Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

“Decreation,” finally, is a word that comes from Simone Weil—her term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated that it makes you leave yourself behind. There is “absolutely no other free act which it is given us to accomplish,” Weil writes, except for yielding ourselves to God. Her writing is animated by this compulsive longing to erase herself. “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy,” she writes. “For in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying I.” She dreams of vanishing completely: “May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.”

The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective. The problem is that it is so easy today for a woman to seize upon an ideology she believes in and then exploit it, or deploy it in a way that actually runs counter to that ideology. That is in fact exactly what today’s ecosystem of success encourages a woman to do.

I wish I had known—then, in Peace Corps, or in college—that the story didn’t need to be clean, and it didn’t need to be satisfying; that, in fact, it would never be clean or satisfying, and once I realized that, I would be able to see what was true.