Unclinging: On Womanhood, Worth, and the Power of Self-Definition

In many contemporary performances of womanhood, value is not intrinsic, it is accumulated. Accumulated through beauty, desirability, and most of all, proximity to a man. So many women’s aspirations are not self-authored but externally conferred. Too often, identity is treated as conditional. Entire life goals are deferred in the name of a hypothetical future self, one who is thinner, more polished, and more desirable. A woman whose perceived “value” finally merits luxury, respect, even love. This self doesn’t emerge from authenticity but from performance, and in this schema, “leveling up” is less about inner expansion and more about optimizing one’s palatability, usually to men. The body becomes the transaction. The relationship becomes the reward. And the self? Deferred.

bell hooks warned us of this trap in The Will to Change, where she critiques how patriarchal culture encourages women to equate self-worth with being chosen. She writes, “Females are taught from childhood that they will never be loved if they are not pretty, and that being pretty is more important than being smart,”¹ but what happens when you decide that you are already powerful—already whole—without being chosen? What happens is you become illegible to people still operating within those terms.

I’ve never moved through life with the assumption that I had to earn my humanity, my joy, or my place. I’ve never been the “If I do X, then I’ll get Y” kind of woman. I’ve always believed I was deserving of Y now, without the body transformation, without the waiting game, without the man, and because of that, I live a life that confuses people who were taught that femininity must always be proven, bartered, or begged for. This refusal often gets misunderstood, particularly by women who’ve internalized the belief that their power lies in their desirability. There’s an entire genre of insult that tells on itself: “At least I have a man.” “At least I’m skinny.” “My hair is long.” These aren’t just put-downs, they’re projections. As psychoanalyst and theorist Dr. Beverly Tatum reminds us, what we define as ‘normal’ is often just what is familiar to us.² To them, I am unfamiliar. I don’t cling to what they cling to, and because they’d be devastated to lose those things, they assume I must be too.

But projection is not truth—it’s confession.

This is what I mean when I say people tell on themselves. They show you their metrics for self-worth by what they weaponize, and once you recognize that, you stop internalizing their critiques. You begin to see clearly: their insults reveal more about them than they ever will about you, and here’s the deeper truth: many women aren’t building lives, they’re building presentations. So much of what’s encouraged as “glow-up culture” is just aesthetic labor in service of male attention. As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom notes in Thick, beauty is a form of capital, but it’s unstable and racialized, and the returns are never guaranteed.³ To divest from that system is not just personal, it’s political.

I’ve said this before: I don’t have insecurities in the way people expect me to. Not because I’m delusional or invincible, but because I’m disinterested in building my self-concept on external approval. The things other women cling to in order to cement their value simply don’t apply to me, and that is freeing. We are told, constantly, that the “best” version of ourselves is always one iteration away but the truth is, your highest self isn’t waiting at the finish line. She’s not thinner, richer, partnered, or better dressed. She’s already within you, waiting to be believed.

Uncling.

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• hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Washington Square Press, 2004.

• Tatum, Beverly Daniel. "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" And Other Conversations About Race. Basic Books, 1997.

• Cottom, Tressie McMillan. Thick: And Other Essays. The New Press, 2019.