ENTRY 015: YOUNG HOE: THE RESURRECTION

I’ve called us here today to speak of the young hoe (YH) movement.

I do, in fact, feel as if I am a part of this movement, though there has been some debate at my job on whether I, in my late 20's, can still qualify as a young hoe. Regardless of the ageism, I do feel as if this cultural moment was brought up just for me.

Specifically due to the mirror it has placed in front of me to examine my relationship to growth, play, and workaholism.

In this entry, I talk about giving yourself permission to use play for your advantage and how there is no growth without the expansion play brings.

I was not a kid who liked to play.

Ask any of my family members, and they'll tell you I was way more likely to be reading by myself than I was to be outside getting dirty. Sometimes I'd venture to the computer to play my little games, or I'd go to a select few friends' houses to play with them, but that was sparingly.

It doesn’t help that I’m the eldest daughter of a strict, single mom.

By the age of 10, I felt like I had the “big people” responsibility of caring for my siblings, and that the door to playing, as it is typically considered, was closed. As a pre-teen and teenager I had a strict baby sitting schedule because my mom worked nights and weekends. Anything I wanted to do that coincided with my babysitting time had to fought for. From then on, it was planted deep in my subconscious that work > play.

Now imagine being locked in a castle, having little autonomy over any part of your life, only to suddenly be granted the keys to escape.

That's essentially what happened when I graduated high school and was able to move on my own.

Going from having little to no control over my life to having all that choice all at once changed me in ways I didn't expect. Once I touched down in Pittsburgh and discovered, essentially, what I'd been missing, things got haywire.

mWhen I started being able to hangout and explore freely, I began to really drink the koolaid. I wanted to be out Thursday-Sunday. Monday-Wednesday if there was a move. I wanted something fun in my life all the time. This burning desire to make up for lost time was fueling me.

Peak young hoe!

When I think about that first young hoe era, it was like releasing an animal back into the wild. I was the epitome of young, wild, and free. Not much thought of consequence or forethought. My decision making was based on what sounded most fun, what felt best in my body, and how i could best capitalize on my free will. Even if it seemed counterintuitive.

All until I looked up at the end of college and was like, “Hold up, what have I really done?”

It’s like the age-old phrase: "When you know better, you do better," and once I graduated and began to do some self reflection, I began to feel as if the reason I wasn't where I wanted to be, in terms of accomplishments, was that I hadn't worked hard enough. I convinced myself that I needed to essentially back-pay myself for the work I hadn't done and the play I hadn't “earned”. Remember, I'm growing up hearing that in order to go out on a Friday, I had to earn it by doing some big task in the house like cleaning the baseboard or washing the walls. So, ending college where I originally set out to be a genius superstar, with a bleek GPA and feeling directionless, I had decided that the reason I felt so discombobulated was because I had too much fun.

You have to know, I ended college in the midst of 2020 when the world was just as chaotic as I felt inside. When I lost my job, the only thing I was holding on to as slight proof that I hadn’t just fucked my life up, I decided to lean in and just go all out and start my own business. This was an act of gusto to say to my imaginary audience, look, I can make it up as I go, follow my passions, and do big, fabulous things like ya’ll. The young hoe was there trying to prove that she had her shit together too. still there though because I just jumped in with no plan, no mentor, and no formal training.

Just vibes and an incessant need to prove my worthiness. To who? I wasn’t really sure, but I knew I needed to feel in control again.

Enter my workaholic era.

During that time, my pendulum swung between using work as punishment and work as a shame teacher. I was punishing myself for not seeing that clearly it was the enjoyment (not actually, but this is what I told myself), that took me away from my purpose and my success. Because my work was rooted in self punishment, there was no balance. It was difficult to find balance between work and play. It was even more difficult to find a sustainable routine for working and set realistic expectations of what I could accomplish. So much so, that any mode of work I took on, I burned out.

I was left with the feeling that I just couldn’t get right. I felt like, if play wasn’t the answer and work wasn’t working, maybe, just maybe, I needed to simply work harder.

Only to find on the flip side of that what the challenge I thought I was facing, work vs. play, wasn’t the challenge at all. The real problem I was facing was finding self-efficacy and meaning in the work I decided to dedicate myself to, entirely outside of the way it measured up to a crowd or measured up to the ever-looming judgment of my mother, whom I had learned to anticipate.

After the breakup, a big thing I was stuck on was how unbeknownst to me, I had once again decided that work was the answer to the disappointment I felt about my situation. If you all remember, I had said I never want to move back to Baltimore, so to then to find myself back living here after this whirlwind of pure bullshit, I decided I just had to focus on something else. What I chose was to commit my life to duty and responsibility. Keep in mind, when I first moved back to Baltimore, I was coming off a run, the 75 days to self challenge, of making art freely and living in the most authentic way I had in a while. It’s wild, but because of that freedom I felt, my subconscious told me that before another fun chapter could begin, I have to commit myself to earning it, so I did.

My second time around at being batman, aka a self punishing workaholic, I decided to follow the, “yellow brick road,” and commit to what I thought was expected of me. My time was filled with working, house work, and thinking of my relationship. Of course I went out and had fun in the meantime, but to put it simply, playing and having fun was the last thing on my to-do list at all times. If it was even on my to-do list at all. The only consistent fun I was having is when we were absolutely slammed at work and I got to fly around helping people and giggling. There was nothing in my life outside of that to give me consistent endorphin boosts.

Jordan specifically had to bully me to do something when the baby was not with me.

Jordan's intervention meant a lot to me because Jordan also loves to work. The dead horses Jordan and I love to beat are talks of work and success. It gives us joy to dream of our future work and where it will take us. So when they, along with many others, including my manager at work, said I need to start doing things outside of work - it was very sobering. A core value of mine is adventure, and to have a light that bright shine back on to me forced me to accept just how far out of alignment I’d been living.

The YH version of me who started college in 2016 was so amazing because she was taking her freedom and creating from it. I made some of my best art back then just because I had enough to pull from. I used to pride myself in my ability to make chaos work for me and through the breakup I had to finally see that before that relationship fell apart, I had been trying to tame the beast that made it all work.

So when I think of connecting all these dots, to go from not playing and having a very serious, responsibility-driven childhood, to finally getting a chance to play in college, feeling like I went overboard, then reprimanding myself to stay in the cave and only focus on work, I realize I was actually always meant to be a YH. 

Not a YH that’s only focused on play and pleasure, but one that finds happiness in deriving personal meaning from harnessing the chaotic good life throws at me and use it as a tool. That’s the energy I’m pulling from now as I cross over into my newest era of YH activity.

In this era, I’m all about flow. May sound a little cringe, but seriously. I don’t want to force anything. I want to take things as they come while prioritizing my enjoyment. That means scheduling time with friends. Scheduling time to read and write. Allowing plans to change and get swept up in the day. Having pure, unabashed fun and forgetting about my to-do list.

I’m back to my true self, a Young Hoe!

This is all because I can finally recognize that this letting play take a backseat is also letting growth take a backseat and limiting what you can pull from to sustain you in life. Play lets you get in the way of new possibilities. To stand in your daydreams and make stuff up as you go along. That’s true freedom, to me.

Ask yourself,

1. When did you stop playing?

2. What currently keeps you from consistently playing?

3. What would it look like to recognize that pattern, catch yourself in it, and instead choose the version of yourself that says 'fuck it, let's see what happens' instead of the one that says 'you haven't earned this yet'?