not because I’ve reached some enlightened place of self love, but because I’m bored. I’m also just tired of watching women be told—explicitly and implicitly—that the most ambitious thing they can do with a fresh year is look better in it.

I don’t want to spend another twelve months turning my body into a before and after slideshow. I want to feel steadier in my own mind. I want to be harder to manipulate. I want to know more than I did last year.

we’re told it’s about confidence, health, wellness, discipline or whatever but somehow it always circles back to visibility and approval. women are encouraged to confuse feeling better with being more desirable, to believe that peace will arrive once the mirror agrees with us. to treat our bodies as lifelong improvement projects instead of places we live.

and it works—because it keeps us busy.

busy fixing, tracking, correcting, apologizing. busy monitoring ourselves instead of the systems that benefit from our distraction.

I want goals that don’t photograph well. goals that don’t always translate into content. goals that don’t necessarily make me more palatable.

this year, I want to become more educated. more emotionally literate. more grounded in my own authority.

I want to read women the work of women who were called “too much” and decide for myself why. I want to understand how power works—not just in theory, but in courts, housing systems, families, and relationships.

I want to name my emotions precisely instead of flattening them into “anxiety” or “burnout.” I want to stop rushing myself through grief so I can be impressive again.

one of my goals is becoming harder to manipulate which means learning how systems actually function. recognizing patterns instead of internalizing blame. trusting my first no. letting anger exist without immediately softening it into something more acceptable. it means unlearning the idea that suffering is noble and silence is strength. it means noticing when my inner voice sounds suspiciously like someone who benefited from my obedience.

I don’t want to optimize my life anymore. I want to orient it. toward clarity instead of chaos. toward steadiness instead of intensity. toward relationships that feel reciprocal instead of aspirational.

I want to build a life that feels internally coherent—even if it looks unimpressive from the outside. I want to make decisions based on alignment, not applause. I want to become someone I trust wholeheartedly.

so no, I’m not setting goals about my appearance this year. I’m setting goals about my mind, my nervous system, my boundaries, my understanding of the world.

I’m choosing depth over decoration and agency over aesthetics. I want a life that feels full of everything the patriarchy doesn’t really want for women. I want to become more so I can be more for myself and for all the women I care so deeply about. that feels a lot more interesting and like a better use of my one precious life than trying to control the only body I’ll ever have. she deserves more than that.

what are your goals for the new year that have nothing to do with your physical appearance?

indifference is far more efficient than hatred. it requires no justification, no rage, no ideology. it allows men to benefit from women’s labor, bodies, attention, and emotional regulation without ever having to deal with the damage left behind. you don’t have to hate women to exploit them. you just have to see their suffering as incidental.

this is why so many men insist they are “good.” they don’t beat women. they don’t scream slurs. they don’t actively wish us harm. yet they vote against our autonomy, dismiss our fear, minimize our pain, and continue participating in systems that grind women down. not necessarily because they consciously enjoy it—but because it doesn’t interrupt their lives enough to matter.

male indifference is what allows abuse to be reframed as misunderstanding, inequality to be reframed as inconvenience, and women’s exhaustion to be reframed as personal weakness. it is what makes men ask for empathy while offering none. what makes them demand patience during their growth while remaining unmoved by women’s degradation.

male supremacy does not require cruelty as a personality trait. it requires distance. emotional, moral, psychological distance from women’s reality. when women speak about harm, men don’t need to deny it outright. they just need to doubt it, delay responding to it, or quietly decide it isn’t their responsibility.

this is why women are constantly asked to prove our suffering in ways men never have to prove their innocence. why we must provide context, evidence, tone moderation, and emotional palatability just to be taken seriously. the burden is always on women to make our pain legible—never on men to make their indifference accountable.

what makes this dynamic especially insidious is how it hides behind politeness. behind progressiveness. behind the language of allyship. men can care about women in the abstract while remaining fundamentally uninterested in what women endure in practice. they can support feminism as an idea while resisting every demand that costs them comfort, access, or authority.

hatred provokes resistance. indifference neutralizes it. you can argue with hatred. you can name it. you can fight it. indifference, on the other hand, asks women to scream into a void and then blames us for being loud.

this is why so many women eventually stop explaining. stop persuading. stop hoping empathy will arrive if they phrase things “correctly”. because the issue was never misunderstanding. it was never lack of information. it was the quiet, persistent calculation that women’s suffering is acceptable collateral damage.

clarity begins when we stop mistaking male indifference for misunderstanding. when we name it as the mechanism that it is. when we understand that our liberation will never be delivered by men suddenly deciding to care.

i threw myself into his arms every time. he was the fun uncle. the funny uncle. the one who sat with me while i listened to one direction for hours and let me talk about absolutely nothing like it was groundbreaking news. i wrote poems about him — real poems, the kind that only children can write, where adoration spills out in embarrassing, unfiltered abundance. he felt like christmas morning.

until i remembered.

the remembering didn’t slam into me all at once. it arrived slowly, like fog rising, revealing shapes i had lived beside but never fully seen. first, stories from neighbors — whispers about him looking at children in our building in ways adults shouldn’t. then, rumors about him and a teenage girl. each story tugged loose a thread, and my brain began to unspool the things it had tucked away for my own survival. the remembering came with fear. dissociation. guilt so heavy it felt like a second spine. and then more memories surfaced — the hide-and-seek games that ended with his hands somewhere they shouldn’t be, while everyone else hid. the videos we watched together, the ones that turned my stomach even back then. the trips to the bathroom that still live in my body, explaining why even now i have to prepare myself to walk into one.

every revelation felt like i was ruining something sacred. ruining the love. ruining my childhood. ruining him. when i was thirteen, he was living with us again. he was dating my friend’s mom. one night , i sat listening to whitney houston with the woman who gave birth to me, and i told her — not everything, just the part about the videos. i don’t remember how it came up, but i remember hoping it would be enough. that someone would say, “this is not okay,” and he would stop living in our house. he didn’t. nothing happened. so i learned not to bother saying more.

as i got older, every time he entered a room, my body revolted. my heart raced like something trapped. i avoided any room he was in. my nervous system felt like it was on the verge of exploding. when i finally tried to act “normal” after moving back home, he looked at me in front of my father and talked about the shape of my body. that moment still makes my skin crawl. a single comment, and suddenly my childhood was back in my throat, choking me.

during the metoo movement, the remembering sharpened. i was 16 and “dating” a 26 year old man, who told me it would be my fault if my uncle ever hurt anyone else because i didn’t report him. i already believed no one would do anything, i had an experience that confirmed it, so i swallowed the guilt and panic alone. i had panic attacks in my bedroom whenever he came over. i slept on the phone with long distance friends and lovers just to feel safe enough to breathe. eventually, i broke. one night i had a panic attack so severe i knew i couldn’t stay. he was going to keep coming over. i was three months out from trying to end my life, and i knew that if i stayed in that house, i would try again. so i left. i moved across the country. i thought distance might give me back the love i lost, or at least relieve the pressure of remembering but memories don’t care about geography. they pack light. they follow. they color experiences that you would never want associated with them.

i came back eventually, and this time i told the truth. the whole truth. i wept in my mother’s arms. for a moment, i thought she understood. later, she told me what i went through was “nothing” compared to her own experiences. trauma became a competition i never agreed to compete in. then 2024 arrived, and we found out he was “involved” with a 16 year old girl. my mother screamed at me for telling her. she told me i needed to report it. i don’t have the language to explain what that moment did to me — how it cracked open something i’d been holding together with shaking hands.

no one understands how much i loved him. and no one understands how much it broke me to realize i couldn’t anymore. i hate how much i miss loving him. i hate how much i miss not remembering. i hate that remembering made me the burden in everyone else’s story. sometimes i think about the child i was — the little girl who ran into his arms, who adored him with her whole soft, trusting heart — and i feel this violent, protective anger for her.

i would burn whole worlds to keep her safe now. and the worst part? there was a moment, a single moment, when i realized the love was gone entirely: when i realized that my life — and so many others — would be better if he were dead. that realization shattered me. not because it was extreme, but because it was honest. i carry all of it every day. the love, the betrayal, the remembering, the wish for forgetting. my brain protected me for a very long time, and some days i wish it still did. i know i would feel more loved if it did but this is the shape of what it means to remember. this is the cost of surviving someone you once adored. this is the grief of losing a person and losing the child who loved them — at the exact same time.

there are so many days i wish i wasn’t anybody’s daughter. not hers. not his. not theirs in theory, obligation, or blood. it took me a really long time to realize it but when i thought i wanted to disappear, i just wanted to appear as myself. i wanted to be untethered to the unpaid labor of healing two adults who never learned to truly look inward. i wish i had come into the world as a person — not property.

i mourn the childhood i never got to have. with my mother, i walked on eggshells and with my father, i walked alone. she was physically absent most of the time, only bringing home words and violence that would take an annoyingly long time to stop making my heart shatter. he was emotionally absent in ways that makes me relate to my friends that grew up with no father there at all. i had two parents in the home, though. lucky me. there’s parenting and then there’s being alive long enough to produce children. i wish the world knew the difference.

you don’t get a funeral for the childhood you didn’t have, you just carry the ashes everywhere you go. people think the parentified child grows up fast or simply has an old soul. so many of us don’t grow, we just harden. we’re fluent in the concept of responsibility but illiterate in safety. we’re excellent caretakers who never learned how to be cared for. there’s immense grief in recognizing your inner child died for a cause she never believed in: keeping the peace in a home that was never peaceful. the grief isn’t only for the mother you didn’t get or the father who never reached you — it’s also for the you that never got to just be small, never got to just be somebody’s baby. you learn to say “i don’t need anything” when what you mean is “i’ve never known help that didn’t hurt.”

reparenting yourself isn’t a transformation: it’s maintenance. it’s learning that love can feel like rest. it’s letting someone hug you without freezing. it’s allowing softness without suspicion. rebirth is not always beautiful. it’s slow and it’s human. it requires you to allow yourself humanity you’ve been denied. it’s choosing yourself without apologizing to the ghosts who taught you not to.

when i say i wish i wasn’t anybody’s daughter, i mean i wish birth hadn’t automatically enlisted me into emotional service. i wish i didn’t have to become an adult before i ever got to be a child. i have so much rage, so much grief. i feel like a very tall child a lot of the time. i know how to run a household but i also raised myself so i still have a lot to learn. i hold an incredible amount of space for anyone on a similar journey. please be gentle with yourselves. we’re gonna be okay.

I don’t blame women for using this excuse. when you grow up in a world where naming misogyny out loud is treated like you’re looking for reasons to be offended, you learn to soften the truth. Andrea Dworkin once wrote that women survive patriarchy by “strategizing around male power”, bending ourselves into shapes men prefer, rewriting the story so it hurts less. we invent explanations, soft and less dangerous ones, to keep the peace and ourselves in tact. saying “he’s probably just gay” is one of those survival strategies.

it’s a lot easier to think a man’s contempt for women is about his sexuality than to consider the deeper truth: that this man like many others don’t see women as equals or even human. maybe he never has. maybe he never will. that’s a terrifying thing to admit in a culture where men’s opinions determine women’s safety. it makes sense to reach for the gentler narrative, especially when its more socially acceptable and feels less personal.

we do need to find better coping mechanisms, however. this line of thinking helps no one. no one escapes gendered conditioning. not straight men, not gay men, not women, not nonbinary people, not anyone. patriarchy isn’t about sexuality. it’s about power and the hierarchy that power creates. patriarchy is fundamentally rooted in domination and domination always requires an inferior class, which would be women. both misogyny and homophobia are rooted in contempt for femininity, rigid gender expectations, belief in men as the superior class, and disdain towards anyone that embodies or is associated with womanhood. homophobia towards men punishes them for being “too feminine” while misogyny punishes women for existing. they are two sides of the same violent coin.

women would rather believe that there’s something out of men’s control that leads them to treat women poorly than accept that they are often being socialized to do so from incredibly young ages. it hurts a lot more to accept that but I don’t believe any meaningful change can take place if we use anything other than the truth to deal with this. women like Dworkin have told us that patriarchy thrives when women misname our oppression. we can’t blur it, soften it, or look everywhere except the source of it then except to see any meaningful changes. we can’t use queerness as a shield for male cruelty. we also can’t reinforce the idea that queer men are exempt from perpetuating misogyny, as if oppression works like a punch card — get stamped twice and you’re cleared of harming women. they are just as capable. this is how socialization works. this is how power works. this is how so many women experience the world. we have to stop coming up with new ways to let men off the hook for how they treat us. we all deserve better.

I think most parts of womanhood are a performance — and honestly, I just wish people would let us perform instead of acting like we owe them the same script.

Every woman knows what it feels like to walk into a room and immediately feel like there’s an audience. Not a supportive one — an audience that critiques, rewrites, and grades you before you even open your mouth. And because we grow up inside that spotlight, we learn the choreography without even trying. We learn what gets praised and what gets punished. We learn the “right” way to take up space.

Everyone is performing gender — men included.

The difference is that men’s performances are treated like personality traits, while women’s are treated like proof of worth. A man can be stoic, loud, controlling, soft, messy — and people say, “Oh, that’s just how he is.” A woman does anything, and suddenly it becomes a statement about womanhood as a whole.

That’s what exhausts me.

I don’t really think femininity is fake. I think it’s creative. I think it’s resourceful. I think women are constantly building identity out of whatever the world hands us. Makeup, clothing, voice, posture, hair, energy — it’s all part of how we translate ourselves. It’s a craft. It’s an art.

The problem isn’t that we perform.

The problem is that people treat our performance like homework.

If a woman wears makeup, she’s “setting unrealistic expectations.”

If she doesn’t, she’s “letting herself go.”

If she’s hyperfeminine, she’s “feeding the patriarchy.”

If she rejects femininity, she’s “trying to be a man.”

If she’s successful, she becomes the standard.

If she fails, she becomes the warning.

It’s wild how one woman’s personal choice becomes a moral lesson for every other woman.

I just wish people looked at womanhood the way they look at art — because that’s what it is. Not every artist works in the same style. Some women are dramatic and glamorous. Some are simple and minimal. Some reinvent themselves all the time. Some don’t change much at all. Most of us are a mix.

That doesn’t make any of it less real. It makes it human.

And honestly? If people are going to watch us so closely, the least they can do is stop acting like they’re entitled to direct the whole thing. Sit down. Watch respectfully. Clap if you want. Or quietly leave. Just stop trying to control the storyline.

At the end of the day, I don’t want womanhood to feel like a test we’re constantly being graded on. I want it to feel like something we get to shape — freely, intentionally, individually.

Not a rulebook.

Not a standard.

Not a competition.

Just a performance we’re allowed to enjoy.

And if people insist on watching, all I’m asking is that they learn to be better audience members.

A week before I turned 18, I decided that the wound would need to be super glued closed. I made my plans and then I told the people around me. I would leave to go be with someone that I no longer recognized anymore but could get the wound to close just enough for me to keep breathing. Leaving didn’t come without a few bruises and hits to the head. This only confirmed that I needed to leave. I had the provider of the wound and the bruises take me to the airport. I spent the next six or seven months trying to hold myself together and keep believing in the dream that had been sold to me over a year ago. I needed that dream to be reality because the alternative meant going”home” and the wound never closing. I ended up going back home anyway.

I picked up all the shattered glass my broken dream left behind and tried to make the most out of what was around me. I came back with a strong desire to make sure that everyone around me felt more peace and love than before. I needed to connect more with my fellow wound bearers and even the wound creator. I clung to them for dear life along with friends that I would consider my family to this day while I picked up every shard of glass for the next two years. I developed feelings for the only person that has ever made me feel truly safe romantically and I became an auntie. This ignited a fire in me that had been put out for years.

It was time to close the wound again. I found myself in the same position I was in at 17, panic attacks in my room and trying to cling to every ounce of hope I could find. By this time, I was almost 21. I saw where loyalties were and they weren’t with me, ever. The wound creator was choosing another wound creator over me. I had to accept that. I still do. I left behind the beauty of becoming an auntie a few weeks before to spend nights in motel rooms figuring things out with the help of people that I’ll love deeply for the rest of my life. I thought this time was it and there was no going back. I thought, finally, there were no more wound creator’s days to pretend to celebrate so there would be no more bruises emotionally or otherwise.

I wouldn’t leave again until a few months before I turned 25. I shared pretty much all of that journey online. I found so much of myself that had been lost since I was about 9. I felt like I had woken up from a nightmare and got to feel the sun on my skin for the first time in ages. I didn’t feel like a broken thing that needed to be fixed anymore. I didn’t feel like I needed to save the day while I drowned anymore. I just felt like me and I finally knew exactly who that was. More than that, I was enthusiastic about who that was. Then, there was a massive security breach. I had let the wound creator back in without knowing. The wound creator and the wound assistants made sure I needed to go back, even for just a moment. Every ugly feeling I had spent months processing and working my way through was now on the surface again. I ran back to what was familiar, the wound creator. This time, the wound creator was different and seemed ready to fix what was broken. I quickly realized that the wound creator was just gearing up to break a little more while wearing the same smile that brought me back into the lion’s den before.

I say all of this to say that if you want to break no contact, please know that you are walking back into the lion’s den and hoping you won’t get bit. I’m not saying no one can ever have a better relationship with their mother because I don’t have that option. I’ve seen the opposite happen with my own two eyes. I know that it is possible but I also want anyone that’s questioned if they should go back on being no contact to know that it’s okay if you’re closed off to the idea. You don’t have to hope that what broke you before won’t break you again. You don’t have to give anyone that’s hurt or abused you a chance to show that they are capable of doing otherwise. If you want to, it’s your life, but know that you don’t have to. No matter who gets sick, no matter what type of daughter you want to be, no matter what is happening for your wound creator. You don’t have to go back into the lion’s den. You get to keep walking in the other direction. I hope you keep choosing the direction that leads you to everything you’ve ever wanted. I hope you learn to trust yourself to keep you safe and put what’s best for you over what feels familiar. I hope you have the support and resources to make the choice really feel like a choice, rather than a last resort. You deserve more than survival.

These feelings come from what transpired in the last two months. I didn’t have the boundaries necessary to keep myself safe and so many people that I never would have suspected took advantage of that. I’ve spent the past month finding out that people I thought were trusted family members, healthcare providers, friends, and more were aiding in my abuse and decline in health. All of the stalking, coercive control, and crossing of my boundaries led me to the psych ward. Practically everything I tried to do to keep myself safe led me to an unsafe situation. I stopped trying to keep myself safe because it felt like I wasn’t meant to be. I started to give up on life again after so many months of thriving.

I spent days wandering around the streets of my hometown as people answered my 911 calls then told help not to come. I was put in juvie as a 25 year old woman after a police officer kneeled on my back. I was told that another police officer would not take my statement about being stalked by an inmate that threatened to beat me while the officer sat in the parking lot outside of the station. I made the mistake of sharing too much personal information with people from the Discord server I had and that was taken advantage of to the point that I was being gaslit by the majority of the people in there. I was being accused of things that other people were doing. I was trying to create a community while other people in there had the intention of manipulating me into mental instability while pretending not to desire me romantically in front of other people they wanted to manipulate.

I blame a lot of what happened on myself and the videos I’ve posted. I’m trying really hard not to but it feels like I put a target on my back that just wouldn’t come off until more recently. I know that more boundaries needed to be in place and I never should’ve fed into parasocial relationships that were happening. I also didn’t know that people from shelters I had gone to were in touch with someone I needed to get away from so that didn’t help. My entire sense of trust is being rebuilt and I’m just taking it moment by moment now. I say all of this to say, I miss posting. I miss connecting with people and bringing light to issues that couldn’t possibly be discussed enough. I just keep battling with both regret and gratitude. I have so many amazing things coming up but also, I’m homeless again. I’m figuring out housing again so it’s hard to enjoy the childhood dreams coming true right now but I am trying really hard to. I need all the joy I can get.

None of this or what I’ve posted so far is the quality of writing I plan to share on here. I already have those posts ready. I just feel alone in all of this sometimes and wanted to share some feelings. I know I’m loved, protected, and all of that good stuff but also no one else has been going through my exact situation but me. Thank you to everyone that has sent kind words, donations to my gofundme, and anything else. I’ll never forget any of it. Thank you for being here. We’ll talk soon because I almost never shut up. Ttyl.

I’m never going to expend very much of my energy trying to convince anyone that there are men that I do love. I don’t believe any man worth having a relationship of any kind with has an issue with women hating men. They know that our hatred isn’t comparable to the centuries of violence and oppression imposed upon women by their fellow men. They know that they’re doing the work in their everyday lives to show their respect and love for women so it’s not something they take personally. Some of my videos were exaggerated because it felt euphoric to be able to say those things without the fear of violence that accompanies interactions with them in real life. I don’t feel bad about any negative video I’ve ever posted about them. I never will. I can’t feel bad about saying “mean” or “extreme” things on the internet while everyone, including men themselves, is less safe in the world largely because of men.

A lot of things have been done to make me feel guilty. I have watched black men encourage white men to make fun of features that we share. I have been posted on Twitter by Charlie Kirk fans which led to..everything that happened last month. We can talk more about that at a different time. My point is that nothing can ever make me feel like I went too far in expressing my hatred of them. My intentions with posting have changed so the language I use moving forward will likely change as well but I want to make that very clear. Women have every single reason to not want anything to do with men for the rest of their lives. The fact that any of us are willing to let them in and hope for the best is a kindness very few of them deserve. I do know men that deserve it though. I know true allies that would immediately give up their privilege if it were a shirt they could take off. I know men that call out their fellow men extensively and have high standards for how the men they have around them treat women. There have been men that have made sure I felt safe and cared for during this incredibly difficult time in my life. I love them immensely. I still hate men as a social class though. I also hope to marry Jonathan Bailey one day. Take care.

Subscribe now