This essay is the third in a series. Here is part 1 and part 2.

“This city’s been destroyed by tourism.”

He continues, “El centro’s the only thing we have left, and it’s completely overrun with tourists. The rest of the city looks like shit.”

Everyone nods and I ask, “How long have you been living here?”

He responds, “I got here a month ago.”

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Feral Woman Reading Club had its first official meeting last Saturday, August 22! We had representation from Vancouver to above Norway’s Arctic Circle, people AND dogs.

Thank you to , , Kristen, and Eva for coming and making the discussion so special. To recap, we read three essays about change:

• “Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion

• “Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet” by Henrik Karlsson

• “State Change” by Ken Liu

And if you’re sad to have missed it… our next Feral Woman Reading Club will be Saturday, October 3rd at 1PM ET. The theme is: the power of language and critical thought. We’ll be reading two essays:

• George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language

• Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture

Below are the video from our Reading Club session as well as links to October’s readings and Zoom meeting. Hope to see you then!

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This is Part 2 of my “Travel Diaries” series. Here is Part 1 and Part 3.

I’m at the Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest performing arts festival. It features everything from traditional stand-up to musicals to interactive clown shows about Van Gogh. Sounds cool, right? Except the thing that makes it so “cool,” that it boasts over 4,000 shows per day1, is the very thing that makes it my own personal hell. After all, I only have four precious days, four afternoons, four 8-9PM timeslots. And I have to make them count.

Every wall in the city is covered in show posters, and that doesn’t even take into account the hundreds of people handing out flyers, “come to my one-woman opera!” “see the only aerial pole show at Fringe!” “A musical about Endometriosis!” It feels like I’m experiencing my Instagram feed incarnate. On my first day, I figure out when the hell “21:40” is, and then realize the six shows I want to go to all start within the same window on opposite sides of the city. After a full morning of military-grade marketing assault, I duck into a sandwich shop for a quick reprieve, but see more flyers littering the counter. I order, pay, and head to the bathroom. I close the stall door, sit, close my eyes, and exhale, only to open them and see: One. More. Poster.

All of this stress is augmented by the fact that my phone isn’t working. You may think: Ok! Just use the WiFi at your accommodation! Well, the WiFi doesn’t seem to work there. Go to a café! Turns out the WiFi doesn’t really work anywhere in Edinburgh during Fringe since the network can’t handle the 700% population increase it experiences during the festival.

But that doesn’t stop me from trying: I spend every spare 30 minutes I have between shows circling the drain on tasks that should take ~2 minutes, my requests often timing out, making me unable to cross a single item off my ever-elongating to-do list. Ultimately, I get an email from RyanAir, “IF YOU DO NOT SCAN YOUR PASSPORT YOU WILL BE FINED…” but the rest gets cut off, “this message has no content.”

I find my friends and determine that while yes, the data sucks here, there is something uniquely wrong with my phone. Unable to hear them over my own internal panic, I leave without saying goodbye. I walk while holding my phone delicately so as to not disturb the Google Maps route that took so long to load. I arrive 20 minutes later to a shuttered phone store, my cortisol now spiking to new heights. I notice people being shepherded toward the nearest mall, and I follow, hoping another phone store is inside. As one comes into view, I feel euphoric. Am I experiencing a mirage? My mouth waters and I prepare to kiss the ground. I run into the empty store and throw my problems at the first clerk I see, “HELP my phone won’t work I can’t scan my passport I will pay you anything.”

The clerk looks at me tiredly, “connect to the WiFi here,” she says. “Stay as long as you need.”

I prioritize the RyanAir passport scan. They’re going to chop off my legs and leak my nudes if I don’t check in early (actually, they’ll just fine me. It’s hefty, but it’s not apocalyptic). I show the clerk, Karla*, how I cannot scan my passport, something I’ve already attempted for 45 minutes in my dorm. She also tries (and fails), and seeing this gives me permission to stop throwing myself at the metaphorical concrete wall that is the RyanAir app. “Go to the airport early, and be really nice to them, they can help you out,” she says. Turns out she used to work at the airport and knows all the staff. However, her glazed-over eyes sharpen for a brief moment, “Just don’t eat at the Starbucks. Trust me.”

“I won’t,” I promise.

On the phone store’s powerful WiFi, I start tackling tasks one-by-one: googling shows, downloading an offline version of Edinburgh’s map, responding to urgent messages. Even though I should feel relief, my shoulders aren’t ready to un-scrunch, and my breathing remains stunted, “but my phone data plan still doesn’t work, do you have any idea why?”

Karla drowsily scrolls through my phone settings. Uncomfortable with the silence and embarrassed by the insane way I entered the store, I pepper her with questions about living in Edinburgh. She recommends visiting a town an hour away where I can put my toes in the grass; it’s where she lives. I hoard her recommendations in my Notes App, still high on adrenaline from being woken up by the dorm’s fire-alarm that same morning.

“What’s your favorite place in Edinburgh?” I ask.

“Spoons,” she says. It’s a bar chain.

I feel bad for how much time she’s spent with me, “can I buy a SIM card from you?” We quickly determine this isn’t possible since I have a locked phone and they only sell 30-day plans. There’s nothing I can buy from her. She’s just helping me.

“Thanks for caring,” I say timidly. “Do a lot of people come in here just needing random tech support?” I ask. She nods, “mostly the elderly.”

Karla figures out why my roaming data plan isn’t working. My phone keeps trying to optimize for the best signal, but is stuck in a loop of optimizing similarly poor signals, resulting in no connectivity at all.

The phone store is underground, dark, and weirdly damp, and sitting side-by-side with Karla reminds me of the camaraderie of late nights in computer science office hours debugging bad code. Turns out Karla’s been awake for 36 hours, and the travel cup she keeps sipping from is filled with Monster Energy Drink.

She turns off the roaming auto-connect, and selects a single (bad) service provider, to break the loop.

“What wasn’t working before that we could try?” Karla asks.

“Instagram,” I say.

I disable WiFi and turn on cellular, the moment of truth to see if our code will run Karla has succeeded.

I open Instagram to a flood of messages, but I get two drop-down notifications in quick succession:

Famous Person*, 2.5M followers, is following you

Message Request from Famous Person

Karla’s eyes, which I’m pretty sure haven’t blinked since I walked into the store, widen, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to read your screen… I think I’m hallucinating,” she says.

“That wasn’t a hallucination.”

Karla leans back in her seat and covers her mouth. She brings her chair in for a landing, takes a huge gulp from her jug of Monster, and calls over her coworker. In the shopping center basement, in a basically-empty phone store with as much ambiance as a hospital waiting room, I tell them how I befriended Famous Person at a party the night before.

After a few minutes of regaling them with my lore and watching their eyes widen and their jaws drop, two customers come in. Karla and her coworker turn to help them.

“Sorry for taking too much of your time,” I slip in before they leave, embarrassed to have overstayed my welcome, to be like one of the elderly people probably using “technical issues” as a cover to satiate their need for human connection.

Karla shakes her head, “I’m clocking out in 45 minutes, I’d love nothing more than to just keep doing this.” She runs to the breakroom, returns with a plastic bag. In it, a Milka chocolate bar. She breaks off a piece and gives me the rest, “be right back.” I don’t look at my phone, just enjoy the store, watch the customers, savor the chocolate.

Karla comes back, sits, and tells me how after work, she’s getting on a 2-hour bus ride to see her boyfriend in Glasgow. He just got his student pilot’s license. “Next time you come to Scotland, we’ll make sure you see outside the city. We can fly over the Highlands.”

I wish I could say the phone store intervention was enough to break me out of my anxiety spiral, but it wasn’t. Once my data was working, I continued to optimize everything, only now with a slightly more functioning phone signal. I bought tickets for shows, then beat myself up for not seeing Edinburgh. I explored the city, then beat myself up for not seeing the Highlands. I went on a 12-hour bus tour through the Highlands, but spent the whole time worrying about how I hadn’t posted enough content. No matter what decision I made, I was always wrong.

It has been a week since I left Scotland. While I saw incredible shows and beautiful vistas, I can safely say that my favorite part of the trip was hanging out in the phone store.

I now recognize that a lot of my time in Edinburgh was spent like my phone before the fix, frantically trying to optimize between near-identical options. I imagine that if I had that much fun in a phone store, I probably would have enjoyed nearly anything if I had let myself be present for it.

* Names & identities anonymized for privacy

PS - Feral Woman summer reading club is next Saturday, 8/22 at 1PM EST. We’re reading three essays on travel & change. Learn more here!

PPS - If you liked this essay, check out Part 1 of my Travel Diaries Series. Part 3 comes out Friday, August 28.

This is Part 1 of my “Travel Diaries” series. Here is part 2 and part 3.

Last year, I started blaming all my problems on New York City. I was convinced that living here was why I wasn’t dating, why I felt lonely, why things were not working.

In December 2025, I wrote in my journal:

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Hi folks- a bit of a departure from my regular programming: I am doing a summer reading club! Instead of reading one book, we’ll be reading a selection of essays and short stories centered around change and seeing things in a new light:

1. Goodbye to All That, an essay from Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

2. Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is because you misread the ones you meet by Henrik Karlsson

3. State Change, a short story from Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

Togther, they’re about one hour total reading time. We’ll discuss all three in one Zoom call the weekend of Aug 20-23 or 28-29, for paying Feral Woman subscribers.

Paid subscribers get: reading materials, the live call, recording afterward if you can't make it, and discussion thread (in the chat). I’ll link all the materials below. Cameras are optional on the call, and if don’t want to be in the recording just let me know and I’ll cut it.

upgrade here

Already a paid subscriber? Vote on what times work here. Voting closes next Wednesday, July 29th. I’ll be dialing in from Spain, so the times skew ET afternoon, Spain (CEST) evening. I’ll email the zoom link to paid subs the week of, as well as any discussion questions/topics.

EDIT: Everyone has voted! Meeting will be Sat Aug 22 1PM EST // 7PM CEST (Spain). The meeting link is below!

All three of these pieces have meant a lot to me and changed the way I think. I try to re-read them when I am going through a big period of change, and I figured it’d be really fun to do it with all of you.

Looking forward to seeing some of you over Zoom,

Olivia

Upgrade here (but this time in a bigger font)

reading materials & zoom link:

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I follow my manager into a sterile meeting room.

As he sits down, he says, “Olivia, I love your blazer.”

I scooch in my chair, smiling, “Thanks, it’s my mom’s.”

“So today’s your last day.”

While it’s cool to have been fired from your barista job for being too “artistic” with the latte art, it’s not as sexy to be fired from your prestigious tech job two months in.

I nervously look around, waiting for the cameras to come out and tell me this is a joke. Across the table, my manager’s previously-kind eyes have turned to stone, as if his body’s now running the company software used to deliver bad news.

The TV mounted on the wall between us springs to life, and a blonde, plastic-faced, 20-something-year-old booms over the microphone, “Hi I’m Brittany! I’ll be handling your transition today.”

My manager pushes out his chair and stands up, so I stand up, intersecting his path, “This is insane. You’re the one who interviewed me, mentored me.” My heart racing, I ramble, “What about my “special skillset,” all my potential?”

He sits back down, purses his lips, and says flatly, “I was wrong. We only hire exceptional people, and you are not exceptional.”

..

..

.

Brittany pipes back in, “I know this can be a lot to take in—”

I laugh.

You could convince me I wasn’t good at my job. You could convince me that I didn’t work hard enough or I was fat or neurotic or unloveable, but strangely enough, where I draw the line is at “not exceptional.” The evidence simply does not support the claim.

We’re interrupted by a heavy knock, a knock that could only belong to a 250-pound security guard. He stands at the door, signaling “you can come with me, or I can make you come with me.” He follows me across the office to my desk and watches me put my measly belongings into a box (having only been there seven weeks, I hadn’t had time to really decorate). I then embark on my escorted walk of shame across the open floor plan, as coworkers cluster, glancing up from their laptops to see who had been sniffed out that day, discovered to be unexceptional.

I walk outside, and sit on a stoop a few blocks away. Watching people pass me by, I say out loud, “I cannot do this again.”

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For years, I had been in a cycle of overachieving things I did not want. But because I did not know what I wanted, and thought it was something only privileged people got to think about, I just went along with the biggest common denominator of what was “good” to want.

I learned early that harder = better. I went to Stanford because it was the hardest school to get into. I then pursued the hardest major to give me the “best chance” at making the most money. It didn’t matter that I cried every day or gained 45 pounds or went to the hospital with stroke-like migraine symptoms. If I worked hard enough, I could do it.

And I could work hard. I was stubborn to a fault– after all, when you see failure as a personal defect, you become really good at mastering systems of external validation.

My first full-time job was at Facebook, making six figures at 21 years old. I was my family’s darling, but god, was I bored. My job could’ve been done by an eighth grader, but the corporate peacocking and gaslighting drained me. I stayed for years, listening to my parents tell me how good I had it despite feeling my soul eke out of my body into my Herman Miller chair.

I started getting headaches again, but this time, with visuals: images copy-and-pasted across my line of sight, giant chunky glitter strewn across my vision. It was as if God was throwing a party to celebrate the end of my life.

Eventually, things escalated into a four-month-long migraine that doctors across the country couldn’t crack. It was only when I was rendered physically disabled that I felt permission to quit my job.

It’s as if my mind and body were in a car, and my mind kept driving despite my body yelling “we are going the wrong way, turn around.” The four-month-long migraine was my body grabbing the wheel, only instead of doing a u-turn, it crashed.

After months of failed treatments, I convinced myself the problem was that Facebook was too big a company, it was the corporate politics that were the problem. So when a startup dangled a $200k/year carrot in front of my face, it didn’t matter that I still saw double, it was time to get back to work.

Six months in, the CEO told me a presentation on graphic design was “life or death,” which was hard to take seriously after being confronted with my own human fragility. I was unwilling to get less than my neurologist-mandated eight hours of sleep a night, and it didn’t help that I asked questions about some fudged numbers. The following week, I was fired Mao Zedong style- here one day, gone the next.

I spent another year in the medical abyss, hemorrhaging tens of thousands of dollars on doctors and medications and holistic treatments. I waited eight months for an appointment with the country’s premier opto-neurologist, when, after listing all that I had been through, asked me, “have you ever tried meditation?”

Despite showing only a moderate improvement in my condition, I figured that I had spent enough time “sitting around” (experiencing chronic illness) and needed to find a salaried, good-benefit job to safety-net me if my health ever really acted up again. It had not occurred to me that these jobs could be the cause of my health issues.

And that’s how I ended up here, sitting across from my manager. Getting fired two months into my new job.

This job was supposed to be “the solution.” After a tumultuous three years cycling through medical leaves, firings, and unemployment, this was the proof that I was “back on track.” Signing the contract, I felt my parents and LinkedIn network collectively exhale. I was no longer the unstable former-prodigy daughter with a spotty resume, I was now gainfully employed at one of the most elite illuminati-type Silicon Valley companies, Palantir. A Stanford, for people who went to Stanford. It felt like dating a super hot billionaire after being single for a couple of years. All of a sudden, I was no longer the undateable spinster, but instead the quirky girl that held out.

The day before I got fired, I got to the office at 7:00 am. I was determined to make this job work, scared of having to go back to the evil job market so soon after being claimed. After my 11:00 pm meeting with my manager, I peeled myself off my chair, extended my legs, and went to go look out the windows at our fancy NYC office. On my way there, I passed people sitting at their desks, their computers illuminating their faces in the shadows. I had come to the office in darkness, and I would leave in it too. I walked up to the big bay of floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out at the dark city, and thought, “I am in someone else’s life right now. This is not my life.”

I had been outside the matrix, and each day at Palantir felt like I was going back in, laying down and holding the tube to my neck, hoping no one would notice.

I went to sleep, woke up, and that day, they noticed. I was fired.

I hear famous artists talk about a little voice in their head, something that told them they were destined for greatness. I never heard a little voice, not a single “Olivia, you’re an artist” or “you’re meant for something, big girl. Dream.” Because of that, I thought it was a sign to stay at whatever job I had.

I couldn’t even admit I was miserable until I was physically unable to look at a screen because it’d feel like an insult, like saying I didn’t like caviar, or fancy vacations.

I felt like I wasn’t allowed to be unhappy because I had no idea how to fix it. But discrediting a feeling just because you don’t know how to resolve it is like saying a house isn’t on fire because you don’t know how to put it out.

It took failing out multiple times to see any sort of pattern, to the point where it became undeniable. If you’ve ever had a friend in an abusive relationship, you know that you can tell her to leave, but she won’t until she sees it for herself. Although I wish I could shortcut this whole thing, sometimes you need to go back to see why you left.

Up until the humiliation ritual that was my firing from Palantir, I had not learned my lesson. I had only heard the voice of fear, fear of not having a stable income, healthcare, or an answer to my mom’s question, “but Olivia, what will I tell people?”

I had been waiting for everyone to give me permission to leave my job, like I was locked in a cage everyone had a key to except me. And in the case of Palantir, I was forced to leave the cage. But in retrospect, the cage was never locked, but the door was closed. I just couldn’t tell the difference from the inside.

Sitting on the stoop outside of Palantir, I did not know if I wanted to be a comedian or a writer. All I knew was that my biggest fear was not getting fired or losing health insurance but doing it all over again just to end up in the same place, a year later.

For the first time, I was able to wonder, “What if I spent the next 10 years doing something I like?”

I want to be very clear: I had money. Not a trust fund that would infinitely create more money for myself year after year into infinity, but I had a cushion of savings from working in high-paying jobs. More importantly, even if I ran out of every dollar I had, I never needed to worry about not having a place to sleep. It may not be the most comfortable to move in with my parents, but there was a 0% chance I could ever be homeless. And yet, I still believed that if I didn’t have one of these jobs, the world would implode and I would be left destitute.

I see people making $100k/year or $500k/year and they tell me “oh Olivia, that’s so nice you could leave and do your own thing.” Unless they are somehow burning every dollar they make, if they really wanted to, they could leave, too. I had a friend tell me she couldn’t quit the job she allegedly hated so much, but the next week was talking about buying apartments.

This is not a manifesto on why you should leave your job. If leaving your job means you and your baby will not have food and end up homeless, stay. But if that is not you and you’re still saying you CAN’T leave, I dare you to challenge that belief.

When most people tell me they can’t leave, they don’t usually mean they’ll end up homeless, it means they’re scared, that it’s inconvenient, that it’s uncomfortable, they don’t know what they want to do, they don’t think it’s worth it, they don’t want people to stop respecting them because they don’t have a nice LinkedIn headline anymore.

It’s easy to discredit the voice of fear for “realism”: “okay so what DO YOU want to do with your life? Hm? Do you have a plan? You can’t just QUIT your JOB and FIND your life, okay? We don’t all have that PRIVILEGE. Some of us have BILLS to pay. Oh, you’re an artist? Art? More like crafts. What’s the last thing you made? Did it make any money? Even really famous artists are poor. Van Gogh didn’t make it until he died. What makes you think you’re so special you’ll make it while you’re alive?

Along with fear, I spent a lot of time with shame, shame of wanting a life I enjoyed, as if somehow that would discredit my parents’ hard work and decision to stay in jobs they disliked. As if the only honorable route would be to live as if my family was still poor in a village in Romania.

But there is no honor in choosing unhappiness, especially when you have the privilege to be happy. Here I had the money to quit, to take time off, but chose to be unhappy because that was the proof I was grateful for what my family had provided for me.

I didn’t see it at the time, but I had already taken a single step toward my happiness. Palantir was so miserable that I physically forgot how to laugh, so a week in I signed up for an improv class. Each week, I’d play one of two characters: angry worker or shitty boss. Eventually, when I told everyone in class I had been fired, no one was surprised, and everyone was happy for me. Someone was putting on a stand-up comedy show, asked if I’d perform. I hadn’t done it since college, but fuck it, I said yes.

My parents and friends had a hard time understanding this, “so you were fired at Palantir and now you want to be a stand-up comedian?” No, you linear-thinking fools! I’m just trying to figure out what I like.

As I threw myself into stand up, I reached out to Gina Brillon, a comedian I had opened for in college. When I met with her, I learned all about her life as a full-time stand-up. It was the first time I had really spoken with someone that supported a family with an arts career. I had grown up seeing the arts as something only privileged people did, but Gina was not that– quite the opposite actually. She didn’t do stand up because it was convenient or easy, but because she couldn’t imagine life any other way.

I loved hanging out with her. I became her shadow, keeping her company at all her shows. From there, I met more people that constantly challenged my preconceived notion of what an “artist” was. Real people, 1-bedroom apartment artists. And they were happy.

A few months in, I went to dinner with a friend from college, Grant*. He invited some friends I didn’t know, and one asked me what I “did.” I dreaded saying “unemployed,” which often led to me justifying my firing. Nervous, I tried something new. I responded, “I’m a comedian.” Grant immediately interjected, “Olivia’s not a comedian, she’s a software engineer.”

The voice inside my head had escaped, found its way onto Grant’s lips, publicly disrobing me, calling me a fool. After dinner, I confronted him, and he said, “Well, Olivia, someone’s gotta be realistic.” That’s when I realized Grant’s objection didn’t mean I wasn’t a comedian, it meant he didn’t believe in me. We couldn’t be friends anymore, because he was trying to bait me back into the cage I had just escaped, and had no interest in going back to.

I continued doing shows and even started making videos. Eventually, one went viral, but I got really anxious about it– I had spent so little time making it compared to my other videos, and felt embarrassed this was the thing that had taken off. I started talking to people about it, and when I realized so many people had the same experience, I wrote about it.

People started messaging me, saying they had experienced similar things. I wrote more, and a girl told me she had quit stand-up comedy but an essay I wrote convinced her to try again. People I hadn’t spoken to in years were unearthing themselves, and even my grandma started calling me each time I published to discuss. All of this meant so much more than “good set” or “you were really funny.” I felt whole, like I was in a golden resonance with my life.

While this was happening, I kept chasing stand-up comedy goals: getting passed at clubs, featuring on specific shows, touring other cities. But quickly, these accolades lost their shine, and I felt burned out trying to do it all. I loved stand up comedy, but to me, it was like going to the gym. It made me feel good, and I met people I liked, but I didn’t want to be a bodybuilder.

I called my friend Catherine for advice, since she had built a very successful life as a creator. She asked me, “if you had to choose between the most successful version of your writing career and your stand up career, which would you pick?”

“Writing,” I said immediately. I had never said that before, or even known it.

She asked, “Well why don’t you just focus on that for three months and see where it goes?”

I said, “DON’T YOU SEE I HAVE TO POST STAND UP COMEDY REELS.”

“Okay,” she said. “Sounds like you’re not ready to hear that.”

Since I wasn’t working for someone else, I thought that there would be no more cages. But turns out, I had built a new one. I was almost impressed at my own ingenuity, how I had tricked myself. I seemed to like the comfort of it, the blind acceptance of its constraints. I had to train to see it, to sit outside of it.

For years I waited for divine intervention, for the skies to open up and a beam of light to shoot into my forehead telling me “go be an architect!” or “move to Spain!” I thought I could only leave my job if I knew exactly what I wanted to do and how I was going to do it. I felt a pressure that whatever came next better be worth it.

But “next” wasn’t a finite state, it was a discovery process, testing the hypothesis of what I could possibly enjoy. It’s not about trying something new and expecting that to immediately be your “dream,” and then failing if you don’t love your first move out the gate. It’s more about taking steps, redirecting and refining. And once I felt what it was like to enjoy what I was doing, it became violently clear every time I wasn’t.

Dreams cannot be heard if you deny your most base feelings. Stomped on long enough, especially in a world where pessimism often masquerades as realism, dreams become quiet. It’s like yelling a child into submission for years, asking what she wants for the first time, and then being surprised she has no answer. When every day is about surviving, there is no space to want.

I’ve since learned to listen closely. That meant starting with really hearing, “this is not my life.” And finally, that was enough.

If you liked this essay, you’ll likely enjoy:

© 2026 Olivia Barbulescu. Restack, quote, and share, just keep my name on it. Do not republish whole pieces or use commercially without asking. Licensing: hello@oliviabarbulescu.com.

Last month, a girl went viral on TikTok for translating my essay into Spanish. She got 1.1 million views on an 11-minute-long video where she explains my essay’s backstory, credits me, reads her translation, then gives her own opinion.

When I first saw the video, it had 40,000 views. I was flattered; I couldn’t believe people on TikTok were sitting to watch the whole video. The comments were overwhelmingly positive, with people saying “quiero besar tu cerebro” (I want to kiss your brain) and I started getting really beautiful DMs saying how much my writing “means to so many mexican women.”

As the views climbed, I noticed the girl’s page getting flooded with new followers. She started to make follow up videos responding to the comments people left on her translation, and was writing Substack posts of her own in response. My basic understanding of Spanish could only get me so far in reading the nuanced comments, and I felt left out of the conversation. I was no longer the face of my work, and it was taking off in a way I couldn’t control.

I was jealous.

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Video essay can be found on YouTube here.

When I was in college, I was so afraid of getting emotionally manipulated by men that I read The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society of Pickup Artists. It’s the red-pill incel’s guide to picking up women, and I figured, what better way to defend myself than by doing reconnaissance on their battle plans?

My biggest takeaway from reading The Game was the concept of “negging.” Negging is an emotional manipulation tactic where (typically) a man gives a backhanded compliment to undermine a woman’s confidence. The goal is that, hopefully, by making her feel insecure, she’ll crave his validation.

As a result of my research, I was always vigilant of negging in dating. Having the vocabulary to understand these passive-aggressive put-downs helped me identify and avoid insecure men.

I realized with time that many of my girl friends didn’t know about negging, but once I introduced them to the topic they had a lightbulb moment. A few years ago, my friend went on a date with a guy who asked her to play piano for him. When she did, he mocked her skill and posture. The next day, he asked to see her again. She called me: “Olivia I don’t get it… it doesn’t even seem like he likes me. Why would he ask to see me again?” Girl, he’s negging you.

While I’m really good at avoiding negging in my dating life, I recently realized it can happen platonically, too. Last month, an essay I wrote, “men aren’t needed anymore and they’re struggling to adapt to being wanted” went mega viral when a big Instagram account licensed part of it for a post. While I’ve learned to deal with hate comments from people I don’t know, I struggled with the subtle negging I received from people I knew in real life.

I got tons of messages like “Oof, rough title,” or “This was surprisingly well-written” from guys I had labeled as “nice.” Either they had girlfriends or read books or were in the minority of guys not doing rape jokes at my stand-up comedy open mic. I always imagined negging would come from the men that called women “females” and focused on biological differences between the genders. I was upset to realize the few men I had believed to be allies were culprits after all.

The day my essay went live, I went to a literary salon in Brooklyn. There, people read their writing aloud—anything from fantasy to personal essays. I had been a few times, and it had felt more supportive than a traditional, stand-up comedy open mic. People came for the whole evening, sat through the readings and then hung out after. As someone who spends a lot of her day writing alone, I was excited to be a part of this community.

At the salon, I saw Brooks*, a guy I had met at one of the previous salons. He was deeply enmeshed in the community, and we were new friends. As the first reader took the stage, he slipped into the seat next to me, saying, “Am I allowed to sit here? I heard you can’t be seen with men.” Ah! He saw my essay get published! Countering his friendly fire, I confided in him that the hate comments were getting to me. He said “Well, I know a lot of people here follow that account”– the one that had published my work– “but I would never read that AI slop.”

In retrospect, this was a classic example of negging, but stunned, I tried to laugh it off. Later in the evening, I read an essay about feeling misplaced in today’s dating scene. Afterwards, Brooks approached me, saying “No offense, but that was realllllly close to stand-up comedy”—an insult here, as stand-up was explicitly banned. I thought he must be joking, as anyone with half a brain cell would never have registered my performance as such.

More of his friends arrived, and with each one, another “No offense, but...” They kept piling on, saying how they were texting during my performance, debating whether my essay was “allowed.” It then hit me that they were serious. These guys (who don’t even have a say in who gets to perform or not) were using the placeholder of “doing stand-up comedy” as a way to gatekeep their small pond. Did being funny really violate the Geneva Convention of free open mics? Or was there something else motivating their takedown?

Some of the nastiness I’ve experienced this month wasn’t as nuanced. One night, a friend and I went to hang out with Eric*, a globally-touring comedian, with millions of followers across platforms. I had hung out with him one-on-one before, looked up to him as a mentor, and even considered him a friend.

When we arrived at Eric’s house, my friend shared how my writing had gone viral and I had gotten a few brand deals. All of a sudden, Eric’s grandfatherly demeanor became clinical:

Eric: “How many followers do you have?”

Me: “Uhh I think I’m sitting around 50k now”

Eric: “Wow. You’d think my extra 950k followers would make brands want to work with me. Must be nice to have tits.”

…

…

.

.

.

My face went hot. I was so embarrassed that Eric would say something like this, especially in front of my friend. His comment felt like a grenade, and all I could think about was how I could snuff it out as quickly as possible.

“Oh, haha, I don’t even post any of that! I only ever post my face. I could help you get some brand deals if you want.”

It felt as if I was playing with a toy and someone had ripped it from my hands just because I had it and he didn’t. Only instead of a sibling, it was my grandpa. The whole situation was so weird. Had he even tried to get brand deals before? Was this even something he wanted?

Being told my success was only from my tits was particularly hurtful because it made me realize something: I had been intentionally putting little-to-no effort into my appearance online so that if I succeeded, no one could claim it came from anything other than hard work. But the reality is I could be wearing a burqa and it wouldn’t matter. An envious person will always find a reason to claim someone else’s success is unearned.

I had told myself Eric was “safe” since he was married and had a kid. And while maybe I was safe from being actively hit on (which I wasn’t) or objectified (which I definitely wasn’t), I wasn’t safe from his envy or entitlement.

Negging can be a gateway drug to gatekeeping and envy, but if left unchecked for long enough, it will assume its ugliest form: betrayal.

Over the past year, I had become friends with a comedian we’ll call Trojan Horse. He’s someone I’ve gone to dinner with, helped prepare for auditions, and even given stagetime. I could always count on standing with him in the back of a comedy club to feel “safe.” I saw him as a real friend, to the point where I had confided in him how certain other men made me feel uncomfortable in the comedy scene, specifically one loser rape-joker who tried to intimidate me in physical spaces and sicced his cronies to harass me and my friends in our Instagram DMs.

At the party, all it took was two beers for Trojan Horse to let it accidentally slip that he had been hanging out with the loser I had told him harassed me and my friend.

I never saw myself in competition with Trojan Horse. I genuinely wanted him to succeed, which is why I helped him, and enjoyed hanging out with him. But that night at the party, I realized he had been competing with me. Only before, in his eyes, he was winning. I was a new act at a comedy club he already performed at, and had similar social media followings. Now, the dynamic had shifted, and that made me a threat.

I felt like shit for a month when I should’ve been celebrating. I had sparked jealousy and envy everywhere from the low-stakes literary community to world-touring comedians, and their passive-aggressive (or in Eric’s case, aggressive) put-downs took a toll on me.

Success is the revealing mechanism for how people feel about you. I wish I could say I have a long list of friends that have stuck with me through seasons of success and failure, but I don’t. My recent Internet success has acted as a sort of fumigation for secret naysayers, and I’ve become paranoid that with each additional success, another layer of friends will reveal themselves as unable to handle my shine.

For weeks, I stewed– angry and ashamed and embarrassed that I hadn’t stuck up for myself, for not spotting these guys sooner, for not clapping back. I finally let up on my self-flagellation when, in response to the “tits” situation, a friend told me, “Oh, I’d have done the same thing. You fawned.” Apparently, fight, flight, and freeze have a fourth sibling: fawn. This is when you try to appease the apparent threat by being overly helpful and making them happy. While naming these phenomena doesn’t cure me of my grief and anger, it has helped me remember that this shame I’ve been carrying is not mine to shoulder.

My dad’s an old-school Brooklyn guy, and he’s known for being good at “reading people.” All of these incidents made me feel I failed to inherit a family superpower.

When I told him what was happening, he said,

“Olivia, the problem is you assume the best in people. Whenever I meet someone, I assume they’re a criminal. Slowly I do business with them, get paid, and they inch themselves from the category of ‘criminal’ into ‘human.’”

This is an insane way to live. My dad is “so good” at reading people because he just assumes everyone’s bad. I don’t want to assume everyone is a criminal. But as a result, I need to be okay with letting people take time to reveal themselves to me.

Men who perform allyship the hardest are the ones most desperate for its cover. If a guy keeps bringing up his wife between hitting on audience members or posting pictures of The Bell Jar while ghosting your friend…run!

My time has become more precious, and with it, I need to be more guarded as to who has access. No one gets a permanent stamp of approval; it’s a changing permission that can get revoked at any time. I wasn’t wrong in giving Brooks, Eric, and Trojan access last year, but they are not eligible for renewal.

I read a whole book about negging but still fell victim to it because it was cropping up in places I didn’t expect. As my friend Melissa says, “It’s very difficult to be naturally resistant to negging. You need to inoculate yourself by being aware.” I wasn’t bad at reading people, I just needed to re-up my vaccine.

I’m not going to be able to predict with 100% accuracy whether someone is a “mole” unless I shut out everyone. Taking chances on people can lead to disappointment, but it also resulted in one of the best friendships I have.

I met my friend Patricia while onboarding for my last shitty tech job. Over the past two years, she’s watched me pursue stand up and writing, always rooting for me, coming to shows, taking me to dinner, and celebrating each and every one of my successes.

A few weeks ago, I invited her over to my house. Before she even got to sit down, I launched into a tirade that eventually became the thesis for this essay. When I let it slip I had hit 50k on Instagram, she stopped me in my tracks.

Patricia: “Olivia. We hit 50k?”

Me: Yeah it’s whatever but–

Patricia: OLIVIA! WE HIT 50k!!!!!! I’m SHAKING!!!! I need to jump up and down in a circle. Do you want to do it with me?

Patricia stood up, making it clear she was going to celebrate whether I was going to join or not. She offered me her hands. I looked at them and for a moment I hesitated. I felt guilty, as if I had a rationed number of celebrations and wasn’t sure if this “small” accomplishment qualified. However, while it was one thing to deny my own joy, I wasn’t going to snuff out Patricia’s.

I took her hands, and we started jumping. When Patricia started chanting “50k! 50k!” I could finally breathe. I let go and let myself be… happy.

These negs, insults, and betrayals are not reflections on my inability to choose good people, but they have informed me of who to spend time around. It took getting burned to see how I was cutting too much slack to people who didn’t deserve it.

I used to think that if I shrunk myself, it would hurt less when other people did it. I’ve learned that if I treat my accomplishments as unimportant, so will the people around me, or worse, I might actually minimize the joy of my real friends.

Shrinking myself to avoid being shrunk is like punching myself in the face, hoping no one else will. But there will always be a line of people waiting to punch me in the face. So why would I start them off?

*All names have been changed to preserve anonymity.

Thank you to for editing. Check out the video essay version on YouTube. You can also see a live reading of it here from last week’s event. If you enjoyed this essay, you’ll likely enjoy:

All content © 2026 Olivia Barbulescu. Unauthorized use or reproduction without express written consent is strictly prohibited. For licensing or permissions, please contact: hello@oliviabarbulescu.com.

Last Monday, I woke up with the flu.

I had taken the previous weekend off to “relax,” and I felt like I was being penalized for taking my first break in months. It reminded me of college, when I’d push myself to my limits during finals: not sleeping, eating poorly, running off adrenaline. Then, the moment I’d get home and enjoy life post fight-or-flight: I’d get sick.

Adapting to my new reality of being a full-time creative means I have finally escaped the 9-to-5, but now work 24/7. Every day is the same: I wake up, and hand write in my journal for thirty minutes. Then, I turn to my 100-item to-do list, which has everything from “make content” to “fight credit card company,” and scream into the void. I never have a “case of the Mondays” because I don’t know what day it is anymore. I’ve written about anxiety following a big viral moment, but now that my social media presence is continuously growing, I am permanently trapped in a “I have to make the most of this” spiral.

T’was the night before the plague, when I finally had Claude make me a schedule. I was flailing across my to-do list, Notes app, journal, second journal, and the flipside of that one wedding invite. After telling Claude all the things I had to do (and accidentally giving him way too much insight into my personal battle with anxiety), he planned out exactly how I’d balance and stack-rank all my tasks while reserving longer swaths of time so I could write essays and plan for new up-and-coming projects like my live reading event on June 11th in NYC.1

I went to sleep ready to attack life with my new AI-generated plan. So imagine my horror when I woke up dead sick on Monday. At 8 a.m. I drowsily came to in sopping wet sheets, I was struck with a pounding migraine so painful I briefly considered just ending it all with one final smack against the wall. Being sick while single and living alone is truly the ninth circle of loneliness hell.

Prostrate in bed, I called my aunt (a doctor), and we (she) decided I needed to get the CVS Rapid Covid/Flu test I neurotically kept in my closet. After psyching myself up for five minutes to prepare to Go Vertical™, I sneezed, coughed, and swabbed only to find out: surprise! Baby had the flu.

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Hi folks- welcome to Feral Woman. Two years ago, I quit (got fired) from my third corporate tech job. Escorted out of the building by security and sitting on a NYC stoop, I decided that for the next 10 years, I’d bet on myself. Now I write and do stand-up comedy full time, and Feral Woman is the product of that bet.

I write essays about friendship, loneliness, dating, and internet culture. New essays go out on Fridays, twice a month: one free and one feral (for paid subscribers). Both have embedded self-recorded audio so you can listen to me speak my own words, with some oomph.

New here? A few good places to start:

1. My most-read essay (and likely how you ended up here): Men aren’t needed anymore, and they’re struggling to adapt to being wanted

2. Are you setting a boundary or avoiding accountability for being a shitty friend?

3. Are your friends negging you?

4. Dating Intentionally, about how dating for marriage isn’t the only way to date with intention.

If those leave you hungry for more, you can become a paid subscriber for $7/month or $70/year and get:

• more feral monthly essays (+ audio)

• Feral Woman Reading Club (next meeting is Saturday Oct 3!)

• the subscriber chat, where you get to have a say in what I write/pursue next (come say hello!)

• Full access to the paid archive, including I didn’t believe in myself and it hurt the people I love, it’s okay to be jealous as long as you do something about it, & Prostituting Myself for the Algorithm.

Upgrade to paid here

The stress of going from salaried → not knowing where my next paycheck comes from is real. When you become a paid subscriber, you’re arguing for a world where people can pursue their dreams without hustling for internet crumbs or being a slave to the corporate machine.

If you’re a big baller or someone in tech who hates their job and you want to say “Olivia, no but like I REALLY believe in you,” there’s a Patron tier, which is essentially where you get to be the John Cena to my Make-A-Wish. I’ll thank you in my book and maybe kiss you on the lips (absolutely just kidding). Click here if you are trying to be a Medici.

Thank you for being here. None of this is possible without you.

Cheers,

Olivia

P.S. Prefer to watch? A few of these live as video essays on YouTube. Here’s my favorite one.

My uncle recently asked why I’m not dating anyone. My mom responded, “Olivia only hangs out with losers.” She’s not wrong.

I exclusively spend time at comedy clubs and my apartment. The guys doing stand-up aren’t particularly known for their date-ability (my source: their own material, declaring their dicks limp, loserdom infinite, and desire to commit nonexistent.)

I live alone. No one’s broken into my apartment, so unfortunately, I’m not meeting anyone there, either (but crossing my fingers that will change once I start leaving my door unlocked).

I even tried the good ol’ dating apps, but I am convinced Hinge is negging me. It recommends men who look unfamiliar with a toothbrush and are looking for “easygoing” women. Hinge: You have 5 years of data on me. If you’re recommending I go out with a man who wants a “laid back” woman, you need to fire your data analytics team.

I started paying for Hinge, thinking I’d get a better-curated list of matches in exchange for cold hard cash. Instead, all I got was the privilege of filtering superficially. I couldn’t give less of a flying fuck how tall you are, but can someone please build me an app where I can filter out single-earring-ed “leftists”? Happy for you and your activism, but if you use your profile to virtue-signal which rallies you’ll be going to next month, we’re probably not a match.

Unsatiated by my $30 monthly subscription, Hinge greedily pushes me to further debase myself by sending individual $3 “roses” to paywalled, probably AI-generated profiles. PS: If you ever catch me about to pay money to message a man, shoot me. Please. End it for me the way Kristi Noem ended it for her dog.

Let’s say I dodge the protestors, match with a non-AI profile, and even get asked on a date—it’s probably getting cancelled. I’m not saying this in a woe-is-me way, I’m saying this in a my-last-three-dates-cancelled-on-me way. One texted me three hours before saying he hadn’t slept and would reschedule if I wanted to (lucky me!), another cancelled 30 minutes before, and most notably, one was simply “not feeling up for it.”

I feel like ahi tuna in a gas station.

It’s as if men mindlessly stumble into the gas station, grab something to eat and gobble it down unceremoniously, or more realistically, take a single bite and go, “Ew, oh GOD! What is that!?”

I am not a palatable dish. I am neither the butter noodles nor cheese pizza of dating. But I know there are people that seek out the best ahi tuna at fancy restaurants. I just don’t know where the restaurants are or how to get those guys into the gas station.

You can say, “Olivia, it’s good those guys cancelled. You didn’t even have to waste your time!”

Okay! But I’m kinda getting sick of being cancelled on? I’m afraid that if this keeps happening, I’ll slowly recalibrate what’s “normal” until I’m just grateful someone showed up at all. Thank god for Patricia, my friend who treats me to dinner as a form of preventative “anti-scrub conditioning” to make sure my baseline never slips.

One last thing about the guy who felt “not up to it”: this wasn’t a “hey” “hey” “drinks at 7pm” conversation nor a drawn-out internet romance. He had double-confirmed AND even admitted to reading a few of my essays. He handled it in the least creepy-internet-stalky way possible, and I was flattered! When he cancelled, I had to wonder: Did he find an essay he didn’t like? Or, since he’s probably reading this right now: Did you find an essay you didn’t like?

I went on a first date with a guy who hadn’t seen any of my content (for those of you who have met me through my essays, I post short storytime videos online). After coffee, he asked for my Instagram and promptly did his due diligence. Instead of a cursory check, he did a deep dive, quoting essays from 8 months ago and referencing view rates on my videos. I felt watched. While I had just been on one date with him, he had spent the whole week with “me.” Walking from dinner to ice cream on our second date, he told me he never would have known how smart I was just from watching my videos. He had spent a week getting to know a version of me I hadn’t offered him and still managed to not know me at all.

Another guy listed three nouns as his “profession” on Hinge, like “Finance + Community Building + Artist.” When we met, I learned that Finance + Community Building + Artist = Influencer Marketing. When I tried to learn more about his intentionally vague job title, he said he felt like he was “in a work meeting.” Sir, you’re welcome to change the conversation or dare I suggest… ask a question?

In an attempt to both throw and catch the ball myself, I mentioned I was learning about marketing. He asked me what I did for work, despite the fact I had “Writer/Comedian” written on my profile. I explained, but 10 minutes later, he admitted to recognizing me from a video I made about men wanting to do tasks.

“If you knew I made videos, why did you pretend not to know?”

“I wanted you to bring it up on your own.”

Not only did he want to be nonchalant, he sucked at it, and had no interest in co-piloting our date. Cool.

He continued to feign nonchalance despite his cover being blown, but eventually revealed he had read several of my essays. There’s nothing wrong with saying you’ve seen my work. What’s not okay is being given three opportunities to tell me, lying, and subtly trying to put me down each time.

I was talking to my friend about these two dates, and she said, “Okay Olivia, but what do you want? You’re posting online, people are GOING to see it. You can’t be upset that people see your stuff.”

I am not upset! Please engage with my work! I google all of my suitors regardless of public-domain-status, but I try to log off after validating that they’re not murderers. I don’t want to stalk too hard– after all, I want to hear about what they do from them, not E! Magazine.

If I matched with Michael B. Jordan on Hinge (God willing. It’s on my vision board. Michael, if you’re reading this: I’m ready) I would not watch all the Creed movies to prepare. But I also wouldn’t lie about what I had seen. If we went to dinner and he said, “It’s been a hard week on site” I wouldn’t say “Oh, do you work in construction?” No! I’d say, “Are you working on a new movie?” and “What is it like to be so so so sexy?”

After getting cancelled on three dates in a row, I tried to regain the illusion of agency by going to in-person events: friends-of-friends happy hours, run clubs, bachata classes. But the issue is I don’t want to drink, run, or dance with strangers. I’m doing these things to “get out there” even though “there” is an ill-defined space that is probably just another gas station. Since I don’t like the underlying activity, if I don’t meet the love of my life, it feels like a waste of time.

Okay, Olivia, then go to some events you do like!

I like book club and shopping and getting my nails done, but those are for the girls and the gays. I love buying clothes and sitting in a reclining massage chair, but neither lends itself toward making “progress” in dating.

Last week, I was overwhelmed with doing the “admin” side of my creative work: making marketing graphics, emailing brands, fixing my website. It was easy to let all these non-vital “to-do” list items eat away at the longer blocks of time I needed to write and film. My friend said I was doing “fake work,” things that felt important because I could check them off a to-do list, but didn’t really actually move the needle long term.

I realized that not only am I doing fake work in my career, but I’m doing it in dating, too. I’ve been going on dates and to events I’m not excited about to convince myself I have control. I keep rearranging the display case at the gas station instead of figuring out how to get to the restaurant.

Here’s the unfortunate reality: Even if I beautifully arrange the display case and a man who loves ahi walks in, he’s not eating it. What sane person would eat ahi tuna from a gas station?

I’ve talked to a few coupled-up friends about this, and at this point in my rambling, they’re usually holding hands, and practically sitting in each other’s laps while saying to me, “Olivia, you can’t force it. Sometimes it just happens,” which just makes me want to punch everyone in the teeth.

Never in my life has anything I’ve wanted fallen into my lap. I ice skated for 15 years, made Team USA. Worked my ass off in school, admitted to every college. Made job applications my whole personality, got the fancy tech job.

I only know how to work hard to get what I want. But that’s not translating to dating.

There are ways to make dating worse for yourself, so by that logic, there have to be ways to make it better. I want to be proactive in improving my life, but maybe the point is I’m supposed to be okay with not having control.

I don’t think there’s a magic formulation of events and apps that end in love. The only thing I can control is the amount of time I spend doing things I want to do. I need to stop wasting time doing fake work.

My whole life I’ve been an extrovert’s extrovert, convinced the number of hours outside my house would directly correlate to better job opportunities, more friends, more love. I’m starting to think that’s not the case after all.

Strangers and friends reaching out to tell me they felt seen in my essay about boundaries and therapy-speak made my heart grow three sizes. It meant so much more than 17M views of me snipping a leaf from a plant.

These essays have unearthed something I didn’t expect: deeper connections with people I already knew. Old friends are seeing a new side of me, my grandma and I have never been closer. Especially in NYC, I’m conditioned to think the answer is always more: more matches, more dates, more people. I let quantity overtake quality to pat myself on the back for “making progress” on feeling less alone. It seems like a blindingly obvious insight, but it took telling my friends and the Internet about my umpteenth bad date to realize that more ≠ progress.

This is me sending a signal outside of the gas station. And if someone happens to pick up on it and decide to visit, welcome. The ahi tuna here is fantastic.

Thank you to for editing. If you liked this essay, you’ll like:

people's archive

Are You Setting a Boundary or Avoiding Accountability for Being a Shitty Friend?

I recently reached out to a close friend, J, and told her I was having a hard time. I asked if we could see each other more, even if that meant just folding myself into her routine: grocery runs, laundry, workouts— anything. I just needed to be around people…

Read more

9 months ago · 634 likes · 56 comments · Olivia Barbulescu

All content © 2026 Olivia Barbulescu. Unauthorized use or reproduction without express written consent is strictly prohibited. For licensing or permissions, please contact: hello@oliviabarbulescu.com.

Below is my most-read piece about friendship, “boundaries,” and what it means to actually show up for your friends. I wrote it for People’s Archive, and you can read it here:

people's archive

Are You Setting a Boundary or Avoiding Accountability for Being a Shitty Friend?

I recently reached out to a close friend, J, and told her I was having a hard time. I asked if we could see each other more, even if that meant just folding myself into her routine: grocery runs, laundry, workouts— anything. I just needed to be around people…

Read more

9 months ago · 588 likes · 53 comments · Olivia Barbulescu

If you’d prefer to watch a video essay version, that can be found on my YouTube here:

“If you don’t think you’re an artist, what do you think of me?”

My face hot with shame, I realized my unchecked self-doubt had hurt someone I love.

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Historically, women needed to attach themselves to men. Women couldn’t inherit land, sign a lease, or travel without a male escort. Did you know women couldn’t sign up for credit cards on their own until 1974? As a single woman in 2026 with a tremendous talent for spending money, trust me: If I needed a man to shop, I’d have settled down with one of my less-than-fabulous Hinge matches by now.

Thankfully, I can solo travel, live on my own, and buy overpriced dresses without a husband, so when I date, I don’t evaluate a man on his ability to provide food, shelter, and safety, but instead whether he’s someone I want to be around.

I think a lot of people lump the “independent woman” and “man-hater” tropes together, but I feel like if anything, modern freedoms allow us to appreciate men for who they are rather than what they provide. As a result, men are no longer needed, but wanted. And instead of seeing this as a freeing and exciting development, I have reason to believe men are struggling to adapt.

Since having a husband was a requirement for survival, women adapted to maximize desirability. From restricting their diets to restricting their personalities, women did anything they could to demonstrate their ability to make men’s lives easier and be wives, mothers, and caregivers. However, society has changed and women no longer need to be picked to survive. Yet men still desire women, but as a group, men were never required, nor encouraged, to undergo that same development. Thus, a skill gap has emerged.

A few days ago, someone left 100-pound weights on a machine at my gym. I couldn’t move them on my own, so I went up to a guy and asked if he could help me. Before I even finished my question, he leaped up and moved all the weights. I was shocked how happy he seemed to be helping me out. I wondered: Is this the secret to talking to men? Do I just need to ask men to do more tasks?

I posted a video online explaining the situation and was shocked when it got over a million views in a day.

Some comments were condescending, likening men to toddlers that just want to do a task. I find this dangerous, as infantilizing men is as damaging as idealizing them. Sayings like “men are simple” or “boys will be boys” are bad for two reasons:

1. Reducing men to base, caveman-ish caricatures in popular media sets a low self-expectation for men.

2. Encouraging women to see men as incapable of having rich inner worlds normalizes poor male behavior. Over time, this gap leads to misandristic thinking and combative dating.

Surprisingly, most of the comments were positive, and even more surprising, those comments were left by… men (a demographic I’ve come to associate exclusively with commenting “you’re not funny” on my YouTube shorts). Even more unexpected: they were using emotional language like “valued,” “appreciated,” and “chosen.” One account commented,

“Being asked for help is being seen, by others, as someone capable and valuable and we all want to be seen that way. And are scared of being seen as weak, unvalued, or worthless. Because we think if that’s how people see us, as worthless, they’ll leave.” - @peterlucier

It seemed that most of the men saying things like “yes! I love a task!” weren’t really focused on the tasks, but more on the feeling of being chosen to help.

Another type of comment started to emerge, calling out the men who talked about loving tasks, yet didn’t help out around the house.

Do we just need to make trash heavier? I’m kidding… but sludgekitten has a good point (a sentence I could never have imagined I’d write earnestly). Maybe it’s that in a committed relationship, a woman asking a man to take the trash out feels like an assigned task rather than “helping,” which takes away the allure for a man. Women shouldn’t be responsible for managing their husband’s emotions around trash, but it is an interesting observation (and I am very open to others’ interpretations- please comment your take). I do think if there was a designated “weight helper” in the gym and I asked him to help, he’d likely be way less enthused than this random man.

Lastly, my friend and I read the comment below and both reacted the same way… “so much to unpack here.”

I am about to put more thought into this comment than @anadeweerd could ever have anticipated. On one hand… I understand how her son wants to be helpful. But let’s say her daughter wants to carry a chair. Carrying it makes her daughter feel strong and useful. The same goes for her son. But there is only one chair.

Who gets to carry it? Should the daughter give up the chair just so her brother can feel useful? I’d argue that her brother should be able to feel useful without carrying the chair, by watching her be strong, cheering her on. However, this is an emotional usefulness that serves his sister as well as himself. In giving the boy the chair, we maintain the farce that he is successfully portraying specific, old-school “masculine” traits instead of modern-day ones, like emotional strength, support, kindness.

If we just let boys carry chairs to feel good about themselves, aren’t we just lying to them? I’d argue that teaching this pattern early is damaging for men. We’re conditioning them to think that their usefulness is tied to accomplishing tasks we don’t actually care about. Then, when women ask for the help they truly need (i.e., cleaning dishes), they get rejected, because it doesn’t match the pattern of what men have learned falls within the expected realm of masculine usefulness.

My friend P recently told me that she is intentional with how she asks her fiancee for help. If she can tie it to “manliness,” he’s much more willing to get involved. I think it’s reasonable to put thought into how we communicate with our partners, but it’s also important to consider the long-term ramifications of being complicit in this pattern.

She said,

“Men like to feel needed until they actually are. If you need them financially or you need them to do 50% of house chores, all of a sudden that’s too much. If it’s being needed in a way that is easy to fulfill and strokes their ego, they love that.”

If you’re needed before you actually are, isn’t that being wanted? So men want you to want their help, not just rely on it.

These days, women make fun of men who have abandoned chivalry, splitting the bill, sitting on their phones while their wives tend to 5 children and 3 carry on bags.

Listen: some of these men deserve to be made fun of. For sure. But shouldn’t men feel chosen in their relationships with women, too? Both people in a relationship should feel wanted, but I think the issues arise in that “being wanted” manifests differently for different people, and it’s the mismatched expectation that is problematic. This applies to friendship as well.

Being wanted is harder than being needed because it’s not as definite. Being wanted can be withdrawn at any moment, which I’d imagine makes men feel less secure, especially if they were taught their value solely came from being indispensable.

It seems like we need to remind men that their worth doesn’t come solely from being useful. I think this quiet change from need to want has been destabilizing for men who tie their self-worth to utility, and has resulted in a large misalignment in modern dating.

Today, true usefulness is often a lot more emotional. Maybe you’re dating a woman who doesn’t need help lifting chairs, but needs you to listen. If it’s being useful that you’re after, no amount of moving furniture is going to help. But sitting on that furniture and listening to her… that’s helpful. Even if you’re not lifting something or fighting a bear, you’re still valuable because you’re you.

Let me make one thing very clear: I don’t want men to stop lifting things or helping me at the gym. I just want them to see that there’s ways to be helpful / do tasks / be needed outside of the predefined mold men have been filling for since their inception. Their responsibilities are changing and expanding, which means there’s a more diverse set of ways to be wanted than before. And I think that’s something to be excited about, rather than dread.

I’m a very independent person, so when I choose a partner it’s because I want to be with them, not because I need them to survive. And I think that kind of wanting, the kind that’s chosen, is a lot stronger than any that’s built solely on necessity.

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9 months ago · 973 likes · 65 comments · Olivia Barbulescu: Feral Woman

Thank you to for editing. If this piece left you hungry for more, check out my video essay where I address some of the common comments/DMs I’ve received. Thank you all for reading!

All content © 2026 Olivia Barbulescu. Unauthorized use or reproduction without express written consent is strictly prohibited. For licensing or permissions, please contact: hello@oliviabarbulescu.com.

I wake up and the rainbow Instagram icon seduces me into watching reels at 8:05AM. Some girl is telling me what colors I can’t wear because of my skin tone. I FaceTime my mom– she tells me which shirt to wear from my newly arrived Bloomingdale’s order. At the same time, Google Maps picks the “best coffee shop near me” so my friend and I can meet up, and she can ghostwrite the texts to the guy I’m seeing.

When did I start outsourcing every decision I make?

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“You said you’re dating intentionally, right? What does that mean?”

A few months earlier, I’d decided to make a real effort in dating after years of wishy-washy cycles on Hinge. I approached dating differently this time, writing five pages describing what I wanted in a partner. And not just “kind eyes, dark hair” but specific characteristics, values, and actions. I kept a living document, adding, removing, and reprioritizing line items as I went on dates with men and left with more clarity. I even added scenes from the life I envisioned: languid mornings drinking coffee in bed; sitting in our sunbeam-strewn backyard, holding hands and enjoying the sound of trees rustling in the wind.

However, laying in his arms, I struggled to remember the details of my manifesto. The closer I was to him, the harder it was to see clearly. Not blind, but everything tinted with the warm glow you get one glass into a full-bodied Brunello.

He was a star and his gravity pulled me, a nearby meteor, into his orbit. As I nuzzled my face deeper between his chin and shoulder, time and space morphed, altering my trajectory. The closeness stretched and distorted what I wanted like light near a black hole. All of my deliberateness collapsed under the intense pressure of chemistry and scarcity.

I figured that by defining what I wanted precisely, I could stay more grounded when dating. I could be more efficient and get to those lazy mornings sooner. It was also a form of self-protection. When things didn’t work out, it could be less “he doesn’t like me” and more “it’s not a match.”

“Dating intentionally” means dating with a clear purpose. And for me, that purpose is to be deeply vulnerable and grow through intense, transformative connection. And I was getting that in this relationship, for what felt like the first time. But he was dating intentionally too.

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A few weeks ago, a male comedian verbally sharted on me at a show. The comic before him performed 15 minutes of material about eating ass, so as the host, I made a quick joke before introducing him in an attempt to “reset the room.” Apparently, that alone was enough to set him off; the moment he got off stage, he cornered me and whisper-screamed, “Don’t try to be funny. Just keep the show moving.”

Adrenaline pumping, I blubbered an apology and later cried in the bathroom.

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For the past month, I posted daily to five social media accounts to grow my online presence. At first, I felt productive, crossing something off my to-do list and patting myself on the back for “putting myself out there.” I felt proud of the videos I posted, but when they didn’t get views, I lost steam. I felt judged by other comedians when they said things like, “I’ve been seeing you a lot on my feed.” Maybe it was neutral, but I heard it as: “Why are you posting so much?” And since I’m neurotic and defensive, I’d reflexively neg my own work, rolling my eyes at myself and saying, “I know it’s stupid– I’m just trying to get videos out there.”

I started shooting quick, direct-to-camera “hot takes” to hit my self-imposed quota. I’d post something thoughtless, flinging garbage into the ether, prostituting myself for the algorithm.

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Having a crush on someone you meet in real life is the best feeling. It’s like I’m fifteen, giddy to go to history class because *he* might be there. And did I mention we met in person? Did you know I’m better than you, Hinge losers? Good luck getting me off my high horse.

A few months ago, my crush and I visited our mutual friend in Rhode Island on the same weekend.

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I FaceTime five people in a row, and none of them pick up.

I get a text, “busy, what’s up?”

I don’t respond.

Eventually, someone calls me back, and I have nothing to say.

I spend an incredible amount of time around other people. However, I’ve recently been plagued with a deeper sense of loneliness. I usually try to avoid this topic because it feels *cringe*. A psychologist once told me,

“Why are you ashamed of feeling lonely? Loneliness is a part of the human experience. By fully experiencing it, you can meaningfully connect with other people who have experienced it.”

While this is beautiful and true, it doesn’t change the fact that I feel it's more acceptable to say “I’ve been feeling depressed/anxious/sad/manic/crazy/schizophrenic” than “lonely.” There’s a lot of advertising around the “male loneliness epidemic”, however, research shows that men and women experience loneliness at equal rates1 (classic— men taking credit for a feeling we both experience).

I don’t know why I feel so much shame around loneliness. Perhaps because when I think of a lonely person, I immediately think of not being invited to the popular girls’ sleepover party, an incel in a basement, or a pitiful widower. Or maybe it's because I have to confront the fact that my loneliness cannot be remedied quickly and is largely out of my control.

It’s not that I don’t have things to do; I spend every night performing in NYC. It’s that I crave the feeling of closeness. I think that’s why I can only get myself to do a task once on the phone with someone, which is strange. Shouldn’t talking to someone take my full attention? Do I crave split attention? Maybe it’s just that I want someone to bear witness to my existence at that moment.

I want to sit on the couch with someone– ideally a partner– in silence, knowing they won’t leave. I don’t know if this is a symptom of Stanford, the tech industry, or NYC, but I often feel I’ve been penciled in for an hour. And if someone’s not getting anything out of our hangout… gotta run! There’s no sense of passively spending time together. I always feel like I’m competing with someone’s next plan.

Most of my comedy friends are still “friends from work.” I feel nervous about overstaying my welcome, oversharing, or being like the drunk secretary at the holiday party. And I’ve realized even though I’m seeing many people, I’m not seeing MY people. My family, non-comedy friends… “civilians.” People who love me for me, and I don’t have to worry whether they’ll leave if I’m not sufficiently entertaining with witty banter. People with whom I can sit on the couch in silence.

This creates a looming sense of scarcity around my hangouts. I’m guilty of it as well: often, I agree to go to several events in one evening. If I’m being honest, I rarely want to hang out with more than three people. Anything more than that, I’m just talking to three people with a backdrop of many more.

I always feel a pressure to entertain, whether I’m around comedians or civilians. It’s as if I believe everyone’s default mode is to leave, and I have to hook them in to stay, like the first three seconds of an Instagram video. Maybe it’s because I believe the only thing I have to offer is entertainment, and if I’m not entertaining… Why would people stick around?

I am incredibly focused on my career right now. I have momentum, and I am improving at a breakneck rate. I feel confident in who I am and the decisions I am making. Yet, despite my loneliness, I’ve noticed I’ve become obsessed with saying “I don’t date comics” because “I don’t shit where I eat” (Tony Soprano). While I believe this is generally a good rule, I think I’ve been using it as a form of self-defense.

A few weeks ago, I had a crush (gasp!) on another comedian. It was incredibly dysregulating. Suddenly, I was second-guessing which shows or clubs to spend time at and what jokes to make during my performance. This made me extremely frustrated because so much was at stake. If I were to date a comic, I risk getting downgraded from “comic” to “plus one.” Meanwhile, it still feels like a guy can hook up with whoever he wants and still get credit for punchlines his situationship helped him write.

I want to make one thing clear: it’s not that I won’t date comics, I won’t casually date comics. But in an industry where we are constantly traveling, dealing with competing egos, and staying up very late at night, this admission is received as if I’ve said I’m a religious zealot that’s saving myself for marriage.

Maybe if there’s strong potential for a comic relationship to go somewhere, I’d give it a shot. But this is really how I am dating in general. I find that dating in any other way makes me feel lonelier than…just being alone.

It feels lame to admit what feels like failure in dating since I cannot control it. It’s easier to blame it on abstaining. Truthfully, I am unwilling to prioritize it over my career right now, and as a person who struggles with being all-or-nothing, it’s hard to imagine a world where I can casually date while pursuing my dreams.

I’ve lost a lot of weight since college, and with that, I’ve gained a lot of self-esteem. Before, if a man didn’t like me, I could tell myself he was superficial, fatphobic. But these days, if a man doesn’t like me, I have to confront the reality that he doesn’t like me. My personality. My core. I’ve talked about this on stage before. I understand that sometimes, it’s just not a match. But my mind wants to protect my ego and I can no longer blame men for being vain.

I don’t envy the majority of relationships I see. But ultimately, we live in a society where people pair up and become each other’s priorities. And it doesn’t feel good to be nobody’s priority. And I don’t want to be the whiny friend complaining that no one prioritizes me. You should be there for your partner or your child. I want my single friends to find love, even though I know that when they do, I will fall even farther down on the totem pole of prioritization. Humans used to live in collectives and spend time together. If this were true today, I don’t think I’d feel the intense need to pair up. But everyone’s doing it, and I don’t want to be eating a TV dinner and almost choke to death because I live alone (this happens to Liz Lemon in 30 Rock).

It doesn’t help that the internet tells me that successful, intelligent women have the hardest time dating. I do believe this is Andrew Tate propaganda designed to make women settle for less. I don’t want to complain about dating because I don’t want to sound like a scorned woman, and I believe in manifesting what you want.

If your mindset is “dating in NYC sucks”, I don’t think you will find success. Nothing’s worse than being seated next to a single woman at a wedding whose only topic of conversation is how horrible it is to date in NYC. It’s the female equivalent of a man doing stand up at an open mic talking about how no one wants to fuck him because he’s ugly. It’s not what either of them looks like that makes them undateable; it’s their personalities.

I have a friend named Sharon. She’s from Trinidad and explained to me the phenomenon of “liming”, which is “the art of doing nothing while sharing food, drink, conversation and laughter.”

I love this. And it makes me think that maybe some of my issues are societal, not personal. Sitting on the couch in silence, enjoying each other’s presence, is very hard for me because I don’t trust that the people around me are just there to hang out. Sitting in silence is incredibly intimate and uncomfortable. I can count on one hand the number of people I feel comfortable liming with, and most of them don’t live in NYC. So it’s a part of me, a desire for slowness, that is not being fed.

However, in stand-up comedy, the biggest laugh is often followed by a deep silence. It doesn’t mean the crowd is ready to leave; it means they are listening and engaged. And maybe that’s what’s scary, too. If I use fewer words, they have more weight. And it’s much easier for me, especially with this climate of constant content production, to just yap, rather than hold myself to a standard of saying fewer, more meaningful words. Maybe that’s part of what I’m searching for: someone I can lime with on a Tuesday night. No plans. Just a couch, a little silence, and the quiet relief of not needing to say anything at all.

Oh, and someone who’ll answer my FaceTimes.

Thank you to Holyn Thigpen for editing, Patricia Arnedo for being an early reader, and Sharon for teaching me the beauty of liming.

All content © 2026 Olivia Barbulescu. Unauthorized use or reproduction without express written consent is strictly prohibited. For licensing or permissions, please contact: hello@oliviabarbulescu.com.