001
I want to be the kind of woman who refuses to be all one way.
I can smoke a cigarette every now and then and still take my magnesium at night. I can drink my chia seed “potions” and a bottle of champagne. I can care deeply about my health and still indulge. I can be disciplined and impulsive, soft and intense, glamorous and messy.
I am an anomaly. An oxymoron. A contradiction.
I wear many faces, but I am not two-faced.
None of these versions of me cancel the others out. They are all me.
Common Courtesy
I don’t want to be a “normal girl.”
Who even defines normality, especially in the realms of girlhood?
Who is the “standard” for normal and WHY is she it?
I think “normal,” in this capacity, is subjective. Because a “normal girl” to me and a “normal girl” to someone else may be markedly different.
Still, I feel I AM a “normal” girl.
By simply being who I am and who I want to be.
That makes me “normal.”
Or, at the very least, normal enough.
These thoughts and many others came to me while listening to SZA’s “Normal Girl.” In the song, she keeps coming back to wanting to be “the kind of girl you take home to your mama.”
But…whose mama?
Because not everybody’s mama would like the same girl. One mama’s idea of the perfect woman to bring home could be another mama’s absolute nightmare. What one considers respectable, another could consider uptight. What one sees as independent, another could see as improper. What one considers feminine, another might not recognize as femininity at all.
So which mama are we talking about?
And why does she get to decide?
Actually, what makes something “normal” anyway? Is normal what we see the most? Is it what most people around us are doing? Is it what we’re most accustomed to? Because if most people do something, then okay, we think it’s common. But somewhere along the way, “common” seems to correlate to correct.
And that’s something I can’t understand.
If most women do X and fewer women do Y, all we have established is that X is more common than Y. Even if you gave me the data—even if you could prove that the overwhelming majority of women behaved, dressed, lived, loved, married, mothered, worked or expressed themselves in one particular way—you would have proven that way was common.
Where did we prove it was correct?
Where does the “should” enter the equation?
Because once common correlates to correct, now there is apparently a correct way to be a woman. And if there’s a correct way to be a woman, then there must be an incorrect way.
A way we accept and a way we don’t.
“Acceptability”
That’s something I think… no…something I know I rebel against.
Because who, what, when, where and why?
And HEAVY on the why.
Why do I…or anyone…need or even want to be acceptable???
What is acceptable? WHO determines what is “acceptable”? HOW are we measuring acceptability? Again, WHY are we measuring acceptability? WHEN—and also why—are some things acceptable but others aren’t? WHERE do we draw the line at what’s acceptable and what isn’t?
And the inverse deserves the exact same interrogation.
Who, what, when, where, why are things “unacceptable”?
Unacceptable to whom?
Because that changes too.
Something can be completely ordinary in one culture and strange in another. A trait can mean one thing in one community and something entirely different in another. What is expected of women changes across cultures, generations, regions, communities, families, religions, classes…even households.
And then add history.
Things that were once considered unacceptable for women can become so ordinary that nobody thinks twice about them anymore. Things considered perfectly normal in one period can later seem absurd. So you could take the exact same woman, change absolutely nothing about her and place her somewhere else, sometime else, among different people and suddenly the judgment of her changes.
She didn’t change.
So what did??
The standard. And if the standard can move while the woman stays still, how objective could that standard have been in the first place? And more importantly, why was I (or any woman) ever supposed to audition for “acceptable” womanhood in the first place? Especially since the more I pull at “acceptable,” the more it starts looking like preference. I feel like a whole hell of a lot of the things we treat as rules for how people (especially women) are supposed to exist are really just preferences that have been given more weight than they deserve.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that preferences are bad.
Have them!
Please! Prefer whatever kind of woman you want. Decide who you want to date. Who you want to marry. Who you want to be. Decide who you want to take home to your mama! But “I prefer women who are X” and “women should be X” are not the same statements. Somewhere between those two statements, a preference has been promoted into a standard.
And why does that standard deserve my compliance?
I know that preferences don’t come from nowhere. They can come from culture. Religion. Family. Tradition. Upbringing. Community. Personal experience. History. What we’ve been exposed to and what we haven’t.
Basically, what we know.
What we’re used to.
What’s familiar.
And maybe that’s part of it.
Maybe we have a tendency to treat familiarity as legitimacy.
Something gets repeated enough that it stops feeling like a way and starts feeling like the way.
We see one kind of woman often enough and she becomes the “normal” woman. We grow accustomed to one expression of femininity and it becomes femininity. One kind of relationship becomes relationship “goals.” One way of building a family becomes the proper way. One version of womanhood becomes the standard against which every other version is measured.
Not necessarily because anybody proved that version was inherently better.
But because it’s familiar.
It’s what we know.
It’s what our mothers knew. Or their mothers. Or our communities. Or our religions. Or whatever particular combination of history, culture, tradition and preference handed us our understanding of how things are “supposed” to be.
And after enough repetition, familiarity starts to feel like legitimacy.
Then a woman comes along who exists outside of that familiarity.
Now she’s “uncommon.”
“Abnormal.”
“Rebellious.”
But is she?
A woman doing something unfamiliar to you isn’t necessarily making a statement about what’s familiar to you. A woman living outside a convention isn’t necessarily rejecting the convention. A woman who doesn’t conform isn’t necessarily waking up thinking, “How can I say “screw you” to society?” today. She may simply be doing what makes sense to her.
Yet the observer goes:
She’s rebellious.
And she could reasonably respond:
Against what? I wasn’t participating in your system to begin with.
Because what makes you think your standard was even part of her decision-making?
Seriously.
Who the hell are you?
What if she isn’t challenging your standard, making a statement about it, protesting it or even considering it?
What if she’s just…being?
Maybe she isn’t “too” anything.
Maybe she’s simply more of something than you prefer a woman to be.
And if that is the case, why is her existence being treated like opposition?
Why is she the one who has to explain herself? To conform?
This is what irritates me.
Because at this point, we aren’t really talking about normality anymore. Or even commonality. Or acceptability.
We’re talking about authority.
Somewhere in all of this, a subjective standard has acquired the appearance of objective authority.
And I want to know how the fuck that happened.
Because I can rationalize why someone might think a certain way.
That’s the thing.
I can play devil’s advocate. I can trace it backward. Maybe it’s their culture. Maybe it’s their religion. Maybe it’s how they were raised. Maybe every woman they respected growing up behaved a particular way. Maybe it’s tradition. Maybe it’s their community. Maybe it’s personal experience. Maybe it’s simply preference.
There is an explanation.
But THAT’S the problem. There is an explanation.
Because being able to explain the existence of a standard does not establish the authority of the standard.
We have established where the belief came from. We have established why it might feel legitimate to the person who holds it. We may have even established that the belief is incredibly common.
Fine.
We haven’t justified its jurisdiction over another person.
That is a completely different question.
You can explain why you believe a woman should be a certain way.
You still haven’t explained why I am obligated to be that woman.
You still haven’t explained why that standard deserves my compliance.
So—
Who deemed you ruler?
Who crowned you?
Who gave you the authority to sit in judgment over somebody else’s womanhood?
And what markers or scale are we judging womanhood against in the first place?
What makes that the scale?
Who determined where someone falls on it?
Who determined what qualifies as “normal,” “acceptable” or “correct” on it?
Because even if we somehow establish the measurement, I’m still left with the same question:
Who gave you the authority to enforce it?
At what point did your familiarity become legitimacy and your legitimacy become authority?
Who gave your preferences jurisdiction over another woman’s existence?
Who decided that because something is unfamiliar to you, it is abnormal?
That because something is uncommon, it is incorrect?
That because a woman would not be your choice, she is somehow an unacceptable version of herself?
Because what was “normal” again?
Common.
Okay.
But common only told us what was common. It never told us what was correct.
So how did the two become correlated?
And if common isn’t necessarily correct, where did the “should” come from?
Because “should” gave us a correct way and an incorrect way.
A way we accept and a way we don’t.
Acceptability.
But acceptable according to whom?
Based on what?
Measured how?
And there’s that question again.
The scale.
Because once I started questioning who gets to determine what is acceptable, I ended up at preference. And once I started questioning preference, I ended up at familiarity.
Familiarity started looking like legitimacy.
And legitimacy started looking like authority.
There it is again.
A subjective standard acquiring the appearance of objective authority.
Except now we’ve followed the whole thing.
We can see where it came from.
We can rationalize why it exists.
We can explain why someone believes in it.
And still—
we haven’t justified its jurisdiction over another person.
So again:
Who gets to define normal?
And maybe even more importantly—
Why am I being asked to aspire to it?
That might be what vexes me most about the idea of the “normal girl.”
Because “I want to be a normal girl” assumes normality is somewhere outside of me.
Something I’m supposed to reach.
Some standard of womanhood I’m supposed to measure myself against, determine where I fall short and then move closer to until I become acceptable enough to somebody else.
But why would I want that?
Actually—
Why would I need to want something I already am?
Because when I say I don’t want to be a “normal girl,” I don’t mean I want to be abnormal.
I don’t mean I need to be different.
And I don’t mean I’m deliberately rebelling against whatever everybody else is doing.
I mean I don’t accept the premise that “normal womanhood” is something outside of myself that I need to aspire toward in the first place.
I am a woman.
I am being who I am and who I want to be.
And so long as the way I am being does not cause harm to myself or somebody else, I don’t know what additional qualification I’m supposed to meet before my way of being becomes a legitimate way for a woman to exist.
I don’t need to be the most common kind of woman to be a normal one.
I don’t need to be familiar to you.
I don’t need to be your preference.
I don’t need to be the girl you would take home to your mama.
I don’t need you to understand me.
And I certainly don’t need you to explain to me why your standard exists.
We’ve established that.
What we haven’t established is why it has authority over me.
So no.
I don’t want to be a “normal girl.”
I don’t have to want to be something I already am.
I’m a woman.
I’m being.
I’m normal enough.
And if that isn’t normal enough for you—
who deemed you ruler?
And, to be the contradictory woman I am…
I DO love the song, btw!
where i’m at in life
I fear…I might be in my Carrie Bradshaw era (without being a bad friend…seeing as I don’t have any.)
I’m living my life as a single 20-something.
I’m alone and sometimes a little lonely, yet I’m the most free and outgoing I think I’ve ever been in my life.
I’m going out alone and SOCIALIZING!
I’m taking on a new hobby/whateverthefuck this blog/ “digital diary” is going to be.
I’m also feeling very 2000s which I feel (and have been told) is my style anyways…soooo I think I’m just further tapping into who I am.
ANOMLY lately
I saw these and INSTANTLY knew they would belong to me. Crazy thing is,…I don’t even like red, but these aren’t “red”-they’re the object of my desire.
I’ve been a lil obsessed with myself lately.
This is all I want. Like, deep down. I’m not built for “modern” dating -which honestly isn’t even dating, but we’ll save this conversation for another edition.
These are some of the funkiest shoes I’ve seen in a while. So me. So ‘70s glam. So groovy. So Studio 54.
002
High Maintenance
Pictured here are my favorite/repeat/go to/whatever tf you wanna call them products I get from Dollar Tree. From skincare to foot scrubs, every product pictured here I’ve used and love. Skincare has always been my thing, maybe even over makeup… now don’t get me wrong… I DO love makeup (and will post about my go to/ fav products and routine later). However, I believe the first step of any makeup routine is skin prep, and with prep comes products. You don’t need all the super expensive/ high end products to attain that either. I mean, my face/ skin doesn’t know this shit came from Dollar Tree! What your face knows is ingredients and products, not labels/names and prices. I’ve used every single one of these products, and I SWEAR by them!
The products as shown (in order): Dermasil “Melon Jelly Cleanser”, Dermasil “Oatmeal Milk Toner”, Dermasil “AHA Glycolic Acid Toning Solution”, Skin + Nutrition Botanicals “SnowGlow Longevity Essence”, Skin + Nutrition Botanicals “Multi-Peptide Anti-Aging Serum”, Skin + Nutrition Botanicals “Niacinamide 5% + Squalane Serum”, Skin + Nutrition Botanicals “ Tea Tree + Caffeine + B5 Revive Serum Mask”, GlobalBeautyCare “Vitamin C Facial Serum”, GlobalBeautyCare “Peptide Facial Serum (vitamins A, C, E,& Collagen)”, Dermasil “Hydra Serum”, GlobalBeautyCare “ Smooth&Lift Collagen Eye Cream”, XtraCare “ Hydro Plus Water Gel”, Dermasil “Night Cream”, Pro SIlk Body “24HR Moisturizing body lotion- pistachio paradise”, Spa-scentials “repair smoothing foot cream”, Spa-scentials “smooth exfoliating foot scrub”.
This is my everyday (AM) skincare routine (in layering order), and what I use to prep my skin before I apply my makeup. To find the products listed, see all the Dollar Tree products listed above, because I’m not typing that shit again. However, not listed above, that is in this routine/pic, is my SKIN1004 “Madagascar Centella Hyalu-cica Water- Fit Sun Serum UV Broad Spectrum SPF 50”; this (unfortunately) can not be purchased at the Dollar Twenty-five store. I purchased mine on Amazon, and you can buy it from ULTA and/or their official site, of course! Also, to note, I was only using either the Multi peptide anti-aging serum or the niacinamide. However, I have recently decided to completely cut the niacinamide from my daytime routine.
Pictured here (and in layering order) is my Monday “BHA night” routine! Again, for products, see (way at the top) above. Also, the COSRX “BHA Blackhead Power Liquid”, unfortunately, cannot be bought at the tree of dollar (twenty-five). I think I ordered this bottle on Amazon (and if you do, just make sure you’re ordering from the official COSRX seller). COSRX is also sold in stores and online at ULTA, and you can occasionally luck up and find their products at TJMaxx; however, you can’t really guarantee you’ll always get certain products.
Here we have my Tuesday “hydration/recovery night” routine (in layering order). This time all the products are FOR REAL from Dollar Tree!
On Wednesday (nights) we use 10% Azelaic Acid Serum! I would tell you where I got it…buuuuut…. I honestly don’t remember. However, the product is from The INKEY List, so it could have come from Sephora, Amazon, or wherever else this is sold! Honestly, I probably got it on Amazon (I’m lazy and hate going to stores). Just be sure that if you order this (or any skin/body care) on Amazon, you double-check that you’re ordering from the official seller/company. BTW, like all pics, this is the order I layer my products in!
Like Tuesday’s lineup, this starting five, aka my Thursday night routine, is also all from the dollar twenty-five store. And again, this is in the order that I apply said products!
See above caption, and change Thursday to Friday, thangya- MGMT. Lol, but seriously, this is my “peptide/recovery’ night routine.
Not pictured are Saturday & Sunday, and that’s because Saturday is the same as Monday and Sunday is a “flexible/recovery” night.
If you catch yourself thinking, “who tf does she think she is to try and “promote” skincare products????”
Exhibit A: my face
Thus, proof I have enough business talking about this shit (and no, that picture has no filters or edits; hell, I don’t even think I brushed my teeth before snapping that pic).
Okay, so these are my fav face washes. I’m a double cleanse kinda girly because 1. I have oily skin, and I also sweat easily. 2. If I’m not wearing makeup, I’m at least wearing sunscreen. So at night I start with my SKIN1004 “Madagascar Centella Light Cleansing Oil” to break everything down. Then, I use the SKIN1004 “Madagascar Centella Ampoule Foam” (as you can probably see the bottle/tub is basically empty), and I LOVE and highly recommend it. Hell, that was either my second or third bottle; however, this time I wanted to try the SKIN1004 “Madagascar Centella Poremizing Deep Cleansing Foam.” I switched over because I’ve been wearing makeup more frequently and really want something that will minimize and cleanse my pores. So, now (at night) I do the cleansing oil, then I follow that up with my poremizing cleaning foam. I mainly use the Dermasil “Melon Jelly Cleanser” if I’m showering and I didn’t wash myself the night before. I’m also kind of odd. I only wash my face in the shower; I absolutely HATE trying to wash my face in the sink.
THEEESSSEEEE…these right here… these products really mean something to me! OBVIOUSLY they aren’t from Dollar Tree (well, the smooth exfoliating foot scrub is). If you have a cocha, Her Fantasy Box is…well…HER! I love the Refresh (this is my second bottle). I use a capful on my second wash (I use Dial white antibac bar soap for my first go-round) and trust me… a capful goes a long way! Neow, that Vita C Bright is that girl too! I use it on my body (again, after I first do a wash with Dial white antibac bar soap). She smells so good and makes my skin feel and look so good. Also, just like with the Refresh, I only use a capful, and it’s plenty and lathers exceptionally. When it comes to Saltair, I’m new to the game; however, I’m already sold and will be repurchasing (unless I learn something bad about them, and I hope I haven’t already and forgot. I will be doing research and am more than woman enough to retract/eat my words. Lastly, the Versed “AHA Exfoliating Body Scrub” is great; however, in full transparency, I don’t think I use it consistently enough to reap the full benefits. I will (try) to do better and get back to you about it (insert winky face).
If you follow along with me over here… we have our body (and lip) moisturizer. We also split the baby down the middle, with half the body moisturizers being from the Dollar Tree (the ones on the right) and the other two being from…not the Dollar Tree. I don’t remember exactly where I got them… could’ve been Amazon… could’ve been Target (back when I was shopping there, now I won’t lie, I have been there since the boycott started HOWEVER it was because either A. they were the only store that had it (or closest) or B. getting it there would’ve been my cheapest option and while I am a baller (manifesting/in spirit) I am also on (or try/should be) on a budget. On the other hand, I do know the “rose PDRN peptide glowy balm” is from a Korean line, Haruharu Wonder, on Amazon.
This is what I’m gonna call “toner central”, and when grouping and photographing all these products, I coined this the “miscellaneous skin/bodycare “ bunch. I mainly use the Dickinson’s toners (yes, both) in the mornings. I know some dermatologists say you don’t need to wash your face in the morning because you wash away the natural oils your skin produced overnight, but if I’m in the shower and I get the chance to wash my face, especially if I didn’t the night before… I’m gonna! BTW, I’m not necessarily giving advice or telling you what to do (I’d never because I hate being told what to do myself); I’m just rambling about what I (much emphasis on I) do. When it comes to the Medicube “kojic acid turmeric resurfacing toner,” I haven’t used it on my face in a hoooot minute. When I do use it, I primarily use it on my body. Like my underarms and inner thighs, anywhere that I wanna try to “brighten”. However, it’s a fan (my) fav, and when I run out, I will repurchase! Next up we have the Medicube “hypochlorous acid body peel shot”; when used consistently, it does WONDERS for my skin! I bet this paired with my Vita C Bright body wash will make me as smooth and shiny as a newborn baby! Last, and certainly not least, she’s small, she’s mighty, she’s the Her Fantasy Box “Renew Her Daily Intimate Care Oil,” and renew “HER” she does! This bag girl here works almost instantly (imo) and smells so good. Very lightweight, and like most Her Fantasy Box products, a little goes a long way.
To conclude this (what I assumed was gonna be a short post, that since turned into an edition) are my favorite body “utensils”: my African bath nets. I’m not really a loofah girly, and I feel a regular towel doesn’t scrub me how I want to be scrubbed. These really make me feel like I’m scrubbing all that dead skin off. When I shower, I need my water hot enough to burn that first layer off, and my body “tool” to be “textured” enough that it’s lifting that layer so the water can burn it off!
