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A wise woman once said, “You don’t have to love me, you don’t even have to like me, but you will respect me.” 

In a world obsessed with social performance, forced politeness, and keeping everyone happy, there is a quiet, radical power in accepting that you might just be unlikeable to most people, and being completely fine with it.

We often confuse performative friendliness with genuine kindness. When you stop putting on a social mask just to make strangers comfortable, your true emotions actually start to mean something. A smile shouldn’t be an automatic reaction to appease a room; it should mean you are genuinely happy or excited. People always know where they stand with someone who refuses to fake it, preferring clear truth over comfortable deception.

Trying to please everyone usually forces you into neutrality, but neutrality is a trap. A person with real conviction is respected when they are a genuine friend and a genuine enemy. Being polarizing simply means you stand for something. Neutrality, on the other hand, leaves you passionless, easily swayed, and living strictly on the surface level of life.

When you stop worrying about whether the world likes you, you reclaim a massive amount of mental energy. You stop wasting time reading into every small interaction or managing other people’s perceptions, and you can finally direct that focus toward your real goals, your creative pursuits, and deeply caring for the small circle of people who truly matter to you.

This doesn’t mean closing yourself off behind an iron gate forever. There is always value in occasionally stepping out of your own head when it genuinely serves or helps someone else. But at your core, protecting your peace and holding fast to your own integrity will always take you further than trying to be everyone’s favorite person.

We live in a culture obsessed with staying relevant. We feel a relentless, almost anxiety inducing pull to track the latest viral discourse, weigh in on hot takes within minutes, and consume recycled opinions before we have even had the time to sit down and process our own. The modern internet demands constant availability, rapid reaction times, and an appetite for whatever trend is burning brightest this second. But what if the best thing you could possibly do for your creative work, your mind, and your sense of identity is to become completely, intentionally out of touch?

In a world addicted to algorithmic speed, the act of turning your back on the internet’s endless churn is not an admission of ignorance, it is a act of creative self-preservation. When you look closely at how content is generated today, much of it is merely a copy of a copy: a reaction to someone else’s commentary on a trend that was already digested by five other creators before them. We end up using the same buzzwords, echoing the same surface-level takes, and regurgitating opinions we never actually earned through our own critical thinking. When you constantly consume second-hand interpretations, your personal artistic perspective inevitably degrades. To build a voice that actually carries weight, you have to go directly to the primary source. Read the foundational text yourself instead of settling for a sixty-second summary video. Study history, philosophy, and art directly rather than scrolling through endless mood boards designed by someone else. Form your own unfiltered thoughts in total quiet before checking what a comment section thinks you ought to feel.

This relentless pace has also completely fractured our relationship with time. On the internet, two weeks feels like two dinosaur epochs; trends flare up, cause mass outrage or fascination, and die before we can even begin to comprehend their deeper implications. This artificial urgency forces creators into a state of panic, pushing half-baked, frantic ideas into the world just to catch a passing algorithmic wave. But real art, good writing, and truly original ideas demand incubation. The legendary abstract painter Agnes Martin famously described sitting in a chair for hours, waiting in absolute stillness for an idea to reveal itself to her, she painted, quite literally, with her back to the world. When you detach yourself from online timelines, you give your ideas permission to breathe. You allow yourself to linger on a single book or concept for months if it moves you, to let your draft sit until it matures, and to replace the frantic rush of instant publishing with the slow, satisfying labor of genuine craft.

Ultimately, true originality does not come from surveying the market or taking the temperature of the culture; it comes from looking inward. When you turn down the volume of external noise, you finally give yourself the space to confront your own reflection, your personal history, your memories, and the unique web of influences that shaped you. This is how you cultivate a personal mythology. Cliche behavior is almost always the result of someone failing to access their own internal complexity, choosing instead to paste other people’s symbols over their own identity. 

You are far too complex to settle for being an echo. Being out of touch is not about hiding from the world, it is about choosing depth over velocity, stepping off the treadmill of constant consumption, and allowing your own quiet, singular voice to finally lead the way- your way.

@signedpaula

Throughout history, the role of the “muse” has almost always been viewed as an external entity. We are captivated by the classic duo: the brilliant creator and their elusive, ethereal inspiration. But this dynamic carries a quiet, historical weight, particularly when the muse is female. Too often, women positioned as muses have been stripped of their own creative agency, intellectual complexity, and intrinsic potential, acting merely as blank canvases for someone else’s genius.

Consider Lou Andreas-Salomé. History frequently minimizes her as the brilliant muse who captivated Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud. Her own prolific body of philosophical work, psychoanalytic theories, and literature remains largely overshadowed by the sensationalism of her personal relationships. Yet, Salomé fiercely rejected the title of a muse. She refused any form of subordination, choosing instead to seek creative fulfillment deep within herself.

It was Salomé who fundamentally reshaped how we understand the journey inward by challenging one of psychology’s oldest villains: Narcissus.

In standard psychology and classical psychoanalysis, narcissism is treated as a fatal flaw, an inability to distinguish oneself from the surrounding world, or a tyrannical, toxic demand for external worship. The myth tells us that Narcissus caught sight of his reflection in a pool of water, fell hopelessly in love with his own image, and ultimately drowned.

Salomé saw something entirely different hidden beneath the surface of that pool.

She proposed that Narcissus’s fixation wasn’t just a regression into fatal self-obsession; it was a dual-oriented state. To Salomé, looking into the water is a deep entry into the self. What Narcissus sees isn’t superficial vanity; he recognizes a fragment of unconscious memory—a lost, unified part of his being.

By engaging with his reflection, Narcissus bridges the gap between the creator and the created. He becomes both the artist and the muse, using self-exploration to access his highest creative potential. This is what Salomé coined as the creative narcissist—the individual who gives birth to themselves.

“The narcissistic way is internal, deeply linked to a feminine archetype of self-containment and inner knowing, much like Venus holding her mirror.”

To understand this journey back to ourselves, we have to look closely at the body of water Narcissus gazes into. In mythology, standing water represents the unconscious mind.

Consider Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory and the mother of the nine muses. Her mythological opposite is Lethe, the goddess of forgetting, who is symbolized by a moving, rushing river. To forget is to be in constant, restless motion, which is why it is represented by the river. To create, however, requires us to stand completely still and contemplate, much like the stillness of a lake.

Without memory and stillness, art cannot exist. When we plunge beneath the surface of our own self-reflection, we are not chasing vanity…we are thirsting for memory. As Albert Camus beautifully hinted in his essays, all human endeavor is ultimately an act of remembering.

When you do the difficult work of figuring out who you are, it often feels less like discovering a stranger and more like coming home to a completed version of yourself that existed long before the noise of the world took over.

The Peril and the Promise

Being your own muse is not a superficial lifestyle trend. In a modern culture increasingly driven by surface-level self-expression, where self-care is occasionally minimized to viral aesthetics or bailing on responsibilities, Salomé’s deeper invitation is highly challenging.

Turning fully inward carries genuine risks. There is the immediate risk of vanity, where one stays entirely on the surface of the water, failing to look deeper than the outer shell. Then there is the risk of the deep, where a person goes so far into the depths of their own psyche that they isolate themselves from the world, or encounter internal shadows they are not prepared to face. Rilke famously walked this line, describing his inner muse as an angel that threatened to destroy him.

Yet, it is a risk entirely worth taking. To be your own muse means building the strength to hold your own hand as you navigate the depths of who you are. The inner whispers of intuition we spend our lives searching for in other people don’t originate from someone else’s mouth. They are coming from you.