To be a woman is to inherit an awareness of being watched.
I believe that there are very few women who haven’t second-guessed their presence in a room. It starts young – that hyper-awareness of space and sound and how much of it you’re allowed to occupy. You learn to become fluent in the language of making yourself palatable: shoulders softening, voice lilting down at the edges, a careful rationing of conviction.
Your passion must be tempered, and your enthusiasm looks better when it's weathered. The safest way to exist is to perpetually inhabit the space between too much and not enough.
How does it feel to live lukewarm?
To fold up your limbs and curve in your shoulders (smaller and smaller and smaller) until you melt into the window seat of the public transit. To become the master of the measured response, the strategic understatement. Ambitious (but not threatening), confident (but never certain), successful (but always with a self-deprecating footnote).
How early do we become the teachers of our own constraints?
The cruel irony is that even this curated tepidness isn’t enough – because “lukewarm” isn’t really what anyone wants from you. They want you in constant pursuit of adjustment. You’re still expected to read the room even though you’ve been forced to live between the margins. An inevitable purgatory.
Everybody wants to be The Cool Girl, and nobody wants to be The Crazy Girl, but we’ve all been both to somebody.
What does it really take for a woman to be “cool”?
Can we ever truly be effortlessly cool? Because it sure seems to take a lot of effort to dilute yourself thin enough to exist in that limbo.
Interested but never eager.
Unattainable.
Mysterious. (Are you really mysterious, or has the world scared you out of being openly and obnoxiously passionate about the things that make you happy? The things you find important?)
Why do we bend over backwards to appear indifferent? What are we protecting, and what are we losing in the process?
These next few years, it’s detrimental to remain vibrant, and angry, and joyful, and empathetic – alive to everything that makes us human.
Occupy space and fill it until it overflows.
Chloe Kruck