barbiesdisciple.me

Tag: identity

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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” 🙂