Empowered Feminist - Trained To Be An Object - Mi...

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?

The feminist inside her says: You are not an ornament. The trained body whispers: But you are a beautiful one.

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? Empowered feminist trained to be an object - mi...

Ballet class at four, knees corrected, chin lifted. “Tuck your pelvis. Smile like you mean it.” Piano recitals where the applause was for how she looked in the velvet dress, not the missed B-flat. Modeling workshops in high school: Walk like you’re giving a gift. Don’t take up space—glide through it. Every etiquette lesson, every “just try to be prettier, quieter, more helpful.”

Empowerment, she learned, could wear the mask of submission. “Choose to be looked at,” the coaches said. “Then it’s not objectification; it’s agency .” So she worked twice as hard. Feminist theory by day. Posture, pout, and performance by night. Her mind grew sharp as a scalpel; her body learned to go soft on command. Some nights she caught herself in the window’s

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.

The split lived in her sternum.

She was trained to be a mirror—reflecting what others needed to see.