Thus Spake Zarathustra, "Go To Paris."
I met my bimbofied ubermensch in France, and tbh, I miss her
There’s something magical about being lost in a crowd of strangers with your sweetheart and feeling like you’re the only two people alive. One hand wrapped around his arm, the other hand wrapped around a decadent slice of flan—nowhere to be, just vibes. Try and conjure up a more perfect scene. I bet you can’t. These are the precise circumstances in which I uncovered my most primal self and healed a couple decades of existential chaos and dread in mere days.
A little over one month and a half ago, I was flying home from a brief and somewhat-impromptu trip to Paris with my (relatively) new boyfriend. We ate some delicious food. We played dress up. We wandered aimlessly with only affection and instinct as our guide. We indulged love in all its forms, and it was marvelous. I revisited the city girl that I buried deep down, I wore clothes I missed wearing, I ritually imbibed overpriced espresso drinks while strolling down the street in shoes not proper for exploring. I walked through the pain and rediscovered the potent numbness that comes along with traversing a couple miles in a pair of heels: I was unstoppable, I could do anything. I’d lost these parts of myself, and as if it didn’t feel good enough to bring them back to the surface, to do so with the person I love made it even better. It was transcendent. It was akin to unlocking a hidden door and finding that it held unseen pleasures I’d only dreamed could be real.
After a couple of weeks back home, some peril unfolded: mainly, I lost my job. The carefree and fun wannabe-Parisienne version of myself was quickly cast asunder and my life felt like it was thrown into free-fall once again. Transience is a space in which I am never comfortable occupying. What most disquieted my spirit though was the feeling of being—although freed from the shackles of employment that made me incredibly unhappy—“caged-in” that the uncertainty of job loss can bring, particularly in a job market as bleak and volatile as the one I was tossed to carelessly into. I was unhappy, but I could escape from the monotony of remote work by transporting myself elsewhere. Doomed to frugality for the foreseeable future, I had to made do within the confines of a home that no longer felt “mine.” (That’s the thing about working from home—it kinda stops being “yours.”) Immediately, my dreams of going to France with my sweetheart again over the summer were dashed. No tipsy late nights spent finding our way back to our flat. No fun picking out outfits for the occasions together. No flan. No smoking between courses at dinner. I felt like not only was my livelihood snatched away from me quite carelessly, but my chance at hanging out with my “ubermensch” again as well. Quelle poisse!
Now, I’m sure I have at least one stalwart follower of Nietzsche who will be reading this, seething at how wrong I am to take such a beautiful and classic text and make it into me gallivanting about Paris without a care in the world. (Woman moment to make it about me at all, I am aware.) I don’t mean to minimize Nietzsche or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I’m simply noticing how it’s so true and so relevant, even on a microcosmic level. While I do not identify with the idea of rising above Christian morality as I believe it to be, I do feel that modern Christianity (or rather, post-enlightenment liberalism as both an escape from the Christian religion as well as an internalized version of this bastardized/Western Christianity that is currently wreaking havoc on the female psyche in particular), the protestant “work ethic,” and whatever is currently happening in the United States spiritually and economically is a force to be reckoned with in a similar vain. In a highly personal way, my overman is a persona that is able to transcend a concept that I discuss quite often—this idea of “femininity under the pressures of modernity.”
Something happened to the “woman brain” in the last several decades—it’s currently filled with an endlessly echoing amalgam of perspectives and beliefs that are at odds with each other. Because of the hectic lifestyles we must adopt to simply survive in this world, we’re rarely afforded a chance to parse them, let alone determine how truly tragic they are and how much damage they’re inflicting on us in a spiritual sense. So many of us are numbed by contraceptives and birth control, over-stimulated by dating apps, over-worked in futile career paths, told that it is preferable to be beholden to an employer who can so easily discard us rather than to be beholden to this “archaic” idea of husband and family. We’re taught that something as noble as sacrifice for a loved one should be seen as slavery, while living only to earn an income and spend it on whatever we feel like is “empowering.” (More on that here.) We’ve been stripped of all beauty traditionally associated with womanhood and made to be just as utilitarian as “the man.” The gentle balance of nature has been thrown askew, and it’s not getting better any time soon. As a whole, womankind is not doing too hot, which is why the impetus has been shifted from the collective to the individual to decide to live outside of the new (and rapidly-evolving) norms. Thus, something as simple as feeling pretty and blithe draw parallels to the Nietzschean overman. The woman’s plight is less steeped in valor, exploit, and honor, but is meaningful in its own way. It’s finding that gentle strength to nurture and to captivate.
In Paris, I was able to get a glimpse of the woman I could be outside of these constraints. I didn’t have to worry about work. I had time to spend to look pretty for my man. I didn’t have to worry about where to be. We decided that wherever we were, that’s where we needed to be. I deferred to the natural order of things and it quelled the chaos that made a home for itself deep inside my spirit and my brain. I allowed him to lead the way, and it healed me. It could have been anywhere, but it happened to be Paris. And now, a month or so later, I’m home, I’m in a similar vain, and I’m having trouble finding that girl again.
Was I able to discover this about myself because “the rules” were temporarily suspended? And if so, how do I get back there?
“I spare the vain more than the proud. Is not wounded vanity the mother of all tragedies? Where, however, pride is wounded, there there groweth up something better than pride. What has the skin of my humility not endured! I dwell at the foot of my height: how high my summits are no one has yet told me. But I know my valleys well.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Had I mistaken my pride for vanity? Was my “insecurity” actually misplaced self-assurance? This seems to be the key in deconstructing my reality to make way for my “overwoman.” I had a small detox from the trappings I wrapped around myself and determined would become my identity. My opinion of self was almost completely built upon external factors. It was in that sense that I could begin to determine who I really am, and, more importantly, who I am meant to be.
Like most women, I can say with confidence that the “pressures of modernity” didn’t weigh so heavily on me when I could temporarily exist outside of them. Even now, as I’ve assessed my savings and recognized that I can coast for a little while and be a bit of a layabout, but it’s still not the same. The permanence of “it all” gets in the way. To know and be known in a place that is home means there are certain conventions that must be followed. So many women have built reputations on being “it all,” and without adequate time and space to adjust, that switch is difficult to turn off. There’s a little bubble of traditionalism in which I can live and thrive when it’s my boyfriend and me alone, but once others enter that space, the lines cease to be so clear. Re-reading Bronze Age Mindset (as a layabout does) with these new eyes made this passage even more salient:
“We love dogs because they express so honestly and without dissimulation what we also are and want. They and other pets calm us because promote a kind of carelessness normal to animal life, unencumbered by thoughts of the past or worries about the future, none of which actually exist. Women are, in their natural state, close to this condition as well, or closer on the whole, which is where they get much of their charm and power from (the modern education, that teaches women to be hyper-aware, anxious for the future, abstract neurotics, etc., actually takes away their power to a great degree, while tricking them into thinking they are being tough or sassy; but a hyper-conscious woman is made powerless and charmless).”
- Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset
To have nowhere to be, no looming deadlines, no one to impress except for my loving sweetheart: it’s a dream. And like most dreams, it’s far removed from any feasible reality. I do feel powerless and charmless in this near-constant state of hyper-consciousness. I do feel helpless and anxious about the uncertainty of the future, but I’m not quite sure how to not feel this way about it, or if that’s even possible. Is it a switch to turn off? Or is it too deeply embedded in my (and your) psyche? A whirlwind trip to Paris temporarily suspended these apprehensions, but they quickly made their way back in as I packed my bag to head back home.
Despite all this, it’s a start. It’s something akin to training wheels in a sense. I know what it feels like, I know what stands in the way, I even have a vague sort of roadmap to get back there, even if it’s just for a bit at a time. I can start by trying to take charge without having too much to worry about. I can begin by recognizing that being anxious about the future is not going to make any semblance of stability arrive any quicker. I can be carefree and cute, if only for my man.
It’s a process. As I search for my next job, as I strive to be the best girlfriend I can be to this wonderful man, as I set out on this new adventure, I am resolute to step over my former self, the one beholden to conventions put into place by people who would hate me, and to slowly become the woman I was in Paris. To recognize my own personal desires, to separate them from the ones that I’d been conditioned to accept. To shun modernity and its pressures, to carve out my own space as a fully-actualized woman.
Over the weekend, my man did some work at my house. He was out in the yard (looking oh so fine) and I watched from inside while I prepped dinner and made him a cocktail. Such celebration of traditional gender roles may be seen as passé, but I saw it as a radical rebellion to this “modernity” I keep talking about. With that, the version of myself I found in Paris was back, if only for a moment. She’s there, she’s waiting to be discovered and to grow. Until then, I’ll continue to microdose my overwoman, discover her nuances, and mature into my final form.
Zarathustra said, “I teach you the Ubermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” I ask you this same question, but for girls.