There is an effortless hospitality to the place. I’ve traveled a lot in my life, and I can honestly say I’ve never had a bad experience at Dollywood. Growing up with season passes, the park always felt intensely family-friendly, populated by workers who were so accommodating and kind it honestly felt like Dolly had personally trained every single staff member herself.

That sense of welcome extends straight from her living room into the air of the mountains. The way the park is decorated for each season is just beautiful, while the live country and bluegrass reminds me so much of my grandfather. It is a sound rooted deep in the dirt and history of the region.

Songs like 9 to 5—which played around me a lot growing up—remind me of when I was a kid, looping in my memory with church trips to Gatlinburg. Dolly is the ultimate country queen. She tells you the truth with a wink and a rhinestone.

Of all her incredible achievements, her true legacy is the Imagination Library. Inspired by her father not knowing how to read, she started a program to mail free books to kids, and it grew into something that has literally changed millions of children's lives all over the world. It wasn't just about teaching kids how to read; it was about giving them a reason to dream big, showing just how deeply she cared about giving back to the people.

When you look at her whole career, the numbers are mind-blowing. Over a seven-decade journey, she sold more than 100 million records worldwide, wrote over 3,000 songs, and scored 25 number-one hits on the Billboard country charts. All of that incredible work brought home 11 Grammys, a Kennedy Center Honor, and spots in both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But what makes her so special is that her heart matched her talent. She didn't just break records—she poured millions into disaster relief, funded medical research like the COVID-19 vaccine, and supported local schools and educational programs wherever she could.

Having gone to school at East Tennessee State University, her influence always felt close by. She is extremely authentic and an inspiration to any young woman who is a creative trying to build something, proving that even as I graduated and stepped into the next chapter, you can stay fiercely loyal to your roots while dreaming big. Her impact is generational. Growing up in Radford and hearing her recorded graduation speech to Radford University at the time of my graduation was a full-circle moment. Even though I was finishing my own journey at ETSU, her words—talking about using what you learned in school to build your own future—hit home instantly. That's just how influential she is.

Because after the park shuts down at the end of the day, when you stop hearing 9 to 5 echoing over the park along with the train whistle, the physical gates close. But Dolly’s magic and legacy live on through everyone who takes that magic with them. Going to Dollywood when I was younger felt magical—it felt like a kingdom in the woods.

That feeling always brings me right back to her words and the way she lived her life. It all comes back to my favorite quote of hers: "The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain." It is a philosophy of hers that I've carried with me for years, a reminder of the grace she has always shown and a lasting reminder of the profound impact she has had on the world.

In 1954, she did something practically unheard of for a major star in Hollywood: she walked away. She packed her bags, moved to New York to study under Lee Strasberg, and poured energy into her craft. By early 1955, alongside photographer Milton Greene, she officially founded Marilyn Monroe Productions.

She was demanding the right to choose her directors, approve her scripts, and share in the profits of her own labor. The industry tried to push back. The trades mocked her ambitions, executives threatened blacklists, and the press weaponized her independence. Yet, Marilyn held her ground until Fox capitulated in January 1956, granting her a new contract that gave her control over her career.

It was a monumental triumph. She proved that an artist could outsmart the machine, standing tall in her power and showing the world that she was the author of her own story. In 2026, a century after her birth, Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most recognizable faces on earth. Yet the true victory of her life isn’t measured in box office receipts or iconic frames of film—it is measured in the agency she fought so fiercely to secure.

For decades, many cultural retellings reduced her to a casualty of her own fame, framing her legacy entirely around the sorrow of her final days. But that narrative robs her of her power. Marilyn was not merely a victim of the Hollywood machine; she was a pioneer who exposed its flaws, a woman who proved that an artist could demand autonomy in a system designed to swallow them whole. She carved out space for women to own their labor, their likeness, and their artistic worth long before the industry was ready to grant it. When we look at her today—past the posters, and the endless reproductions—we see a woman who refused to be neatly filed away. She wanted to be taken seriously, to be known, and to be respected as a creator. And while the world was often too slow to catch up to her mind, she left behind something far more enduring than stardom: a demonstration of owning your own story.

Photo from Pinterest

Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est doesn’t just reject the romance of war; it violently explodes it, starting with the heavy, deceptive weight of its title.

The poem borrows its title from a famous line by the Roman poet Horace: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"—which translates to, "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country." It functions as a grand, gilded sepulcher: a beautifully carved monument designed to make a gruesome reality look like an honorable shrine. Society loves to worship at the altar of these polished myths, and the men march off because they haven't yet experienced the true horror to know how hollow the promise is.

The descent begins long before the gas hits; it lives in the sheer, bone-deep misery of the march. The soldiers are "old beggars under sacks," coughing through the sludge, moving forward in a state of absolute exhaustion—literally "marched asleep," many having lost their boots and limping on "blood-shod," so drunk with fatigue that they are deaf even to the sound of distant shells dropping behind them.

Then comes the sudden, terrifying chaos of the gas drop, captured in the frantic scramble of the "ecstasy of fumbling"—a mad panic where men are driven completely beside themselves, fumbling blindly for clumsy helmets just in time. But for the one man who fails to fit his mask in time, the illusion completely shatters right there in the wagon: the sound of the blood “gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.”

It is visceral, grotesque, and entirely unignorable. You can hear it. You can picture it. It forces you to stare directly at a hanging face and a drowning man.

Yet, the horror doesn't stop when the smoke clears. Owen reveals that physical survival is only half the battle, plunging the speaker into a permanent psychological cage. The trauma lingers on in the "smothering dreams," where the dead soldier endlessly plunges at him in a green, suffocating haze—a haunting reminder that the mind remains trapped in the trenches long after the body has left.

Because Owen saves his ultimate blow for the very end, the poem’s true thesis doesn't hit until the final lines. Turning his gaze outward to the armchair patriots, he throws the ancient Latin phrase back at them, finally branding it for what it truly is: the "old lie." He forces the reader into the wagon alongside the dying soldier, demanding that they witness the horror firsthand so they can never look away again.

Ultimately, the takeaway isn't just about the mud of World War I; it's a vital reminder of how easily we let history be sanitized. Not everything is as glorious as it seems, and it is crucial to recognize history for what it actually is. When we throw glitter over the brutal mechanics of tragedy to make ourselves feel safe, we become complicit in the lie. Owen’s poetry is a permanent scar left on the page.

This is part of an ongoing series exploring the powerful messages embedded in literary works — from short horror stories to classic fiction and poetry — that I’ve encountered through my literary exploitations class and beyond.

We are conditioned to be good guests in our own lives, but Carter shows us a darker truth about our own complicity. From childhood, we are fed stories that praise the girl who sees the best in a difficult man, the girl who mistakes a velvet leash for an embrace.

The Marquis doesn't start by locking the door; he starts by handing you priceless heirlooms, by pouring you champagne, by making you feel chosen. And so you perform. You smile through the tight chest and the quiet dread, because to do anything else would be ungrateful. It turns your life into a circus. You are balancing on a high wire of someone else’s making, terrified that if you slip, if you look too closely behind the curtain, you’ll be the one at fault. You spend your days managing moods, second-guessing your own instincts, and convincing yourself that the growing cage is just a room with a view. Women are taught to look for the monster with a knife, but the real danger is almost always smelling of Russian leather while he hands you the keys. You look for the good because you want to believe people are fundamentally safe, and then—precisely because you opened yourself up to his world—you realize the game was rigged before you even arrived.

That is why the heavy antique keys are the true trap of The Bloody Chamber. When the Marquis leaves for his fake business trip and hands over the ring of keys to his sprawling, decadent castle, it feels like an act of supreme intimacy. He tells his young bride she can open every single door, except one. It is the ultimate psychological setup. He doesn't just want to test her; he expects her to fail. He has predestined her curiosity, designing a boundary line specifically so she will cross it and justify her own execution. Walking through those rooms is like navigating any modern dynamic where someone holds all the cards. But the horror peaks when she finally turns that heavy key in the forbidden door. Finding the blood-stained torture chamber isn't just a gothic spectacle—it is the violent shattering of the illusion. It is the moment you realize that the man who showered you in opulence has a history of systematically destroying the women who trusted him. The key burns her hand, and the heart-shaped blood on it refuses to wash off. When the Marquis discovers her discovery, he presses the stained key into her forehead, leaving an indelible mark— the permanent brand of betrayal and sudden awareness.

Yet, the true genius of Carter’s architecture is that the labyrinth does not have the final word. The game was rigged, yes, but the Marquis underestimated the wild, untamed forces waiting outside his carefully constructed walls. When the trap snaps shut and the executioner raises his blade, the story violently rejects the traditional script of female victimhood. Salvation does not come from a handsome prince or a quiet submission to fate. Instead, it arrives on horseback in the fierce, brave form of the narrator’s mother. Breaching the castle gates, and putting a single, defiant bullet through the Marquis’s head, she represents an ancient, maternal fury that no gilded cage can contain. She is the proof that the cycle of destruction can be broken, not by playing by the monster's rules, but by blowing up the board entirely.

Ultimately, the narrator does not just survive the house of horrors; she dismantles its legacy. She rejects the corrupt luxury of her inheritance, turning the Marquis's blood-soaked wealth into a public school for the blind—transforming a monument of private terror into a sanctuary for collective healing and light. Alongside Jean-Yves, a gentle man who loves her not for her performance but for her reality. The mark remains on her forehead, a permanent scar of what she endured, but it is no longer a brand of shame. It is a badge of radical awakening.

This is part of an ongoing series exploring the powerful messages embedded in literary works — from short horror stories to classic fiction and poetry — that I’ve encountered through my literary exploitations class and beyond.

Photo from Pinterest

I’ve always been a night owl, and I really value this time—it’s the only part of my day that is entirely mine. I use these hours to just lay there and try to make sense of everything going on in my life. I actually just picked up a new diary a few weeks ago specifically for this chapter I’m in. It’s a (chic as hell) Juicy Couture one I found at a discount store, and honestly, it’s probably my favorite diary I’ve ever owned.

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My silence is not an absence of feeling; it is an over-saturation. A lot of times I become quieter, this is because the internal noise is so deafening that I have no bandwidth left for the external world. I am in the archives, sorting through the flood, trying to make sense of why the world feels so sharp.

And yet, there is the other side of me—the side that wants to be heard. It is the urgent need for a witness. I want someone to see the depth of what I am carrying, but I am terrified of the distance it creates. I see the way people look when I am "too much," the slight discomfort when I don’t perform and I refuse to keep things surface-level.

I am caught in a cycle of wanting to dull the edges to survive, while simultaneously knowing that if I succeed in becoming less sensitive, I might lose the only part of myself that makes life feel like it is happening in high definition.

I am an archivist of my own humanity, and the price of that archive is constant, quiet, and heavy labor. I am exhausted by it, but I am also defined by it. The fear I have is not just that I will be "too much" for others; it is that I will one day wake up and think that the colors have faded, that the music is noise, and realize that I have finally, successfully, protected myself right into numbness.

There are days when I find myself wishing for a quieter world. But then, the light hits the trees just right, or a song captures exactly what I couldn’t put into words, and I realize: this is the price of admission for a life lived in full color. I may be an archivist of heavy labor, but I am also a collector of profound beauty. And I think, perhaps, that is a trade worth making.

Photo I took in Summer 2025

Read that again. Not her words. Not her signature. Not anything she actually says to a judge. Just her staying quiet — even if she has no real choice, because of the people and fear around her. Under this law, that silence counts as a yes.

I keep thinking about that sentence because it marks a terrifying pivot in how the Taliban operates. This isn't a flash of sporadic cruelty; it is cruelty formalised into a permanent legal system. That difference matters. A government that rules through orders can be inconsistent — followed in one place, ignored in another. But a government that rules through written law builds something that lasts. Future courts can use it. It becomes official.

Decree No. 18 effectively dismantles protections that existed under Afghanistan's former civil code, which had set the minimum marriage age for girls at sixteen, by codifying rules that permit child marriage within the state's legal framework. It gives fathers and grandfathers broad authority to arrange marriages for children and imposes significant barriers on women seeking to challenge or dissolve marriages.

UNAMA and Amnesty International have warned that these provisions undermine meaningful consent and make it substantially harder for women and girls to escape unwanted marriages. UNAMA noted that the decree undermines protections recognised in the Taliban's December 2021 "Special Decree on Women's Rights," including provisions concerning women's consent to marriage, which had at least prohibited forced marriages.

This law didn’t appear by itself. In early January, the Taliban’s top leader quietly signed a new criminal law. Legal analyses published by Amnesty International in March explained what it actually does under Decree No. 12: domestic violence is only criminalised when it results in a broken bone or visible injury. Violence that falls below that threshold is excluded from criminal punishment, leaving many forms of abuse effectively beyond the reach of the law. That means women seeking protection must demonstrate that the abuse meets the law's high threshold for criminal punishment.

This same logic of enforced visibility extends to public life. Just as the law ignores the abuse that doesn't leave a broken bone, it demands a hyper-visibility in public, punishing any deviation from the dress code as if it were a physical transgression against the state.

Then in early June, data documented by UNAMA and reported during their June Security Council briefing confirmed that Taliban morality police arrested at least thirty women in the city of Herat for breaking dress code rules — not wearing a face mask under their burqa, letting their hair show, or wearing perfume. Witnesses reported that several of the detained women appeared fully covered, raising questions about the consistency and arbitrariness of enforcement. When people in the city protested on June 9th, Human Rights Watch documented that Taliban security forced opened fire on the crowd, killing one child and injuring others.

I want to slow down on that pattern, because I think it tells the whole story. Silence counts as agreement. Only visible injury counts as legally recognizable harm. Protesters asking to be heard are met with gunfire. Each step shrinks what the government has to notice. A girl’s voice doesn’t count. A woman’s bruises don’t count unless they’re bad enough. A street full of people asking to be heard gets answered with gunfire. This is what erasing women actually looks like up close. It isn’t one big dramatic event. It’s law after law, each one quietly deciding what doesn’t have to be seen.

Almost everything I know about this, is secondhand. Afghanistan’s own news media has been gutted since 2021. Most female journalists have lost their jobs or been forced into hiding. News outlets have been shut down or forced to work in secret. The people best able to report on women’s lives have been pushed the furthest away from being able to do it. Most of what reaches the rest of us comes through UN reports, Amnesty International briefings, and a few outlets like Zan Times, an independent investigative newsroom run by Afghan journalists working both inside the country and in exile. That’s not an accident. A government that wants silence to count as agreement also has every reason to silence the people whose job is to ask more questions. Bearing witness, here, is its own quiet act of resistance — Someone reads a law nobody else bothered to read. Someone counts how many women were arrested. Someone writes the sentence down instead of letting it pass as routine paperwork.

I don’t have a neat ending for this. What I have instead is the discomfort of that first sentence, the one about silence. It is a mirror held up to every place where power functions by interpreting silence as complicity. Institutions do this all the time, at every level—deciding that no formal complaint means nothing happened, that staying quiet means agreeing, that not speaking up out loud is itself the answer. Most of the time, it isn’t written into law. It doesn’t need to be, to still work.

The least any of us can do, wherever we are, is refuse to let someone else decide what a woman’s silence means.

I finally looked it up. Turns out I wasn’t imagining things.

The show is set in Hawkins, Indiana — fictional town, fictional county. Except the county isn’t entirely fictional. Signs throughout the show identify Hawkins as sitting inside Roane County. There is no Roane County in Indiana. There are, however, two real Roane Counties in the United States — one in West Virginia, and one in Tennessee, sitting right next to an actual Hawkins County, Tennessee.

It gets more specific. A school bus in the very first episode reads “Roane County School District.” Characters reference the Roane County Coroner’s Office. In episode 2, the search for Will takes them all the way to Cartersville — and a witness Hopper questions mentions going fishing in Etowah — both real East Tennessee towns. Characters also name-drop Jonesboro — spelled slightly differently, but Jonesborough, Tennessee is right there, fifteen minutes from where I went to school.

Although I did blink and miss them… These aren’t blink-and-miss-it background details. They’re in the dialogue, on screen, named out loud.

And maybe this is a stretch — but “Islands in the Stream” by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton plays as Bob and Joyce dance around her living room. It’s a 1983 hit that could have ended up anywhere. But it fits the mood of this particular corner of America just right.

Then there’s the lab. Hawkins National Laboratory maps almost perfectly onto Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which sits right on the edge of Roane County — a secret government facility that played a major role in the Manhattan Project and the Cold War.

Here’s why that matters. Oak Ridge was built entirely in secret in 1942, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers purchased roughly 60,000 acres of rural East Tennessee farmland to construct a city and three facilities dedicated to developing the world’s first atomic weapons. Over 80,000 people worked there, and almost none of them knew what they were actually working on. The government had engineered an entire community of deliberate ignorance — people clocking in, doing their jobs, going home to their families, with no idea what they were collectively building.

That is exactly how Hawkins works. The town exists in the shadow of a lab it knows nothing about. Hopper is eventually pulled into maintaining the silence. Oak Ridge proved that you could hide something enormous in plain sight, tucked into the Appalachian hills, and a whole community would just… live around it. Hawkins is that idea taken to its horror-story conclusion.

And then the show goes one layer deeper. Eleven’s mother, Terry Ives, mirrors the real-life victims of the MKUltra experiments — college students and civilians given large doses of LSD and placed in sensory deprivation tanks without truly knowing what they were part of. Terry was unknowingly pregnant at the time. Eleven was born into that system, stolen by Dr. Brenner, and raised inside a Department of Energy facility that mirrors Oak Ridge on the Roane County border. The Duffer Brothers set the show in 1983 — peak Cold War — and the paranoia they’re drawing on isn’t abstract. It has very specific ties to East Tennessee.

By placing Eleven’s origin at the intersection of mind-control abuse and a classified government facility, the show mirrors how East Tennessee actually served as a Cold War testing ground.

The Duffer Brothers grew up in Durham, North Carolina. They’ve said Hawkins is modeled on their hometown. Maybe that’s true for the street layout, the feel of the place. But the geography they wrote into the show — the county names, the town references, the secret lab on the county line, the shadow of MKUltra — that’s East Tennessee.

Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe they did their research and liked the resonance. Maybe someone in the writers’ room knew this region.

I just know that I drove through Jonesborough every other week for four years, and nobody ever told me I might have been practically living in Hawkins.

Photo from the Netflix Media Center

I had to sit with that for a long time before I understood what it actually meant — not as philosophy, but as practice. As something you have to choose, repeatedly, and sometimes at a cost.

I have always been an empathetic person. I have always cared deeply about the people around me, always said I wanted peace, always believed in it the way you believe in something before you truly understand it. But wanting peace and knowing where it lives are two different things. I spent years looking for it in the right circumstances, the right relationships, the right environment — not realising that none of those things could give me something that was already mine to begin with.

2026 has changed that.

It taught me that peace is not a destination. It is something you protect. And protection requires paying attention — to the people around you, the environments you inhabit, the version of yourself you’re willing to shrink into for the sake of keeping things comfortable. I got a lot more selective. I spent a lot of time alone. And somewhere in that solitude, I started to understand what Rawat meant — that the thing I had been looking for was never outside me.

But there is something his words don’t prepare you for — or maybe they do, and you just have to live it to understand.

What happens when people are actively trying to tear it down?

Because fighting for your peace looks different when the threat isn’t abstract. When someone is methodically chipping away at your light — choosing peace stops being philosophical. It becomes defiance.

It means choosing kindness when someone is trying to provoke you into something uglier. It means refusing to become what they need you to be so they can feel justified. It means holding onto yourself when the whole point of what is being done to you is to make you let go.

That is not passive. That is the most active thing I have ever done.

Rawat also says happiness is your own treasure because it lies within you. I used to perceive that as comfort. Now I perceive it as instruction. What is yours cannot be taken — but it can be neglected, eroded, given away piece by piece to people and places that were never worthy of it.

Protecting your peace means accepting that not everyone deserves access to it. It means understanding that kindness and boundaries are not opposites — that you can be a warm person and still close the door. It means choosing, every single day, to tend to something internal that the world will always try to disturb.

I am still learning this. I am still in the middle of it.

But I understand now what I couldn’t before — that peace was never something for me to find. It was something I needed to choose, defend, and return to — even when everything around me was asking me not to.

Photo from an old trip to Bermuda

There was a stretch of childhood where I wouldn’t go many places at all without my headphones — they were as essential as shoes, a piece of equipment I needed before I could leave the house.

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Outside of writing, I’m into photography, live music, and getting to know people’s stories. Probably why I became a journalist.

I’ve kept a diary since I was old enough to write. Writing has always been how I make sense of things — the world, the people in it, the stories that don’t make the front page.

Glad you’re here.

Photo by: @lexi.photosss on Instagram

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I’ve always been a defender of truth. Not in a noble, declarative way — more like an instinct I couldn’t turn off. Something in me reacts when the truth isn’t in the room. I feel it before I can name it. A tightening. A surge of something close to anger. Growing up I was confused about a lot of things — the world, people, how to make sense of what I was seeing around me. So I swung between ideas, testing different sides of things, trying to find solid ground. What I didn’t know then was that confusion isn’t the opposite of clarity. It’s the beginning of it. Every time I dug deeper, things got a little clearer. That’s still how it works for me. That’s still how I find the truth.

It didn’t click until my senior year. Four years into studying media, four years into a journalism minor, and it landed on me like it was brand new: I’m a journalist. I always have been. I just didn’t have the word for it yet.

Truth-telling has cost me things. When you’re that committed to finding where the truth lives, you’re also going to be wrong sometimes — and being wrong in pursuit of something real is a different kind of wrong than being wrong because you weren’t paying attention. But it’s still wrong. And I’ve had to learn to sit with that.

The search for truth isn’t a straight line. Sometimes you are so certain and then the full picture comes in and you have to reckon with having been confident about something incomplete. That used to feel like failure. Now I think it might be the most important part of the job. A journalist who can’t be wrong can’t be trusted. The willingness to find the truth has to include the willingness to discover you didn’t have it yet — to correct, to grow, to keep going back toward it even when it’s humbled you before.

That’s the part they don’t put in the job description.

Photo I took while traveling in NYC

There was a night near the end where I sat in my room and let myself actually think about the last four years. I lay there staring at the ceiling, my mind running through everything — my life, my choices, what was coming. That happened a lot that last semester. I’d stay up most of the night, unable to quiet my brain, because somewhere underneath everything I knew the chapter was closing and I didn’t know how to feel about that yet. All of it. The things I’d done, the things I hadn’t, the clubs I never joined, the friendships I let thin out, the version of myself that showed up my first two years — social, present, in it — and the version that showed up at the end, alone most evenings, mostly just existing.

I wondered if I’d wasted something. If I’d let the best part slip by while I was busy surviving the rest of it.

The days that last semester ran together. Work, class, repeat. Back out into a town that felt like it had stopped having a place for me, surrounded by people who made me feel like I didn’t belong there. So I sat in my car. When I felt like I had nobody, I had music — songs that felt what I couldn’t say out loud, that showed up every time without asking anything in return. If I’m being honest, music has always been my closest friend.

There’s a specific kind of alone. Not the kind that comes from having no one — I had people. It’s the kind that comes from being surrounded by people and still feeling like you’re on the outside of something you can’t name.

Graduation was relief and grief at the same time. Relief that it was closing. Grief that it was closing. And underneath both — that quiet, persistent voice that says: you could have done this differently.

Maybe. But I also know what those lonely evenings gave me. I know myself in a way I didn’t before. I know who I want to be. I also know, more clearly, who I don’t.

That’s not nothing. That might be everything. And maybe that’s exactly what Tennessee was for.

Photo I took while traveling in NYC

Prem Rawat is one of those people.

The narrative is ready and waiting for you. Cult leader. Self-proclaimed God. A man who convinced millions of followers that he was divine, that he alone held the keys to salvation, that devotion to him was the price of inner peace. It’s a tidy story. It’s also, I would argue, one of the most persistent misreadings of a human being and his message that I have come across.

I had heard his name my whole life. Or the name “guru” at least. My grandmother has followed his message since she was a young girl, meeting him for the first time in West Germany.

She carried whatever she found there across decades, across borders, across every chapter of her life that asked a great deal of her. And even knowing that — I still couldn’t quite understand it.

It wasn’t until I actually started asking questions that I started putting the bigger picture together.

Cults control. That is their defining characteristic — not belief, not devotion, not even charisma. Control. They tell you who you can speak to and who you can’t. They demand financial surrender. They create an us and a them. They make you dependent. They punish questioning. They need you small so that the structure stays large.

So I looked at my grandmother’s life and I asked myself honestly — does any of that fit?

This is a woman who has an opinion about everything. Who has walked out of rooms she disagreed with her whole life. Who raised my mother with independence and skepticism and the unspoken message that you should always, always think for yourself. Who has never once asked me or anyone in our family to believe what she believes.

That is not what a cult produces. A cult produces people who cannot function without the structure. My grandmother functions —Beautifully. Loudly. On her own terms.

On April 7, 1979, Prem Rawat gave a talk in which he broke down the very title that had become so controversial — Guru Maharaj Ji. Word by word. Gu means darkness. Ru means light. One who takes you from darkness into light. That is what a Guru is. Not a god. Not a supreme being to be worshipped. A revealer. Someone who illuminates what is already there.

And then he said something that genuinely took me back when I first read it.

He said Jesus was Guru Maharaj Ji.

Bold right?

But he said this not as a metaphor. Not as a throwaway line to seem inclusive. He said it directly. Didn’t Jesus take people away from darkness and bring them to light? So he was Guru Maharaj Ji. The title was not about a person — it was about an action. A function. A truth that could be embodied by anyone who genuinely lived it— And Prem says that Jesus embodied it completely and perfectly.

Now stop and think about that for a moment.

A man who believes he is God — the one supreme authority, the singular divine presence on earth — does not say that. He cannot say that. Because the entire architecture of that kind of ego depends on there being no one else at the top. The moment you point to Jesus as a perfect teacher, you have collapsed the claim of exclusivity.

Prem Rawat collapsed it himself. Freely. Repeatedly. Without hesitation.

When someone once asked him directly — if I am a Christian and I believe in what Jesus taught, would receiving Knowledge from you mean denying Jesus? — his answer was immediate and unambiguous.

Jesus taught this Knowledge.

You won’t be denying Jesus, he said. You will be going further on the path. You will be realising who Jesus actually was.

His father, Shri Hans Ji Maharaj, wrote about this same understanding — that the paths of great teachers may look different on the surface but they all arrive at the same place. That the state Buddha reached through his path and the state Christ reached through his are not two different destinations. They are the same destination. Different roads. One truth.

This is not the theology of someone who thinks he is uniquely divine. This is the theology of someone who has looked across traditions that point toward inner peace and recognised the same light in all of them.

Here is what Prem has actually spent his life saying.

Peace is not a concept. It is not a political position or a distant goal or something you arrive at after enough suffering. It is something that exists inside every human being right now. It has always been there.

That is the message. That is what my grandmother heard as a young girl in West Germany and recognized as something she already knew in her bones. That message is something she carries with her to this day. Without ever needing anyone else to validate it. Not because she was blindly devoted to a man but because the thing he was pointing to was real and she knew it was real and no amount of external noise was ever going to convince her otherwise.

“I wasn’t following a man, I was following my heart.” she says.

The reason so many people have misread Prem Rawat for fifty years is the same reason they misread every teacher who ever had the audacity to say that what you are looking for is already inside you. It’s an uncomfortable message. It removes the middleman. It makes institutions nervous and cynics suspicious.

This is why cult narratives exist.

Now to be fair — and fairness is the whole point of this — the confusion did not come from nowhere. In the 1970s, as a teenage leader of the Divine Light Mission, the language and imagery surrounding Prem Rawat was intense. His organization used terminology rooted in Indian religious tradition that implied a divine status, and for many Western observers encountering it for the first time, it was easy to misread. But here is what that narrative always leaves out. By the early 1980s, Rawat himself course-corrected. He moved away from that framing entirely, transitioning into presenting himself solely as a human spiritual teacher. Not a god. A person. And today his message could not be clearer — his teachings focus entirely on the subjective inner experience of peace that lives within each individual. Not worship of him. The divine he points to is not himself. It is you. It has always been you. That is not the arc of a man building a god complex. That is the arc of a man who cared more about the message landing correctly than about the power the misreading gave him.

He has spent over fifty years traveling the world to share a message that asks nobody to worship him. He has spoken about Jesus as a perfect teacher. He has spoken about Buddha with reverence. He has said consistently, in language that could not be clearer, that what he is offering is not belief in him but a direct experience of something that lives in every human being regardless of religion, culture, or background.

You cannot build a cult on that. You cannot trap people with a message that keeps insisting they are already free.

I think about my grandmother standing as an MC at one of his events—trusted with the very thing she had believed in since she was a girl. That image tells you something. Cults don’t produce that. Cults produce people who shrink. Whatever she found in Prem Rawat’s message did the opposite — it made her larger. More herself. More certain of the thing inside her that she had always known.

That’s not what following a cult looks like.

That’s what following your heart looks like.

And my grandmother — sharp, independent, opinionated, whole — is the living proof of it.

Photo from Premrawat.com

The 2026 Met Gala’s theme was “Fashion is Art” — and the looks showed up for it. Not in the way fashion usually gestures at art, referencing it from a distance. In the way that makes you stop scrolling and just look.

Anok Yai in Balenciaga was one of the most stunning things on those steps. The black gown, the architectural hood, the gold — the way it caught on her skin like she’d been kissed by something ancient. The tear tracks running down her face didn’t make her look sad. They made her look untouchable. Like grief and beauty had decided to exist in the same place at the same time, and her face was where they landed.

Photo: Getty Images

Emma Chamberlain caught my eye immediately. The dress was elegant in a way that felt alive — like the brushstrokes had just been painted onto her, still wet, still moving. You didn’t just see the art. You felt the hand that made it.

Photo: Getty Images

What stood out was that both Emma Chamberlain and Charli XCX represented Van Gogh that night — and neither of them did it the same way. Emma wore him loudly. The dress itself was designed with Van Gogh as an inspiration — and you could feel it. The colors swirling and bleeding into each other, that same restless electric energy — looking at her, you couldn’t help but think of Starry Night. Charli wore him quietly. One iris at the center of an all black Saint Laurent gown — subtle, deliberate, and just as powerful. Two women. Same painter. Completely different interpretations. Both beautiful.

Photo: Getty Images

Hunter Schafer in Prada looked like she walked out of a painting — because she did. She channeled Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Mäda Primavesi, a young girl painted with such delicacy and intention that the image has never left art history. Hunter carried that same quiet power. Ripped white and gray, a floral chiffon train — fragile and undone on the surface, but completely commanding underneath.

Photo: Getty Images

Sabrina Carpenter in Dior looked like a goddess. Old Hollywood draped over her like it was always hers. The dress was constructed from actual film strips taken from the 1954 romantic comedy Sabrina starring Audrey Hepburn — and the fact that Sabrina Carpenter was paying homage to a film that shares her name made it feel like something more than fashion. It felt like destiny. She didn’t just wear the reference. She wore the film itself. She owned it in a way that made you forget anyone else had ever worn it before.

Photo: Getty Images

Heidi Klum does this every time and every time it works. She doesn’t just dress up — she disappears. And who she came back as was Giovanni Strazza’s “The Veiled Virgin.” Every detail of her was marble. Every line was carved. She wasn’t wearing a costume inspired by the sculpture — she was the sculpture, breathing, moving, somehow standing on the steps of the Met like she’d just been uncased from a museum and set free.

Photo: Getty Images

Madonna brought a coven. Inspired by Leonora Carrington’s surrealist painting “The Temptation of St. Anthony, Fragment II,” she arrived in a gothic black Saint Laurent gown, a long flowing veil carried by seven helpers trailing behind her, a brass horn in her hands. Every detail of the painting accounted for. Every element intentional. That’s not a look. That’s a production. That’s devotion to the art of showing up. That’s Madonna.

Photo: Getty Images

Anne Hathaway wore a poem. A hand-painted gown pulled from Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” — doves, peace, ancient imagery on black silk. Her designer called her his Grecian urn. A woman becoming a poem. That’s the kind of thing that stays with you.

Photo: Getty Images

And Yu Chi Lyra Kuo in Jean Paul Gaultier looked like she descended from somewhere higher than a red carpet. Channeling the Winged Victory of Samothrace — a headless, armless sculpture that has left people speechless at the top of the Louvre’s Daru staircase since 1883. Lyra carried that same energy to a different set of steps.

Photo: Getty Images

A lot of people will tell you that fashion’s obsession with the past means we’ve run out of ideas. That pulling from classical art, from surrealism, from ancient sculpture means we’re going backward.

I don’t think so.

There’s a difference between reaching backward and keeping something alive. Preservation isn’t regression. Honoring what came before isn’t a sign that we’re stuck — it’s a sign that we know where we came from. The looks that caught my eye felt timeless.

People often place preservation and regression in the same sentence. But there is something beautiful about valuing the existence of things enough to carry them forward — so that art doesn’t die with the era that made it. It gets handed to the next generation instead.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Growing up, I didn’t always have the words for what she was doing. I just knew that she was there. When things fell apart, she was there. When I needed someone in my corner, she was there. Not sometimes. Not when it was convenient. Every single time. She showed up for me the way some people show up for work — like it was just what you do, like there was never any other option.

As a kid, she made every birthday feel like the most important day on the calendar. In a way that told you someone had been paying attention. She put thought into it, care into it, love into it, because that’s what she does with everything she touches. Those birthdays didn’t just feel special. They felt like proof. Proof that I was seen. Proof that I was loved. Proof that to her, I was worth celebrating.

And it wasn’t just birthdays. Whatever I was involved in at school, she wanted to be there. If it mattered to me, it mattered to her. She showed up to things parents don’t always show up to. She asked questions, stayed involved, kept up with every detail because she genuinely cared. Not because she had to. Because she wanted to. There is a difference, and as a kid, you feel that difference in your bones.

She is my biggest cheerleader. Loudest voice in the room, most belief in her heart. She never lets me doubt that she is in my corner, and when you grow up with that kind of support behind you, it changes the way you move through the world. You walk a little taller. You try a little harder. You believe in yourself a little more — because someone who loves you believed in you first.

But here is the thing about my mother: She is radiant and outgoing in a way that stops people in their tracks. People gravitate toward her because there is something in her that refuses to dim. She inspires me to stay positive even when I want to give up.

Not everyone has a mother like that. I know that now more than I did when I was young. I know what it means to be loved the way she loves — steadily, fiercely, without condition. It shapes you. It gives you a kind of foundation that holds even when everything else is shaking.

I could write endlessly about the ways my mother shows up for me. There are not enough pages, not enough words, not enough hours in the day to capture all of it. Every memory I have of growing up has her fingerprints on it somewhere — in the background, in the front row, in the quiet moments no one else saw. That is not an exaggeration. That is just the truth of who she is.

I heard that lyric and just got it immediately. Not in a poetic way. In a literal way. Silence and I have never really gotten along. There is just too much in it. Music has never been background noise for me — it has always been the thing that makes everything else make sense.

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While most kids my age were checking out picture books or chapter series about kids solving mysteries, I was the one at the library quietly pulling horror stories off the shelf. One of the ones I kept going back to was Alvin Schwartz’s “The Green Ribbon” — a deceptively short children’s story from his 1984 collection In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories. I thought I loved it because it was creepy. A woman wears a ribbon around her neck her whole life, refuses to explain it, and when her husband finally removes it on her deathbed — her head falls off. Classic.

I had no idea I was reading a feminist text.

It wasn’t until I encountered it again in my literary exploitations class — this time alongside Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber — that the ribbon stopped being just a horror gimmick and started being something that made me genuinely uncomfortable in a different way. Because I realized it wasn’t about a severed head at all. It was about what happens to women who dare to keep something for themselves.

There is a moment in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber when the narrator stops being an object and starts being a person. She opens the forbidden door. She sees the truth. And everything changes — not because the Marquis becomes less dangerous, but because she finally does.

That moment has a name in real life. We just don’t always call it liberation. We call it difficult. Selfish. Too much.

In Schwartz’s “The Green Ribbon,” a wife spends her entire marriage protecting one private piece of herself from a husband who cannot stand that there is a single thing about her he doesn’t own or understand. The ribbon isn’t dramatic. It isn’t dangerous. It is simply hers. And that is exactly why he can’t let it go. When she finally gives in out of sheer exhaustion, she loses her head entirely. The metaphor is impossible to miss: some boundaries are the only things holding a woman together, and when a partner forces those boundaries down, he isn’t getting closer to her — he is destroying her.

This is not just a fairy tale. It is Tuesday.

According to the https://leanin.org/ 2023 Women in the Workplace survey, nearly 60 percent of professional women reported burnout as a primary barrier to performance, driven mainly by unrealistic workloads, blurred boundaries, and an always-on culture. And yet, when women begin to protect their time, the backlash is swift — they’re seen as difficult, detached, or disinterested, and their ambition is questioned even if their output hasn’t changed.

The language has updated since the days of Jenny and her ribbon. Instead of pestering a woman about what she’s keeping to herself, society now questions her loyalty, her warmth, her likability. She has “changed.” She used to be so easy to be around.

In 2024, 37% of women reported experiencing harassment at work — a number unchanged from previous years — suggesting that no amount of awareness campaigns have actually changed the culture underneath.

Carter understood this deeply.

In The Bloody Chamber, the male gaze isn’t just about attraction — it is about ownership. The Marquis surrounds the narrator with mirrors not to help her see herself, but to see his wealth reflected back through her beauty. She begins to look at herself the way he looks at her, judging her own body by what she imagines he wants to see. This internalized gaze is one of the most quietly devastating things a woman can experience — the moment she stops being the one who looks and becomes only the one who is looked at.

The story only shifts when she uses the key. When she chooses to see the truth rather than perform for his approval. That act — of looking with your own eyes instead of borrowing his — is what Carter presents as the only real escape from the trap.

In real life, that key looks different for every woman. It might be leaving. It might be speaking. It might be simply refusing to keep shrinking. But the response is often the same: punishment. Social exile. The accusation that she was fine before, that something went wrong in her.

Women remain underrepresented at every level of the corporate pipeline — making up just 29 percent of C-suite roles and research consistently shows that women who advocate for themselves are penalized in ways men simply are not.

What they mean when they call her difficult is that she has become someone they can no longer control.

The mother at the end of The Bloody Chamber doesn’t arrive on horseback to be looked at. She arrives to act. She represents a kind of female power that has nothing to do with being chosen or approved of — it simply exists, and it moves, and it saves. That image is radical precisely because it is so rare: a woman whose worth is not measured by any man’s gaze at all.

Both Carter and Schwartz — one writing literary gothic fiction for adults, the other writing scary stories for children — are ultimately telling us the same thing across different audiences and different centuries. The woman who reclaims her identity will be called a problem. The boundary she protects will be called a wall. The moment she stops performing will be called a betrayal.

But the ribbon was never the problem.

The man who couldn’t leave it alone was.

This is part of an ongoing series exploring the powerful messages embedded in literary works — from short horror stories to classic fiction and poetry — that I’ve encountered through my literary exploitations class and beyond. Stay tuned.

Photo: Amazon.com