She remembered a line from a forgotten zine: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But what if the master’s tools are the only ones she was given? What if she’s a hammer that learned to see itself as a nail?
Some nights she caught herself in the window’s reflection—perfectly angled, waiting for an appraisal that hadn’t yet arrived—and felt a surge of rage so clean it could fuel a city. Other nights, the rage collapsed into a smaller, uglier question: What if the training worked? What if I’m most powerful when I’m most object-like? Empowered feminist trained to be an object - mi...
She lives in that hyphen—the “mi…”—the unfinished syllable between mirror and mind , between misogyny and misfit . Some days, she calls that hyphen freedom: the refusal to resolve the contradiction. Other days, she calls it exhaustion. She remembered a line from a forgotten zine:
She read de Beauvoir by flashlight under the covers. She marched with signs that said My Body, My Choice . She could name every fallacy in a patriarchy-apologist’s argument before he finished his second sentence. Other nights, the rage collapsed into a smaller,
The feminist inside her says: You are not an ornament. The trained body whispers: But you are a beautiful one.
She was trained to be a mirror—reflecting what others needed to see.