girl cannon events, recent books, & a digital garden
hello.
a short and sweet letter to say hello…
i’ve been seeing the girl canon events trend going around on tiktok, so i put together a version of my own. i’m also sharing a little digital garden of internet things that have been on my mind lately, plus a few books currently living on my nightstand. (digital garden inspired by )
for those unfamiliar, a girl canon event is a defining moment in one’s life, particularly teen years/ early 20s. often painful, embarrassing, or quietly transformative. moments that feel inevitable in hindsight. it’s the kind of experience that shapes who you are, even if you’d never choose to relive it. so let me share some of mine…
girl canon events
homoerotic friendships mistaken for fate
treating confession like performance art
getting sent to a religious therapeutic boarding school in the middle of nowhere for 2.5 years for being too much
unrequited crushes on professors with god complexes
eroticizing the grotesque when beauty feels dishonest
academic validation as love language
cutting your own bangs at 3am and pretending it’s a metaphor
obsession with religious aesthetics & repressed desire
mistaking pain for profundity, then romanticizing it
confusing intellectual intimacy with actual connection
using theory to dodge vulnerability
wanting to be understood but terrified of being perceived
realizing you don’t want to end your life, you just want to be someone else
do we share any of these experiences?
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lately i’ve been reading:
the days of abandonment by elena ferrante
a woman is left by her husband and everything unravels. she stops pretending, stops coping, stops being polite. what follows is raw, chaotic, and hard to look away from. this is a novel about rage, female madness, motherhood, and the messy process of clawing your way back to yourself without sanitizing a single emotion.
memoirs of a dutiful daughter by simone de beauvoir
de beauvoir traces her early life with precision and clarity. you watch her grow into her mind, resisting the roles imposed on her while carving out her identity through reading, thinking, and observing. it’s a personal story, but also the intellectual groundwork for everything she later wrote. honest, grounded, and slow-burning.
the vet’s daughter by barbara comyns
this reads like a bad dream narrated in a sing-song voice. the main character lives in a violent, surreal home and begins to develop strange abilities that may or may not be real. the story feels like it's floating just above reality, eerie and off-kilter. gothic, sad, and quietly disturbing in a way that lingers.
the hélène cixous reader edited by susan sellers
reading cixous is like stepping into a fever dream written in fire. her work defies logic and embraces feeling, weaving together myth, memory, eros, and philosophy. nothing is straightforward. it’s dense and unruly but deeply alive. this reader is a great place to start if you want to feel language more than analyze it.
lolly willowes by sylvia townsend warner
a woman leaves behind the life that was assigned to her and retreats into the woods. she finds freedom not in rebellion, but in quiet refusal. the story is soft and strange, with just enough witchcraft to unsettle. it’s about solitude, nature, and choosing obscurity over conformity. no fanfare. just freedom.
the lost estate by henri alain-fournier
a boy stumbles upon an estate that feels enchanted and falls in love with the girl he meets there. the rest of the novel is about trying to return to that feeling and never quite getting back. this is a story about longing more than love, and about how memory makes everything feel more golden than it was.
let me share my little digital garden from this week before i leave you for the day…
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okay, that’s all for today.
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i love you.
bye.
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i wish there was a little poll section between every canon event to see how many of us experienced the same exact ones. also, 2.5 years in the middle of nowhere is wild.
we have literally every cannon event and every substack in common lol girl i fear we must be friends