I Am A Hypocrite.

​I am a hypocrite. 

I write that like a confession, but it feels more like a description of the conditions I live in. I am a feminist who shaves. I critique capitalism, while imagining ways to make money within it. I speak about liberation, about dismantling systems that produce inequality, and yet I move through those same systems every day, I am shaped by them, I am sustained by them.

There are moments where that realization sits heavily; like I’ve misunderstood myself, or failed to live up to what I claim to believe. But there are other moments where it feels less like a contradiction to solve and more like a reality to navigate.

Because I don’t stand outside the system I critique. I am inside it, trained by it. My language, my options, even my sense of what is practical or possible; these are all, in some way, inherited. So when I take part in it, it isn’t always a wholehearted endorsement but rather compliance. 

I want to dismantle what I also depend on. I want to imagine a different structure while continuing to move through the current one. That contradiction doesn’t resolve cleanly, and maybe it isn’t supposed to. Maybe it’s the friction that keeps the critique from becoming detached.

It’s easy to oppose something from a distance. It’s harder to recognize how deeply you’re entangled in it. Awareness doesn’t absolve me, but it does complicate the idea that alignment must be perfect in order to be meaningful.

If I am participating in systems I want to dismantle, then part of the work is seeing where that participation is unavoidable. Not to become ‘pure;’ that feels increasingly unrealistic; but to become more conscious, more accountable to the contradictions I already live inside.

So maybe hypocrisy isn’t the opposite of integrity. Maybe it’s what integrity looks like in progress, the moment where belief hasn’t fully caught up to behavior, but hasn’t been abandoned either.

I am a hypocrite, yes.

But I am also someone trying to notice the systems I’m inside of, someone trying to question and resist the system, even if I haven’t figured out how to step completely outside of it yet. 

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I don’t really know who I’m trying to be as a woman anymore.

​It sounds like a big statement, but I don’t mean it in an abstract way. I mean it pretty literally. It’s not that I sit around consciously trying to define my identity every day; it’s more that I keep noticing how many expectations exist, and how inconsistent they all are, and I don’t fully fit into any of them.

Some days, it feels like I’m supposed to be composed. Put-together. Self-assured in a way that looks effortless. Other days, it feels like the expectation is the opposite: to be carefree, detached. And I move between those things without feeling like either one is actually me.

What makes it more confusing is how clear other versions of womanhood seem to be, at least from the outside. There are people who appear certain of themselves, or at least consistent in how they present themselves. And I can’t tell if I’m missing some understanding they have, or if they’ve just become better at performing certainty.

I don’t think I have a negative relationship with being a woman. It’s more that I don’t fully understand what it’s supposed to look like in practice. A lot of the expectations feel implied rather than explained, and I keep finding out about them only when I don’t meet them.

There’s also this quiet pressure to already be “secure” in it; to have a clear sense of confidence, identity, and presentation. But I don’t feel like I’ve arrived at that point. Most of the time I feel like I’m still figuring it out in real time, without any clear reference point for what “figured out” is supposed to look like.

I think that’s what I keep circling back to: I don’t feel like I’m failing at being a woman, exactly. I just don’t feel like I’ve been given a stable definition of what that would even mean. So I end up adjusting constantly, trying to interpret expectations that don’t come with instructions.

And honestly, I don’t have a conclusion for this. Just the ongoing sense that I’m still trying to understand something everyone else seems to treat as already understood.