barbiesdisciple.me

Tag: autonomy

  • 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.

  • 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.