Morgan Lily Rodriguez is a New York–based multimedia artist whose work spans photography, modeling, fine art, music, acting and writing. Rooted in curiosity and emotional honesty, their creative practice explores the intersections of identity, intimacy, and human behavior. With a background that bridges visual and written storytelling, Morgan approaches each medium as a language of its own — one that invites reflection, connection, and depth. Their work captures moments that feel both personal and universal, revealing the beauty in vulnerability and the power of self-expression.
I’m a multimedia artist and writer from the Lower East Side of Manhattan — born into the noise, the movement, the erasure of the 24-hour day that defines New York City. I didn’t go to art school, and I don’t come from formal training. My education came from observing: people, light, silence, the rhythm of the city, the way emotion lingers in a room after everyone has left. I’ve always been drawn to the quiet things that speak the loudest.My practice spans across writing, painting, sculpture, and photography. I’m someone who needs to feel what I create — the texture of clay under my fingertips, the brush against canvas, the shutter clicking at the perfect instant. Tangible, tactile mediums allow me to connect the physical act of creation with the emotional weight behind it. My work lives somewhere between the mind and the body — where thought and feeling coexist, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict.As an Autistic person living with Borderline Personality Disorder, I’ve always felt the world at full volume. Every emotion, every interaction, every heartbreak and moment of connection has a kind of gravity to it. Art, for me, is a way to translate that gravity — to make it understandable to others, or at least to make it visible. I create because it’s the only language I have that can hold the full weight of what I feel.My work often revolves around love, intimacy, human behavior, and the way we reach for one another — even when it hurts. I write about relationships, longing, obsession, the philosophies of connection. These themes repeat themselves because they repeat within me. I’m endlessly fascinated by what drives people to care, to destroy, to rebuild, to forgive. I think, in many ways, art is simply the study of empathy — and empathy is what keeps us human.
My goal is to make people think. Not in a way that’s academic or detached, but in a way that brings them closer to themselves. I believe reflection is a form of rebellion — especially in a world where we’re taught to move fast, consume quickly, and feel less. We’ve grown accustomed to apathy, and it shows in how we treat each other. My art asks for a pause. A breath. A moment of stillness to remember what it feels like to feel.My influences are vast — writers and philosophers like Dostoevsky, Kafka, Nabokov, Nietzsche, and Foucault; filmmakers like David Lynch, Gregg Araki, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Terry Gilliam; books like Alice in Wonderland, 1984,and others that follow surreal, dystopian, and mythological themes. I’m drawn to anyone who explores the depths of human consciousness — who can make you uncomfortable, and in doing so, make you aware. I think art should challenge as much as it comforts. I began to care more about and explore more of my physical art after seeing "Can't Help Myself" by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, an exhibit that truly spoke to me.I don’t know if I consider myself an artist in the traditional sense. I’m a person who creates out of necessity. I make because I have to. My work is filled with contradictions — one project may disprove the last, one philosophy may dissolve into another. But I see that as proof of my humanity. Proof that I’m still learning, still changing, still alive. To be human is to be flawed.People often tell me my work makes them feel less alone. That’s reason enough for me to keep sharing it. Art, to me, is not about permanence or perfection. It’s about honesty. It’s about saying: I’ve felt this too.My portfolio is a reflection of that — a collection of moments, thoughts, and emotions that I’ve translated into something tangible. It’s not a definitive statement; it’s a living archive. A map of the ways I’ve tried to understand the world, and myself, through creation. Welcome, and enjoy.
It creeps in slowly, almost imperceptible at first—a flicker of interest, then fixation. They lodge beneath the skin like a splinter, impossible to ignore. You replay their words long after they’ve left the room, dissecting tone, gesture, absence. Every silence becomes a puzzle. You’re no longer your own—your thoughts rewire around them, your attention hijacked by the possibility of their attention. It’s not love, not really. It’s hunger with a velvet face. A kind of beautiful rot that softens the edges of reason. You know the imbalance, the desperation it breeds. But still, you linger in the waiting. Still, you ache to be seen by them in the way you’ve already imagined.
I am learning to love the sound of my feet walking away from things not meant for me. It’s a quiet education, this unlearning of attachment. There is no ceremony to it, no grand revelation — only the gradual realization that much of what we call loyalty is disguise for fear. We remain in places, with people, in patterns, not because they nourish us, but because they are familiar. The human creature will endure great discomfort so long as it is predictable.As a child, I believed virtue lay in persistence. I mistook endurance for moral strength, assuming that staying — regardless of suffering — was evidence of character. I admired constancy in others and condemned the ease with which some could abandon pursuits. I have come to see that there is a quiet dignity in departure, departing not in anger, but in clarity.There’s a certain sound the soul makes when it is no longer straining against its own better judgement. It’s not the crash of slamming doors or the roar of decisive change, but the soft, deliberate rhythm of forward motion — unhurried, confident, final. In learning to walk away, one does not become hardened, but refined. The heart does not grow older; it becomes selective. It learns that self-betrayal is too high a price for temporary belonging.It is a difficult thing, to abandon a life you have outgrown, especially when no one else sees the urgency. Friends will call it impulsive, family will call it ungrateful, and the world will offer a million reasons to stay. But eventually, the dissonance becomes too loud — the distance between who you are and where you are becomes unbearable. Then, if you are lucky, your feet will begin to move.I am no longer interested in remaining where I am tolerated out of politeness, or where my silence is mistaken for contentment. I have grown wary of spaces that require me to shrink in order to fit, of affections that are conditional, of roles I was never meant to audition for. I leave because the longer I stay, the more I begin to disappear.To walk away is not always an act of abandonment. Sometimes, it is the highest form of loyalty — to oneself, to truth, to life as it was meant to be lived. So, I walk. Slowly, deliberately. Not with regret, but with reverence — for the version of myself that I was always meant to become.
I love, love. Not the kind wrapped in glitter and sales tags, not the kind that arrives with flowers and a promise and ends in a montage. I love the kind of love that hides in plain sight. The kind no one writes about because it’s too quiet. Too fleeting. Too ordinary.Love, to me, has never belonged only to romance. I’ve seen it in the way people wait for each other at crosswalks. In the way a dog rests its head in someone’s lap without being asked. In the way a friend sends a message just to say, I thought of you today. I’ve seen it in shared meals, bought drinks, in silence that doesn’t need to be filled, in the moment someone reaches out instinctively to catch your arm when you trip — not out of duty, but because it’s what love does.It’s in the details. The care taken in folding a shirt for another. The second-to-last bite offered up without comment. The way someone listens — not to respond, but to understand. None of it is grand, but all of it is love.We do a disservice when we confine love to romance. As if it only counts with a title or a timeline. Love happens every day — in glances, in gestures, in the invisible threads that connect us briefly to strangers and constantly tot he people we carry with us.Some of the deepest love I’ve known had no ceremony. No label. No photographs. Just the feeling of being seen and held, even in silence.I don’t think love is rare. I think attention is. I think we’re so busy looking for the fireworks that we miss the candlelight. And it’s in the candlelight — soft, flickering, quiet — where love actually lives.
People misunderstand fear. We associate it with darkness, grief, suffering. Pain is familiar, predictable even. It has a flow, a cause, a story we know by heart. Joy — real joy — is terrifying.We expect pain, we build lives around it. People learn to function inside their suffering like a suffocating quilt — itchy, uncomfortable, but safe in its predictability. It’s hard to feel betrayed by something you’ve already resigned yourself to. Pain becomes a constant companion, a structure, a narrative. This is who I am. What I’ve survived. There is power in that. Certainty. Identity.Joy is a stranger. It arrives unannounced, like sunlight breaking through a closed window. At first, unwanted, even blinding. It threatens the story we’ve built about ourselves. It asks us to hope. And hope is dangerous. What if it doesn’t last? What if the moment you allow yourself to sink into joy, it’s ripped away? What if you let your guard down — just for a second — and then you fall harder than before?Pain teaches you to expect nothing. Joy requires you to believe there is something worth expecting.Maybe that’s what makes joy so unbearable. Not its lightness, but its fragility. You can wrap pain in routine. You can tolerate it with rituals, name it with diagnoses, dull it with control. But joy? Joy is ephemeral, elusive. You can’t catch it, and worse — you can’t keep it.So we fear it, downplay it, sabotage it before it can disappoint us. Then, we call ourselves “realistic”. I think it’s cowardice, or maybe grief dressed as logic.There are moments I’ve felt joy so complete, it scared me — because I knew I couldn’t possibly stay there. I hated that I already knew how to mourn something I hadn’t even lost yet. That’s what makes joy cruel: it’s a reminder of what could be. It forces you to imagine a world where you are not merely surviving, but living — and then dares you to believe it could last.And what if it could? What if the real fear isn’t that it will disappear — but that we might not know how to live if it doesn’t?
When you are not fed love on a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off of knives. When love is not offered gently, when it does not arrive warm and waiting for you, you don’t stop needing it. You simply learn how to take it in its sharpest forms. You swallow the edges, you call the taste of blood “sweet”.In a way, it is. There’s a sweetness in being wanted, even if it’s by someone who only knows how to wound you. There’s a sweetness in attention, even when it feels like punishment dressed as care. You tell yourself it’s better than nothing. That this must be what love feels like for people like you — jagged, conditional, fleeting. So, you adapt. You lower your voice, then raise it. You shrink, then expand. You mold yourself into whatever shape will keep the spade steady in someone’s hand.The thing is, after a while, you begin to confuse pain for passion, chaos for devotion. You tell yourself that fire burns because it’s alive, when it really just burns because that’s what fire does. But when you’ve been starved long enough, even the sear of it feels like nourishment.People like to romanticize resilience, but they never talk about the cost. They never mention the quiet ache of teaching yourself to take what should have been given freely. Of learning to sip love in its most dangerous forms because it’s the only way you’ve ever known.The worst part? You get good at it. So good, you forget there was ever suppose to be another way.I wonder what it would feel like to be fed love without bleeding for it. To taste softness without iron in the back of my throat. Would I even know what to do with it? Or would I spit it out because it feels wrong — too safe, too gentle, too much like grace? Or would I spit it out simply because I learned to love the taste of char?Maybe that’s where the tragedy lies: when you grow up licking knives, a silver spoon feels like a lie.
I'll never understand the culture of measured affection, of rationed care. The rules of modern love feel designed to make everyone smaller: Don't message first, don't appear too eager. We are taught to behave like our hearts are bargaining chips, as if withholding makes us more valuable.That isn't how I love. I love in full. I love to the edges. I love the way water fills a glass without hesitation, taking its shape completely. To hold back feels dishonest, like living only half of a life. I don't want to strategize the timing of a kind word or calculate how vulnerable I'm allowed to be. I want to give freely, not because I expect anything back, but because love, when it's real, is its own reward.Still, the world teaches caution. It tells me that caring too much will make me unloveable. That my natural state — to love deeply, openly, and without hesitation — is too much for people to hold. Sometimes I believe it. Sometimes I try to dim myself, to care less, to be less. It's exhausting.I don't want to care less, I don't want to withhold. If that makes me too much for people, then so be it. The truth is, the love I carry has never been smaller for being fully given. It grows, and I don't intend to stop.
To love anyone truly, without condition — is to step willingly into uncertainty. It is not simply a choice to give affection, but a confession: I know how deeply you could break me, and I'm offering myself anyway. Love begins with risk. Even the most tender connections carry within them the seed of devastation, because love, by its nature, makes us vulnerable to loss, to time, to misunderstanding.We talk about love like it's soft, but it's not. It's sharp-edged. It begs for exposure. It asks us to demolish the walls we built. To say I love you is not just to declare feeling — it is to declare trust. It's to hand over the sharpest weapon and believe, against all reason, that it won't be used.The truth is, sometimes it is used — and more often than not. Sometimes we are shattered by the very people we once believed incapable of harm. What's the alternative though? A love that costs nothing, risks nothing, reaches for nothing — would that even be love at all?I think it's worth the devastation. Not because pain is noble, but because a heart that avoids being broken never really learns how to feel alive.
I've always been drawn to the things that hurt me. Maybe it's foolishness, maybe it's just human nature. We return to what once burned us because the warmth of it, even fleeting, felt alive in a way nothing else does. They say a burnt child dreads the fire, but I've never found that to be true. Once you've felt that heat, the memory of it lingers, calling you back even as your scars remind you of the pain.There's an intimacy to fire, both beautiful and cruel. It doesn't just warm you — it consumes, slowly, without asking. It invites you closer, makes you believe in its warmth, but sooner or later, you notice how close you've leaned, how easily it could take everything if you don't step back. Yet, stepping back feels impossible. Once you've felt that kind of heat, ordinary warmth feels hollow.Maybe it's not just longing that brings me back to the fire, but defiance — spite. I know I've been burned before, and I still think: Let me try again. Let me learn its edges, it's temper. Perhaps I believe that this time I can hold it carefully, that I can feel its glow without being destroyed. Or maybe I've accepted that some things are worth the burn, worth the ache of healing.The truth is, I'm not sure I'd recognize myself without the fire, without the burns. It's taught me what love can cost. It's taught me where I end and where I'm willing to lose myself. And though it hurts, though I carry its marks like quiet reminders, I still lean toward it every time. Because fire is not just pain. Fire is life, movement, warmth. Without it, I'm cold. Without it, I'm not sure I feel anything at all.
I do understand — and it is terrible. // Franz KafkaUnderstanding is often painted as a gift, but I've learned that it can be unbearable. There is nothing worse than seeing clearly and having to live with what you see. I used to think if I could understand people — if I could decode their silences, rationalize their choices — it would make things easier. But instead, understanding leaves me with no illusions to hold onto.Now I see why things ended, why people leave, why the silences stretch longer and longer until there is nothing left but the hollow shape of what once was. Knowing these reasons does not soothe me. It cuts deeper. Because part of me would rather believe in mystery than accept that things can falter for such ordinary, human reasons.There is no comfort in knowing someone's heart simply grew tired, or that affection can fade as quietly as dusk turns to night. It's easier to imagine there is a grander reason for the loss, something beyond my control. Some cruel twist of fate rather than the slow erosion of feeling. The truth is rarely that dramatic. Most endings happen in silence, in the small decisions and forgotten gestures that accumulate until one day the thread snaps.What no one tells you is that understanding doesn't stop the ache — it magnifies it. You can explain every choice, every moment that led to the unraveling, and still find yourself awake at night, wishing you didn't know. Because mystery, however cruel, leaves space for hope. And hope, even fragile, is easier to hold than the cold finality of knowing exactly why.
Nobody warns each other about the kind of love that doesn't erupt. The kind that doesn't arrive in a blaze. No one prepares for the slow-burn — the love that simmers quietly, just below the surface, until one day it's overtaken everything.It's like a gas burner left on. No flame, no sound. Just this presence — unassuming, silent, invisible. And then, without realizing it, the house fills with something dense and inescapable. Something deadly in its quiet. It creeps in slowly, unnoticed, until it's in the lungs, the bloodstream, and there's no going back.But maybe it's not truly slow at all. Maybe the intensity is always there — ready, immediate, undeniable — but the people involved are too afraid to act on it. Too afraid of what ignition might bring. So it lingers. Simmering under the surface, carefully contained. It's not the love that takes time but the courage.It disguises itself as comfort, as safety. It grows in the background, not demanding much. Until suddenly, everything has shaped around it. Habits change, attention shifts, the world tilts slightly toward the presence of that person, and then keeps tilting. Just a quiet understanding between two people that somehow, everything has changed. The way a person checks their phone, the way certain songs begin to ache, the way silence begins to feel full rather than empty.Slow-burns are not less intense because they are quiet. They're consuming. They don't break down walls, they seep through the cracks — and by the time it's noticed, it has already claimed every room. What makes it so haunting is how easy it is to pretend it's harmless, but beneath it all is something volatile. Something that could ignite everything — if given the spark. That's the danger of a slow-burn, it doesn't ask permission, it just stays and stays and stays.
There's a self I only meet in the wake of love — soft, golden, reckless in the gentlest way. She rises early without complaint, humming while she makes breakfasts that look like celebrations — eggs cooked just so, fruit cut into deliberate shapes, orange juice freshly pressed and poured with care. She buys flowers because the vase is empty, wears dresses that feel like daydreams, and leaves her hair wild because the wind likes it that way. She writes until her wrist aches, not to be read, but because words can't be held inside her. Her journal fills at an impossible pace — pages of observations, confessions, moments that would be forgotten if she weren't so intent on keeping them alive. She notices the way sunlight fills a room, the way laughter sits in the air after it's over. It's a rare, almost mythological version of myself that only appears when the surplus of love I have to give is suddenly funneled toward one singular person. I don't know why it takes another human for her to surface, but when she does, I watch her with a kind of awe, as though she isn't me at all.She is abundance. She is light spilling over the edges of her own body. When I'm in this state, I move through the world softer, but also brighter. I'm most beautiful then, though I'm too careless to realize it — unconcerned with perfection, unafraid of being seen. I live in the details, in the secret little ways love asks to be expressed.And now, I feel her stirring again. Like watching a familiar figure walk down the street. I want her to stay. I want this version of me to be permanent. But there's already a quiet fear, an understanding that she exists only as long as her love does. That if the other person leaves, she will too.So I watch her while I can. I memorize her movements, her instincts, the unguarded joy. I want to tell her she doesn't need anyone else to come alive like this. But I don't. Instead, I let her be, selfishly hoping that this time, she won't disappear.
Sometimes I wonder if love is a mercy or a punishment. To still feel it after everything, to still be able to reach for it like a fool — what is that, if not cruelty dressed as tenderness? There are moments when it feels like the only living part of me if the part that aches to give, to care, to attach itself to something outside of myself. And yet, every attachment has left me split open in some new an inventive way. Still, the impulse survives.That might be the most twisted thing about it. How the heart can keep producing warmth even after it's been emptied, how it can insist on ebating in rhythm with someone else's presence long after it's been abandoned. It makes me feel like I've been wired for self-sabotage, programmed to yearn regardless of the cost. Pain should have cauterized the nerve by now. It should have hollowed me into something incapable of such tenderness. Yet in the midst of grief, there are flickers — small, disarming moments where I catch myself caring, reaching, imaging beauty in a world that has given me every reason to turn away.There's a heavy humiliation in loving when the world has proven it will not return the gesture. To still press your hands into soil – knowing the seeds will never sprout. It's quite comical, if it weren't so devastating. I can't decide if that persistence is a nobility or just stubborn desperation.Should I be grateful for this — this ability to feel, to keep reaching through the dark for a hand that never arrives? Should I call it resilience, or is it just a refusal to learn? It is a defiance that boarders on absurdity. till, I do not put it down. I hold it because it is proof that I have not gone entirely numb, that pain has not won by making me empty. It is a strange kind of victory — to bleed and still believe in warmth. And I do not know if that is strength, or if it is simply another form of surrender.Maybe love, after all misfortune, is not a blessing or a curse. Maybe it is the most human thing left in me.
Please kiss the brick before you throw it at me.I'm not asking for mercy. Mercy has never been mine. I want intimacy, even in destruction. If you are going to wound me, I want to feel the warmth of your mouth pressed against the very thing that will undo me. Let me know, in the string of the breaking, that I was touched first, that there was tenderness before destruction. That even if the end comes violently, it wasn't always cruel.I've always loved like this — standing still and waiting for the blow, not because I crave pain, but because I crave proof that it all meant something. That I was seen. That my softness was not wasted in a void. To be kissed before being broken is to know I was close enough to be touched, that the ruin carried my name.Love has always felt like this. An unbearable marriage of sweetness and brutality, devotion tangled up in wreckage. I envy those who love simply, without needing this duality. For me, every embrace already carries the shadow of an ending, every tenderness already tastes faintly of loss. Perhaps that is why I ask for it. If I must crumble, let it be from a hand that once held me.It's not the brick I fear but the silence that would follow if it were hurled without acknowledgement, without love. Throw it, if you must, but kiss it first. Let my undoing carry the trace of your affection, however brief, however fragile.In the end, it isn't the breaking that terrifies me. It's the thought of being broken by someone who never touched me softly first.
A kiss can destroy a philosophy. // Anaïs NinAnd isn't that the truth of it? Whole systems of belief collapse under the softness of a mouth. What I said I would never allow, never do, could live without — all dismantled by the brush of a pair of lips. Desire mocks logic, touch rewrites scripture. One kiss, and the body proves itself more convincing than any theory.It is terrifying, how quickly the body can overthrow the mind. One moment I believe myself anchored in certainty, in ideas I've spent a lifetime rehearsing, and the next I am reduced to softness, trembling at the disintegration of everything I thought unshakable.A kiss is not just affection — it is proof of the body's refusal to obey restraint. It reminds me that no philosophy, however noble or carefully constructed, can withstand the force of desire when it makes itself undeniable. The press of a mouth can turn atheists into believers, cynics into dreamers, revolutionaries into beggars. A kiss is the betrayal of theory by experience.It reminds me that the most elaborate architecture of thought is fragile compared to the immediacy of touch. That even the beliefs I once clung to with white knuckles can dissolve in the heat of touch, in the closeness of skin. The real philosophy is not what survives after the kiss, but what is revealed in its demolition — the raw, unarguable truth that I am human. I am fragile, and I am helplessly moved by tenderness.
I am envious of the people and things I write about. To write is to carve something into permanence. With a certain affection, I gather fragments — the way someone's laugh folds over itself, the way their hand hesitates before reaching for a glass, the hushed sliver of light on their face in a passing moment. I write them with prose, gentleness, beauty. They do not know how carefully I've observed them, how I have already transformed them into artifacts — archived not only in my memory but in the immortality of ink. To be written is to be granted a second life, and I often feel that those I write about live more vividly on my pages than they ever do in reality.There is something dastardly in this envy. What I give them is not only memory but reverence. I take fleeting gestures, overlooked expressions, moments otherwise lost to the current of time, and I make them last for eternity. A half-forgotten smile becomes luminous, a single conversation, stitched into words, begins to outlive even the person who first spoke it. I try to make everything last forever, as though my pen could resist the natural ruination of all things. That is why I ache — I know how precious such preservation is, how sacred it feels to be rendered in language, and I wonder if I will ever be given the same gift.Has anyone ever written me this way? Has anyone noticed my smallest hesitations and found them worth recording? Has anyone studied me with the same acclaim I give others? Sometimes I fear I am the only one who looks at the world with such grace — the only one who insists on seeing beauty where it is easiest to overlook. And if that is true, what becomes of me when I am gone? Will anyone hold me in their sentences, preserve me against time's slow erasure?There is a loneliness in always being the archivist. I wander the world with open eyes, with an instinct to gather, save, hold onto everyone else's ethos as if it were treasure. Perhaps I am doomed to scatter myself across my own pages, to be remembered only in fragments I've left behind. Perhaps my only hope of immortality is through myself – through the endless journals where I bleed, where I am both subject and scribe. Still, I envy those I write about, because they live twice: once in the moment, and again in my words. Whereas I, despite all of my writing, do not know if I even live once in anyone else's.
I've felt meloncholic today. I've decided that September is my favorite month of the year. It feels like both an ending and a beginning, a hinge between two worlds. The air sharpens into something crisp, carrying the faint scent of leaves that have just begun to surrender, and the sound beneath every step is a soft, papery crunch. September is a love letter written in parting: goodbye, for now, to Summer – the golden haze, timeless evenings, the dreamlike weeks that slip by. It's bittersweet, tender.It's always a month of planning, reflecting, dreaming. I scheme out goals, imagine who I might become, I dream of love found in unlikely places. September feels like a new year. Not the clamor of January resolutions, but a gentler, steadier rebirth. I tell myself that this year the cycles will stop. That this year will be different, that I will step out of old patterns.I think I already am different. I feel it in the way I move through the day. In the way I've been breathing a little deeper. In the way I've been going out more, speaking more, existing a bit more freely. There is a strangeness to it, a mix of good and fear and sadness, as though I am watching an old version of myself dissolve in the distance. It's never easy to say goodbye, even to the selves who have hurt me or held me back. There is a tenderness in this kind of farewell too, a recognition that growth always costs something.I don't know who I will become by the time the leaves fall completely, or by the time Summer makes her return. But today, in this melancholy light of September, I am learning to live without immediate purpose, without expectation, without the constant need for certainty. Just to live, to let things arrive and depart like the seasons.
She removes the "too" when returning an "I love you". It is never accidental. She cannot bring herself to say it like an afterthought, a syllable tacked on for comfort or out of obligation. When she says love, it is not a performance of politeness. It is the marrow of her, pressed forward without hesitation, raw and certain.Her heart lives outside her chest. She does not tuck it away or cover it with armor. She wears it openly, like a jewel that could be stolen at any moment. She knows this. She knows it makes her vulnerable, knows that people see an easy opening to take advantage, and still, she keeps it out in the open. She would rather let it shatter, gathering its remnants again and again, than deny anyone the proof that they are worthy of love. To her, love is a gift not meant to be hoarded. She gives it away as if to say: there, this is what it feels like to be seen.She has so many rules. Rules about how one ought to move through life, to behave, to guard oneself. But when she falls in love, every single rule disintegrates. She does not mind the weakness of it; in fact, she honors it. She bows before it as if weakness in the name of love were not weakness at all, but a higher form of strength.The world has never shown her this to be true. On the contrary, it has tried its best to convince her that love — this kind of love — is naïve, dangerous, fantasy. That she is undeserving of the very thing her soul lives for. But she refuses to believe in that kind of poverty. She uses love like a protest, like a strike against despair, like a light held high in the face of all that says no. She loves in spite of it all, because to stop loving would mean to surrender.She is observant, achingly so. She notices every shift, every flicker, every detail others overlook. And though she does not always speak of it, she collects these moments the way one collects artifacts — delicate, priceless, worth preserving. Inside her is a quiet museum of human gestures: a look, a hesitation, a quiver of a smile. Each one is a relic of intimacy, saved as if she alone knows how easily they disappear.She loves to explore, not landscapes or foreign streets, but the unmarked trails within people. She longs to map the contours of another's mind, to walk barefoot inside their psyche, to slip into their eyes and see the world as they do. Every soul she encounters adds to her endless cartography, expanding the atlas she carries within her.She knows she is different. She has accepted it, even leaned into it. People come and go, as they will, as they need, and she no longer begs them to stay. She lets them decide if they can bear her difference. And still, she draws curiosity the way a flame draws a moth. Something about her — how she carries herself, how her silence hums — sets her apart. The air shifts slightly when she enters a room, as though she bends reality just by existing.She writes, she creates, she builds. Her life is a relentless attempt to turn thought into something material, to make feelings visible, to make love into something tangible. Yet, it never feels enough, never scratches that unnamable itch within her. So she tries harder. She writes harder, loves harder, feels louder, pouring herself onto the page and into the world, hoping that even one person might feel the echo of her intensity. Hoping that someone, somewhere, feels that intensity too.That might be her gift: that she refuses to withhold herself. That even when the world tells her she is too much, she continues to spill over the edges. She lives not to be untouched, but to be touched and to touch back — no matter the cost.
My father taught me that love is monetary. Whenever he felt guilty, he'd buy me a gift — a distraction wrapped in paper and ribbon, an apology hidden behind the swipe of a plastic card. His affection always came with a receipt. He never knew how to hold a feeling, but he knew how to buy one. Gifts became his language of remorse, of avoidance.My mother taught me that love isn't real — it's just a transaction. That my worth is negotiable, that attention and affection are rewards — things you secure through beauty, sex, manipulation, timing. She showed me that a woman's body is the greatest form of currency, a bargaining chip in a world built on desire. She called it power, but it never felt like mine.When I love someone now, I give. Endlessly, recklessly. I buy gifts, little things that say, I see you, I think of you, I want to make you feel special. If I could, I'd buy them the universe. I'd hand over everything I have, every bit of beauty I can offer, just to feel that I've done enough. It's not about the money. It's about proving that I'm worth keeping. That my love holds value.None of this ever satisfies me. Not the giving, not the sex, not the devotion disguised as generosity. My mother's lesson echoes in every gesture, my father's eyes in every transaction. And yet, all I've ever wanted is something neither could give or teach: a love that costs nothing.I want love that doesn't demand performance. Love that doesn't tally what's given or owed. Love that doesn't make me sell pieces of myself just to feel wanted. I want someone to choose me without expecting to be paid in pleasure, gifts, or perfection.I want to believe that love can be free. Free of debt. Free of transaction. Free of the ache to prove I deserve it. Real love is just two people existing, giving, receiving — without the fear that it'll all be taken away if the balance tips.I've spent my life mistaking the weight of gifts for the depth of love. Now I'm learning that love isn't heavy at all. It's quiet space where you can finally put everything down.
From Beauty and the Beast to The Shape of Water, from Frankenstein to Hellboy, the trope of the Beauty loving the Beast endures — not simply as fantasy, but as a metaphor for otherness, redemption, and love forged in the margins. What remains striking, time and again, is the role of the woman who loves the monster. She is not merely the passive recipient of transformation; she is the lens through which the monster is humanised, and through which her own marginalisation is acknowledged.Women long for kindness, morality, goodness, and they often find it inside the monster precisely because they know what it is to be judged by appearance, dismissed for the body, rendered invisible by a world that values only the acceptable inside of a binary. In tales of the Beast and the Beauty, the woman perceives more than the surface; she recognises the wound beneath the form. In Disney’s 2017 live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, Belle is no longer simply passive; she carries curiosity, defiance, and intellect, refusing Gaston’s superficial wealth in favor of something deeper.This gesture speaks to true cultural dynamics. Femininity, the female body, and female desire are themselves often portrayed as monstrous or dangerous in horror and gothic media. Consider the pregnant horror in Alien, or the monstrous womb in innumerable feminist horror analyses. Barbara Creed’s “monstrous-feminine” concept addresses exactly this: that women’s bodies, their potential, their autonomy, are feared and rendered abject. In that light, the Beauty who loves the Beast is not simply rescuing a male monster; she is reaffirming her own right to be more than victim, more than decorative cast-off.The beast is the damned, the exiled, the scarred, the deformed. Those who fall outside normative society’s favor. He is monstrous in appearance, yes, but often human in longing. In Frankenstein, the Creature is rejected for his shape and ends in rage, not because he is evil but because he has been denied love, humanity, dignity. In The Shape of Water, the amphibious creature is both human and other; the mute Elisa recognises him because she too has been silenced and overlooked. Thus the woman’s empathy is born not in spite of difference, but because of it.Why are these stories making a comeback now? Why are we returning, again and again, to the Beauty and the Beast schematic? Several currents collide. First, there is nostalgia — familiar narratives recast with high production value and modern sensibilities. The 2017 Beauty and the Beast grossed over $1.2 billion, proving the commercial appetite. But beyond commerce lies something deeper. In an era that increasingly questions who belongs, who is other, who loves whom, the trope offers a mirror. Contemporary adaptations tend to emphasise agency, trauma, the imprisoned beauty-figure or the cursed monster’s backstory. They ask, What if the Beast’s wound mattered? What if the Beauty had a voice beyond rescue? One account argues that modern versions “interrogate” the trope rather than simply romanticising it. (GoodNovel. How Has the Story of Beauty and the Beast Changed in Modern Films? GoodNovel Q&A, 25 Aug. 2025. Web.)There is also cultural pressure on love-stories to reflect more complexity: diversity, consent, disability, difference. In the 2017 film, the Beast’s curse becomes metaphorical for otherness; Belle is no longer just defined by beauty but by intellect and agency. At the same time, audiences crave catharsis. The monster’s redemption, the Beauty’s embrace. These become symbolic gestures in a culture fragmented by fear and alienation.In these narratives, it is typically the woman who holds kindness as her weapon. She recognises the monster’s marginalisation because she knows her own. Her role is more than redeemer; she is equal witness. She sees the beast’s sorrow, his disfigurement, his exile and chooses love not as redemption of his sin, but as recognition of his humanity. When she enters the castle, wanders the derelict halls, she is not always a damsel but a wanderer, an interlocutor.The trope’s transformation in newer tellings emphasises that the Beauty is not just the one who tames the Beast, but the one who affirms him. She does not take his beastliness away; she acknowledges it, holds it, and in doing so, holds herself. She says: You are deserving of love even before you become human. And by that declaration, she transforms the story.From the original fairy tale’s implicit moral (“see beyond appearances”) to Gothic-horror Dracula, Frankenstein — to modern fantasy films Hellboy, The Shape of Water — the arc remains: the outsider redeemed through compassion; the woman priestess of that compassion. But the modern resurgence complicates one aspect: the asymmetry. Many current versions interrogate the idea of rescue, asking whether the woman needs to stay prisoner, whether the monster must become human to be loved. The answer shifts toward: love can exist even in difference; "monsters" need not be tamed — they need to be understood.In an age of fractured identities and contested bodies, this narrative offers something subversive: a beauty that does not demand perfection, a love that does not require conformity, a woman’s compassion in the face of fear. The beast becomes not the other, but a mirror; the tale becomes not about rescue, but about recognition.
I’ve given my heart and soul on a platter to those who never cared to taste what I made for them. They didn’t care how much time I spent in the kitchen — the hours I spent perfecting flavor, layering texture, balancing sweetness and salt. They were just hungry. They saw something warm on a plate and devoured it whole, not because they wanted it, but because they needed it. They didn’t look up. They didn’t ask who cooked it. They didn’t savor. They just ate.I know I’m a marvelous chef. I know what I bring to the table — the tenderness, the care, the attention to detail, the willingness to craft something worth remembering. I know how to feed a person’s soul and make them feel full. But what happens when you’ve spent years cooking for those who never learned to taste? When every dish you’ve ever made has been swallowed without thought, and all you’re left with is an empty plate and hands that still smell of smoke and saffron.Now I stand before someone who isn’t starving. Someone with taste. Someone who doesn’t eat out of desperation. And suddenly, I’m terrified. Because for the first time, I’m not serving someone who will devour me without question. I’m standing before one who is looking. Observing. Waiting. Deciding if they want a bite.And that’s somehow more frightening than hunger.Because when someone is starving, you know they’ll take what you give. When someone is full, they can choose to refuse you. They can push the plate away. They can critique the seasoning, the texture, the presentation. They can say, “It’s good, but I’m not in the mood.” And what am I supposed to do then?It’s strange to realize how vulnerability shifts when you’re finally seen. When you’ve built your worth around being consumed, being chosen, being needed — what happens when you meet someone who doesn’t need you? Someone who is simply curious. Someone who can afford to be patient. It forces you to stand in your own kitchen, trembling, wondering if your food holds up under real light.I am terrified to plate myself for someone who might actually taste me. To be seen, evaluated, possibly rejected — not because I am not enough, but because I am finally real enough to be a choice, not a necessity.There is such fragility in that. Such quivering humanity.That might be the scariest moment: the quiet pause before the first bite. The silence of someone who hasn’t decided yet. The waiting, the watching. Standing there, heart still sizzling on the pan, wondering if I’ve overcooked it again.
There are days when I feel like the world is thinning out. Not dying, not collapsing, just losing its human weight. As if everyone is getting lighter, easier to lift, easier to throw away. My therapist asked me why this keeps coming up for me, why I circle back to this idea of disposability, like a bruise I keep pressing. And I said the following:“As long as we view one another as disposable, we will continue to have a world where absolutely none of us matter.”I didn’t say it to be dramatic. I said it because I’ve lived inside the machinery that grinds people down.Sex work has put me in rooms most people will never step into. Rooms where — primarily — men forget they’re talking to a person, rooms where the lights are too dim or too bright, rooms where the air is heavy with unspoken words. I’ve seen how quickly some men slide into the belief that women exist for their use, that sex workers exist for their disposal, that desire is something owed to them on demand.It’s not always loud. Sometimes it shows up as a small flicker. The moment his gaze shifts from you to the idea of you. And in that shift, the human disappears. In that shift, I become a vessel. Gratification without guilt. A human body with the humanity scraped out.And I’ve started to notice how this isn’t contained to the rooms I’ve worked in. We’ve built an entire culture on the language of dehumanization, softened by humor, disguised as irony. Calling strangers “NPCs.” Treating inconvenience as villainy. Acting like this is our world, our movie, our timeline, and everyone else is a background actor with no inner life, no weight, no consequence.It makes it easy to forget that other people have beating hearts. That their memories stretch backward and forward. That they feel.In this world, the relationship has become the latest casualty. We’ve made intimacy into a simulation. Something you can enter and exit without cost, without accountability. The rise of the "situationship" isn’t an accident, it’s a symptom. One person wants connection, the other wants benefits without responsibility. One person risks, the other rehearses. One person loves, the other consumes.I don’t think the danger is that someone might leave — leaving is human. Leaving is often part of the experience of love, though we hope it isn't. The danger is entering with no intention of being real. Holding someone close while planning your exit. Borrowing their tenderness like it’s a rental you can return without penalty.It feels like we’ve forgotten that our words leave marks. That our actions touch the inside of another person’s life. Sometimes I look around and it feels like everyone is walking through the world with their hands outstretched, accidentally knocking pieces off each other and never stopping to see what’s fallen.I asked myself if I believe we could get back to a place where we truly see one another. Where we look at each other not as obstacles or tools or narrative devices, but as peers. Humans. Souls with their own centers of gravity.I don’t know if “back” is the right word. I don’t know if we’ve ever been there. Maybe the truth is that humanity has always been a fragile practice. Something we have to choose again and again. Something we have to remember.Maybe that’s the beginning. Not the optimism that people are good, but the willingness to act like we matter anyway. To hold ourselves like we matter. To hold others like they do too. To let the world regain its weight.
