Everybody Wants to be Happy. Everybody was Happy.
The pressures to be upbeat but stay calm, have heightened emotions but only during sex, smell good, and be funny but not too funny, and not ask a lot of questions... they're annoying, especially if there's laughing at the same time. Double annoying.
Don't be a feminist, but can you get a job? Shit's expensive. Yeah, so what, you found my Tinder profile. If you weren't so sad, I wouldn't need a Tinder profile.
I know what a period is🩸I just don't want to know about yours.
Anyone with half a soul can see why so many women aren't happy, even when we're so good at performing. We were raised to perform. It's the one way to survive in a society so misogynistic that human trafficking produces $236 billion a year in revenue. (That's more revenue than Nvidia made in 2025 ($215.9B)).
I want to know what happens when women stop performing. How does that impact the world?
What if we collectively just stopped?
Everybody was happy...
Post-discovery of my husband's affair, we went to couples counseling, which I loathed and highly recommend. It was after one session, perhaps the last one–we were a lost cause–when he turned to me in the parking lot as he was opening the car door for me 🙄 and said: "Everybody was happy." Which was a way of blaming me for ruining everything. If I just kept silent, nothing would need to change. If I had just stayed dumb to it all, performed, everyone could go on about their awesome lives. But I had to go and demand accountability.
If there's one thing I've learned, it's that people who betray other people hate it when someone holds them accountable.
But he wasn't wrong, considering he evaluated others' happiness through his own perspective. To him, I was happy. The convenient thing he overlooked was that the perceived happiness wasn't real. None of it. Not his happiness, mine, or the happy couple's happiness. It was all made up. We were all faking.
This should be straight-up common knowledge, but screwing people over does not lead to happiness. It leads to yet another opportunity to learn that screwing people over is a bad thing to do. And if one screws over another person and then blames them for their response to that betrayal... well, that's DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender). Something I, as a good, raised-Catholic+Republican girl, was not taught to spot.
For women, DARVO comes in a wide assortment of colors and flavors. Roe is settled law! Until it isn't. Citizens have the freedom to travel throughout the country, unless they're girls and women of reproductive age. You can go to college! Get a job! Buy a house! Except if you're a girl. And then you need to get married and get pregnant as early as possible, preferably while a teen, and not complain when you can't afford a house because the rich and powerful men who convinced you to have that baby are going to starve you in favor of hoarding profits.
Do you. And boy do I mean that.
In key scenarios, I allowed my happiness and autonomy to be hijacked. Hijacked in doctor appointments. Hijacked by shoving a rail-thin, tan, blonde ideal down the throat of a chubby, freckled, red-head with skin so white it was see-through. Hijacked by people-pleasing. What no one could see but likely sensed was that I never felt like I fit in. So I kept trying. Not realizing until recently that fitting in means I get to be me. That's exactly how I fit. And being me means they didn't hijack shit. I was dutifully fulfilling the roles (good patient, good wife, all-around good girl) I had been conditioned to fulfill. But I don't have time for that anymore.
Who the F is that?
These days, with all the gaslighting and, frankly, abuse heaped on us by a rogue administration hellbent on making life awful so they have more billions, it's easy to lose ourselves. We're protecting kids, caring for parents, working for a paycheck that doesn't cover nearly what it used to, losing our rights, our access to healthcare...listening to powerful men say they want to take away our right to vote...and watching in horror as well-trained women echo their misogyny...and somehow we're supposed to find ourselves? With all that and a whole F ton more going on, none of it good? Funny...
I'm thinking the way to conquer this quest, in light of the present chaos, is to just stop faking. Don't even sweat the discovery process. Just move straight to no more performing. Shit's serious out there. We don't have to light up the room, be the shiny bauble, the agreeable one. That only helps to encourage/excuse shitty behaviors.
Instead, let's be broad-like about it. No one knows how any of this ends, so why not be demanding now? Leap barefoot from a path filled with eggshells to your comfy, kick-ass throne. Slap on that crown and unroll your list of demands. Hear fucking ye...
Better healthcare? Relationships? Career? Compensation? Taxpayer-funded services? Cat cafes on every corner? All of the above. Because first, we're human. And those are human rights. (Fair enough, the cat cafe may have gone a bit too far. But overall quality of life does matter.) So is access to joy and happiness. Both of which are being hoarded by a handful of men, all billionaires, who are more enamored with joyless, humorless AI than compassionate humans.
We want them back. Not playing. This is how it's going to roll from here on out:
Broad Demands
1. Return to us the joy and happiness you stole
2.
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