Reject Tradition, Embrace Modernity (and touching grass)
A reflection of my first steps of my emergence from out of Twitter’s shadows and back to the basics, one epiphany (and meetup with an old or new friend) at a time.
March 2020. My initial elation at the prospect of getting an extra long Spring Break during my freshman year of college turned to surprise, then dread upon realizing that the home-base “break” would ultimately last the next one and a half to two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic that sent the entire world into a health and politics-related societal tailspin. During that time – and still remaining long after its onset – the energy in the air was palpable and had a few names: lonely, yearning, and – like my mom likes to say about lost, wayward souls – “people searching for something to belong to.”
And could you really blame them? Whatever your opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent onslaught of policies completely and nearly irreversibly altering our world as we knew it, we have become a very lonely and isolated society as a result. The pandemic served as the fateful, fabled hands unlocking Pandora’s Box, the powder keg of political and social unrest burgeoning and festering underneath the surface. It soon served as yet another method by which to divide ourselves into the neverending “us vs. them”, a perpetual Shakespearean battle of Capulets vs Montagues that really only ended in unnecessary division and untimely death. Were you a masker, or were you anti-mask? Did you or did you not get “the vaxx”? Did you believe in the validity of the pandemic and the scientific methods being emphasized to curb its spread throughout the country, or did you believe in the “plandemic” being completely falsified, if not used as the front for increased government control over a rightfully sovereign nation?
Additionally, anything that serves as a prime point of societal division also serves as a grand unifying factor, but only for those within the same ideological framework or “in-group”. As in, “we’re in the right, and we know we’re in the right – let’s unite for the sole purpose of A) molding society in accordance with our framework and B) eliminating everyone who doesn’t fit it.” This has been a hallmark of humanity ever since our initial conception, but it has accelerated on overdrive in the era of social media, unnaturally instantaneous feedback loops, and heavily insulated echo chambers. It went beyond the pandemic itself, although the pandemic was definitely the foundation for this new boom.
One of the byproducts of that foundation is the rapid (re?)emergence of the “tradwife” phenomenon. A tradwife – or “traditional wife” – is a woman who believes in and practices, or aspires to practice traditional feminine gender roles within the context of both a traditional marriage and society at large. That definition has spawned into an entire movement that has taken the nation by storm for better or for worse, and everyone (and their mother) has an opinion on it. You can read a million tweets and articles and watch a million Tiktoks about it on your own time, but for the purposes of this article I’ll say this: for a 20-22 year old girl in the midst of societal unrest experiencing profound loneliness on the heels of a heavily repressed childhood, the ~art of tradwifery~ seemed like the answer to all my prayers and the solution to all of my problems. Maybe through being the perfect tradwife – or, LARPing as one online to receive the attention I’d always wanted – I would finally receive the validation and the community that I’d been craving; a craving I always possessed but was exacerbated by the extreme isolation of the pandemic.
And for a while, that’s just what I received (kinda), but in direct proportion to how much I played up the “tradwife” persona. I learned what made “our” male equivalent twitch – I didn’t have the anime titties or the blonde hair or blue eyes, but I had buzzwords/phrases like “Peaty”, “anti-seed oils”, “based”, and “I wanna live off-grid and have babies the government doesn’t know about” to get the guys going and to eventually become part of the biggest, ever-growing network of anti-establishment rebels since Free Love in the 1960s. Whatever you said or did, you did not want to be perceived as a dreaded “normie” (*shudder*), then you were OUT. Soon, that tradwife and tradlife “community” façade quickly gave way to a digital underbelly of blatant and unapologetic racism, sexism, homophobia, and misogyny, all acting as the fuel to the “trad” fire, all operating with the objective of establishing a strong “us” vs “them” with rock-solid parameters of who was allowed to be an “us”.
As a young black girl who always felt “different” from everyone else and didn’t *quite* know what I’d be getting myself into, it made me completely detached from the reality of the world around me. I was one person online and one person in real life, and I often looked into the mirror or looked down at whatever angry paragraph I’d written or whatever bait-y tweet I’d composed not at all knowing who this person was that I’d become. I knew, deep down, that I wanted deeper, fuller connections. And I knew that – especially after one too many so-called racist white “groypers” flooding my DMs with desperate flirtation while displaying racism on the TL that would make David Duke blush – I wanted out. But when my real life was (and still kind of is) an endless cycle of isolation, quiet desperation, and rejections both subtle and outright, I had lost almost all hope that my real life would ever be better than the artificial and toxic yet much more appealing world I crafted online. Even so, I wanted out.
One of the first steps I took was getting mad as hell about what I’d endured in toxic, traumatic religious circles growing up and the online religious “trad” circles that emulated similar values. Like, what do you mean I’ve been lied to this whole time? What do you mean everything I’d been learning about being the “ideal woman” was a capitalist marketing ploy at best and a patriarchal means of [population] control at worst? And the most terrible thing for me…you mean to tell me that trying endlessly to contort myself into this perfect, based “tradwife” type of girl was not only doing me more harm than good, but it was keeping me further away from my goal of being in a loving, happy relationship, while the “whorish” girls I was told I was “better” than were thriving in all areas of life but especially relationships? It was WILDLY unfair, and I’m still mad about it. Mad not only at the people around me who perpetuated these lies, but mad at myself – my college educated, intelligent self – for not being immune to the propaganda I’d been trained to spot, rationalize, then avoid. A mass unfollowing and blocking spree ensued, and I felt much more at peace with certain viewpoints and accounts no longer showing up on my timeline.
Ironically enough, the next step was exposing myself to more online fodder – things that were *actually* helpful, to be specific. I learned from wise women – like my dear mutuals Vivrant Thing and Dr. Gloria – about expressing my divine feminine sensuality with raw, unapologetic authenticity, as well as new ways of viewing spirituality that weren’t wrapped up in repressive Abrahamic dogma. I learned from (in)famous Artemis Cultist and Loosh Harvester Radfem Hitler on the arts of touching grass in the midst of online trad insanity and of shouting a resounding “FUCK you” to the patriarchy after being its victim. I learned from sweet Audrey Horne (who has an amazing article on her Substack simply titled “How to Make Friends” that I will be referencing this summer) who is one my newer Twitter friends and who is also on the path to self-actualization in the aftermath of religious repression and COVID-induced isolation (wow, I use the word “isolation” a lot in this essay. But it’s fitting nonetheless). Learning that there were other women out there who not only shared the same sentiments I did, but who also went through the same digital toils and troubles I did who came out on the other side, gave me hope and still does.
Lastly, what I’m working on now is just…touching grass, as the emerging normie subculture promotes and proclaims (please read this as tongue-in-cheek). I’ve come to realize a few key things about myself:
I am not an introvert as previously understood about myself; rather, I am a socially anxious and awkward extrovert. Despite my anxieties and novice mentality about connecting with people, they energize me nonetheless.
I am gratified and feel even self-actualized upon connecting with new people, but especially when in some type of mentorship role or when learning something new.
There’s a seemingly never-ending list of things I want to learn about, try, and experience, and that won’t happen if I’m measuring myself with the metric of chronically online misery.
I have a lot of love to give, both to the world and to myself, in both big and small ways.
In the past few weeks, I’ve joined Meetup groups ranging from DnD games to Spanish-only roundtables (still kind of working up the courage to go, but I’m being intentional about it!), endlessly researched different religious traditions and philosophies, mentored high school girls in disadvantaged communities with aspirations of becoming scientists, nurses, and lawyers, mingled with people in my community, started to get ready for law school, and actually made a few friends. I have yet to find love [that lasts longer than three months]; I feel like that’s one of the last things on my “checklist”...but I also want to step away from viewing life as a series of “to-dos” that will somehow elevate me into some ideal version of myself that’s ultimately not real. I do enough of that online as it is. The next chapter of my life is preparing me for a career in which groundedness, levelheadedness, and awareness are paramount to my success in said field. The [false] “world” of Twitter has given me many great things, but it will not give me those things. It has surely given me, though, a very interesting, robust, and ultimately transformative period in my life in which I learned about myself and two versions of Ann – the Ann I wanted to be, and the Ann I wanted to feel sorry for, kiss on the forehead, and put to rest. But the end of that chapter is…not quite over, but nearing. I’ve all but rejected the “trad” life – at this point, I am a commentator, a bystander. I’m ready to be the ever-dreaded “normie”.
So, in the words of a longtime mutual (whose tweet I can’t link here because she’s private and hates drama), at some point in the not-so-distant future, I will be “delet(ing) the apps for a while” so I can “rawdog life”.
P.S….I’m trying to stay cool about it but I really, truly might riot if I’m not riding [on the back of] a man[’s motorcycle] this summer.