Welcome to The Girls’ Office.

Every institution has a department where the real work gets done. This is ours.

The Girls’ Office is where we discuss the things women have been discussing forever, usually somewhere private, with snacks… and almost never in complete sentences.

Men. Dating. Friendship. Beauty. Money. Sex. Clothes. Jealousy. Ambition. Aging. All these social rules we don’t remember agreeing to.

Disclaimer: I am not necessarily trying to solve anything. Sometimes we are simply here to examine the situation.

Think of it as a barbershop, but we women have better …everything. Our first matter of business, we’re starting with something simple and fun: the man eater.

I think we have… unfortunately misunderstood the job description.

A man eater is not a woman who goes out looking for men. That is being hungry. A man eater is for when there is already a man or two chasing you. The men are there. You are simply managing the ecosystem.

A true man eater has supply. Ideally, men should be approaching her like migratory birds. She should be able to look up from whatever she is doing and think, Why are there always men here?

Maybe one is texting you every morning. One keeps asking when you’re free. One has been trying to take you to dinner for three months. One has somehow reappeared from 2023 because we know the dead do rise.

You didn’t call them. They came. And now you have a population problem.

There is no having fifty men, collecting them like refrigerator magnets, spending every night swiping through dating apps with the concentration of someone searching for a missing person. It’s simply the absence of scarcity, because when you’re hungry, everything looks like food.

She can observe and choose.

This is vital here, because she is not actually defined by how many men she has as much as her relationship to attention.

Every man who likes her isn’t a potential husband, nor every attractive man as a potential boyfriend, nor every flirtation as a developing relationship. Some men are simply men who like her. This is allowed to be the entire thing.

She has a rather healthy tolerance for unfinished narratives.

A man can be handsome and still be annoying. He can be charming and still be incompatible with her. Can want her very badly and still not be invited any further into her life.

And this is where the archetype becomes much more interesting than the stereotype. The stereotypical “man eater” is imagined as ruthless, promiscuous, emotionally unavailable, collecting men for sport. But the actual archetype I’m describing is pretty much the opposite. She is discerning because she has enough distance from attention to evaluate it.

“How do I make him like me?” doesn’t get asked nearly as often as, “Interesting. Why does he like me?”

There is a tiny anthropologist living inside her watching. How does he behave when he doesn’t get his way? Does he become sulky? Does he become sweeter? Does he disappear? Does he suddenly develop a mysterious scheduling conflict? Fascinating.

She doesn’t believe in playing hard to get. She is naturally not trying particularly hard to be gotten.

Oh, and she can occasionally put some of the supply back.

If I have to go outside and find men to eat, I am not considered a man eater. I’m in procurement. And procurement is a perfectly respectable profession, but not the position we are discussing.

That, to me, is the essence of being a man eater, the men are already in the ecosystem. You are simply managing it.

And “managing the ecosystem” does not include manipulating everyone inside it. The man eater is not cruel for the sake of being powerful. She is more than comfortable allowing people to occupy different distances from her.

There is the man she is actually dating. The man she is curious about. The man she thinks is gorgeous but knows absolutely nothing about. One who keeps asking her out and whom she politely keeps declining. The old flame who has wandered back into the forest. The friend of a friend. The man who is beautiful enough to deserve a moment of silence but not beautiful enough to ruin her life.

They do not all receive the same access.

This is one of the great social skills of the maneater, she just understands that attention and access are not the same currency.

Someone can have her attention without having her time. Someone can have her time without having her intimacy. Or have her intimacy without having her commitment.

And someone can have absolutely none of these things and still be very handsome. You know, life is just full of administrative complexities.

But underneath the joke, I actually think there is a useful way to live here.

Because once you believe there is only one man for you, every little thing he does starts feeling much more important than it actually is.

The moment you believe there is only one person available to you, you start behaving differently around that person. You might become more accommodating. Anxious. More willing to interpret crumbs as a full meal. Might even overlook incompatibilities because, mentally, losing him starts to feel like losing your only opportunity.

And whew, that is how you end up writing a five paragraph analysis to a man who keeps saying “we’ll see.”

And I promise you he is not being mysterious. Sometimes mystery is just poor communication.

The irony is that you may not even want him that badly. You may want the reassurance of knowing that he wants you.

The problem with scarcity is that it can sneakily change the question you’re asking. Instead of Do I like this person?, you start asking How do I keep this person?

Those are completely different questions. The difference is the first one makes you an observer.

Again, the man eater should never look hungry. The whole point is that the food keeps presenting itself.

But I think there is another part of the maneater lifestyle that gets overlooked - she has a life outside of men. She has somewhere to be.

She has friends, hobbies, errands that somehow take four hours. She is reading something, making something… has opinions about restaurants. She has a chair in her apartment that is technically for sitting but has become a clothing dump. May disappear for six hours because she went to a museum and then got coffee and then wandered into a bookstore and forgot about phones.

Her life is not arranged as a waiting room for romantic developments.

And this changes dating for her enormously.

If a man texts her, she responds when she actually has something to say. If she wants to see him, she sees him. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t force availability to prove interest. She does not intentionally delay her responses like a heiress hiding behind a curtain. She just has a life.

There is also a friendship component to this that I think we rarely discuss. The same scarcity mentality that makes someone cling to one romantic prospect can happen socially, too. You decide one friend is your person. Suddenly every delayed text feels personal. Every new friendship they make feels a little threatening. Their absence feels like abandonment. You begin monitoring the relationship instead of being inside it.

The maneater, socially, understands that friendship can be abundant too.

She doesn’t need one best friend to fulfill every emotional, intellectual, recreational, logistical, and spiritual function. One friend might be the person she calls when something terrible happens. Another is the museum friend. Another understands fashion. Another will sit on the floor with her at 1 a.m. eating something that only makes sense to them. Another is brilliant at making plans. Another she only sees twice a year but picks up with immediately.

This is that ecosystem I’m talking about.

And because she isn’t demanding that one person be everything, she can love a friend without needing constant access to her. And can meet someone new without treating it as a betrayal of the old. She can survive a friendship changing shape without immediately deciding somebody has become evil.

Sometimes people simply move into different rooms of your life. The maneater understands rooms.

Not everyone gets the penthouse. Some people get the lobby. Some… the terrace. Some get invited over once and stay until 3 a.m. And some people are lovely, but, unfortunately, the building is full.

This is perhaps why the archetype, properly understood, has very little to do with men at all. This is just typically how they respond to such nature. It is about a woman practicing non-attachment without becoming emotionally vacant, and having enough internal and social abundance that you don’t immediately grip whatever is currently available.

The maneater can be deeply romantic. She can fall in love. Become obsessed. She can want one person very badly. She is not a robot nor emotionally unavailable.

She can say, “I really, really like this person,” without adding, “therefore …I must make this work.”

…That second sentence is where we can get ourselves into trouble.

When you know you are capable of being desired by more than one person, one person’s behavior doesn’t have to become a referendum on your desirability.

He likes you? Cute. He doesn’t? Okay.

You can be disappointed without becoming destabilized. And like someone deeply while remembering that liking someone does not require you to leave your standards behind. And most importantly, you can let a man reveal himself instead of immediately trying to secure him.

Luckily, abundance gives you time to observe.

You get to watch whether he follows through. Whether he is considerate. Whether he makes plans. If his words and behavior resemble one another. You learn if you actually enjoy him once the novelty wears off.

And you learn whether you like yourself around him. This might be the most underrated question in dating. Do I like who I become when I am with this person?

Am I relaxed? Funny? Curious? Do I feel beautiful? Am I suddenly checking my phone every six minutes like a hostage victim? Am I watering myself down? Am I performing femininity instead of embodying myself?

Because sometimes a man is perfectly lovely and the relationship is still wrong. Sometimes the problem is not that he is terrible. Sometimes your nervous system files him under “absolutely not, girl.” Listen to the filing system.

And no, you don’t need twenty men hovering around you in order to feel secure. That would simply be outsourcing your self worth to a small committee of men, which is hardly the liberation we were promised.

An option is not an obligation. So, ladies, please remember your department’s responsibilities.

And for God’s sake, if a man is confusing you, you do not have to become a detective.

Her life will not collapse because one man stops texting. The ecosystem experiences a small weather event. She puts on her coat and goes to dinner.

And The Girls’ Office will be investigating accordingly.

different languages contain words that don’t exist in others, and yet the experiences are still there. the feeling isn’t dependent on being named to exist. it will always exist… but imagine never learning a word for something u already felt your whole life, how it stays unacknowledged and never fully arrives into form. encountering words from classical  tibetan language and korean has made it more obvious that language isn’t a neutral container.

words are starting to feel like they carry hidden agendas. i would hope one wouldn’t take this in an extreme way, but at least notice how they (words) organize unique experience into something more digestible/controllable, it’s less faithful to what things actually feel like and what things truly are. i don’t mean this as a rejection of communication; i still deeply value it but i’m much more aware of how language can create both clarity and collective confusion simultaneously. its making me more intentional with my own words and also less judgmental of other people’s, more willing to let them express imperfectly without needing to dissect everything.

there is a way of loving that begins in admiration.

not for the body, though the body is where we are first persuaded, and whatnot, but something less visible; the interior life and private logic of a person. the way their mind arranges the world, the way their wounds show up through their choices. you recognize it, and something within you says: i see you. and then, almost without noticing, you begin to love them there, in the unseen.

it feels noble. rare. like you’ve accessed a deeper language of love that other people are too impatient to learn. but there is a threshold inside that devotion, where seeing someone clearly turns into staying beyond what is clear.

because when you love someone’s soul, you can start to negotiate with what their body is doing. you begin to translate.

you say: this contradiction means something. this inconsistency has a reason. this hurt is not what it appears to be. blah blah blah! unfortunately, you have become both author and editor of a story that was never yours to revise.

and slowly, almost imperceptibly, your relationship to reality begins to shift in a subtle, almost intellectual way. editing and changing a text until it says something kinder than what was written. but i’ve come to realise, the body does not workshop your illusions.

the body keeps a more honest record. it registers what is repeated. tightens around what is unsafe. growing restless in the presence of what cannot be trusted. there is intelligence there that will not argue, persuade, or romanticize. it keeps score in a language you cannot sweet-talk. this is human nature.

something i’ve always returned to in my mind: remove the voice. remove the words.

what are they doing?

if there were no explanations, no apologies, no declarations (just movement and choice) how would it feel to be on the receiving end of that?

sometimes i imagine we are living as the first humans. no language polished enough to disguise intention. no vocabulary for love, no rehearsed apologies. if that’s even how it worked … just breath, sounds, hand gesture. a small vocabulary of grunts carrying the entire …conversation?

a hand reaching…or not.

a body staying or leaving.

if that is all there was, you would know. you would not need to interpret. you most definitely would not be tempted to call confusion depth.

words, in that sense, begin to lose their authority. they decorate and mutilate. they can be sincere, yes, but they are not proof. action is where authentication lives.

to love well, then, is not just to perceive deeply but is to remain aligned with what you perceive.

this is where self-preservation enters, i don’t mean as a reaction, either. though i’m very aware it can can be an unhealthy concept… but i see it more as a principle.

self-preservation is often misunderstood as distance or avoidance, sometimes even as a refusal to extend grace. but in its truest purest form, it’s clarity practiced over time. the ability to say: i can understand the complexity of a person and still refuse what harms me. it begs for balance.

compassion, so that you do not reduce people to their worst moments. discernment, so that you do not excuse patterns that diminish you. without compassion, love becomes brittle. without discernment, love becomes self-erasure. and self-erasure has a way of disguising itself as devotion.

the tension between the two cant be resolved once. you have to live inside of it, consciously. and to live there well requires care and embodied attention.

a mind that is fed truth can recognize when something is off without spiraling into doubt. a body that is rested and regulated can distinguish between intuition and anxiety. a spirit that is nourished does not confuse intensity for depth/passion. to tend to these parts of yourself (mind/body/spirit) is to create the conditions where love can be experienced clearly.

the greatest form of love is seeing each other with clear eyes. without the need to convince yourself of what is not there.

without this, there is loud, insistent narratives about what love should look like, who holds power, who should distrust whom. a constant invitation into opposition + performance. roles that flatten the complexity of real people into something easier to argue about. love is never lived in theory… but in the unobserved moments between two people choosing, again and again, how they will treat each other. it is not a referendum on a gender or a reaction to a trend. i like to treat it as a private practice, and at the center of that are two qualities that resist spectacle: trust and respect.

trust accumulates through the steady alignment of word and action. it is almost invisible when it is present, because it does not demand your attention…it simply holds. just like good architecture, you notice it most when it fails.

respect is even more precise. it is the recognition that the person in front of you is not an extension of your needs, but a world unto themselves. it is the discipline of not violating that world, even when it would be convenient.

when both are present, love becomes a warm hut. you can rest inside it. you can think clearly inside it. and you do not have to fracture yourself to maintain it. you are safe. but when they are absent, no amount of depth, history, or perceived connection can compensate. loving someone’s soul will not protect you from the reality of their actions. this is the difficult truth. depth does not absolve damage.

to love someone fully is to see them as they are, not only as they feel to you; to love yourself fully is to respond to that vision without distortion. anything less begins to ask for your disappearance. and love, if it is to be worthy of you, should never require that.

I went to college for my BA from 2015 to 2019, during a period where I was praised almost exclusively for my creative thought. For putting things together. Curating, forecasting. As well as my conceptual agility. Go me. I learned to live from the neck up. Many of us do. Western education rewards abstraction and detachment while secretly training us to distrust our bodily sensations.

We are taught to override intuition, quickly medicate our discomfort, and to narrate our lives instead of inhabiting them. Those thoughts are commentators permanently stuck outside the game.The feminine lineages knew better than this. Think priestesses, ascetics, and healers - they did not ‘solve’ consciousness but rather, listened to their bodies. I learned the hard way that I have to let the body answer first.

I smoked daily for three years. Possibly longer. Weed, and gradually over time, nicotine. It grew to be more devotional than I had planned. The stoner life arrived as fun or medicine sometimes, but then …unfortunately it became ritual, then it slowly hardened into my identity. As habits tend to do when no one’s watching. When I quit, I did not dramatize it or pity myself. Nor did I frame it as a moral triumph. I protected my ego from this - or it from my ego. I allowed the consequences. Irritability. Insomnia. Restlessness. Horrific dreams. Funny, I was actually grateful it wasn’t worse after hearing the stories of my peers. I lived, for a very short period, with a nervous system grieving that chemical companion. It was my karma unfolding. Cause and effect, precise but also impersonal. The body recalibrating its chemistry with the absence of any complaint, only sensation.

Renunciation, in ancient traditions, is not punishment. When you remove a vice, dopamine resists because it is truly very conservative. The brain prefers what is familiar to what is true. The Buddha knew craving as insistence, the refusal to let sensation pass. I quit smoking by refusing to negotiate with discomfort. I stopped arguing with my body and shifted my attention toward the future self by silently assembling beneath the withdrawal. I thought only of what I would and could become. The feminine - the universe - allows space and time for gestation.

Between 2019 and 2021, after college, stress dissolved the scaffolding of my life. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder. I was told it was incurable. Funny to think about now. Such a bold thing to say to someone whose nervous system is already so dramatic. The panic basically trains you to distrust your own mind. Thoughts become threats. You just monitor yourself endlessly and the hyper-vigilance masquerades as intuition or some deep knowing. Our culture typically mistakes this for self-awareness but it’s self imposed estrangement. Eventually, like I did, you may recognize something is wrong with your mind and become desperate for help.

My body would shake, tremor, and fear everything. This went on for months, nights and weeks with no sleep, rest, or food. I could not explain, even to this day, how much fear I held in my body for seemingly no reason.

What no one told me, and the real answer I was looking for, is that panic is not a thinking problem. ‘Panic disorder’ was a rupture in the intimacy I was meant to cultivate between my mind and body in my early 20s. Early 20s is when we are thrown these mental chemical imbalances - and when the mind stops trusting the body, it attempts to rule alone. This is when thought turns almost predatory, convinced it knows best. The body is the archive and the feminine has always known this. The womb, the gut, the heart are sites of intelligence.

There are periods in my life I can barely remember my soul and it wasn’t because it left, but because I was not observant enough to perceive it. I had buried it somewhere lonely and dark. Who I was at my core feels like a stranger looking back. When you act on thoughts as if they are you, you lose sight of who you are. Thought is movement, and the moment you identify with every passing cognition, you fracture yourself into fragments of reaction. A thousand selves, none of them at home.

The soul speaks ever so gently through alignment and a sense of inner coherence that returns only when you stop following every thought that enters your train of thought.

I stopped fighting my mind simply by stepping out of it. I learned to feel before I interpreted, to notice heat, vibration - you know - sensations and stuff. And let the body complete its stress cycles without interruption. Listening to the body does more for the mind than any cognitive strategy ever could - ironically. Panic dissolves when it is not resisted. I happily can say I have not had a panic attack in years because I stopped mistaking it for truth. Attention starved it. My awareness scared it away.

A few months ago, my life felt static. As though nothing would move no matter how much effort I applied. I believed the distance between where I was and where I wanted to be would take years to cross. This belief itself was the weight. So, Buddhism calls this wrong view. Your views shape reality, so why chose the wrong one? Especially one you don’t even enjoy living inside.

The feminine understands time differently. Change is not linear. You accumulate change over time. When you’re molding clay, you don’t snap and it becomes a new shape, you mold step by step, with detail and over time, it becomes something entirely new. This is just how change works.

For example, in life, you remove one vice, the nervous system becomes softer. Then after the nervous system softens, perception widens. When perception widens, opportunity becomes visible. You look down the long road and finally, you see the house you have been walking towards. Reality rearranges itself through coherence and the attention you pay shapes experience. Experience shapes belief. Belief shapes the world you wake up into. It’s the butterfly effect.

Esoteric traditions have always known that the world responds to the quality of your attention, instead of the volume of your desire. I am now living in a chapter I once believed was light years away. And it wasn’t because I rushed, or forced anything but because I stopped resisting the present long enough for it to reorganize itself around me. This may be hard to believe but the reality you desire prefers cooperation.

When you stop treating the mind as sovereign and the body as subordinate, reality becomes responsive. The human mind is not made to rule reality, but to listen well enough not to interfere.

Snakes carry consequences in every deliberate motion. Whatever burdens you picked up at the beginning of this year traveled inside you, threaded themselves through your routines, your sleep, your choices. A serpent teaches in spirals.

Think of the year as the length of the snake’s body. The bruises you touched in January became scales by April. All the tension you swallowed in June hardened into vertebrae by September. Snakes metabolize slowly, just as we do.

And now we’re arriving at the head, the place where endings decide their own quality. A snake’s venom is not uniformly distributed. It pools at the head, the point of decision and strike — the release. The final days of a snake year are always the most potent. Whatever you refuse to let go of now becomes venom. Whatever you allow to slide off your spiritual epidermis becomes medicine.

If your year began with old grief, betrayals, financial fear, romantic confusion, etc., your task now is not to “fix” anything. Your task is to loosen your jaw around what you’ve been holding on to. To let the metaphorical skin split and taste the freedom on the back of your tongue.

For many of us — including myself, my friends — this was also a Saturn return year. I had been catapulted into a double initiation. Saturn is often feared because she doesn’t sugarcoat. Her lessons are structural, karmic, skeletal. Saturn strips the ornament and hands you the bone. Yet her symbolism intersects with the serpent’s; both deal in maturation, shedding, discipline, cycles, and becoming.

Saturn is the ringed planet of boundaries. The snake is the creature that slips out of any boundary that no longer fits. They create something strangely exquisite and gruesome, a potion of pressure and transformation.

In esoteric traditions, snakes are archivists of the subconscious. They know what you hide, even from yourself. They know when you outgrow an identity but cling to its corpse. They know when you’ve reached the threshold where shedding becomes non-negotiable.

With the Year of the Snake, honestly… I’ve been living in the torture chamber of my own mind. Every misstep, every half intention, or choice I tried to rationalize has been smoke rising from a burnt offering. I continue to be haunted by them and the echoes of what I did, what I left undone, what I thought I could survive without consequence.

The snake doesn’t allow shortcuts. It forces you to face your mistakes and turn over each stone of your habits and vices. You will find yourself staring into the dark corners you usually avoid. And yet, there is grace in this merciless scrutiny: the moment I confront them, name them, exile the consequences, I step lighter, in a way that only deliberate reckoning can produce.

The lesson is simple: you cannot carry what belongs to the past without paying in venom. You cannot escape the labyrinth of your own design until you walk through it fully, torch in your hand, and leave behind the ashes of what no longer serves.

This year asked for honesty in a pitch most people aren’t comfortable hearing. A spirit can no longer be diluted by the venom you once normalized. And at this point in the cycle, your spirit can’t afford to be diluted. So let’s siphon out the final trace of it.

All week, I’ve been circling these questions in my journal:

• What is the last poison I am still holding?

• Where do I feel the resistance to ending?

• Which heaviness has become habitual instead of necessary??

Because the head of the snake (the closing weeks of this cycle) determines the nature of your next beginning, if you meet this end clenched, the venom remains inside you. If you meet it open, something ancient in you molts.

Do not mistake this for urgency. Snakes never rush. But they do know when the old skin has served its final purpose.

As we step toward the new year, imagine pulling your spirit through a narrow doorway. Leave the husk and old fears behind, as well as the dimmed version of yourself that was trained to expect too little.

You’re a creature who is remembering its own divinity. The serpent has taught you all it can.

So I started studying intuition the way some people study wine; reverently, with the suspicion that there’s more going on beneath the surface than anyone admits.

And after years of observation, research, and notes in my phone, I’ve arrived at a simple conclusion: women’s intuition thrives at the intersection of emotion, memory, and cognition. High emotion sharpens the senses. A painful past trains vigilance and psychological understanding ties it all together. It’s usually looked at as witchcraft or psychic activity. It’s literally just pattern recognition.

Science agrees. Neuroscience affirms what women already live. We often display more activity in regions tied to emotion and focus, while men have more intensity in spatial processing. Women also have stronger inter-hemispheric communication; meaning both sides of the brain are constantly gossiping. Men’s brains specialize (tunnel vision) while our brains cross reference.

Different processing styles. And don’t mistake this for different worth either, it’s different maps of the same forest.

Disclaimer: This is not written to enable gender war rhetoric.

But anywho, intuition is not the feral cousin of emotion. Fear, and even desire, can impersonate foresight. Thrive Global gently reminds us that a true intuitive hit feels grounded rather than frantic. It’s the stuff spoken kid in class raising its hand because they actually did the homework. The sensation of a truth settling into you rather than leaping out of you.

And yet… men and sometimes even women… basically everyone, still love calling women too emotional or dramatic.

If only they knew how funny that is.

Research shows men experience feelings just as intensely; they’ve simply been trained to express them sideways. Vulnerability is outsourced to anger, sadness morphs into silence. Fear buries itself under the soil of “I’m good.” Worlds most common lie, by the way. Normative male alexithymia, defined as difficulty naming emotions, often isn’t a personal flaw. Men experience a specific conditioning: Boyhood teaches that crying is a liability; adulthood proves that not crying is disastrous.

So women develop the skill of reading what men don’t say. Generations of patriarchy required it. When you do not hold power, you develop exquisite attunement to those who do. You learn to read tone shifts, eye movement, the microsecond delay before someone tells you whatever it may be. We are trained to read between the lines, but unfortunately, to also shut up about it.

Intuition is simply cognitive compression. Rapid integration of nonverbal cues, emotional literacy, long-term observation create an inner system optimized through history’s longest, most exhausting internship, which is surviving a male dominated society.

And still, patriarchy dismisses anything it cannot quantify. Emotional intelligence..Soft. Intuition..Irrational. Meanwhile the entire stock market runs on hunches, but when a woman senses something’s off, she’s “jumping to conclusions.” Call it whatever name feels comfortable. It remains accurate.

I’ve never been dogmatic about gender roles. They bore me and they rarely match reality. But if we’re working with what we’ve got, then let’s at least respect the intelligence encoded in our wiring. Women’s emotional perception is strategy that often gets mistaken as weakness or instability. Men’s strengths don’t have to be a threat, but just… contribution. None of it needs to be weaponized. They are both met with distrust and seen as threats, in all actuality.

We don’t need to weaponize what could simply be shared.

Reciprocity is the only construction that lasts.

My mother’s intuition taught me this. She discerned things the way some people taste spices in a dish, she did so confidently, without theatrics. She wasn’t guessing either. Sometimes, she will call me on my worst days and she’ll immediately ask what’s wrong before I can even say hello. She must have heard my exhaustion in the silence between rings.

And I’ve decided i’m this time, that I refuse to shrink that ability in myself. I won’t dim my knowing to protect someone else. Intuition is the soul logic, a science that moves through the body before it reaches the tongue. And if that makes someone uncomfortable, then…fine, call it emotional, but I will continue to call it true.

Recently, during a boxing class I noticed I have a good left hook but it seems I keep forgetting the right exists. It reminded me of how people move through life: lop-sided and loyal to one mode of being. The overthinkers live in flowcharts and to-do lists that never touch daylight. They are brilliant, but brilliance locked in stasis is light sealed in resin.

And then there are the doers, the ones who swing until their arms give out and never write it down because they’d rather keep going than watch themselves admit where the limits live. They move forward with bruised knuckles and sometimes broken timing, but at least the fight belongs to them.

Meanwhile, the impulsive ones are leaping into everything headfirst, full of grit but no grid. They move like they’re running out of time, love, oxygen.

I’ve tried being both. There was a season where I lived inside a Google Doc that was 47 pages long and organized by moon phases. I called it “The Big Becoming.” I did not, in fact, become. I outlined it obsessively. Then one day, I deleted the whole thing and biked across the Brooklyn Bridge. I, too, have been the blueprint and also… the hellfire.

But there’s a bit of magic in the few who can hold both frequencies of clarity and movement. I admire those people in a near-religious way. Those who follow up by breaking it down, mapping it out, and then actually doing it. They know when to zoom out, when to dive in. Scary combo.

Planning without action is may feel like discipline, but it actually reeks of fear. We arrange our thoughts like talismans, believing order alone will save us. It creates an illusion of control. We soothe the nervous system with color-coded illusions. But planning can become a head-heavy trance, the crown chakra begins spinning so fast it forgets the body is starving for movement. Plato warned us about this in his ideology called Plato’s cave, ideas so luminous inside the mind that we become afraid to drag them into daylight, where they might look smaller, rough, or more human.

Action without planning is just another form of avoidance. Many people confuse urgency with intuition. This is reactivity over response.

You’re sprinting away from yourself and hoping no one notices you’re out of breath.

I’ve been there too. Post now, start the project today, say yes to everything, as if speed alone guarantees substance. Reactivity is sketching with a broken pencil; you’re moving your hand, sure, but nothing’s landing on the page.

In creativity, this shows up everywhere. The half assed drafts, camera roll graveyard, manic brainstorms that never turn into reality. Avoiding action leaves you with dusty notebooks, while avoiding planning leaves you with a mess and disorder. Eventually, both become excuses.

Instead of planning my ass off, I simply asked myself in my journal: Can I think clearly and move consciously? Can I hold the vision and carry its weight? Can I plan without hiding and act without fleeing?

If you can do both, even a little, you’re already ahead. Planning should be ritualistic. Acting would be prayer in this scenario. Together, they create integrity. There’s confidence in knowing your ideas don’t rot in the notes app. You wake up, sketch a rough outline, then make moves because you’re someone who trusts your own brain. That can be terrifying if you’ve spent most of your life playing small.

This reminds me of Aristotle’s phronesis. Not only do you need to have a personal inner knowing of what’s good, but doing it consistently in a messy world requires nervous system strength (and risk.)

The bigger risk of succeeding is finally realizing your power. That’s what most people are afraid of. You don’t need to be like most people. You really just have to be the one who sees it through.

In these times, where everyone is burnt out and overstimulated and spun sideways. So, the ability to think clearly and act decisively is a radical, almost rare skill.

I’ve started to think of it as a personal art form. Most people never finish. Most will barely begin. If you can plan and act with equal power, that’s a superpower. You don’t abandon your dreams when the body gets tired, or the ego gets scared, just move like someone who’s sat with themselves long enough to know exactly where they’re going and why.

Half the world treats their dreams like seasonal décor; cute until inconvenient. You’re not obligated to be gentle when it comes to your vision. Let it demand something of you.

I don’t quit just because my body wants a nap or my ego wants insanity. However absurd, it is worth the heat. I move like someone who’s spent far too long in their own mind and finally decided the path is worth all the crazy sh*t.

So again, ask yourself, can I think clearly and move deliberately?

Can I hold the vision and carry weight?

I thought about it for a few months, circling the idea the way I’d circle a tiny, shy animal, and I realized friendship is basically a social contract with a touch of improv. Two people agreeing to say “yes, and” to each other’s sentences, while occasionally adding in a “no, but” when boundaries get blurred.

Women’s friendships, specifically, are like highly specific love affairs. They can heal at astonishing speed and, with equal talent, transform into a Hallmark horror film.

Truthfully, I used to think friendship should be easy. But then I remembered absolutely nothing involving human beings is ever easy. Especially not women, who were conditioned from childhood to be caretaker, confessor, hypewoman, therapist, shoulder to cry on, sparring partner, and occasionally spiritual archivist.

I began to notice the ways friendships could thrive (or implode) based on how we approach connection. Somewhere between chaotic group chats, and nights crying into burgers and fries, (and my psychological studies, if course) I pieced together a few principles.

1. Allow the slow burn (friendship isn’t a Netflix binge)

Love bombing isn’t just an experience that you get after Hinge dates. I’m sure you have met a woman at a gallery opening, or something of the sort, and suddenly you’re like inseparable soul sisters by week two, texts firing into the message thread like a machine gun. It’s sweet, dizzying, and usually theatrical. It feels intoxicating but it’s often performance.

The psychological term is “illusory intimacy”: confusing instant chemistry with depth. In Gen Z language it’s when you confuse a situationship for a relationship, but in this context it’s platonic. True friendship is a slow burn. You have to learn her microexpressions, the way she eats fries (with ranch? or ICE CREAM?), and what her “sorry I’m busy” actually means. That’s intimacy.

2. Your bestie has a inner cinematic universe too

We all want our best friend to be our crisis hotline. But HONESTLY, she’s running her own hotline too. Sometimes, you’re both crying over different people, at the same time, on the same FaceTime call, and neither of you will notice.

This is where gender studies comes in: women disproportionately absorb emotional labor. Your bestie is not your mom, therapist, and boyfriend combined. She’s human. Romanticize her life too. Ask about her weird coworker. Remember she’s healing from her own breakups. Balance by  remembering she’s the lead in her own story. Encourage her in this. Notice the ways she’s rebuilding herself. Avoid keeping score.

3. Love isn’t only measured in hours logged together

Time lies. You can spend ten hours with someone and still feel misunderstood. Meanwhile, one thoughtful gesture; a sticker, her favorite drink, a screenshot of an inside joke or meme, can do more to remind someone “hey! you matter to me.”

These are symbolic affirmations. Even if you haven’t fully honed words of affirmation, you can lean on these. They are proof that the market’s $3 section can save lives. Women often silence parts of themselves because they feel too loud and needy. Trinkets, texts, and gestures clear all that anxiety out. Your friend doesn’t need you 24/7 however she may need reminders she’s real to you when you’re not in the room.

4. Practice radical honesty (but medium boundaries)

Okay, this one’s tricky. Realistically, most friendship fallouts don’t happen because someone slept with your ex or keyed your car. Usually, someone swallowed too many “I’m fine”s. Women are trained to preserve harmony, which makes resentment bloom like mold behind drywall.

Radical honesty is the cure. Don’t scorch the earth with your truth, definitely a more middle-ground honesty. Like: “I love you, but when you cancel last minute I feel disposable.” Or, this one is common for me “I’m cranky today and not good company, rain check?”

Medium boundaries. Don’t think walls… open fields, either. Think of like a stylish fence you can see through. Honesty keeps friendship breathable. Remember her as your neighbor always.

5. Let friendships evolve (phases aren’t failures)

My older train of thought carried the ideas that “real” friendships never change. But then I remembered humans molt. Jobs, therapy, breakups, new neighborhoods. Sometimes your bestie is your everyday person, sometimes she’s seasonal. I don’t think it cheapens the bond, in my eyes, it actually makes it richer.

The best friendships don’t resist evolution. Friendships can take new shapes, voice notes instead of daily hangs, yearly dinners that still feel holy.

6. Be romantic, platonically

A secret no one says out loud is women’s friendships are often the most romantic relationships of our lives. Holding her earrings while she fights with her boyfriend. Sending a playlist called “Songs for When You Hate Everyone Except Me.” Catching her eye across the bar and laughing because you just know what she means.

My philosophy here is romance doesn’t belong exclusively to Eros. I mean, lean into the melodrama. Buy her flowers for no reason. Write her name with a heart in your Notes app. Take her seriously enough to remind her the world is still gentle in places.

Sisterhood is a room the two of you build where you can stretch, contradict, heal, collapse, resurrect, and send each other deranged videos at three in the morning. Stronger connections grow from that mixture of honesty, humor, affection, and forgiveness.

Women deserve friendships that feel supportive and alive.

I currently live in Brooklyn (I’m sure most of my points are accurate for most walkable cities and close knit living quarters) and the neighborhood carries the bones of real community: aunties on stoops, the gossip, pockets of spirit that existed long before community became a PR word. Layered over all of this is a new wave of people crying about “community” as if they want us all to jump through a hoop for them. It’s almost theatrical.

People speak about community the way the LOASS (Law of Assumption/Online Manifestation Hogwarts) community speaks of manifestation; like if they say it enough times, it’ll materialize at their doorstep without requiring much effort of them. You can’t just wait for it to appear. Not quite.

It is something that absolutely has to be cultivated, and more importantly, you have to understand what you’re even asking for. Some people don’t actually want community, I noticed they crave a control that feels communal and prefer a painfully deliberate curation of people who orbit around their own convenience and individualism.

Here’s the anatomy of the cliquey energy you may feel these days; aesthetic-first belonging and friend groups formed around similarity rather than pure sincerity. Unfortunately, there is a fantasy of intimacy without the vulnerability that makes intimacy possible in the first place. As soon as one is to step out of the fantastical line, they are exiled from a community of people who they thought they could rely on.

True community asks you to be emotionally available in ways that aren’t always sexy and Instagram postable. We must carry the capacity and willingness hold space when someone is falling apart and listen without looking for our own reflection. It seems it’s become hard for people to be present in moments that won’t become content or beneficial later on. I suggest we all find more courage to stay when it’s easier to float. This also requires less attachment to ego.

Sadly, most people don’t have the bandwidth for that. It isn’t because they’re “bad people”, but mostly because our culture has starved us of those skills. (Especially after COVID lockdown).

We know how to gather, connect, but struggle to root. We’ve built lives optimized for self-protection and then are confused as to why we feel so lonely and isolated.

Even my own community didn’t arrive easily, as if I stood in the mirror and said “community” three times. I simply focused on what I love and talked to people who love the same things, without judgment or performance, of course. It grew when I allowed myself to be inconvenienced at times, and taught myself how to linger in moments when I could have left, becoming an active participant in the processes that life guarantees. Secretly, something real and beautiful formed.

Community, I’ve comes to realize, is a willingness to be seen without the armor of the persona, and to see others without the filter of expectation.

Maybe that is the spiritual assignment of our generation: to stop begging for community as a finished product and learn to put it into practice. I even had to give up the fantasy of effortless belonging and choose the luminous work of building something real.

The way forward is simpler than everyone makes it. Start small. Reach out first. Follow up. Stay five minutes longer than you planned. Practice the belonging you crave and offer the reciprocation you are demanding. Let people see you in an unpolished hour.

Willingness is the doorway most people never walk through.

Dre Fidalgo makes  photos that looks simple until you try it yourself. A white backdrop, a model, lights. It seems easy, right?

…Not so much.

His work proves that minimalism is centered in precision. Anyone can throw up a seamless backdrop and hope for magic. Fidalgo knows how coax out color where there shouldn’t be any, how to make a blue sweater feel like an electric current. That’s what drew me to him, and made me want to interview him for this series.

Growing up with a Cape Verdean father and Colombian mother, he was in a chromatic abundance, streets painted, food that looked like festival banners. He carries that saturation into his photography. Color isn’t for decoration in his practice. But instead of flattening it into cliché, he uses color as intimacy. His favorite is blue. It lets the other colors do their thing. And it’s always there, grounding.

If you’re expecting Dre to pull out binders of references, storyboards, or spreadsheets, don’t bother. He freewheels. That doesn’t always mean unprepared, but mostly attentive.

“Nine times out of ten, the shot finds me,” he explains to me. “The model steps in, I see something in their posture, and I follow it.”

He casts people who radiate what he calls “earth-alien energy” ordinary and otherworldly at the same time. The faces that feel familiar yet slightly impossible, déjà vu in human form. Inclusivity and beauty of differences really shines in his work.

Here’s the part younger artists should underline: his camera is old. I don’t mean ‘vintage in a cool way’ old. It’s lived many lives and technically not “industry standard.” He’s had it for seven years, and refuses to replace it. “If it breaks, I’ll figure it out. That’s part of the job.” There’s genius in that. Tools don’t make the artist; malleability does. You could hand Dre a disposable camera or an iPhone flashlight and he’d still find the shot.

That attitude comes from necessity. In his early New York days, he was renting one hour studios, watching half his paid time evaporate while models ran late. He laughs about it now, but it forced him into discipline. With thirty minutes left you learn to see faster, shoot sharper, and stop waiting for perfect. “Constraints can be annoying,” he says, “but they teach you to improvise. That’s why I trust myself now. I can make it work anywhere.”

I have a few of his influences lined up like a syllabus: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, Solange’s visuals, David Sims editorials from The Face. What connects them is the keen sensitivity to detail. You don’t need a backstory when you can read the crease in a garment, the tilt of a chin. His portraits carry that same romance; just subtle, deliberate, never ever stiff.

And yes, he has ambitions within this. Billboards on Lafayette. Calvin Klein campaigns. A magazine cover that’ll stop people in their tracks. He doesn’t, at all, speak about his dreams with desperation, I felt rather, a sense with inevitability.

“It’ll happen when it’s supposed to.” That’s a reminder to artists everywhere: the work is the proof. The timeline is simply just …happening.

His advice to emerging photographers is disarmingly practical:

“Stay malleable. Don’t let tools or timing limit you.” If all you’ve got is an iPhone and a flashlight, bounce it off the wall and make it work. Press every button. Break some rules. Keep going.

That’s Dre Fidalgo. A photographer who creates from restraint and living, breathing proof that art isn’t born while waiting for perfect conditions, but when you refuse to wait at all.

We’re having a silence before the storm moment but this silence sounds like the hum of fluorescent lights in an office where no one’s hiring, and the air smells faintly of stale coffee and years of debt.

Everyone’s asking if are we in a recession.

Technically, no. Officially… also no. But ask your landlord, your boss, look at that grocery receipt, and while you’re at it ask the cashier that rang up that $9 nut milk, and the answer starts to bend toward yes. The answer just feelslike yes.

If enough people feel broke, they act broke. They cut back, hoard, lose confidence. And once confidence cracks, the economy follows.

The smoke before the fire

August jobs report: 22,000 jobs added. A cough in the middle of the night. Unemployment at a near 4-year high. Consumer confidence bottoming out. Bond markets twitching.

Economists are using phrases like “labor recession.” Which gives mild, like “diet recession” or “lite recession.” Labor is the economy. If the workers are cracking then the whole structure is already leaning.

When unemployment rises alienation rises with it. People start to measure their value in hours lost and opportunities missed. Entire communities shift into survival mode, and survival mode rewires the brain; narrows imagination, shrinks risk tolerance, makes us mistrustful of one another. You can’t build culture or innovation on scarcity thinking.

The delusion of “not yet”

The Fed won’t call it a recession because calling it would make it real. So they cling to their lagging indicators:: GDP still moving, spending still decent, incomes wobbling but… intact. But data is slow while a reality is fast and rude.

Your rent doesn’t wait for the Fed. And those groceries don’t care about quarterly reports.

If the government doesn’t name it, maybe people won’t panic. However, I think denial is a very fragile thing. It fractures fast when daily life stops aligning with official optimism.

Once trust in institutions is shattered, it’s rarely whole again. It’s like glass. If people feel gaslit about their reality, their loyalty breaks, and the spiral deepens.

Why this matters

Recessions are rooted in trust, energy, and power. They shape who gets to dream, and who just tries to survive. They’re about whether artists can keep studios, whether families can stay housed, and if communities can keep their lights on.

Recessions expose what was already fragile. They widen inequality because they spotlight it. They show who had a cushion and who was always just a paycheck away from collapse.

People internalize structural problems as personal failures, blaming themselves for layoffs, high rent prices, and/or shrinking opportunities. And shame isolates, which in turn makes collective action much harder.

This is why it matters how we talk about it. Because if we let the word “recession” become abstract, we’ll miss how it’s already moving through our lives.

Wake-up call

We are on the edge. Not officially, but you don’t wait until the house is fully in flames to admit you smell smoke.

So watch the labor market, and don’t just believe the headlines. Try to notice how people are moving, spending, and surviving. Notice how the economy isn’t numbers and stars, but bodies, with hours worked.

We may not “be in” a recession yet, but the recession is already in us.

And how we acknowledge that, whether with denial, despair, solidarity, will decide what happens next.

The Old Script

There’s a specific brand of advice making its way around in pleaser heels, sipping an $18 martini at 3PM, adjusting her oversized sunglasses so you can’t see the absolute terror behind her eyes: fake it till you make it.

She meant well. She got you through your first job interview, first date, also your first apartment application. For a minute, it worked but the longer you wear that mask, the more it fuses to your face. And when you finally peel it off, your real self sat is pale, just crawled out of the basement of other people’s expectations.

In today’s economy of self-awareness and nervous system literacy, “fake it” is a VHS tape in a streaming era.

Why “Faking It” Doesn’t Work

Confidence isn’t a mental Photoshop job. You can’t airbrush over your fears until you’re pretty enough for public consumption. It’s a body level thing: shoulders down, breath slow. Heart steady because you’re here, actually in the room. There are no feelings hiding in the attacks.

“Fake it till you make it” teaches dissociation. It tells you to perform competence while your real self waits backstage. But insecurities don’t disappear when buried; they knock on your door at midnight just to remind you they’re still here.

The Real Curriculum: Discomfort

It begins as exposure therapy in its rawest form: putting yourself exactly where the discomfort lives.

If you’re a tall girl taught to shrink, stop folding yourself like you owe the room less square footage. Wear the damn heels. Let your legs speak a foreign language. Most consequences you fear aren’t real, they’re social fan fiction containing punishments and  rules nobody ever agreed to.

When you fake who you are, you’re always auditioning, especially for yourself. But peace comes from rooting down, trusting that your presence is enough.

Wisdom Hour

Sweet angel Toni Morrison once wrote: “You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.”

Her words radicalized me.

You are more than what you produce. Rediscover the self that exists outside of work

You can’t hustle and costume change your way into being someone you admire. You arrive by sitting so deeply in your own body that no side eye or cold shoulder can rattle you. And yes, people will project. They’ll see what they need to keep their own story neat. But their version of you is only community theater. Let them ponder and squint.

Alice Walker sharpened this truth even further: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

Fake confidence is pretending you’ve got power, while you should be remembering you never lost it, you just believed someone who told you otherwise.

The Generational Layer

A lot of what we call “lack of confidence” is really old programming, family scripts, hallway politics, media soundbites, gender expectations. I call this mental residue.

Gen Z (Black kids, in particular) grow up bilingual; fluent in self-expression, fluent in dodging surveillance. Told to shrink in one breath, told to “be authentic” in the next. That contradiction is the curriculum. Confidence gets buried under the syllabus, but the doubt itself is proof of survival.

The Practice

You don’t need to fake it. You need to practice.

• Practice showing up nervous.

• Practice letting the room adjust to you.

• Practice holding silence without rushing to fill it.

• Practice being seen without making notes.

Your only job is to keep stepping into rooms (barefoot or in heels) with your pulse still racing, and stay long enough for your body to learn: it’s safe to belong. Do it scared.

I meet Kiara in a studio that carries pieces of her and memories of memories. She calls herself Kiarita when she paints, a name kissed forward from her grandmother.

What Kiara does is simple but audacious; she paints the tender parts of life onto objects that have already lived. Nightstands, record players, cabinet doors. Which contains vulnerable bodies at rest. Lovers experiencing each other.

I. Chaos, Control, and the Muscle of Making

For Kiara, adaptation is the engine. She treats both chaos and control not as enemies to be wrestled but as co-conspirators, two hands on the same wheel. One insists on structure, the other on surprise. To banish either would flatten the work; together they create the heartbeat.

She thinks of painting the way a runner thinks of their stride: a practice of endurance, rhythm, repetition. The muscle must be trained daily, even when the body resists, even when the ideas feel thin. In the act of constant making, discernment is sharpened; quantity becomes the soil out of which quality eventually blooms.

II. Origin Story: The Cabinet Door

She shared that she had no wood panels, no budget, just a cabinet door. Her grandfather’s light hoarding became her materials library. That first piece was a meditation on home. And she realized quickly that she wasn’t just painting on an object, but painting with it. The cabinet door already had a history; scratches, hinges. Over time, she began to see the object itself carried as much meaning as the image layered on top.

III. Intentionality as Architecture

Every choice in Kiara’s work is deliberate, the furniture is the stage, the frame, and container of memory.

Privacy is an active presence in the work. Some paintings are tucked into compartments you must open to see, giving her viewers permission to enter rather than assuming they have the right. It’s an assertion that  intimacy is earned instead of freely given.

IV. Textures, Tools, and Research

Materials are never neutral. They are collaborators, each carrying their own temperament and history of use. She chooses them not only for utility, also for their ability to deepen the conversation between surface and story.

Plaster literally and figuratively gives her paintings depth. Spread across the wood, it raises and lowers like terrain, inviting shadow to fall into its ridges. It transforms the flatness of the surface into something sculptural, as if the painting were learning how to breathe through its skin. She researches without snobbery, so Reddit is as valid as a masterclass.

Her choices read as playful but also subversive.

I liked that about her, that she refuses the elitism that so often clings to art circles. Watching her work, I realized just how playful her choices are, using scraps to turn domestic momento into tangible beauty.

It reminds me that beauty can be engineered from anywhere, that what is considered “domestic” or “decorative” carries the power to shape representation.

V. Vulnerability Tax

The month before a show is a season of its own. For weeks, she worked eight to ten hours a day, excavating her emotional reserves. The work asked everything and she paid in full.

One result, a six-panel painting of intimate moments with a partner, is rarely shown. Out of stewardship. Some images are too charged to be handled casually; they must wait for the right hands, the right eyes.

VI. Public Eyes, Private Meanings

Critics once saw her work as memorials to loss, her intent was rest. Culture reads through its own wounds. She learned to curate fiercely: through light, sequence, and context. One viewer heard Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden in a piece; another’s soundtrack swap mirrored a shift in her own relationship. Eventually she saw she was building installations, and it wasn’t all paint and canvas.

VII. Process and the Myth of the Perfect Idea

No music in her process, she listens to the painting itself. The process is like a conversation.

She reminded me that no two processes will ever look the same. She tells me perfection is a myth and the work rarely matches the image in the mind, but accidents bring the unexpected gifts. I went on to compare the artist’s process to the human fingerprint, unique, literally unrepeatable, impossible to counterfeit.

Listening, I felt my own resistance soften. Maybe the accident isn’t deviation at all, and it’s the whole point.

“Leave the door cracked for accidents,” she tells me.

VIII. Teaching, Fear, and Ritual

Cardboard is perfect, use what’s there, Kiara tells me. She works on two or three pieces at once to spread the weight of expectation. Unfinished work is tucked out of sight, so it can be met fresh later. Copying is welcomed as study, as long as you credit where it came from. And always, create for yourself first.

Her ideal studio day is structured but loose: arrive early, journal before and after, paint in focused 40–60 minute sprints, break, repeat. Social life comes after the work is done.

IX. Advice For Young Artists

I. Process over performance.

Performance will exhaust you and process will sustain you. The real work happens in the quiet hours when no one is watching. Learn to love the primary rhythm of making. The applause will be temporary while the process shapes you.

II. Materials are invitations, not excuses.

The brush, the pen, the scraps of wood, or whatever you have nearby are enough. The material isn’t the obstacle; the hesitation is. Let what’s available guide you. Scarcity can sharpen your vision.

III. Let the work protect itself.

You don’t have to defend every piece you make. Art has its own armor (if it’s honest). Trust that the people who need it will find it, and those who don’t will look away. The work is braver than you think.

IV. Quantity teaches taste.

Taste is earned. The more you create, the more your intuition will refine. You’ll learn which ideas are seeds and which are weeds. Make so much that discernment becomes second nature.

V. Curate like a surgeon.

Cutting away isn’t a rejection of self, it’s clearing space for what’s vital. Keep what feels alive, let go of what doesn’t breathe anymore.

VI. Let life edit the piece.

Time and experience are part of your toolkit. A heartbreak may shift the meaning of a color. Allow the outside world to filter through. The piece grows alongside you.

VII. Fear is a material, shape it.

You can mold fear into form. Let it become part of the work, don’t let it become  the reason you don’t begin. What you fear most often holds the most resonance.

X. Closing: On Kiarita and the Right to Rest

Kiara’s furniture isn’t furniture anymore. They  hold secrets and doors that carry a grandmother’s name, or a lover’s breath. When she paints, the house learns a new language. When you stand in front of it, so do you.

While love is the medium, home is frame.

Rest is her thesis.

///

By someone who sees the world through a curtain of bone-deep realism.

Monogamy is metabolically expensive. It’s anthropology. It’s the truth no one wants to admit when quoting wedding vows or preaching virtue.

Throughout human history, our species has jumped between two conflicting survival strategies: attachment and expansion. One is about building villages; the other, burning them down to feel the heat. Lust, as disruptive as it is, is not an enemy of civilization, it’s what births it and keeps it alive.

In lower-energy organisms, like lizards, insects, even many primates, monogamy is rarely the default. Why? Because it requires energy conservation with purpose. To be monogamous is to invest long-term in emotional regulation, and conflict resolution. It’s to delay gratification and metabolize routine without seeking a constant spike of dopamine.

Philosopher Michel Foucault might call monogamy a form of “bio power”, a structure imposed not because it aligns with our primal instincts, but because it disciplines the body and organizes society. To love one person, consistently and with depth, is to submit yourself to a sacred limitation. It’s spiritual, but also highly political.

And yet, how many leaders, kings, tycoons, prophets, and revolutionaries have faltered at the altar of desire?

Last week, the CEO of Astronomer became a living case study. Caught on the kiss cam at a Coldplay concert in an intimate moment with his head of HR. A moment that went viral within hours, his marriage unraveled in real time, his resignation came swiftly, and the internet feasted. The image was harmless enough: a glance, a grin, a duck of the head. But the subtext was thunderous.

The contradiction lives in the gut: the very same men and women who lead nations, heal bodies, and move markets are often the most prone to affairs, to lust, to betrayal because they are metabolically deprived and  disembodied from their own joy.

Power doesn’t always bring pleasure. Often, it just brings pressure. And within that pressure, novelty becomes a salve. The forbidden becomes a form of breathwork. Infidelity isn’t always about sex. They’re escaping the avatar they created to survive daily obligations.

This isn’t to excuse harm but to examine it honestly.

In psychological terms, this is dopaminergic starvation. When you’re constantly producing, performing, managing, or leading, your nervous system becomes trapped in a high-alert state. Novelty, sexual, romantic, or emotional spikes dopamine, temporarily restore your sense of vitality. You feel young again, alive again, human again.

Sociologically, we must look at this through the lens of capitalism and modern stress culture. The more high-performing a role becomes, the more disconnected it can be from the body. The more disembodied someone becomes, the more they chase experiences that force them back into their skin. And sex, especially secret sex, is one of the most primal, immediate ways to return to sensation.

This isn’t new. In every era, from ancient Egypt to Victorian England, from the Roman Empire to Wall Street, the most powerful figures often sought release not in their palaces, but in their secret chambers. Because they were tired.

You cannot run a kingdom and be emotionally available at the same time unless you are metabolically supported by connection and regulation.

And that’s the core wound of modern relationships: we ask people to show up fully for us, but we’re not metabolically resourced to show up for ourselves.

Freud might call this repetition compulsion, the unconscious return to the same wound, dressed in new faces. Audre Lorde would say, “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” The spiritual teacher in me agrees.

When your nervous system is in a perpetual state of constriction, you don’t crave intimacy, but relief. That’s not love at all.

So what happens when you finally slow down?And hold yourself the way you begged others to?You stop reaching for sparks that burn you. You begin to feel again, not just in moments of passion, but in moments of calm. That’s what separates lust from love, reactivity from receptivity because intimacy is about capacity. And most people are simply not regulated enough to love deeply. Not yet, at least.

But you can be if you choose to metabolize your triggers, instead of constantly escape them. If you choose truth over fantasy and mostly, if you choose your own aliveness through care.

Why the Post-Apocalyptic Aesthetic Isn’t Just a Trend

I. THE UNRAVELING LOOKS GOOD ON US

The world is burning and we’re dressing accordingly.

Utility belts. Built-in gloves. Buckled boots. Cargo silhouettes. Weatherproof fabrics that could double as tents. These aren’t just garments anymore. It’s It’s fashion at the edge of a nervous system collapse.

Every pocket means “I carry what I need.”

Every oversized hood means “Don’t perceive me.”

Every fabric choice; canvas, leather, recycled synthetics, is a prayer for durability in an age of decay.

This is often reduced to “Mad Max cosplay,” is actually something more intimate and  ancestral. It’s what happens when we lose trust in systems and start trusting our instincts again. It’s protection.

II. WE’RE DRESSING FOR THE FALL

It’s no coincidence that the rise of apocalyptic fashion coincides with climate chaos, mass extinction, AI paranoia, and institutional failure.

We’ve seen floods on our timelines and the sky turn burnt orange. We’ve watched democracy falter and billionaires flee the planet. We’ve felt sensation that we are not post-anything. We are pre-something else unknown. And so, we reach for garments that feel like readiness.

We crave equipment. We want boots that can walk through rubble and jackets that make us look like we could vanish into or a forest.

This is the subconscious wardrobe of the survivalist dreamer.

The one who imagines a world collapsing, but still makes it to the end of the movie.

III. CLOTHING AS A BOUNDARY

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just about “fashion.”

Our bodies live in a hyperstimulated world. The layers and heavy fabrics are a wearable NO.

It’s genderless because when you’re running, hiding, surviving, identity gets streamlined to action. We’re not asking to be understood but to be left alone — and still alive.

IV. POST-STRUCTURALIST FASHION

Now enter theory.

Fashion theorists often mirror philosophers: questioning reality, questioning form, and who decides meaning.

Post-structuralist thought (Foucault, Derrida) taught us that nothing is fixed; not language, not roles, not symbols. Meaning is always in motion. And in the same way, style becomes unstable and disobedient.

Post-apocalyptic aesthetics are inherently nonlinear. They borrow from the past (military), remix the present (streetwear), and imagine futures we hope never come true. There’s no consistent reference point.

When we no longer believe the system will save us, we design our own semiotics, and wear them on our bodies like geometry.

V. DRESSING LIKE YOU KNOW SOMETHING

What you wear says what you’re bracing for.

So think: Are you dressing to seduce the present, or survive the future?

For many creatives, this aesthetic is an invitation to start documenting collapse with clarity, and design with intent.

Style becomes a map and mourning ritual.

VI. PROMPT: WHAT WOULD YOU WEAR IF THE WORLD NO LONGER PROTECTED YOU?

Strip back the trends. Forget the runway.

If you had to walk through a world that felt unsafe, uncertain, or unrecognizable,

what would you wear?

Would you reach for sharp angles or draped silhouettes?

Would you scream through color?

Would you preserve softness or conceal it completely?

Design from that place.

Because it’s not centered around what is “cool”but what gives you structure when society can’t.

VII. WHAT THIS MEANS FOR DESIGNERS + VISIONARIES

As a creative, you’re not just playing with fabric. You’re engaging with the emotional landscape of an era. You’re responding to instability in the way you shape silhouettes, choose materials, and build visual narratives.

Let it be a question:

What do we wear when we stop pretending things are fine?

Because collapsewear isn’t necessarily cynical.

It can be sacred. It can be a form of grief or protection. It can also be a form of personal and cultural protection, a way of saying: I may not control what’s happening, but I can control how I show up in it.

Creation becomes a way to process, adapt, and stay human in environments designed to erase humanity. When we create through crisis, we’re reclaiming our role as meaning-makers. And in creating meaning, we get to survive.

VIII. FINAL WORD

The post-apocalyptic aesthetic is future-proofing. It’s building it on new terms. And maybe that’s what all of this is:

You were never meant to be soft just for the sake of softness. You were meant to be prepared, wild, and free.

Build your armor. Light your candle.

And design as if the future is still worth dressing for.

Faye had always lived in the quiet between questions. She was raised in a house where love was rarely spoken. Her parents — precise, stylish, offered tenderness like rationed sugar: carefully, never without ceremony. Even their silences had posture. She learned early how to exist like an antique vase.

She became fluent in withholding. Thinking before speaking, then thinking again. Then came Tak.

He entered every room like he’d just fallen from the sun. You felt him before he arrived. The kind of man who laughed with his whole body and cried without shame. The kind of man who didn’t believe in quiet, only in pauses between breaths.

They met on the Calypso Rising, a floating relic turned ecological research vessel.

It had once trafficked spices, opium — now it carried scientists and dreamers, both haunted and holy. It drifted through the Atlantic like a ship with unfinished business. Faye came to study star patterns. Tak came with no title. He just... showed up.

That’s what he did. Appeared, unbothered by permission.

Her job was to chart the relationships between weather patterns and ancient constellations. A poetic role. But the really, she came to get lost. Or become someone who wasn’t always hiding.

He carried ropes, repaired leaks, cooked when no one asked him to. His hands smelled like sage and engine grease. He flirted with everyone but meant it with no one… until her.

“You always that still?” he asked, on a night slick with salt air.

“You always that …boisterous?” she replied, not looking up.He smiled like she’d handed him a key. She didn’t smile back.

That was the beginning.

They drifted into each other the way you slip into dreams. Without realizing it’s already too late to turn back. Late night stargazing. Her fingers tracing moons along his arm. His voice teasing as he called her doc, just to see her roll her eyes. She kept telling herself it was only temporary. He never believed in temporary. They made love as if searching for glimpses of their past lives, hoping to recognize something they’d once belonged to.

But even then, something inside her stayed braced. Like love was a wave that might turn violent at any moment. She admired him, maybe even envied how easily he moved through the world. How he wore his longing on the outside, while hers stayed tucked and coded.

He needed a witness. She needed shelter. And there is no manual for how fire lives inside still water. It worked — for a while. Fire needs containment. Water needs warmth. But need doesn’t mean forever. It just means now.

The storm came on a Wednesday.

They had just returned from diving near a coral graveyard. The water clung to her hair in dark strands, salt drying into fragile lattices along her collarbones. She was cold bone-deep, the kind of cold that makes you believe you might never be warm again. He was aching in that way only hours underwater can carve into you; muscles heavy, lungs tender, a ringing in his ears that made the world feel a little out of sync.

The ship groaned around them, a low, ancient sound that felt like it was grieving death. The wind pushed against the hull like it was trying to remind them of something they’d promised to forget. He reached for her, almost reverently, pressed a hand to the back of her neck. His thumb brushed the place where her pulse fluttered, uncertain.

“You disappear,” he said, voice edged with something he couldn’t hide anymore. “Into your mind. Like there’s a room I’ll forever be locked out of.”

She stared over his shoulder at the moonlight glinting on wet ropes. The truth was, she did disappear. It felt safer to vanish into the quiet of her own thoughts than risk saying the wrong thing, needing too much.

She said nothing.

His hand fell away, leaving a phantom heat on her skin. He swallowed, eyes searching her face for any sign she might open the door just a crack. But her gaze stayed fixed somewhere beyond him.

“So…” His voice broke and reformed itself. “If I have to keep guessing how to love you…” He looked down at his calloused fingers, twisting them together like they might tell him something he hadn’t already rehearsed in his head a thousand times. “Eventually… I’ll guess wrong.”

The ship gave a deep, shuddering sigh.She wanted to scream. To tell him that she didn’t mean to vanish, that her silence was fear. That she didn’t know how to be held without bracing for the moment it would all be taken away.

Instead, she stayed still.

His gaze lifted to hers, exhausted and luminous. For a second, she thought he might say something else. That he might push past the last defense she didn’t even know she had. But his eyes drifted, unfocusing as if he’d retreated somewhere she couldn’t follow.

“I mean,” he murmured, more to himself than to her, “I’m trying.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

They stood there, breathing each other’s breath, neither moving to close the space between them. Outside, the waves slapped and wind swept over the deck, carrying the scent of brine and rust and something older than either of them.

Later, she would think of this night as the point when something small (but essential) cracked.

They lasted three more months after that. It was like watching a fire burn itself down to ash, too tired to feed it, too proud to admit you still wanted to.

By the time they reached the port city, there was cinnamon in the air, rust along the rails, something between them had closed.

She packed at dawn. No dramatic gestures. No begging. Just folded shirts. She told herself she didn’t care that his boots weren’t by the door.

But when she reached the platform, she heard footsteps.

Tak.

Out of breath. Holding her old sketchbook.

“You forgot this,” he said.

“Or maybe… you needed a reason to see me again.”

He grinned, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You always gotta make it hard.”

She opened the book with trembling fingers, shaking more than she would allow her face to show. The spine cracked, exhausted from being opened and shut too many times. She turned past diagrams of weather systems and rough sketches of constellations until she found the page she’d been thinking of since dawn… though she hadn’t admitted it to herself until this moment.

The drawing was of the Calypso Rising, rendered in dark, quick strokes. Half of it was burned away, edges singed and curling inward like an old wound that never fully closed. She traced the line where paper turned to ash. The ship had always felt like a metaphor.

She ripped it out. The sound felt final.

When she looked up, he was watching her with that unbearable softness in his eyes, the look she’d tried to forget because it made her want to stay. He stood there, boots scuffed from the road, coat hanging open like he’d put it on in a hurry. He looked like he hadn’t meant to come here but had no other choice.

She stepped closer, holding the drawing between them. For a second, neither of them moved. Then she pressed it into his hand.

“Here,” she said, voice low and steady in a way she didn’t feel. “You should have it.”

He looked down at the page, his thumb brushing the burned corner. His eyes traveled to the bottom, to the single word she had written in deliberate script:

Hold.

For a moment, the air felt charged as if the smallest movement might change everything or nothing at all. His gaze lifting to hers.

He didn’t ask her to stay.

She didn’t ask him to come. Some stories aren’t meant to be rewritten, you just keep the memories with all their fractures intact.

She stepped back. He let her.

When the train lurched forward, it was like a tether snapping in her ribs. She set her bag on the worn seat beside her and turned her head, against every instinct telling her not to look.

Through the smudged window, she saw him still standing on the platform, the drawing held against his chest. The wind tugged at his coat, lifting the edge like a question. His eyes were fixed on her—steady, unblinking, watching her as if he knew he’d never get to again.

She held his gaze as long as she could stand it. Then the platform slid away, replaced by rails, then by a blur of winter grass and steel.

She let the ache spread through her chest. Let it be real. As the train carried her away, she closed her eyes and tried to remember how it felt to be wanted so completely that even leaving could feel like love.

Years later, in a studio built from driftwood and sea-glass, Faye wrote:

He loved loudly. I loved long.
He needed to be understood. I seemed to need solitude more.
We were a lesson in timing. A match lit in wet hands.
But God, did we boil.

For a long time after, she didn’t speak his name out loud. Not even to herself. It hung there, unspoken.

She let time do what it does: soften the edges of memory into something she could touch without bleeding. In the beginning, she believed she was getting better. She convinced herself that silence was the same thing as peace.

She moved to a city older than her grief, a place with winding alleys and iron balconies and evenings that smelled of moss and old books. She rented a narrow studio above a print shop, the walls painted the color of milk left too long in the sun. At night, she would open the tall windows and let the moon pour in, the only witness to the life she was trying to build.

She designed constellations no one would ever read. Precise charts of imaginary skies, maps for travelers who didn’t exist. Her students, a handful of quiet young women, never asked why the diagrams were always half finished, why she would sometimes stop mid sentence as if remembering something she wasn’t ready to share.

On mornings when the city was still sleeping, she would walk to the market to buy fruit she never ate. She liked the ritual of selecting oranges, feeling their weight in her palms. She liked that they smelled almost, but not exactly, like the way his hands used to smell after he cleaned the ship’s engine.

Her studio became the home of stories that didn’t want to be told. She would start to write about the Calypso Rising, about the man who called her doc with that irreverent smile, but the sentences always collapsed before she reached the end.

Some days, she would look around at the stacks of sketches, the half finished journals, the climbing ivy in the window box, and think: Well, I survived.

Most days, though, she felt like an artifact someone else had excavated. A relic preserved in the exact moment she had chosen to leave him behind.

She was someone who had almost loved well, and then decided that almost… was safer. As if a clean ending could spare her the humiliation of admitting how much she’d needed him.

But the body remembers what the mind sends to the archives.

She learned that truth the first spring after she left. She was sorting through old books when she came across his handkerchief, folded around a piece of driftwood he’d carved into a crude little whale. The sight of it made her heart fall to her feet. She had to sit on the floor, palms pressed to the cold boards, and let the ache move through her.

His laughter haunted her.

And whenever she peeled an orange, the smell of it would rise up like a summons. She would stand there, breathing in citrus and engine oil, and feel that she was being called back to something.

Back to the version of herself that had believed, however briefly, that she could be held without breaking.

And then, 3 years later, on a spring afternoon that felt suspiciously like mercy, she was invited to speak at a sustainability symposium along the southern coast. She accepted without reflection. The ocean pulled at her like it had something for her.

She wore her best dress and brought her notes. She spoke about star systems and coral revival, about the simple intelligence of plants. She made the audience laugh, then made them fall silent. She was good at that now.

Afterwards, the crowd dissipated. She wandered outside, barefoot on the dock as the sun began its descent.
And then.

“Doc.”

Her heart tightened for a split second.

Turned.

There he was.

He was beautiful in a way that made aging look like a blessing, like time had pressed its thumb into him and left only grace behind. His hair was kissed with gray at the temples, framing a face she had tried to forget and never managed to. The lines around his eyes were deeper now, etched by sun and all the years he’d spent refusing to stay still.

She blinked like she was staring at a ghost she’d made peace with in the privacy of her own mind. Except he didn’t look spectral at all. He looked solid. He hadn’t left her bones, no matter how many times she’d told herself he had.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The dock stretched out around them, bleached planks soaked in afternoon light. The ocean behind him moved in long, deliberate breaths. Finally, he exhaled, a soft, incredulous sound. His voice was low when he spoke, rougher than she remembered.

“You still disappear before you say goodbye, huh?”

The words landed between them with the weight of a truth she’d never been able to outrun. She felt something in her loosen, the ache uncoiled itself from where it had been hidden under her ribs.

She laughed quietly surprised. Involuntary. The sound slipped out before she could think better of it.

“You still talk like that,” she said, her voice softer than she meant it to be.

An uncertain smile touched his mouth, and she could see it cost him something to let it show. He shifted his weight, a habit she remembered, how he’d always needed to be moving, even in stillness. His hands rose and fell at his sides like he was deciding whether it was safe to reach for her.

He took a step closer, as if he was afraid she’d vanish if he moved too quickly. A gull cried overhead, then fell silent, and the whole world seemed to pause.

She studied him, cataloging every detail: the silver in his hair, the caution in his smile, the tired devotion in his eyes. And something inside her: a door she’d locked and then forgotten had shifted on its hinges.

For one long moment, she let herself believe that maybe this time, she wouldn’t have to disappear.

The wind picked up, neither of them looked away. Faye took a slow breath, tasting the brine on her tongue, feeling new wonder colliding in her chest. And the sea kept moving behind them as if it already knew.

Some things are meant to come back.

“I found your sketch,” he said, reaching into his coat. He unfolded the drawing. Calypso Rising. Still burned at the edges. But now, below the word Hold, he had written something in his tiny, stubborn handwriting:

Still.

She stared. Her throat tightened.

“I waited,” he said, voice almost breaking. “The kind where… you leave the door unlocked. Just in case.”

She moved to speak, then stopped.

He stepped forward again, slower this time, like he was asking.

“I don’t need to be right this time,” he said. “I just want to be here.”

The silence wrapped around them like gauze. She placed her hand gently on his chest.

The same spot she’d mapped moons onto, years ago.

“I don’t want to be alone in my room anymore,” she said. “If you’re still willing to guess… then… maybe this time I’ll help you get it right.”

He didn’t answer.

He pulled her into his arms, like a man who had forgotten how close joy could live to grief. Taz vividly memorized the idea of her but never thought he’d touch her again. His hands shook in recognition.
There you are.

She pressed her cheek into his chest and listened to the way his heart stuttered, it was trying to remember the rhythm.
A heart that once beat beside hers in the belly of a ship, that she had once tried not to fall into.

They held each other for what felt like a season. Autumn curling into winter. Time stopped to watch. No rushing, just the relief of contact.

The sea clapped softly behind them. Like a hymn. A wind passed through, lifting her hair, brushing against his jaw, and neither flinched. They’d already survived so many storms. This one felt like a benediction. In that moment, nothing was undone but something was rewritten.

Not the past but the way they would carry it forward.
Together this time.

Still.

That night, his shirt draped over her shoulders, starlight spilling in — she whispered:

“You still love loudly.”

He smiled into her neck.

“You still love long.”

And this time, they held.

To love someone isn’t just to witness them, but to let them witness you in return, even when your voice shakes, and you would rather vanish into the quiet, because timing is a language. And silence can be prayer or punishment, depending on how it’s used, and for so long she had it wielded like a blade.

And Tak learned that softness isn’t some rare mercy that appears when you finally earn it. You make room for it like light through a cracked door. That the loudest hearts sometimes need the gentlest doors, and you don’t have to guess how to love someone if you’re patient enough to ask.

They spent that night with no urgency. Just the two, and the long, slow relief of finally stepping back into a room they’d both been circling for years. The hush between them was less like an ending. It was more like the start of something that didn’t need a name.

Later, wrapped in the hush of early morning, she lay beside him and thought of her mother’s glass vases, lined up behind cabinet doors, untouched, admired for their perfect stillness. Fragile by design.

And she realized:

She was never meant to be placed.

She was meant to be held.

She was, in fact, not a vase.

In the days that followed, they moved carefully, like people still learning the shape of a language neither of them had spoken fluently the first time. They learned each other all over again, as two people who had suffered, healed, and finally returned.

Mornings were coffee in chipped mugs, laughter that didn’t have to mask fear. Afternoons spent side by side, sometimes speaking, sometimes not. Evenings where she would watch the way his shoulders softened when he let himself believe she was really there to stay.

Faye would look at him across the room, sometimes with paint on his hands, sometimes mid-laugh, that same unguarded brightness in his eyes, and think:

Love isn’t what saved me. Learning how to receive it was the hero.

And Tak, watching her trace lunar shapes onto their ceiling late at night, her hair spilling across the pillow, would think:

Love is the willingness to stay when the flame dims. It’s the courage to stay soft.

When neither of them was speaking, when the past rose up like a tide, they both knew:

Some stories don’t end. They simply learn how to begin again.

in the tongues of those who remember everything

The tailor’s hands moved like the fabric would shatter if she pressed too hard. The dress had memories already stitched into it, and she didn’t want to disturb them. Her palms held years of life.

Dola stood barefoot on the low cedar platform, arms extended like a saint offering herself to something, her neckline dusted with talcum.

“Lift your chin, angel,” the tailor murmured, eyes on the hem. Her voice was sweet, cracked like old porcelain left too long in the sun. “Relax. Can’t fit you right if you’re holding your breath.”

Dola exhaled just enough to feel her ribs shift.

Asha and Lami sat cross legged, watching nearby, chewing sticky dates and sipping tea, like this was just a regular Thursday and not the night before the world would rearrange itself.

“Jahi’s gonna pass out when he sees you,” Asha said, biting into a date like it owed her money. “You look like a blessing you can’t ever return.”

“He better,” Dola muttered. But her smirk was a cracked bowl holding something heavy and bruised.

Asha laughed the way girls laugh when they still believe their choices will lead them home. And for a second, Dola wanted to be one of them again and forget what she knew.

Outside, the sky hung violet. Inside, the room pulsed with heat and the devotion of women making something sacred with their hands.

….

Salif showed up that afternoon with dust on his ankles and a suitcase too small for sincerity. His jacket was wrinkled, lips dry from carrying bad news through heat.

“Father decided he’s not coming,” he said. The words dropped like stones into the center of the room. “He said he couldn’t watch. Said you already left us.”

Dola didn’t blink. She slipped her fingers beneath the edge of the table and held on.

Salif’s voice softened and she shook his head. “He said… by marrying a man from outside the village, you’re changing your name without asking the ancestors.”

Dola raised her eyes like sunrise. “Jahi knows my name,” she said firmly. “He says it like he wants to carry it. I am not caged here. Not here.”

Salif looked at her the way brothers do when they’ve already lost the argument but still hope love will make you pause. Sometimes, silence might succeed where words have failed.

He sat beside her, slowly, careful not to disrupt the thread in her hand. They sat like that. Two branches from the same tree, bending in different directions.

….

That night at dinner, she laid on the floor alone. The house smelled of jasmine rice and the lingering grief of a blown out candle. Her hem was unfinished. She threaded the needle with tired hands like it was a prayer she wasn’t sure she still believed in.

The moon spilled across the table full of ideas.

She thought of Jahi. How they met in a bus depot, waiting for different routes. How he offered her a mango without asking her name first. How he listened to witness. When she spoke of her mother’s hands and the ache of being shaped by others’ expectations, he didn’t flinch.

He had never asked her to be small. Or palatable. He’d simply said:

“You don’t need to be easy to be worth it.”

She remembered the first time he visited the village. Her father looked at him like he was a question without an answer. It’s like he believed was made of some unfamiliar material that didn’t belong in the house.

The long silences during dinner, how the spoons paused mid air. She could never forget the sentence that carved the deepest groove:

“He won’t understand you.” He finally said after lugging a wagon a tension behind him all night. But Jahi had understood, and without needing a map, too.

She remembered being seven, her father teaching her to plant turmeric in the back garden. His hands in the earth like they were coming home.

“You have to listen to the soil,” he’d tell her. “She knows when you’re pretending.”

He said she as if the ground was a woman worthy of respect. And yet, when she brought him poems in unfamiliar tongues, when her dreams stretched wider than the fields he knew, and her softness hardened into boundaries, suddenly, he recoiled.

He could listen to the land but not the daughter it raised. He could romanticize the dirt beneath his feet, while questioning her roots. He didn’t see that her questions were a kind of prayer too. He honored the seeds, the tilt of the sun, but not the wild garden growing inside her.

Somewhere between fifteen and twenty-eight, she stopped asking him to.

….

Salif found her still sewing at dawn. He stood next to her, simply offering her his company. Silence lingered for a bit as Dola prepared herself to speak.

“Why can’t he open his mind for me?” she asked, eyes fixed on the thread. The needle paused in her fingers, caught like breath in the chest.

Salif shifted his position, fingers grazing the wrinkles in his jacket like he could iron out the discomfort.

He said it soft. Maybe even to himself: “Because… he can’t even do it for himself.”

The sentence drifted in the room like steam after a bath. It was clean. And that’s what made it hurt the most. It folded her in like a door closing gently behind her. So it was okay.

It wasn’t the ending she wanted but it was the truth. He couldn’t open his mind for her because he’d never opened it for himself. And it had never been her place to fix it.

…..

The wedding took place just past the village, in a clearing where goats used to play and girls skinned their knees under mango trees. Someone had laid down white runners. There were marigolds in mason jars and laughs travelled through the air like new dialect.

Jahi waited beneath a cloth canopy in a linen suit. His palms open. Eyes focused. He looked at her like he’d already seen the life they’d build and still said yes.

He didn’t try to supress her past, and didn’t need to be from the same bloodline to build something heavenly. All he needed to know was how to listen when she went quiet. And how to witness her without shrinking her.

Dola didn’t search the crowd for her father or count the empty chairs. That mourning had already been buried in the folds of the hot layers of silk.

Still, for a moment, something moved through her. The grief of being unrecognized by someone who named you. But as the wind lifted her veil like a prayer being answered, she let go of the girl who needed permission.

The grief had come weeks before, when the invitations went out and she hesitated before addressing his. When she practiced her walk and imagined his absence. Especially when she looked in the mirror and wondered if he’d still see her as his.

But in that sunlit field, with her shoulder kissed by light, surrounded by people who had chosen to be there, she didn’t hurt the way she once did.

She had let go of the version of herself that believed love meant being understood by the people who raised you.

She was replanting her bloodline. Giving it a new climate. This time, she would know what to do with the soil. This time, she would listen to what wanted to grow and never again ask the earth for permission to be herself.

From the moment you are a child, your body is read like a warning. The way you sit. Walk. If your skirt is too short. If your eyes are too loud. God is watching. But he’s a belt in the sky, a judge, a jealous ruler.

This version of God doesn’t love but tolerates you. He expects you to live a life of suffering for the sake of a heaven you won’t know until you’re dead. And for Black children, especially, who are already policed in the streets, in schools, in their own homes, to now feel policed in their spiritual life too? How can we feel expected to feel the soft brush of salvation?

I was the kind of child who picked up on the tightness in a room before words even landed. And when I felt too much my body would betray me. Never in tantrums or sobs, try Silence, followed by blood. Nosebleeds. Stress-induced. Divine leaking. (My mother always tells me, I cry 10x more as an adult).

I grew up in the deep South. I’m talking sticky, gospel saturated, tire swing and snake-in-the-creek South. The air hums with bug zapper electricity and field rats would sneak under our floorboards like ghosts with actual tasks. Cows lowed in the backyard. Lawnmowers buzzed like church bells on Saturdays. The world was loud in the body and quiet in the mind.

But my brain was a diver. Always swimming somewhere further. I saw red flags where others saw tradition. The little white building with its steeple poking the sky, felt like a whisper through the sea. Something just off enough for me to flinch before I understood why.

Honestly… I was scared to go. But my sweet mother, in her Southern sweetness, convinced me. She braided love into the lie, the way good mothers do. And so I went.

One Sunday, I was in my favorite pale pink dress. I remember the coolness of the sanctuary, the predictable sway of the preacher’s voice, the heat behind my forehead. Then: that wet feeling in my nose.

I wiped. It was blood.

The lady beside me looked at me as if I was possessed. Like the devil himself had entered through my nostrils. My mom rushed me to the bathroom, hand tight on my wrist. I stood in silence while she dabbed my face with paper towels, my dress slowly blotting darker at the collarbone. I looked in the mirror and didn’t feel human. I felt like the girl in the horror movies my parents let me watch when they were in soft moods; beautiful, marked, and misunderstood.

My mother said it was just the heat.

The following week, I was baptized.

No one said it out loud, but the timing was loud enough. Like they needed to clean me and dunk the weird out of me.

I mean, that was my introduction to God.

it was not warmth, nor light. My baptism was used as the answer to a fear others had of me. I was never just a little girl with nosebleeds. I was a vessel. A disturbance to the script.

And yet, we’re told this is “love.”

We are not taught to know God as us. As the sunlight in our skin, the photosynthesis of our healing. As the breath that held us in the hospital bed. As the voice that whispers ‘you are enough’ when no one else does. Instead, God is an external tyrant, whitewashed and male, used to threaten rather than uplift.

God as Colonial Tool

Christianity, as we were introduced to it, was not for liberation. It was on ships and in plantations, in missionary schools and through assimilation tactics - Christianity became the colonizer’s favorite weapon. It justified slavery by branding us descendants of Ham. It justified patriarchy by weaponizing Eve. It justified silence by claiming that obedience is holiness.

James Baldwin said, ‘If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.’

But the God we were handed was a warden, but still, we yearn for liberation. So now we sit in churches, led by men who may be touching deacons behind the pulpit, cheating on their wives, or grooming young boys, but still deemed ‘anointed.’ Meanwhile, a queer child who simply exists, who tells the truth of their body, is told they are going to hell.

Who does that serve? Not the child. Not God. It serves the system and it’s control. I believe religion should be solo. You should craft your relationship with the divine based on your own experiences, traumas, shadows that need light. No middleman or dusty patriarch translating for you.

Your religion could be a walk through Prospect Park with music in your headphones. It could be journaling every night, or dancing in your kitchen in your underwear. It could be gardening, making tea, crying in the bath. If God is omnipresent, then so is the temple. You don’t need a pew to pray.

The Psychological Damage of Performed Righteousness

Psychology teaches us that early moral development is deeply shaped by our caregivers and communities. When good and bad are framed as external approval vs. punishment, we lose the ability to self govern. We develop what’s called introjected regulation, which is doing the supposedly ‘correct’ thing to avoid guilt or shame and not because it aligns with our truth.

So we perform and just suffer quietly. And religion, if wielded like a whip, encourages that.

In churches, we’re told to abstain, to deny, but be holy. But we’re not taught how to integrate desire. We’re not told that our sensuality is sacred, that our rage can be prophetic, that our joy doesn’t need to be earned.

A New Theology of the Self

Imagine a world where we are allowed to invent our own theology based on their own healing. Your pain as scripture. Your pleasure as psalm. Peace as proof.

We would no longer be controlled by fear of damnation, We’d be guided by intimacy with the divine that lives within our own chest. We would no longer look to touchy preachers for our salvation. We would no longer use scripture to crucify each other for being human.

We would finally understand that God is not some man on a throne.

God is a mirror. God is the water that doesn’t judge you when you cry in the shower. The plant that still blooms when you forget to water it. God is you, in all your becoming.

We don’t need to abandon the spirit. Let God out of the box. Let the children laugh in the sanctuary. Let the queer ones dance in the aisle. Let us question what doesn’t feel like love. Let holiness mean wholeness.

As if presence alone means participation.

We build homes in mental weather and then wonder why we’re always tired.

Mindfulness doesn’t parade through the streets of your nervous system. It’s quieter than that, and steadier. True mindfulness is the quiet clarity that sees something arise and says, Ah, here you are. And then, Okay, go on now.

It’s a  kind of wise, rooted self-parenting that knows the difference between a real alarm and a fake one. You don’t have to bolt up every time your mind sends a signal.

When you live with an active or overstimulated mind, thoughts can feel like mini emergencies running around demanding attention. Intrusive thoughts, spirals, flashes of self-doubt or past pain all arrive like they want something from you. Honestly, you don’t owe them your body. You don’t have to grant each one a meeting, monologue, and a meltdown.

This isn’t detachment in the cold, spiritual bypassing sense. I prefer to call it nervous system stewardship. Just a gentle refusal to make a crisis out of every cognitive twitch, glitch and switch.

In psychology, we know the mind is the number one pattern finder. It will always try to make sense of what it notices, especially under stress, and when you’re lonely or depleted. So when a strange or intrusive thought arrives, the brain, trying to protect you, might say: This matters. This means something. But here’s where philosophy steps in with a more liberating concept: What if it doesn’t? What if it’s just passing clouds across your internal sky?

Marcus Aurelius said, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

The Stoics weren’t ‘romanticizing their melancholic solitude’, they were practicing sovereignty. Something Buddhist lives within that sovereignty: a middle path. A space where thoughts aren’t gods to obey or enemies to fight, but uninvited guests just passing through. No need for you to offer them a seat. I call this the gray area.

However, this middle path is not passive. It is active non-engagement. Awareness without absorption. It’s like a kind of spiritual aikido, acknowledging the force without letting it knock you off center.

To the Stoic, and to the mindful, inner freedom won’t come to you if you are silencing the mind. The answer is not letting it rule you.

So instead of making shrines out of passing fears, novels out of every fleeting thought, you learn to stand at the threshold and say: I see you. You may go.

Let them pass. You don’t have to offer every one a microphone, a monologue, a megaphone. You don’t have to psychoanalyze every flicker or flirtation. Some thoughts come like spam emails and just because they landed doesn’t mean they deserve your click.

If you are sensitive, intuitive, artistic, or neurodivergent, this is even more important. Your mind is an instrument of richness, but also a magnet for stimuli. Every vibration, every emotional cue, every memory echo - your brain picks them like seashells. The temptation is to examine each one, react, and do something. But just pause for a second. Maybe two. Maybe three.

You’re not the forensic analyst of your own psyche. You don’t need to catalogue every shift in mood or thought like evidence in a case.

Sometimes the most radical thing a tender mind can do

is nothing at all.

Can you let the wave come without surfing it?

Try this next time you feel hijacked by a thought:

Ask yourself, Does this need my reaction or just recognition?

The difference is subtle, revolutionary. You can notice without nurturing. You can witness without weaving a narrative. You can say, I see you to the thought without saying, Stay for dinner.

Some thoughts are just energy leaving the body.

Awareness is the sacred pause between the thought and the response, that’s the space where power resides.

The next time your mind throws a tantrum or a temptation, try this:

Let it come.

Let it be.

Then let it leave.

You don’t need to build a home in every current.

Some rivers are meant to be watched.

Let the mind do what minds do.

And you, stay free.

Share this with someone who overthinks everything (maybe that someone is you). 🥂

There’s a certain type of person you’ve probably met. Or maybe you are this person.

They can debug an entire system at 3am with two Red Bulls, no sleep, and a vague memory of something they read on a forum in 2008, but who can’t, for the life of them, use ‘figuratively’ instead of ‘literally,’ or remember if they turned the stove off.

They mumble tech jargon like poetry, wear glasses that slide off their nose, and often look mildly stunned by the physical world. They are dancing around in cyberspace and absolutely insane chaos at brunch.

Welcome to Harrisburg

Not the town. Harrisburg, in this case, is that mysterious inner city of the mind. Imagine a busy downtown intersection where certain types of intelligence cluster like sweaty start-up kids at a JavaScript conference. It’s my term for the part of the mind where hyper-competence and selective dysfunction hold hands and walk into oncoming traffic.

The cognitive version of ‘I can explain the theory of relativity but I don’t know how to flirt or boil an egg.”

The Science of Asymmetric Intelligence

This is neuroarchitecture. The brain is a mosaic not a perfectly distributed machine andsome minds are built like…Silicon Valley’s open-floor plans: genius in one corner, total disarray in another.

What you’re witnessing is asymmetric intelligence, and it’s often associated with high-functioning autistic traits, ADHD, giftedness, or just plain old eccentricity.

This kind of intelligence doesn’t show up neatly on report cards or in job interviews, it spills out in bursts: deep dives, obsessive fascinations, hyper-creative solutions, moments of almost prophetic insight.

But it also means forgetting birthdays, zoning out mid-conversation, or using a ten dollar word in a five dollar sentence with the syntax of a paper airplane. These are minds built for depth.

They’re the people who appear absentminded but are actually deep inside a mental cathedral, reordering the stained glass. They often miss what’s happening around them because their attention is wired to go within and into rabbit holes of meaning and possibility. In a world that prizes quick replies and polished presence, their glitchy brilliance can look like incompetence. But really, they’re just playing a different game.

They’re just busy bending the laws of logic or writing a symphony in Python. Their genius is real, just unevenly distributed and often misunderstood in a world addicted to linear excellence.

Here’s how it works:

The Prefrontal Cortex is often hyperdeveloped in areas tied to logic, abstraction, or pattern recognition (think code rewrites). But Executive Functioning, which includes task-switching, working memory, and motor coordination, might lag behind.

This mismatch can create someone who can mentally map an entire blockchain ecosystem but gets lost in a Trader Joe’s.

Think of it as running a powerful graphics engine on a computer with a cracked screen. What’s inside is breathtaking. But the interface is a little glitchy.

Why They Spill Coffee But Not Code

Spilling coffee is often a failure of motor planning or divided attention. That’s part of what executive functioning governs - basically, the brain’s project manager.

Meanwhile, rewriting code is deep work requiring monotrophic attention (see my last post) and hyper-focus. When these folks are in the zone, everything else fades. Spatial awareness, hunger, common sense. They’re notreally ditzy, but tunneled.

And ironically, the more ‘in flow’ they are, the more their body becomes an afterthought. Hence:

• the unmatched sock

• the coffee stain

• the forgotten appointment

• the endearing misused word (syntax errors… but for language)

So What?

We live in a world that over-values polish and under-values depth. But in Harrisburg, the clumsy genius thrives. The mind that drops its phone in the toilet but can reverse engineer your dating app. The person whose brilliance comes with a little blur.

So maybe, instead of calling them ditzy, we honor them for what they are: specialists in the impossible, residents of an inner city where the lights are broken, flickering, but the ideas burn bright.

TL,DR xx

• Some minds are wired for hyper-specialized genius.

• Executive functioning lag doesn’t mean someone is scatterbrained, it means their energy is concentrated elsewhere.

• Celebrate the mind that spills its coffee. It probably just invented something you’ll be using in 5 years.

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