me, then spend the rest of the time maintaining that reading.

    i’ve felt left out most of my life, not because i didn’t try hard enough to belong, but because the cost of inclusion was always dilution. sanding myself down. softening edges. making myself easier to absorb.

    so i opted out. deliberately. i built an interior world strong enough to anchor me without a community, because forced inclusion smells like pity and i’m too proud to accept it.

    i don’t want to be categorized.
    i want to be met.

  • When Truth Stops Hurting

    There’s a strange reflex most of us have.

    The moment someone says “here’s the truth”, our bodies tense.
    Shoulders lift. Chest tightens. Jaw sets. As if truth is something that must bruise us to count.

    Somewhere along the way, we were taught that honesty arrives sharp, unpleasant, and corrective — that if it doesn’t sting, it must be indulgent, naïve, or incomplete.

    After my own breakup, this belief showed up in an unexpected way. I found myself hesitant to tell people what had happened — not because I was in denial or afraid to face it, but because I knew my experience was too unconventional. I knew, too, what would likely come next: people giving me conclusions without listening, advice delivered without context, narratives that would flatten something nuanced into something familiar. So I kept quiet without a second thought, out of clarity. I want to protect my truth long enough for it to settle inside me, intact, before letting it be named by anyone else.

    In moments of emotional complexity — especially around love, loss, and endings — people often reach for familiar conclusions. You’ll get over it. It wasn’t meant to last. You’ll find something better. You’re romanticizing the past.

    These statements aren’t always malicious. They serve a function. They compress lived, nuanced experiences into something manageable. They reduce complexity, soothe discomfort quickly, and restore social order.

    What they leave no room for is lived truth — the kind that hasn’t settled into a conclusion yet. That kind of truth is inconvenient because it doesn’t offer fast closure, and it forces people to sit with ambiguity, something many are not practiced at doing.

    So instead of listening deeply, people reach for templates. Not because they understand your story, but because the template helps them regulate their own discomfort.

    Even when advice feels wrong in our bodies, we often internalize it anyway. We’ve been trained to believe wisdom must come from outside us, that growth must hurt, and that truth must be harsh. So when something feels gentle, coherent, or comforting, we distrust it. We mistake emotional violence for clarity.

    Real truth has a very specific texture. It doesn’t shock your system. It doesn’t demand self-betrayal. It doesn’t force you to rewrite your lived experience. Instead, it settles, clicks, aligns, and allows you to breathe more fully after hearing it.

    Truth doesn’t have to hurt to be honest. Sometimes it feels quiet. Sometimes it feels bittersweet. Sometimes it simply feels right.

    Discerning truth isn’t about choosing comfort over reality. It’s about recognizing when something resonates because it matches the full picture. You are allowed to hold truths that are gentle and real, kind and precise, comforting and honest.

    So yeah. I still love my ex (in my head, we are married XD), I’m a whore for material things (sorry Karl Marx). and I feel more spiritually aligned in a nice coat. And none of that feels like a failure to me.

    See how gentle truths can be?

  • 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” 🙂