WHEN YOU BREAK THE GIRL CODE

It was 2022, or 2021 - I can't really remember anymore. We were in and out of COVID lockdown, and there was tension.

A person I knew suddenly stopped replying to my messages and got a mullet. It was weeks, then months, then they would slide in with a: Hey! I want to write a spoken word track for my album, and you did that for your first EP. Could you give me some advice? Then it would be: Ok, thanks! No response to: Meet soon? I tried defaulting back to our jabs: wtf it's been a month wanna hang? No response. I see they have new friends, new vocabulary, new clothes. Then I see red. Because they left a flirty comment on some white guy on the internet they knew I had eyes for. I see purple because someone asked me if I was editing their content for them because they noticed they had a new editing style, similar to mine. I wonder what happened to their old dog that shit all over their dark home, that they apparently only let a few friends see.

I think if you do girl math, it would be like: ghosting + using me + copping my style + stealing my man = absolute breaking of girl code. But it's 2026 now. Everything is laughable because none of us ended up with the white guy, we never made up, I unfollowed them, they blew up on the internet. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, they moved on from me to take up more space for themselves. But in the lonely shadows of my post-COVID immunity, they left an unfair and ugly hole in my heart.

And we are by nature fearful, gentle women. But they taught me that not all soft, whimsy, fae-like women fight the same. So the first song in my album is about anger.

Fun fact: Initially, AHHH didn't exist. It was another shitty song, with an intro that sounded exactly like one of their songs. But I imagined a look on my producer's face that was anything but collaborative and eager, and I guilted myself from stooping to new lows. So I wrote AHHH. I tried to channel anger and realised I was so, so, very, angry. And in being so, very, very angry, I felt so very, very guilty.

In anger, I wrote about unfriending someone. I think calling someone your "ex best friend" or "ex friend" is childish, but the way we lash out as grown humans is perhaps reflective of the ways we weren't allowed to vent as a child.

Now I know anger is not violence until acted upon, but back then, I felt guilty for taking a stab at someone I was once so intimate with. We watched a horror show on my bed behind our fingers and they told me how to give a blowie (this one's not going on LinkedIn I guess...) while walking back from fried chicken dinner.

So AHHH is loud, but it is an anthem. I feel the only way I know how to act on anger is to just shout louder than the person next to me. Anger is not productive if not a war cry, and I am all about productivity.

At that point, I was also coming to the tail end of working at a small, local music label. I was seeing other artists getting offered radio slots, submitting "radio edited" cuts of their new music to the founder for opportunities I was not made known of. I think the truth that I was always running from was coming to light: That I was not good looking, popular, skinny enough for the mainstream.

No matter what people tell you about being your authentic self, always know that the industry is driven by agenda, not authenticity. So in some ways, I knew the end was coming, and we created AHHH to end in a cacophony of distortion. Because an extended, loud outro would, in my darkening mind, never be mainstream.

And it turns out, I was right. About most things anyway.

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