Alter ego game femal how to#

For me, that situation was going to school on time for my classes like a normal human and not spending hours teaching myself how to use coat hangers to create a massive fishtail braid hair crown that would make me appear imposing and sculptural. Picture yourself in a situation that makes you uncomfortable. I will conclude today’s dive into my admittedly zany coping mechanism by offering a quick and dirty step-by-step guide for finding your own therapeutic alter ego and putting that baddie to work in your life. If, while reading this, you thought, Dang, I want to fill up my deprivation shame pockets with abundance and heal myself through whimsy! Then, buddy, you came to the right place.

and maybe above all else, an expectation that life is going to work out for them, that they can have what they want in this world, because why wouldn’t they?.

feeling deserving of clean, nice, frivolous things that belong only to them,.

They seemed happy and calm and even if I now know that they may have been just as fucked up or more than me and my family, there are some things I wholeheartedly believe the Karens of the world are just better at than me and my folx. These ladies, with all their privilege and their Macy’s credit cards, seemed to be doing really well.

Karen is in some ways the descendant of the wealthy fun-mom that I always saw at the mall from afar, wearing her yoga pants and flipping her professionally highlighted hair. My parents were Shakespearean actors, I grew up hella barefoot in northern California, and my family sitch was often in a state of low-grade calamity. She has the ability to control her surroundings and her life in a way that I didn’t really have a model for in my youth. Karen is my portal to a calming, clean, orderly world. I let Karen take the wheel when I can’t stand one more minute deciding how to sign off an email or paying bills that need to be mailed or sending a text that says, “sorry hun, just seeing this how are you?” when I know damn well I saw it a while ago but just needed some Me Time.īut Karen is so much more than, like, a jokey internal personal assistant (although, tbh, she is also that and it is very fun). I get her things that she likes, such as house slippers and a tiny hot plate for her tea mug. Karen is somewhere between these ladies and the dewey wellness moms of my California youth, with just a dash of Fran Drescher in The Nanny (the objectively best show for fashion and brash femme domination of the 90s). They always hit me with the freshest goss from bible study and wear jewelry to yoga that is obviously their “casual” or “sport” jewelry. Karen is partly modeled on the sweet middle-aged Southern women I teach yoga to and absolutely adore. Karen is the part of my personality that adapted to tend to the parts of me that were once deprived or wounded and then grew up believing themselves to be permanently deserving of that deprivation and those wounds. But she became a necessary part of my life here, enabling me to think and interact with the world in new ways. Before Alabama, I’d never needed a fully fleshed out alter ego. Taming all my chaotic spontaneous whimsy into a new life that demanded so much order was disorienting. It was a choice to stay in place, to put down roots, to try to make a life I would want to hang around in for a while. If every other shift I’d weathered was the result of some spontaneous now-or-never jump into the unknown, going to grad school was a much weightier decision. And every time I changed course, I’d had to make new friends, new routines and reinvent myself to adapt to a different environment.

I was a beauty queen, a tourism director, the content manager for Jet Li’s now-defunct martial arts website. During this time, I basically started a new life every six months. Prior to school, I’d spent a few years outside of the U.S., mostly in the region of the Philippines that my mother is from and across Southeast Asia. Technicolor fur collars in the South? Forget about it, honey. I created Karen when I first moved down to Alabama for grad school, when the whole international-eccentric-art-girl aesthetic I brought with me from a media job in Taipei was garishly out of step with my new life. Karen, my therapeutic alter ego, whom I created to organize my tupperware, take the blame for my online shopping habit, and demand to see your manager, is a Maxxinista. Hello, my name is Sarah, and I am a Maxxinista.

Alter ego game femal