On Aspirations

It might be that, tonight, I washed and conditioned my hair with Biolage – the brand of my late kidhood. Maybe it’s that it’s St. Patrick’s Day and I listened to the brilliant voice of Dolores O’Riordan singing Dreaming My Dreams – a sound that brought me back to the same time. But I’ve felt inspired to consider the evolution of aspirations.

To this day, when I don’t have a gym membership, I tend to stay in shape by allowing the still-relevant Cindy Crawford Shape Your Body and Next Challenge workouts learned in middle school to be my personal trainers. But, despite the degree to which these have so helpfully fostered a healthy body image over the years, especially at times when almost impossibly deprivation-oriented beauty standards prevailed, I’m grateful to have, at least to a degree, moved on from such outwardly-focused goals as central.

More and more, it seems many people & organizations seek, above all else, to influence and to dominate externally, rather than to do the inward work of producing or becoming something or someone worth seeking out or emulating voluntarily.

And I continue to feel that this phenomenon has been most pronounced in the corporate media world where, it seems, success is increasingly defined as the attainment of such influentiality, rather than good done and that this matters; because it so strongly tends to be accomplished by a corrosive, placating, and lulling form of self-seeking pandering on the part of corporate content creators. The distortion of so-called wokeism, in other words, seems to have gone so far as to have had the exact opposite of an awakening effect.

But, just as it is possible to prioritize taking care of one’s appearance without going on to judge others’, a distinction can easily be drawn between tolerating and encouraging frailty.

Particularly as untethered from important fundamentals as our economy has become and as far as modern journalism has sometimes seemed to separate itself from truth for self-seeking reasons in recent years, it may still be worth considering deeply the relatedness of these two phenomena. As it seems that when people or organizations obtain a certain level of influence, they tend to take one of two roads – help point others in the right direction or, like neon arrows pointing to themselves, go to greater and greater lengths in order to hold onto others’ attention unnecessarily – it feels more essential than ever that the former group receive more support.

This is one reason, I believe, there seems to be so little room for compromise between people determined not to be governed by corporate banks & corporate media outlets and those determined never again to elect a person like a particularly divisive recent former president. But, if a third option, or even a greater level of mutual understanding, could be made possible, there would conceivably be plenty of opportunity for these two constituencies, who could be called the anything-butters and the never-Trumpers, to come together and find common ground.

As treacherous as I do understand the subject has been made, I still feel it needs to be said that matters raised during the women’s movement in journalism continue to go unaddressed and are distinct from conversations about the prevalence of predatory forces in other contexts, which, while also massively important, with regard to hazards endemic to prevailing media business models were also at best non sequiturs and, at worst, misused for the purpose of delaying dialogue regarding the propriety of news corporations’ (and adjacent celebrities and organizations, given media giants’ tendency to cartelize) collective relationship to the stock market.

And Destinations

As a kid growing up, I remember searching the world for an idea of what I should seek to be. And I’m so grateful that, partly because of exemplars who championed inward and outward strength and health over a capitulating strategy of seeking connection via weakness and pandering, I realized early that aspiring to be a people-pleaser was no worthy life goal. For years, though, I continued to desire a feeling of safety practically above all else. (Of course, this is just about the most expedient way to ensure one never finds it.)

Lately, I’ve loved having the opportunity to recognize those whose examples have extended to me the most confidence, inspiration, and clarity with regard to what constitutes real progress. (And this even includes strangers, like whomever did the lovely sidewalk art above.) None of these seek to control, but to rather express qualities worth emulating.

Thanks to them, it’s begun to dawn on me, finally, what I’d most like to be when I grow up: a supermodel.