from the desk, this newsletter sat oddly together at first, a piece about children losing a genre of music built for them, and a piece about a fictional mother-in-law who never once shrank herself for anyone's comfort. but read back to back, they're arguing the same thing from opposite ends: what happens to a woman's (or a girl's) relationship to her own body and voice when the only scripts handed to her were written for someone else's comfort, not hers. one piece is about absence. the other is about refusal. put together, they're basically a before-and-after.
classism, borrowed choreography, unapologetic tea-sipping, all in one edition. bitter, on purpose, as always.
a love letter to the version of you that never apologised dear you, i want to write to the version of you that hasn't been invented yet; the one who says the true thing at the dinner table and doesn't spend the next two hours rehearsing an apology for it. i don't know her yet. i keep meeting her in glimpses. she showed up last week when i didn't say sorry for having an opinion. she showed up in a fictional mother-in-law who never once made herself smaller for anyone's comfort, and i realised i'd been taking notes.
i think about the four-year-old girl who learned to dance to a song that was never written for her, and i want to write her a different letter too. One that says your body was never a performance, it was just a place you got to live. i think about how much of growing up is just slowly unlearning who you were told to be for other people's comfort, and how long it takes to get back to something that was never lost, just misplaced under all that softening.
so this is a letter to whoever you become once you stop asking permission. to the woman who calls it what it is and goes back to her tea. to the girl who gets to keep her own song. i'm not her yet, not fully. but i'm getting there, on purpose, one unapologetic thought at a time.
with love, and zero apologies, angie yours truly, angelina