Is every white woman tired? Do you think yourselves are ridiculous? – 03/12/2023 – The Worst of the Week

Eliza writes to me asking if I’m tired. Eliza, I’m exhausted. My white friends from São Paulo from the west zone are at the point of death. And we find ourselves and pipipipópópó, we are falling over the edges. Let’s freak out. Let’s go inside. We need to stop and blah blah blah, patriarchy and neoliberalism.

Suffering guides many of us, women communicators. We are “relevant personalities” thanks to machismo, tiredness and autoimmune diseases. If it weren’t for the patriarchy, the mental burden and an inflamed body, who would we be on Instagram? And without Instagram, who would we be as communicators? What would we talk about on women’s portals? What palms would we have today if we weren’t swollen, sick and abused?

Every woman with more than a thousand followers decided to tirelessly repeat that she is tired. It became a kind of place in the world, an existential skin, a psychic home. And I am absolutely sure that they are telling the truth. I am telling the truth. I dreamed that she had been admitted to the hospital for IV fluids and was immobile for three days because she was just dead tired.

We discovered that we are exhausted, we talked about it, we had the taste of belonging to a necessary movement called “women are tired and they talk about it”. But now I’m exhausted from so many tired women. I got tired of my tiredness, of talking about my tiredness and of hearing every tired woman talk about her tiredness. From this team we formed of sick white collapsed women who, I have no doubt, also suffer. But aren’t we also ridiculous?

All the women I know wear comfortable, loose-fitting clothes, the kind of cotton that “doesn’t kill macaws”, have faced 89 toxic relationships, have been diagnosed with some fashionable illness and have a geometric tattoo with very affective and particular symbolism. I’m included in all of this. And how beautiful to talk ABOUT, how important, but there are times when being a white feminist from São Paulo giving it real is like wearing Pakalolo in the 1990s. I feel like a replicator of Pakalolo’s neon fru-fru, and not a feminist.

I can’t stand interviewing women like me, maybe like me. Help, I feel ridiculous and I think everyone else is ridiculous. Everyone who comes to my house, everyone I follow. It went wrong, guys. People: it went wrong. Mental note: don’t write columns on mornings when I feel this way.

I can’t stand talking about how tired I am and I can’t stand anyone else who is tired. But at no point do I doubt my tiredness or your tiredness. But, I don’t know, think about it, we are very ridiculous. This paragraph is redundant on purpose.

We’re going to open our gift of cream, tea, self-care routine, skincare from the exhausted warrior from Pinheiros, we’re going to travel around Brazil giving the talk “Exhausted Mother” and we’re going to take the nanny.

Do you sleep at night, tired white influencers (myself included, always good to remember)? I mean, besides the insomnia that you have and I also have, don’t you think you’re ridiculous?

Instagram is the “new new money”, militancy has become employment, late capitalism has become the “new capitalism of getting real”. What we had left of intellectual decency is gone. It’s shit money with a sustainable outfit of shit money. Everything that is more or less new is ridiculous, but the old one was worse. Strength, white warrior of Pinheiros! But it’s okay if you get tired, because “it’s okay not to be okay.”

Arghhhh! Don’t you get tired of how original it was to say some of these things and how “a highly monetizable media place” it has become to keep saying them? Exhausted yawns for all of us.

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