Empowered Feminist Trained To Be An Object - Mi... [AUTHENTIC | 2026]

The split lived in her sternum.

It sounds like you’re exploring a powerful and provocative tension: the contradiction between being (agentic, self-determining, critical) and being trained to be an object (passive, decorative, existing for the gaze of others). The unfinished word “mi…” could point to several directions—“mind,” “mirror,” “misogyny,” or “misfit.”

Below is a short piece that captures this friction. I’ve leaned into the lyrical essay form, as it suits the duality you’re naming. The Object She Was Shaped to Be 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?

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? The split lived in her sternum

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

She read de Beauvoir by flashlight under the covers. She marched with signs that said My Body, My Choice . She could name every fallacy in a patriarchy-apologist’s argument before he finished his second sentence. I’ve leaned into the lyrical essay form, as

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.

And yet.