the worst woman in the world

against validation

Can I say something bold and audacious? I’ll take the eyerolling if I have to, but I don’t think I’m delusional here. You be the judge: the more I grow into myself, the more aligned I feel on my path, the more frequently I get people’s undivided attention followed by either a full dismissal of my personhood or an attempt to put me back in my place. For a woman committed to being a little less lonely and a little more loved, an influx in attention resulting in a net negative is frustrating. If you dedicate your whole life to approval from those who care and especially from those who don’t, surely there would be some viable return on investment? Surprisingly, not quite. When I was smaller and more insignificant to the world and to myself, men were gentler, women were kinder, words weren’t imploding under the weight of their breaking point. There was some warmth to take home. Now, it seems, my frequent visitors could be described as a tension headache personified. The stakes have grown, but so has the surface area for bruising. All that glitters is gold eroded along the edges — terrible news for anyone who stunts their way to love and acceptance.

Like many, I want to be admired. Like most, I downplay how much attention keeps my vitals in check. Attention not from a specific gender, person, or for certain attributes, but by the conceptual other that encompasses all — to see acceptance reflected back to me because it needs to take shape in whatever external force available for me to believe it, recognize it, and internalize it. Grated and bottled like precious stardust, my methods for getting validation are a secret recipe, I’m not one to share. I’m sorry. I’m greedy about it, primed to harbor. But what I naively thought I’d known about my own and other people’s hearts has ruptured now — the attention to dismissal pipeline put me face to face with my obstructive appetite for acceptance at all costs, and the lengths I will go to get it. From the men I’ll attract into my life with no discernment for who they are, to the things I’ll allow to unfold in my periphery, the favors I’ll say yes to, the generosity without the upper hand, ease of attitude that gets me places, agreeableness that protects me from dismay, and, of course, the input-output ratio to my detriment — not ever needing more than I’m presented with. Definitely never asking for more. Who am I if not soft to the touch, easy on the eye? What am I defined by, if not by trying to be your favorite?

Party Girl (1995)

Only once the validation is granted does the real fun begin. You can spend your entire conscious life trying to get people’s approval, but the itch doesn’t go away once the approval surpasses everything you could ever hope for: the starving brain needs to catch up to abundant reality, which it selfishly refuses to do since there’s always more love to hoard. More to need. More of yourself to betray for another fix. And what is validation, really? A pathway to love and unconditional acceptance, or something darker? Now, it may not be evil and malicious in itself — a sliver of approval, some praise on the internet, or innocent banter won’t kill or break bones, just tickle the dopamine receptors. But by virtue of the meaning we assign to it, how much weight it holds, how it rises above our own perception and intuition, how it’s never enough, it's slow-acting poison. It makes you naive and vulnerable, and then your hunger invites infection to an open wound: validation can be a fabricated practice for one’s own benefit or a projection of some unbeknownst traits that have little to do with you and everything to do with their void to fill.

Everything is water when you’re thirsty, and I’m no victim here: the lack of discernment creates the perfect breeding ground for the pervasive, predatory kind of attention. It is perhaps my guilty conscience that sees attention as a trade scheme or an invoice that prompts me to reward every ounce of it, to give away something of mine in return, to never receive a compliment without giving back or compensating. A simple “Thank you” won’t suffice — do you want all my money or my love? Maybe just 24/7 access? My body and my social security number? When starved of connection, you’ll take whatever you can get. And when there’s suddenly a lot, maybe a little too much, you stuff your mouth with it like it’s death row fine dining hour. In The Cost of Living¹, Devorah Levy recalls an interaction with a nervous student who’s done a good job. In response to generous feedback, the student takes out two samosas out of her backpack and hands them over to Levy, which startles the author. “You don’t have to give me things for letting you know you’re a genius,” she says. I think about that exchange a lot. Call me a genius once, I’ll hand my body over. Call me a genius twice, I’ll hand my soul over, too.

Some life lessons take about a hundred train rides before you get ‘em right, such as that not all attention is created equal. I’ll tell you what happened. With a few too many hours carved out for a promising grown man who’d claimed to have been a long time admirer of my little world of posting, I found myself at a club, lonely and surrounded, staring in the eyes that only stared back at the more palatable sides of me. The sides that complemented his insouciance, arrogance rebranded as honesty, the praise he himself didn’t believe but needed to shower me with to get his way, maybe the image of me and what I should’ve represented. Wrapped around his finger with the generosity of his words, so typical of me to fall for a shiny renegade. Not even frontal lobe development can save a girl from the crushing weight of sticky sweet compliments. I’m an ego creature, of course I was smitten – but now that I showed there were more facets to me than to a cardboard cutout, wasn’t as cheerful as he’d anticipated, and voiced an opinion against his broadcast prime time, the air has been sucked out of the room. A rampant vibe shift, I’ve been dismissed. Staring at the swaying back of a phony maestro, you always know when someone’s capable of making you sad for the rest of your days. He was no longer fascinated — hence the fall from grace from a mysterious internet personality to the worst woman in the world. I think they call it a projection, which I betrayed with ambivalence, and he no longer cared to waste niceties on a dupe of the woman he thought he was pursuing. Slurring my words to try and get my point across, bad idea. “With the way you speak,” he said softly, with the kind of grin reserved for words with the power to haunt you, “people wouldn’t even know you’re a good writer.”

There it is. Of course the admiration foreplay was a loaded gun. I am indebted after all, we’re as transactional as they finish. Pitting the image of me against my truth. It always breaks in the same spot like a glowstick, acidic and irreversible, the last drop of apathy against cheap cologne. I wanted to go home then, though felt by leaving I would disfigure the beginning of our beautiful story, put something in motion I could never take back or mend, so I stood there a little longer, reviving the butterflies of all the ways I’d charmed him just days earlier. But as I stood there, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what was so ardent or beautiful about this story or this dancing stranger paying me no mind, myself a sudden nuisance in his hero shot.

Then and there, clarity: I should be embarrassed that at my big and ripe age, my only criteria for liking people is for them to like me first. An instant magnet. It should be shameful to go about life this way with no discernment, no selection, no assessment, to latch onto praise like an IV drip. It pains to have all eyes on you and still be this desperate, this hungry, gullible, gasping for air. To still register attention as intimacy, confuse approval for safety. His swaying resumed, each minute spent alone further removing him from integrity. I dreamt myself back to reality, and then I dipped. Multiple missed calls to follow. Every mean woman is a retired nice girl, and every asshole is just an asshole.

The pattern of incessant praise to violent devaluation is amusing. I like to call this push and pull the proximity paradox: the things you’re admired for from afar will be the things that get you denounced under a magnifying glass. Fast-tracked to hatred if you’re cute enough. Appreciation for your creativity turns to a grudge against your sensitivity or emotional display when one lays groundwork for the other and cannot exist without it; kudos to your social capital and independence swerve to accusatory possessiveness; and the appreciation for your being ‘special’ and ‘unlike others’ quickly takes a shade of contempt towards your inability to make yourself act in ways a normal person would, to arrange yourself along the expectations: you will be going off-script, and they’ll probably hate every second of it. People are drawn to a foreign thing they don’t understand, but the attempt to possess it while lacking the empathy and openness to see not just its allure but the darker, sturdier roots results in failure — and in some cases, it is exactly the misunderstanding that creates an impulse to put you down. To ‘correct’ you. I’ve grown wary of any kind of praise, especially when it disrupts the natural progression of getting to know somebody. Praise devoid of kindness is just arrogance in polished colors, a barometer for what will get you expelled later. What attracts, repulses. What draws in, scares away. Proximity is the variable. And since this is all new to me, I’m inclined to believe the contrast reaches its peak when you start going places you’ve longed to go.

I know exactly what the problem is, just not yet how to fix it. Catching up to yourself is sometimes harder than changing. I let my faulty operational dependence on external approval sit tight under my belt while growing and evolving, but now the software is pending an update. I still sniff out affection as though I’m invisible, as though I need to deserve my way to love, but I’m not in 6th grade anymore, and this is outdated thinking. I have a platform. I’m a full person. I hand out invitations to my table as if trust is a default setting and not a guarded backyard, letting people walk out of it rather than earn their way in. This bellyful of anxiety of not being accepted clouds my judgment, still. A public image, however small or niche, should come with a sticky note in bold: not every stranger who reaches out for coffee wants to be your best friend. Not every man who throws praise and roses your way is capable of knowing you. And, not to sound paranoid, not everyone’s applause is in your best interest. If in your mind I’m breaking down something fundamentally obvious, I’m happy for you — but a shy kid on the playground grows into a flâneur weak in the knees for recognition. In Lispector’s short story Gertrudes Asks for Advice², the young protagonist is at a precipice of change: “She was worried about doing something eccentric and still wasn’t used to herself.” I’m getting used to myself now, to all these little truths.

I still care what you think. I’m sure I always will. Which social species is above that? I’d be a liar if I said I’ve outgrown my appetite for approval, likes on the internet, male validation. To quote Sartre, “We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves.”³ The flattery itself is not corrosive, but for those of us with an attention deficit moral compass and the mind of an outsider, the rush of excessive admiration is easy to misread for something deeper, vital, automatically true, something that is here to stay and guide. Consistently, the more I’d give into praise, the less of myself there was to account for — that’s how you know nothing external is capable of truly saving you.

I’d like to move forward with newfound knowledge that being looked at is not the same as being seen. At this stage, as a writer and a woman, a friend and a professional, a daughter and a sister, I feel I deserve to be seen more than anything — I’m already looked at enough. It’s the age of surveillance and we could all use a little less looking. I think I’d prefer the kind of attention that lands on integrity and coats encouragement, which means grieving the high of flashy affection, the cheap kind I used to live and pray for, with a subsequent relief of knowing that the attention worth keeping is boringly consistent and quiet. It often doesn’t feel like attention at all. It feels like curiosity, or noticing. A gaze that doesn’t falter when faced with contradiction. Feedback that helps you be amazing, not extravagant praise that insists you already are. A hug that steadies you and makes every time you’ve been admired for an oversimplified facet of yourself irrelevant. That’s what I want. And to be bold and audacious about it.

1. The Cost of Living - Deborah Levy

2. The Complete Stories - Clarice Lispector

3. Hell is other people … misquoting philosophers — Brandon Ambrosino