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.