Intonation & Atonement

Merry New Year and all that Jazz... *wink *wink

It’s been a hot minute.

My last essay here was December 18, and I know some of you have been quietly holding space for me since then. I feel that, and I don’t take it lightly. When people choose to sit with your words, even in absence, that’s a kind of relationship.

I didn’t disappear because I ran out of things to say.
I went quiet because everything I wanted to say began rearranging itself.

Sometimes thinking isn’t linear. It can be tidal, with the same questions circling until they finally click into a shape you can live inside.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been pulling on threads I’ve always carried:

• Why obedience is dressed up as love

• Why girls are trained to wait

• Why authority so often wears a masculine face

• Why systems built on hierarchy feel “natural”

• Why belonging so often asks women to shrink

And why, at sixteen, I walked away from a faith I wanted to believe in—not because I rejected morality, but because I refused to amputate myself in order to belong.

What’s been forming isn’t just an essay. It’s a reckoning with stories we inherit: fairy tales, sermons, myths of protection, myths of order, myths that tell us who we are for before we ever get to decide who we are.

This piece is me following those threads—through princesses and pulpits, through patriarchy and power, through a quiet Mississippi writer who once forced white readers to recognize themselves in a murderer.

It’s not neat. It’s not polite.
It’s honest.

And if you’ve been here since December, thank you for waiting.

Let’s begin.

The First Story We’re Given

Before we ever learn how power actually works, we’re taught how it’s supposed to feel.

It arrives wrapped in velvet and lace. In castles and crowns. In hymns and bedtime stories. In the soft authority of “happily ever after.”

When I say “women” here, I’m not talking about a narrow biology or a single story. I mean anyone who lives in, claims, or is shaped by womanhood—through body, psyche, spirit, culture, or choice. Woman is not a function. It’s a field.

The earliest myth most of us are given is not about becoming—it’s about being chosen.

You are taught that safety comes from being desirable.
That goodness is quiet.
That love is something that happens to you, not something you build.
That your reward is arrival—at the altar, at the kiss, at the ending.

The knight comes. The spell breaks. The story closes.

No one tells you what happens the next morning.

No one teaches you how to negotiate, how to disagree, how to leave. No one shows you a woman who belongs first to herself. The architecture of the story is simple: wait, behave, endure, be saved. It’s the same architecture I would later recognize in church—different costumes, same choreography.

Even the “progressive” updates keep the same spine.

Brave tells us Merida doesn’t want to be owned. She wants to fight for her own hand. It feels rebellious. It feels modern. But even there, the battle is framed around marriage—around whether she will be given or choose. The axis doesn’t move. It just tilts.

The myth persists:
Your life is a narrative someone else completes.

This isn’t just Disney. It’s sermons. It’s wedding culture. It’s the way girls are praised for being “good,” “easy,” “low-maintenance,” “understanding.” It’s the way we’re trained to interpret discomfort as devotion.

And that training is political.

Because a person who believes safety comes from proximity to power will not challenge the system that holds it.
A person who is taught to wait will not lead.
A person who sees themselves as protected property will hesitate to become a threat.

Fascism doesn’t begin with uniforms.
It begins with stories about who deserves to be guarded and who must be governed.

Patriarchy doesn’t begin with violence.
It begins with romance.

And by the time the world asks us to accept hierarchy—God above human, man above woman, some lives above others—we’ve already rehearsed the choreography.

We didn’t learn this from law. We learned it from lullabies.

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The Fairy Tale Curriculum

We like to pretend these stories are harmless. Just cartoons. Just songs. Just dresses and tiaras and glittering castles.

But stories are how a culture teaches its children what to expect.

Long before we understand law, or money, or politics, we learn narrative. We learn what a life is supposed to look like. We learn what kinds of endings are worth wanting.

And for those of us shaped by girlhood—however that girlhood arrives—the lesson is consistent:

You are not the subject of the story.
You are the reward.

Princesses don’t build kingdoms. They inherit them. They don’t leave. They’re chosen. Their virtue is measured in patience, purity, and endurance. They are good because they wait. They are worthy because they are wanted.

Even when the stories modernize, the arc remains intact.

The heroine may be clever now. She may swing a sword. She may say no at first. But the climax is still arrival. The frame is still romance. The center of gravity is still being seen, being selected, being secured.

The world is something that happens to her.

And that becomes muscle memory.

You learn to read rooms before you read books.
You learn to soften your edges.
You learn that being “too much” is dangerous.
You learn that safety lives somewhere outside your body.

This is why the wedding becomes a cultural crescendo. A woman’s value is ritualized in white. Thousands of dollars, months of preparation, an entire industry built around one moment of being witnessed as chosen. We are taught to spend our lives moving toward a single photograph.

No one teaches us how to stay, how to leave, or how to belong to ourselves.

We’re handed a script where love looks like rescue and commitment looks like containment. Where endurance is mistaken for devotion. Where discomfort is reframed as depth.

And this is how obedience gets dressed up as romance.

Because a person trained to believe their future depends on being chosen will learn to tolerate almost anything in the meantime. They will confuse patience with virtue. They will interpret erasure as intimacy. They will wait for permission to become.

This isn’t about fantasy.

It’s about rehearsal.

It’s about teaching bodies to accept hierarchy before they ever encounter it in law, in church, in the workplace, in the state.

By the time authority arrives with rules, with borders, with guns, with God, the posture is already familiar.

We have been practicing submission in silk and song since childhood.

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Training for Obedience

What these stories teach is not just romance. They teach posture.

They teach how to hold the body in relation to power.

To be good is to be agreeable.
To be loved is to be low-friction.
To be safe is to be small.

Over time, this becomes instinct. You don’t have to be told to yield—you anticipate it. You don’t have to be silenced—you edit yourself. You don’t have to be controlled—you learn to manage your own edges.

This is how hierarchy becomes intimate.

It doesn’t arrive first as law or threat. It arrives as tone. As praise. As the subtle reward for being “easy.” It arrives as the soft correction when you’re “too loud,” “too intense,” “too much.” It arrives as the smile that says that’s not how a woman behaves.

And the lesson sinks into the body:

Safety lives outside you.
Authority knows better.
Resistance is risk.
Endurance is virtue.

By the time power shows up in uniforms or policies, in pulpits or boardrooms, it doesn’t feel foreign. It feels familiar. It feels like home.

This is why fascism doesn’t need to invent obedience. It inherits it.

A population already trained to associate protection with submission is easy to govern. A culture that confuses authority with care will accept almost any hierarchy if it promises order. A people taught that goodness looks like compliance will mistake domination for stability.

Patriarchy does the emotional labor that fascism requires.

It teaches us to locate our worth in proximity to power.
It teaches us to interpret control as concern.
It teaches us that being chosen is more important than choosing.

And the training doesn’t end when the tiaras come off.

It just changes costume.

As we grow, the stories grow with us. We graduate from castles to cubicles, from ballgowns to blazers. We’re given new myths—9 to 5, The Devil Wears Prada, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, How to Make an American Quilt. These feel like progress. They center women. They name injustice. They offer friendship, ambition, voice.

And in many ways, they are a gift.

But notice where they land.

In The Devil Wears Prada, power is intoxicating—but wanting it too much is framed as a moral failing. Ambition becomes something a woman must flirt with and then renounce. The lesson isn’t “you deserve to lead.” It’s “don’t lose yourself.” Which quietly becomes: don’t want too much.

In The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, growth is real, but the horizon remains relational. Love, loss, and connection carry the story—but power is emotional, not structural. The girls are allowed to become, but not to reorder the world they inherit.

Even 9 to 5, radical for its time, couches rebellion in comedy. The women win by fixing the system, not replacing it. The boss is softened. The office becomes humane. The hierarchy remains.

These stories crack doors. They matter. They gave many of us our first mirrors.

But they still orbit the same center:

Be better within the system.
Be fulfilled around power.
Be whole without overturning the order.

They teach us to negotiate, not dismantle. To survive, not redesign. To be exceptional without being foundational.

So even our “empowering” narratives often stop short of sovereignty.

They give us permission to cope—but not to command.
To be resilient—but not to be architects.
To be loved—but not to be dangerous.

Obedience doesn’t always look like submission.

Sometimes it looks like success that never threatens the structure that made it rare.

So when the world says trust me, the body remembers.
When it says this is for your own good, the muscles soften.
When it says stay in your place, it sounds like common sense.

This is not because people are weak.

It’s because they were trained.

Long before there were borders or ballots, there were bedtime stories.
Long before there were laws, there were lessons.

And those lessons were never neutral.

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The Father Becomes the State

For a long time, I thought my break with Christianity was personal. Emotional. A teenage refusal dressed up as independence.

Now I see it as structural.

So much of Western religion is built on a single metaphor:
God as Father.

Not parent. Not ancestor. Not source.
Father.

Authority made intimate. Power made familial. Obedience reframed as love.

In that architecture, the divine becomes a man, and the man becomes a god. The household becomes a rehearsal space for hierarchy. The father’s authority is mirrored in the priest, in the king, in the boss, in the state. Doubt becomes disobedience. Disobedience becomes sin. And sin becomes something that must be corrected.

The father becomes the state.
The state becomes the father.

For some, that metaphor feels comforting. Protective. For others—especially those raised without a father, or with a violent one, or with a man whose authority was unpredictable or unsafe—the metaphor is not holy.

It is terrifying.

What happens when “father” doesn’t mean safety?
What happens when authority has already taught your body to brace?
What happens when the person who was supposed to protect you was absent, volatile, or cruel?

In those bodies, obedience doesn’t feel like love.
It feels like survival.

So when a system tells you to submit “for your own good,” it echoes something older. Something intimate. Something learned in rooms where leaving wasn’t an option.

This is why these structures hold.

They don’t rely on belief alone.
They rely on memory.

They draw power from the earliest relationships we have with authority—who fed us, who disciplined us, who left, who stayed, who scared us, who held us. They take the chaos of family and elevate it into cosmic order.

And then they tell us it’s natural.

This is where fascism finds its emotional footing. It doesn’t need to invent obedience. It sanctifies it. It wraps hierarchy in the language of care. It promises protection in exchange for surrender. It says: trust me, I know better.

For those taught that love comes from above, that safety comes from submission, that questioning is dangerous, that structure is salvation—this feels familiar.

This is how private wounds become public order.

It feels like home.

Which is why breaking from it is not just political.

It’s personal.

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The Pyramid

Every system like this needs a shape.

Not just metaphorically, but materially. It needs a way to distribute power, value, safety, and meaning. It needs a way to decide who is centered and who is expendable. Who is protected and who is managed. Who belongs and who must prove they deserve to stay.

The shape is a pyramid.

At the apex sit white, cisgender, straight men—not because they are inherently more capable, but because the architecture was designed to center them. Patriarchy assigns authority to masculinity. Christianity, as empire, sanctifies that authority. Capitalism rewards accumulation and dominance. Fascism hardens it all into law.

Stacked together, they produce a world where:

• White men are framed as leaders, protectors, owners, deciders.

• White women are positioned as symbolic property—innocence to be guarded, lineage to be reproduced, morality to be performed.

• Everyone else is cast as labor, threat, resource, or problem.

This is not a binary of “men versus women.” It is a stratified system of roles. Gender is one of the levers. Race, class, ability, citizenship, and conformity decide how far up or down a body is placed. The pyramid doesn’t care who you are. It cares how useful you are to its shape.

This isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a map.

It’s how the machine allocates humanity.

What makes this structure durable is that it doesn’t only distribute power—it distributes meaning. It tells people who they are for. It teaches white men that authority is inheritance. It teaches white women that safety comes from proximity. It teaches everyone else that survival requires accommodation.

Each tier is given a story that makes the arrangement feel natural.

Men are told they are burdened with responsibility.
Women are told they are cherished.
The rest are told they must earn their place.

No one is told they are standing on someone else’s back.

And because the stories are emotional, not just ideological, people defend their position even when it harms them. The man defends dominance as duty. The woman defends proximity as protection. The worker defends exploitation as opportunity. The citizen defends violence as security.

The genius of the pyramid is that it turns hierarchy into common sense.

You don’t have to be cruel to maintain it.
You just have to believe it’s the way things are.

That belief is the load-bearing beam.

Which is why the most dangerous question in a system like this is not who’s in charge?

It’s:

Who decided?

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Eudora Welty and the Murderer Next Door

In 1963, a white writer in Mississippi did something most of her peers would never have dared.

Eudora Welty was not a radical by reputation. She was known for her gentility, her restraint, her deep Southern voice. She belonged—comfortably—to the world that taught women to be polite, to soften truth, to make things palatable.

When Medgar Evers was assassinated in his own driveway, Welty did not write a eulogy. She did not reach for uplift. She did not perform innocence.

Instead, she wrote a story from inside the mind of the man who killed him.

Not a monster.
Not a caricature.
A neighbor.

An ordinary white man irritated by a Black man’s visibility. A man who believed the world was changing in ways that threatened him. A man who acted. A man who went home and expected to be understood.

What Welty exposed was not the extremity of hatred, but its normalcy. The way violence grows out of everyday grievance. The way supremacy lives in kitchens and marriages and small talk. The way it sounds reasonable to the people who carry it.

That choice unsettled everyone.

White readers did not want to see themselves in the killer’s voice. Activists wondered why she would grant him interiority at all. Both sides were asking for the same comfort: a clear line between “us” and “them.”

Welty refused it.

She understood that systems survive by preserving innocence. By convincing people that harm only belongs to monsters, never to neighbors. That danger is external. That “people like us” are exempt.

She had lived too long among them to believe that.

Her resistance was not theatrical. She did not become a public crusader. She did something more destabilizing: she withdrew her cooperation from the lie. She wrote what she saw. She refused to perform for segregated audiences. She let institutions choose whether they would change or disappear.

She did not break the system.

She broke the spell. And spells are how systems survive.

And that is the kind of courage this machine cannot metabolize.

Because fascism depends on distance.
Patriarchy depends on innocence.
Empire depends on the belief that harm is always someone else’s work.

Welty made it intimate.

She showed that the murderer does not always wear a hood.
Sometimes he wears a wedding ring.
Sometimes he eats dinner and complains about his day.
Sometimes he thinks he is justified.

She did not give white readers a villain.

She gave them a mirror.

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Heresy

I didn’t leave faith because I wanted chaos.

I left because I could feel the cost of belonging.

I could feel the way my body was being drafted into a story I did not choose. The way my doubt was being treated as defect. The way my hunger to become more was being framed as danger. I could feel the slow, polite pressure to make myself smaller in order to be safe.

And something in me said no.

Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just: no.

That refusal has followed me ever since.

It shows up every time a system tells me that hierarchy is natural.
Every time authority insists it knows my place better than I do.
Every time power dresses itself up as protection.
Every time I’m asked to trade wholeness for belonging.

What I believe now is simple, and it is heretical in a world built on pyramids:

Human beings are capable of morality without submission.
Care does not require domination.
Biology is not destiny.
Hierarchy is not sacred.

We do not need a father in the sky to be good.
We do not need a king to be safe.
We do not need to be small in order to be loved.

What we need is the courage to unlearn what was trained into our bones.

Because this machine—this braid of patriarchy, fascism, capital, and sanctified authority—only survives as long as we mistake inheritance for inevitability. It only holds if we believe the stories are older than choice. It only works if we never ask how any of it began.

But this was built.

Which means it can be unbuilt.

And the most dangerous question you can ask a system like this is

not Who’s in charge?

It’s Who decided?💎