My Thoughts Exactly

by Allen Lily

The label didn’t like it that ‘Hard Out Here’ used the word ‘bitch’ so much. One executive in America sent a long email arguing why I should lose some of the references. He’d counted the number of times I’d used the word. ‘I don’t think a female would like another woman calling her a bitch,’ he wrote. Umm, how about the female that wrote the song? Why do you think she’s using the word bitch, bitch?

I was obsessed with getting confirmation, over and over again, that I was indeed just what I felt: an object, a fuckable thing that didn’t mean anything to anyone. Such confirmation, I felt, in reducing me to a shell rather than a functioning wife and mother, might help absolve me and my behaviour.

Your values become based on how you look, how you sound, how you perform, what other people think, and how much or how many people want to fuck you. That makes you feel insecure, because those values are shallow and only relate to your surface being. Praise becomes cheapened too, because it’s only about that same surface, even though praise is what you constantly crave and, because it isn’t meaningful (and therefore fulfilling), you can’t ever get enough of it. Your self-esteem can, if you’re not careful and warrior-strong, become fragile and reliant on the opinion of others.

Let’s try and teach our daughters to be stronger and more resilient, better at being less grateful, more insistent on being taken seriously, louder at saying no.

I felt isolated and like an outcast from my own life.