As I walk through the shadow of the valley of death in my kitten heels, I stand on the precipice of a new dark time and ponder all the great creative women who came before me. My writing has felt dull lately. My creative sparkle is flickering out in the cold winter. I discovered a new fault of mine, where I second guess myself when I write. Second guessing paragraphs, sentences, even ideas. Last year, I could sit my ass down at my computer and it would simply flow out of me like a waterfall with a confident, youthful flair of ‘I know all and this is great.‘ Now I’m nit-picky, I’m unsure, but I’m also smarter. But what I want back is that unabashed fearlessness, that security in risk. As Hollywood merges into fewer and fewer hands, art is absorbed into corporate machines, and artificial intelligence creeps into human existence, I can’t help but keep asking the same question: in a world optimized for algorithms, is there still room for a woman with an inner life?
“So it turned out that power was the quality of knowing what you liked. An odd thing for power to be.”
-Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood
The quality of knowing yourself feels like it’s fading—or maybe just smothered under the low-grade fear that comes with being seen. Self-knowledge is always changing, especially as you get older, but in this small slice of my twenties, I’m stumbling. As an artist, who am I without influence, and without the fear of judgment? And with social media, how do you even learn that anymore? Sure, we could Eat, Pray, Love our way through life and call it self-discovery. But day to day, it’s different. It’s more like playing Jenga with your identity: stacking new blocks on top of old ones, only to knock them down and start over again. Eve Babitz would absolutely roll her eyes at that. To her, self-knowledge was practically a sport, and she played it effortlessly.
Being yourself doesn’t pay much anymore; it rarely benefits the companies that want everything polished, predictable, and easily digested by an algorithm. I won’t pretend I’m above the machine. It-girls need money too—cigarettes and fur coats don’t buy themselves. And yet, a woman with an idea is still treated as a risk factor rather than a resource, something Eve understood long before the rest of us caught up.
Risk lives at the heart of all art. Movies, books, fashion, painting—risk is what makes the it-girl. Without it, we’re left with cultural slop, emoji movies, and stories rinsed of any bite. (Though if a studio offered me millions to voice the poop emoji, I’d probably say yes too. Respectfully, Sir Patrick Stewart.)
I think about women like Patti Smith, whose big break wasn’t a benefactor, rich parents, or a brand deal, but a bag of coins she found outside a bus station. A tiny, accidental mercy from the universe, just enough to keep going. As a modern artist, I think about that moment often: a flicker of yes in a world of no. I also think about how she didn’t really give a fuck. Her writing was an act of rebellion and, at the same time, her lifeline.
Sometimes, when I read about these women, I long for a life without social media. But then again, sometimes I don’t. I like my Pinterest boards. The Leo in me loves posting my face on Instagram, and I cherish the connections I’ve built through it. Still, I wonder if I’m missing something the It-girls of the past seemed to have so naturally: being a muse for themselves. I think artists go out looking for trouble, emotional trouble. When life gets too mundane, when nothing sparks, you go searching for it. You open Hinge. You manufacture a little chaos. Something, or someone, to ignite that fire. This usually ends badly, but always results in a creation of some sort.
But to truly be your own muse, I think you need to have some sort of inner peace. Am I saying Eve had that? No, but she got close. She had a little pocket of it. I catch glimpses of that pocket in myself—lying in the grass on a sunny afternoon, walking by the farm near my house, sitting in dimly lit libraries, or in shitty bars with my friends. In those moments, I find the muse in myself, it feels internal and unforced. It comes easy.
Patti Smith once said she worries social media is stealing our daydreaming, those times when you need solitude to hear your own mind. I agree. The it-girls before us weren’t just stylish, they were radically attuned to themselves. They didn’t outsource their identities to the digital murmur. There is something reverent in the way they tended to their inner worlds like a garden.
The it-girl, of course, is a performance—much like the way we glamorize Hollywood in the ’60s and ’70s, a common fantasy I know many of us share. The lustful yearning we have for real art is simple and almost embarrassing in its intensity. I envy a world where I could walk into a film studio, light a cigarette, throw a script on a table, and say,“Here, boys.” I know that world only exists in a dream, but the wanting is real.
But maybe that’s the point. What defines us is not the fantasy of living like our idols, but the quieter work of knowing who we are. Our ideals—Patti, Jane, Eve, Joan—aren’t just aesthetic references. They represent courage, audacity, and a refusal to compromise the self for the sake of convenience.
And maybe, in that pursuit of our art, we carve out a little piece of ourselves that belongs to no one else. Something private and protected.
So, in true it-girl fashion, I pull a tarot card. Brigit, goddess of communication. “Feel changeable.” Maybe the great artists are telling me it’s okay to shift, to bend, to evolve. Because even in this strange new century, a woman with an idea is still the most dangerous thing in the room.