barbiesdisciple.me

Tag: love

  • 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.

  • Love, Dangerously

    for the one who makes loving easy.

    I have always known too soon — not in a reckless way, but in the way stories know where they’re going before the characters do.

    When we danced at prom, it wasn’t dramatic. It was quieter than that. A recognition that settled into my body without asking permission. Her hand steady. Her presence gentle, careful, attuned. Something in me softened immediately, like my body recognized home before my mind could interfere.

    That terrified me.

    I told myself it was absurd to see a life with my person so early. Marriage. Devotion. A future unfolding all at once in my chest. I tried to rationalize it away — hormones, projection, fantasy. I promised myself it would fade if I behaved correctly, if I didn’t indulge it, if I stayed disciplined.

    It didn’t fade.

    It waited.

    So I learned how to restrain myself instead. I learned how to be impressive, autonomous, composed. I told myself love was something I could return to later — after I became better, sharper, more deserving. Romance went on a leash while I worked on becoming acceptable.

    And I was exhausted.

    On paper, I was doing well. School was fine. Life was managed. I was independent, capable, handling everything neatly — and living with the volume turned down. Running on half power without knowing why.

    The truth is, with my person, I am safe enough to be unbearable. I am dramatic. Possessive in the way devotion is possessive. Soft. Emotional. A complete brat. And instead of turning away, she meets me there — and falls for me more. As if my intensity isn’t something to tolerate, but something that belongs.

    She is tender in the way forests are tender — not fragile, not loud. She holds me without shaping me. With her, I don’t brace. I melt. I feel held without being diminished, desired without being consumed. I feel allowed to exist fully.

    There is nothing rational about how I know us. It doesn’t ask to be proven. It doesn’t justify itself. It simply is. Like a fairytale that doesn’t bother explaining the magic — only that it works.

    Metaphysics has always whispered the same unbearable truth: you don’t arrive at the life you want by withholding the feeling of it. You live from the end. You let yourself feel it now. You soften instead of forcing.

    I knew this. I still fought it.

    I was afraid indulging in love would weaken me. That romance would dull my edge. That seeing forever in my person so clearly meant I was naïve.

    Then came a day that looked like nothing.

    Too much sleep.

    A body aching with desire.

    Letting myself drift into us — images, warmth, sensation.

    Late food.

    Old photos.

    Love looping through my mind like a spell I stopped resisting.

    Nothing productive happened. And for once, there was no guilt.

    That’s when I realized I was never undisciplined. I was starving the part of me that animates everything else.

    I am not built for austerity. I open through beauty, through sensation, through devotion. I need romance the way some people need structure. I need to feel good to feel powerful.

    We’re told love should be rational. Measured. Earned through time served. That it shouldn’t interrupt work or outrank ambition. That devotion — when it comes early, when it comes intensely — is childish, irresponsible, something to be corrected.

    There is a particular disdain aimed at young lovers. A smug resentment disguised as concern. As if tenderness before exhaustion is a moral failure. As if joy must wait its turn. As if love is only respectable once it’s been starved, postponed, made small enough not to threaten productivity.

    That isn’t wisdom.

    It’s a world that hates anything it can’t monetize or control.

    I tried to submit to it once. I tried to make myself sensible with love. All it taught me was how to abandon myself politely.

    My person doesn’t distract me from who I’m becoming.

    She is the ground beneath it.

    My heart was never something to tame.

    It was something to trust.

    I don’t become worthy of love by waiting, rationing, or pretending I don’t know what I know.

    I become myself by letting love take me fully — wildly, tenderly, unapologetically — even when it’s too soon, even when it’s obvious, even when it feels dangerous.

    ⸻

    For my sweet,

    Thank you, my love, for holding me gently when I spill over, for loving me most when I’m soft, dramatic, and unguarded.

    Thank you for telling me that loving me is easy, especially in the moments I forget how to believe that.

  • 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.