Two years ago, Molly was sitting outside in the sunshine in front of her luxury downtown apartment when the wife of the business owner downstairs looked at her and said, “You’re Boujee.”
Then, almost immediately, she added, “Oh, I mean that in a good way.”
…Of course Molly took it as a compliment. Why wouldn’t she?
Fast-forward two years and apparently she has continued her upward trajectory in the boujee arts.
Except now she is beginning to wonder if she is quite as comfortable with the compliment as she thought she was.
Because here she is on a random Wednesday afternoon while two women cleaned her house, her laundry was picked up and will be returned this evening, and the house smells aggressively clean.
The cats are offended…
And Molly is lying there thinking:
Who the hell am I?
Apparently, this is what happens when a metaphysical experiment walks out of the laboratory and into the neighborhood.
This particular Wednesday is an interval day. The seven-day Earth Cycle has technically ended. Yesterday was the final sphere, Refine, and Molly’s word for the day was Mental.
Mental state.
Mental attitude.
Mentality.
The thing underneath the thing.
She had spent the previous seven days exploring metaphysics, archetypes, intention, observation, connection, expression, the material world, and finally the mind itself. She had been drawing archetypal figures, particularly Moxie and Mojo, and immersing herself in the strange little world she was building through her Quantum MeMoir practice.
And now there is an eighth day. An interval. A space between cycles.
She had imagined she might write a tidy reflection. A composition. A proper MeMoir post that gathered everything together and made sense of it.
Instead, she sits quietly. The house is clean. The laundry is gone.
The cats are searching for pieces of plastic to chew because apparently the new level of cleanliness has come with gastrointestinal objections.
And Molly is thinking about money.
Not because she suddenly has a great deal of it.
In fact, that’s part of the whole reflection.
She isn't bringing in what society would value as an independent income right now. There isn't an enormous pile of disposable money waiting to be converted into luxury services.
And yet she has hired a housekeeper…
And a laundry service...
And she likes it.
She likes it a lot.
There it is.
The uncomfortable part.
Molly has spent a considerable portion of her life believing that a woman should be able to take care of herself. More than that, she has carried an old internal equation that says a woman should earn her right to be comfortable.
Work hard.
Make money.
Take care of the house.
Take care of the man.
Don’t depend on anybody.
Don’t spend money you didn’t personally earn.
Don’t be lazy.
Don’t be spoiled.
Don’t expect someone else to clean your toilet.
And definitely don’t sit around and read on a Wednesday afternoon while somebody else does it. There are a lot of women living in Molly’s head.
The Good Wife.
The Independent Woman.
The Hardworking Woman.
The Self-Made Woman.
The Woman Who Doesn’t Need Anybody.
The Woman Who Earns Her Keep.
The Woman Who Doesn’t Spend Money She Didn’t Personally Make.
The Woman Who Should Be Grateful.
And, apparently, the Woman Who Is Now Boujee.
They have all been invited to the meeting. Nobody brought snacks.
Underneath all of them sits the oldest authority of the bunch, clapping her hands together impatiently. Molly knows that voice. It belonged to her mother. And underneath all that urgency is the question that still knows exactly how to find her:
But did you earn this?
Maybe that’s what Molly is actually confronting.
Not luxury.
Not housekeeping.
Not money.
Deserving-ness.
The strange cultural belief that comfort must be purchased with suffering. That receiving must be balanced by labor. That if someone takes care of you, there must eventually be an invoice.
That if a woman isn’t producing money herself, she must somehow compensate by producing something else.
A clean house.
A cooked meal.
A well-managed family.
A perfectly maintained life.
And if she doesn’t do those things herself?
Well…
What kind of woman is she?
Molly recognizes this voice because she has heard it for years. It doesn’t necessarily sound like another person anymore.
That’s the interesting part.
Society doesn’t have to stand outside the door and tell her what to do. Society can move into the house.
It can become an internal narrator.
It can become the voice that says, You should be doing this yourself.
It can become the voice that says, You didn’t earn this.
It can become the voice that says, Women like you shouldn’t have this much help.
And perhaps freedom isn’t about fighting Society. Perhaps it is about noticing when Society is still living inside the head.
And maybe that’s why the eighth day is Society. Not society “out there,” with its rules and expectations marching around somewhere beyond Molly’s front door.
The society she carries around inside herself. The invisible audience. The imagined judgment. The old rules she never consciously agreed to but somehow learned to follow. And now she’s beginning to wonder what happens when she stops asking that audience for permission.
Then there is the smell…
The house smells so clean. Almost aggressively clean.
Molly knows that smell. It is the smell of manufactured cleanliness, the olfactory equivalent of a freshly printed certificate announcing:
THIS HOUSE HAS BEEN CLEANED.
The problem is that the cats don’t seem impressed.
They’re looking for plastic things to chew, and Molly knows the fragrance and cleaning products may not be particularly kind to them.
So now the boujee housekeeper fantasy has developed a subplot.
Molly wants help.
Molly likes having help.
Molly also wants the help to happen in a way that feels good for the animals, the environment, and her own nervous system.
Apparently, becoming more comfortable receiving doesn’t mean surrendering discernment. It means becoming more specific about what she is willing to receive.
Maybe the future version of this isn’t simply:
I have a housekeeper.
Maybe it’s:
I have enough resources to receive help, and I get to decide what kind of help belongs in my home.
That’s a different kind of luxury.
And then Molly thinks about her daughter, because this question doesn't seem to belong to Molly alone. They have talked about this strange territory before.
Both of them have experienced versions of being taken care of, of having access to a level of comfort or luxury that they didn’t necessarily create through their own traditional employment. And both have wrestled with the same peculiar question:
What does that mean about us?
Does receiving mean dependency? Does being provided for mean something has been taken away from independence? Does comfort have to be justified? What does a woman owe in exchange for being cared for?
And why does the question seem to become especially complicated when the woman isn’t the one bringing home the money?
Molly doesn’t have an answer.
That may be the point.
Because this seven-day cycle began with Purpose, and its word was Metaphysics. Molly opened the week by deliberately exploring the unseen.
She wasn’t trying to prove anything. She was curious.
What exists beneath the obvious?
What might be happening beyond the material explanation?
What happens when she takes her own strange perceptions seriously enough to investigate them?
Then came Ground, with the word Moxie. The exploration needed nerve. Not certainty. Moxie.
The willingness to keep going into unfamiliar territory without needing a map first.
Then came Intend, with the word Blueprint.
Molly began thinking about the internal structures beneath experience.
The patterns.
The designs.
The architecture of thought and behavior.
The things that may be operating before a person ever consciously decides anything.
Then came Observe, with the message Fringe Dwellers.
This was where Moxie and Mojo began taking shape in drawings. The archetypes emerged from the edges. The strange characters. The perspectives that don’t necessarily occupy the center of the room.
Molly began noticing what happens when she allows the peripheral things to become visible.
Then came Connect, with the word Archetype.
The drawings stopped being merely drawings. They became ways of seeing. Ways of organizing experience.
Ways of recognizing familiar human patterns without insisting that any one pattern tells the whole story.
Then came Express Sphere, with the word Material World. And suddenly the metaphysical had nowhere left to hide.
Money.
Work.
Marriage.
The house.
The body.
Security.
Deserving-ness.
The physical world.
The things that can actually be touched, purchased, cleaned, lost, protected, or paid for.
And finally came Refine, with the word Mental.
The mind itself became the material being examined.
Mentality.
Attitude.
Interpretation.
Belief.
The internal machinery through which the outside world becomes an inside experience. And then the cycle ended.
Except it didn’t.
Because on the eighth day, Molly found herself sitting in the middle of the result.
She had spent the week exploring the relationship between inner experience and outer reality. And now her outer reality was giving her a rather amusing practical exam.
Two women cleaning her house.
Laundry being collected and delivered.
Money being spent in ways that would have once felt extravagant.
A husband who doesn't require her to prove her usefulness by keeping the household running.
A woman sitting on the floor…
And the old character standing in the doorway asking:
Who gave you permission to do this?
Molly almost laughs.
Because apparently the answer is: Nobody.
That’s the strange part. There isn’t necessarily a permission slip. There is simply a life happening. And she has to decide how she feels about participating in it.
Molly doesn’t want to turn this into another manifestation success story.
She isn’t interested in writing:
I discovered that manifestation works, and now everyone should simply believe they deserve luxury.
That would be too neat. Too certain. Too easy.
Because she doesn’t know.
She doesn’t know exactly how much of this is manifestation.
How much is psychology.
How much is circumstance.
How much is privilege.
How much is timing.
What the universe is doing.
She doesn’t know whether the archetypes she draws are discoveries, inventions, mirrors, or some strange combination of all three.
She knows that she is experiencing something.
And she knows that she is making meaning from it.
This, Molly thinks, may be the most honest thing her MeMoir can offer: not an answer, but an investigation.
And strangely enough, not knowing gives her more freedom than knowing ever did. Because she doesn’t have to turn her experience into doctrine.
She can investigate it.
She can observe it.
She can change her mind.
She can find the contradiction and sit beside it for a while.
She can say:
This feels wonderful.
And:
This makes me uncomfortable.
At the same time.
Which brings Molly back to Boujee and Uncomfortable. It is funny because it is true. She really does like the nice things.
She likes having help.
She likes not spending an afternoon at a laundromat.
She likes the feeling of a clean house.
She likes that her time and energy are valuable enough to protect.
She likes the direction her life appears to be moving…
And she is also uncomfortable with it.
Not because she doesn’t want it. Because some old part of her still believes she has to prove she deserves it. That’s the part that is changing. Not necessarily the circumstances.
The meaning.
Molly is beginning to question the idea that a woman has to suffer sufficiently before she is allowed to experience ease.
She is beginning to question whether dependence and interdependence are actually the same thing.
She is beginning to question whether being cared for diminishes her.
She is beginning to question whether earning money is the only legitimate way to contribute.
She is beginning to question whether receiving something creates a debt.
And she is beginning to see that some of the limits she thought were simply “the way life works” were actually inherited ideas about what a woman is supposed to be.
That’s a quieter kind of ego death. Nobody has to die. Nobody has to be defeated. An old character simply begins losing authority.
Perhaps this is what reflection looks like.
The old character says: Tell me what this means.
The emerging character says: Let’s see what happens if I keep looking.
The old character wants the answer.
The emerging character wants the experience.
The old character wants certainty.
The emerging character is becoming strangely comfortable with curiosity.
And that might be the most important thing Molly has learned from the entire seven-day cycle. She isn’t trying to become a woman who has all the answers.
She’s becoming a woman who can observe herself having the experience. A little breathing room between what happened and what it means.
A place to sit with the contradictions.
To notice the old stories.
To notice the new ones.
To let the cats remain unimpressed by the luxury.
And maybe, just maybe, to let Molly enjoy the clean house.
Even if she still feels a tiny bit scandalized by her own bathroom.
Two years ago, someone called Molly boujee and she took it as a compliment.
Two years later, she is beginning to understand that becoming that woman may require something stranger than simply learning how to receive more. She may have to learn how to stop asking whether she is allowed to receive it. And perhaps becoming the woman she wants to be doesn’t require her to stop being uncomfortable.
Perhaps she just has to stop letting the discomfort decide who she’s allowed to become.