oh you want to be a cool girl? okay then go get yourself a personality that never asks for too much.
go get yourself a wardrobe that looks accidental but isn’t. clothes that say i didn’t try, even though you stood in front of the mirror long enough for time to lose meaning. go get neutral colors. blacks. whites. greys. things that don’t beg for attention but quietly earn it.
go get yourself emotional restraint. this is important. this is essential. you cannot be cool if you are easily wounded. you cannot be cool if you react in real time. you must learn how to feel things privately, invisibly, like your pain has manners.
go get yourself indifference. or at least the performance of it.
when someone leaves, you shrug. when someone disappoints you, you nod. when someone forgets you, you forget them faster. you must always appear slightly out of reach, even from your own life.
especially from your own life.
go get yourself hobbies that photograph well. things that translate easily into aesthetic proof. reading books you almost finish. listening to music that sounds better when you tell people you listen to it. existing in ways that can be observed.
because that’s what cool really is.
it’s not a personality. it’s a surface.
and surfaces are easy to sell.
you’ll learn this quickly. faster than you expect. people will reward you for your restraint. they’ll call you low-maintenance. they’ll call you independent. they’ll call you refreshing, which is just another way of saying you do not burden them with the reality of your humanity.
they will love how little space you take up.
and you will confuse that with being loved.
this is where capitalism enters quietly, like it always does. not as a system, but as a logic. a way of organizing your existence around value and consumption.
capitalism does not just want your labor. it wants your identity.
it wants you to see yourself the way markets see products. in terms of desirability. efficiency. demand. it wants you to believe that every part of you can be optimized. improved. refined.
so you refine yourself.
you remove friction. you remove unpredictability. you remove the parts of yourself that cannot be easily understood or consumed.
you become legible.
you become brand-safe.
you become cool.
and the terrifying part is how good it feels.
because people start looking at you differently. they project things onto you. depth. mystery. control. they assume you know something they don’t. they assume you are stronger than them, simply because you reveal less.
but you are not stronger.
you are quieter.
and quietness is easy to mistake for power.
you stop asking questions you want answers to. you stop expressing needs you’re not sure will be met. you stop reaching, because reaching creates the possibility of rejection, and rejection creates evidence that you are not in control.
and the cool girl is always in control.
or at least she must appear to be.
so you split yourself in half.
there is the version of you that feels everything. the version that wants, and fears, and hopes in embarrassing, uncontrollable ways. and then there is the version of you that the world is allowed to see. the edited version. the optimized version. the version that survives.
the version that sells.
and slowly, without noticing, you start living as her full-time.
you monitor yourself constantly. you hear yourself speaking and immediately evaluate how it sounded. you feel emotions and immediately evaluate whether they were appropriate. you exist, and then you observe yourself existing, like you are both the person and the audience.
you become your own product manager.
your own surveillance system.
your own prison.
because the cool girl is never off-duty.
even when she is alone, she is performing aloneness correctly. even in private, she is aware of herself. aware of how she might be perceived if perception existed in that moment.
and after a while, you forget there was ever another version of you.
or worse, you remember her, but she feels embarrassing. excessive. inconvenient.
unprofitable.
because capitalism has taught you that value comes from control. from consistency. from predictability. and the messy, human parts of you cannot be controlled. they cannot be streamlined. they cannot be monetized.
so they disappear.
not all at once. not dramatically. just slowly. quietly. professionally.
you become easier to love because there is less of you to resist.
less of you to reject.
less of you.
and everyone applauds you for it.
they call you cool.
they say it like it’s a compliment. like it’s something you earned. like it’s proof that you have transcended the chaos of being human.
but cool is not transcendence.
cool is compliance.
cool is what happens when you shape yourself into something that cannot disrupt the system that consumes you.
cool is what happens when you disappear so gradually that no one notices you’re gone.
not even you.
especially not you.