I don’t want to be respected. I want to be understood — and those two things have never loved each other.
Respect has always felt like a polite distance masquerading as virtue. Like someone standing just far enough away to avoid being touched, nodding with approval, saying you’re impressive, while silently hoping I never lean closer, never let my voice crack, never admit how much of me lives below the neck. Respect is clean. It keeps its hands to itself. It doesn’t ask questions that might ruin the illusion. It doesn’t stay long enough to smell fear or desire or need.
Understanding, on the other hand, is invasive. It requires proximity. It demands that someone sit close enough to feel heat rise off my skin when I speak. It asks them to stay when I contradict myself, when I want tenderness one moment and intensity the next, when my body knows something my intellect hasn’t caught up with yet. Understanding means being willing to witness the unedited version — the one that doesn’t resolve neatly, the one that keeps changing shape mid-sentence.
And people say they want that, until it actually shows up.
I have been respected most when I was smallest. When my softness was ornamental, when my desire stayed symbolic, when my emotions were well-behaved and useful. I learned, without anyone ever saying it out loud, that approval came easiest when I translated myself into something legible. Something digestible. Something that could be admired without consequences. I learned how to sand myself down into coherence, how to sound profound without sounding needy, how to be sensual without making anyone uncomfortable, how to be honest in a way that never actually risked rejection.
For a while, I confused that with safety. I thought being respected meant being protected.
I thought it meant I was finally doing something right.
But it doesn’t. It just means being managed.
Respectability is a cage lined with compliments. It tells you you’re doing so well, that you’re admirable, that you’re such a powerful woman — as long as you don’t lean too hard on anyone, as long as you don’t want too much, as long as you don’t bleed in public. It rewards restraint and calls it maturity. It praises composure and calls it strength. It flinches the moment a woman admits she is driven by appetite as much as principle.
And I am driven by appetite. For closeness. For sensation. For truth that lives in the body, not just the mind.
Understanding me would require people to admit that I am not tidy. That I can be reflective and impulsive, gentle and confrontational, deeply romantic and unapologetically physical. That my longing does not cancel out my intelligence. That my softness does not make me weak. That my desire is not a flaw to be outgrown but a language I speak fluently.
Understanding me would mean accepting that I don’t exist to be exemplary.
That I don’t want to be an example at all.
So instead, people offer respect. They offer distance. They offer advice about tone. They suggest I’d be taken more seriously if I softened this edge, blurred that detail, kept certain things implied instead of spoken. They frame it as care, as concern, as guidance. But what they’re really asking is for me to make myself easier to consume.
Be less alive, they say, without using those words.
Be less inconvenient.
Be less felt.
Be easier to digest.
I am done agreeing.
Here is the part that costs women the most when they finally say it out loud: I would rather be misunderstood for who I am than respected for who I am not. I would rather repel people with my honesty than attract them with a performance. I am no longer interested in dignity that only survives at a distance. I want the kind that can handle proximity. The kind that doesn’t collapse when desire enters the room. The kind that can hold eye contact when I say I am soft and hungry, emotional and lucid, loving and self-possessed.
I am not trying to be safe. I am trying to be true.
And truth is rarely polite.
There is a specific violence in how women are taught to trade depth for approval. We are told, subtly and constantly, that our worth increases the more contained we become. That intimacy should be curated, that longing should be disguised as metaphor, that wanting too openly makes us unserious. We are praised for our insight as long as it never gets embodied. We are celebrated for our voices as long as they don’t shake.
The moment I speak from my nervous system instead of my strategy, the room shifts. The respect drains out like air. People get uneasy. They reach for labels — too much, oversharing, attention-seeking. As if there is something indecent about letting life show on the surface of the skin.
I stopped arguing with that reaction a long time ago. Now I treat it as information.
Because the truth is, respect is often just fear with better manners. Fear of being implicated. Fear of being pulled closer than planned. Fear of having to feel something instead of just agreeing with it. Understanding is riskier. Understanding asks people to stay when the image cracks. To sit with contradiction. To accept that a woman can be both deliberate and messy, thoughtful and impulsive, deeply ethical and unapologetically sensual.
I am all of that. I refuse to amputate parts of myself to make the picture cleaner.
I refuse to self-edit into something survivable.
Some people will unsubscribe because of this. I can already sense them — the ones who enjoyed me as an idea, as an aesthetic, as a voice that said interesting things without ever demanding anything back. They wanted proximity without intimacy. They wanted truth without heat. They wanted me at arm’s length, beautifully composed.
This is me stepping closer.
If that makes you uncomfortable, you’re allowed to leave. I am not lowering my voice to keep you. I am not flattening my body into metaphor so you can nod along without feeling implicated. I am not interested in being palatable at the cost of being alive.
Because the people who stay — they don’t respect me. They recognize me.
And recognition is warmer. It’s messier. It’s dangerous in the best way. Recognition doesn’t clap politely from the sidelines. It leans in. It listens without flinching. It lets itself be changed.
I am not a lesson. I am not a role model. I am not a brand dressed up as a woman.
I am not here to behave.
I am a living nervous system with a voice. I write from inside my body. I choose understanding over approval every single time. And if that costs me admiration, followers, or respectability, so be it.
I was never writing to be kept. I was writing to be seen.