You need environments that reward your decisiveness

Adapting to environments that require dishonesty to remain functional will deteriorate you.

For the past month and some change, I have been away from writing, and honestly, I did not realize how much I needed that distance until I actually took it. Now my approach with writing has alway been about having a very one sided conversation with myself that yall just happen to witness and for some reason I haven’t had much to say lately. I think sometimes when you are constantly producing thoughts in real time, especially publicly, you can end up narrating your life faster than you are actually living it. I’ve gotten used to every deep thought becoming a potential essay just as much as every realization becomes a draft. I was consistently putting out articles for months straight and it felt great to be unreliable. I wanted to disappear into my own life for a little while and let myself experience things without immediately trying to package them into insight, so thus I did.

During my hiatus, I moved into a completely different environment, and I do not mean that in some metaphorical “new era” kind of way. I mean my actual day-to-day life changed in tangible ways that have had a very real effect on my body, my routines, my emotional regulation, and even the way I think. I moved somewhere that accommodates the kind of life I genuinely want to live. That sounds simple, but apparently it is revolutionary to stop forcing yourself to survive in environments that require you to constantly negotiate against your own needs. For instance, I do not drive y’all… I don’t even have a permit. So living somewhere walkable was not a cute aesthetic preference for me. It was necessary since I refuse to drive and get a car, so I needed to be within walking distance of my essentials, my gym, grocery stores, cafes, post office, art spaces, and all the little things that make me feel connected to being alive instead of merely managing survival. The difference this has made in my life has honestly been difficult to explain to people who have never experienced environmental alignment before. I wake up around the same time every day like I always have, but my life feels completely different because my energy is no longer being drained by resistance before my day even begins.

I live near my community too and my goodness it’s been a couple nights leaving my friends house walking home crying because it hits me that I got this due to being radically honest with myself. I guess I realized how much calmer my nervous system has become too. Not calmer in the sense that all my problems disappeared overnight, because life is still life, but calmer because I am no longer spending every waking second adapting myself to an environment that did not fit me. That is something people underestimate all the time, I sure did. We can get caught up thinking that burnout only comes from working too hard or experiencing one major traumatic event, but sometimes burnout comes from the slow psychological exhaustion of constantly overriding yourself.

Constantly saying, “This is fine,” when it is not or delaying decisions you already know you want to make. I used to tell myself I could wait another year before moving even though deep down I already knew I was done. I already knew my body was done. My spirit was done. My routines were done. But I kept trying to intellectualize my own hesitation because sometimes we think suffering longer makes us more responsible. Then one day I got tired of performing patience with myself. Especially tired of pretending like uncertainty was wisdom. The moment I started approaching my life with radical honesty instead of strategic avoidance, everything started changing very quickly. And what shocked me the most was realizing that the biggest hardship was never rejection itself. It was the anticipation of rejection. It was the fear of finding out whether something was actually possible for me or not. Once I started chasing rejection (opportunities) directly instead of cautiously orbiting around them, I realized how many things were actually available to me the entire time.

I think a lot of people are living inside environments that reward self-abandonment and then wondering why they feel psychologically fragmented all the time. Some environments genuinely reward indecisiveness because indecisive people are easier to contain. Easier to predict, manipulate, and to keep emotionally dependent. So if you are always doubting yourself, you are less likely to disrupt anything. You are less likely to leave and less likely to ask for more. And once you realize that, you start understanding why decisiveness makes people uncomfortable even when your decisions have nothing to do with them. A decisive person forces everybody around them to confront their own negotiations with themselves. Since cultivating my community, allies, and mutuals, the majority of my inner circle are extremely decisive adults that assume full responsibility for their lifestyle and I adore how none of us are the same either. They had a big influence on aligning my life to what the fuck is on my visionboard sooner than later.

That is why people sometimes react strangely or supportive when your life starts improving after you finally make an honest decision. They do not always dislike your success. Sometimes they are reacting to the fact that you stopped asking permission to become yourself. Especially when your life starts becoming softer, healthier, and more integrated afterward. People are used to hearing that honesty ruins lives. They are not prepared to watch honesty stabilize one. My friends saw the entire journey from me deciding to move, to helping me set up furniture, to now hosting my first aperitif party… everyone has been telling me how much calmer my already calm ass has become. I LOVE IT.

What has been interesting about this phase of my life is that my goals are no longer disconnected from each other. Everything feels integrated now. I forgot who told me that if you focus on one goal that keeps you up at night, everything else will fall into place with it… and it’s true, at least for how I applied that expression to benefit me. Like just because I focused on my business and moving, I now spend more time at the gym because I actually enjoy moving my body instead of trying to punish it into desirability. I spend more time outside because my environment invites me into public life instead of isolating me from it. I spend more time creating art because I finally have the mental spaciousness to hear myself think again.

Even becoming a regular at certain places has affected me emotionally in ways I did not expect. There is something deeply human about familiarity. About walking into spaces where people recognize your face. I think for a long time I lived with this underlying assumption that my real life would begin later. Later when I had more money, when I became more accomplished, when I moved, when I was more healed. Basically later when I became some hypothetical perfected version of myself. But now I am starting to realize how dangerous it is to build your life around future permission. So I changed the way I respond to my actual life as it exists now. I want to make decisions based on truth instead of fear management.

And honestly, this shift in perspective has affected the way I approach relationships, sex, intimacy, and womanhood too. One thing I have become increasingly comfortable admitting is that I do not want marriage, children, or traditional partnership structures for myself. I know people hear women say things like that and immediately assume bitterness, trauma, loneliness, confusion, or some hidden sadness waiting to be psychoanalyzed into a more socially acceptable narrative, but sometimes a woman is simply telling the truth. Sometimes there is no deeper tragedy to decode. I enjoy my autonomy, solitude, and intimacy without needing to transform it into permanent identity construction. And one of the most freeing realizations I have had recently is understanding that money changed my relationship to sex entirely. I made a video recently where I said casual sex is a rich woman sport, and people lost their minds over that statement, but I stand by it because what I was really talking about was autonomy. Acquiring financial stability changed sex from something potentially tied to survival, boredom, emotional dependency, validation, or access into something fully optional. That changes the psychological experience entirely. When your needs are met, your choices become clearer. I do not have sex because I need rescuing. I do not date because I am terrified of being alone. I do not attach myself to people because I need financial assistance or social legitimacy. Sex exists in my life as pleasure. That is it. And because I approach it honestly, intentionally, and responsibly, I have actually become more grounded in my decisions instead of less.

What fascinates me is how harshly people judge women for creating options for themselves while simultaneously romanticizing women enduring unnecessary struggle. People say they want women empowered until empowerment removes dependency. Then suddenly the same honesty that sounded progressive in theory becomes threatening in practice. I am very honest about the fact that I invest in my reproductive health, my sexual health, my boundaries, my access to contraception, and my ability to navigate my life safely. I am not ashamed of that. If anything, I think more people deserve the resources to make informed decisions about their own lives without fear consuming every choice they make. But what I have noticed is that people often feel more comfortable watching women improvise through instability than watching them proactively prepare for freedom. And I think that is because intentional women expose how much of society still relies on female self-sacrifice to feel emotionally coherent. Me being honest about how I live my life confuses people because they are used to women performing shame even when they are being responsible. The less I lie to myself, the easier my decisions become. And the easier my decisions become, the more aligned my environment becomes too.

The irony is that people will call honesty taboo while participating in dishonesty constantly. I have met people with extremely rigid moral or religious convictions who will compromise every single one of those beliefs the second temporary pleasure enters the room, yet somehow I am the one perceived as controversial because I do not pretend to be someone I am not. That has been one of the strangest things to witness as I have become more transparent about myself. People are often far more comfortable with performance than truth. They prefer socially acceptable contradictions over socially disruptive honesty. But I cannot live like that anymore. I do not want to build relationships where everybody is secretly negotiating against themselves the entire time. I tell people exactly who I am now. I tell people what I want. I tell people what I do not want. And then I allow them the freedom to decide whether they want to engage with me accordingly. That has brought me far more peace than trying to shape-shift myself into digestibility. I think some people spend so much time trying to avoid being judged that they accidentally build entire lives around concealment. Then one day they wake up and realize nobody around them actually knows them. I would rather be misunderstood honestly than accepted fraudulently. That is one of the major lessons this season of my life has been teaching me over and over again.