everyone is yelling and i am addicted to it

why being the right kind of woman feels so good (and fucks us anyway)

hi, before you get to the good stuff, let me reintroduce myself. I’m erica, your resident cat lady who daydreams about rewiring the world through storytelling. I’m into the ‘round the campfire moments of a good story scaring the shit out of you while being a mirror into the tortured parts of your soul. In most of my essays, I create a new world that shows you the myth, and then we chat about it after.

The fires cranking, I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves about being good.
And what happens when those stories start to rot.

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They gave it to us in little silver boxes with violet velvet ribbons. They handed it over to our hungry fingers like it was a gift.

Here, they said, for your own alignment.

And we held our little hands out, presented the soft skin in the inside of our elbows, because we were told it would keep us good.

The metal was warm in the syringe. I watched the nurse shake it like a snow globe, like she was waking something up inside it. And I remember the needle sliding in as I clenched my eyes shut and tilted my chin to the ceiling. It wasn’t painful, just enough to make me flinch like a curtain in a breeze. That’s how they got inside.

That’s where it began.

The MIRIAM injection. Named for some ancient ghost of a woman who’d been good enough to be remembered, good enough to be remade. The self-releasing nanomentals were linked to morality sensors buried deep in our neural pathways.

The tech was precise but not flawless, no, it didn’t need to be flawless. It just needed to be consistent enough to feel like God. They started us young, not on a full doses, but with micro-feedbacks, tiny pulses of warmth that flickered beneath the skin when we said the right thing, flinched at the right moment, adjusted our posture when Authority passed. A tingle in the wrist when we asked if another girl’s outfit was regulation. A subtle bloom of heat across the back of the neck when we clicked Report Concern on a peer’s social score.

We were told it was part of Alignment Training, that our bodies were learning the shape of righteousness. But really, it was a form of engineered craving. Like a dog trained on electric fences, but instead of pain, we were jolted with pleasure, small, almost imperceptible waves of approval that taught us to equate surveillance with safety, and policing with belonging.

By thirteen, your nervous system had been conditioned to twitch toward correction like it was instinct. That was the way it worked, the Sanctify compound, a molten flood of chemical ecstasy administered through internal release. And by the time the mature-age dose was unlocked you weren’t just ready for it, you were fucking starving for it. You’d been walking toward it your whole life, trembling and grateful, unaware that what waited wasn’t freedom or clarity or purpose but an intravenous leash made of your own hunger.

No one tells you what it’s like to get high off virtue.

How it uncoils slowly in your spine, like a snake that knows it’s holy. How your fingertips tingle from the approval, how you throw away any desire for love or lust because approval feels like God has praised you from the inside out. It’s addictive, the hit of righteousness, like you’ve been washed in gold and are finally clean.

The first time I got the hit, I was twelve and watching a girl cry in the school bathroom after her post was flagged for indecency. She wasn’t even showing skin, just smiling too big, looking too wild, saying too much. And something in me clicked. I leaned over to the AI-monitoring node in the corner of the ceiling and said, soft as honey,
She’s spiralling. I’m worried for her.
The bot scanned my retina, confirmed my emotional tone. I felt the Sanctify rush up my spine like a hymn. I felt baptised. Glorious. More than liked, I felt seen, and for a girl in a world like this, that feeling was rarer than diamonds.

We grew up aching to be spared, to be left alone, to slink through life. We were so desperate to move through the world unscathed by others that we didnt have the space to hunger for power ourselves.

They never threatened us with whips or chains, not anymore, just distance.
Just silence.
Just the kind of invisibility that made your skin ache. But if you were good enough, if you caught the others fast enough, if you turned your care into surveillance, if you learned how to smile when you gutted another girl with a well-placed “just checking in”, you rose.
Your hit rate got faster, your tolerance increased.
Your skin got clearer, your status cleaner, your access wider. And you started glowing in that specific way that said: men can trust you.
Not to be a leader, of course not. But to protect their world from your sisters.
And that’s almost the same thing, right?

By sixteen, I’d learned the algorithm like scripture. I could score a public interaction before it finished; the syntax of disobedience was obvious to me. Girls who laughed too long. Girls who didn’t lower their eyes when Authority passed. Girls who touched other girls with too much hunger. I had a file of phrases that performed compassion while extracting compliance
I used to be like that too.
You’re better than this.
Are you open to feedback?
I just don’t want you to get in trouble…
It’s not hate, it’s accountability.
Every time I uttered one, the dose dropped into my bloodstream with a hiss. I got so good at it, I didn’t even need to fake the concern anymore. I felt it. Because when the system rewards you with chemical grace for caging others, your soul starts speaking in the language of the cage.

They gave me a room in the Inner Sanctum at eighteen, which was unheard of. It was just me and a wall-sized screen looping morality breaches in the Outer Zones. Girls with shaved heads and crooked smiles. Girls running. Girls breaking down on camera, pleading for a hit, for a taste of what I had.
I’d sit in my chair, one leg folded under me, sipping my nutrient paste, and press the Flag & Correct button like I was watering a garden. Each time, the injection flared in my neck and I’d whisper thank you to no one.
That’s when I knew I was close.
Not to freedom, we didn’t use that word anymore.
But to recognition.
To finally being valuable.

The Cleanline Board had never spoken to me directly; they didn’t need to. Their silence was a pedestal. But one day, as I passed through the bone-white corridor toward the Ascension Archive, I saw him.
Dr. Elion.
One of the oldest. One of the original architects of the morality coding. He looked at me, oh my god he really looked. And he nodded. Just once. A small tilt of his chin. I nearly wept from the violence of that pleasure. My spine lit up, my brain went white, I collapsed into myself like a lung deflating.
I had done it.
I had been seen by a man who built the world.

I know it cost me something. I don’t know what, not exactly.

But I remember waking up the next morning and not remembering how to cry, not knowing why I’d want to.
My friend Lara came to visit, if you could still call her that, she hadn’t scored in weeks. Her skin was dull, her voice soft with shame. She whispered, Do you ever miss being real?
And for a moment, for a flicker, I almost said yes. But I felt the bots stir, a prickle under the skin ready to punish the pause, so I turned, grabbed her hand, and said, You’re not well. I’m worried. The hit came fast.
Hard.
My veins sang.
Hers didn’t.

That’s the thing about goodness in this world, it isn’t real unless someone else is suffering for it. The bots don’t reward you for being moral. They reward you for making sure other women are reminded that they’re not.

And still, still, I climbed.

Even when my body started to ache in the morning from too many doses. Even when my empathy became a memory I accessed like an old file; dusty, half-corrupted, slow to open. Even when I dreamed of the girls I’d flagged and woke up moaning for a drug I no longer felt. My dosage increased, but the joy flattened, plateaued with a version of me I’d never get to know.

That’s how addiction works. They never taught us that in Cleanline training. They never said the top would feel like being buried under gold you used to worship.

I am Ava Mirth. I am a daughter of the machine.

And I am everything they ever wanted.

---

do you feel like everyone on the internet is yelling? because its loud in here.

And I get it, some of us should probably be yelling. Some of us have been gaslit into silence for so long that the sound of our own fury feels like our first breath, like our resurrection, like returning to the body after years of whispering ourselves small. Some of us are pleading for an ounce of justice and yes, those voices deserve to ring out like sirens for some damn basic humanity.

But the rest of it?

The constant shouting, the moral scavenger hunting, the nitpicking disguised as nuance, the performance of intellectual superiority, where everyone’s just sharpening their tongue for sport.

The way we make up problems, amplify micro-flaws, call it “our truth”, and then build empires off the insecurities we just invented, well… it’s driving me absolutely fucking insane.

It’s not a conversation.
It’s a coliseum.
And the prize is power. Not the sexy kind that frees you, but the kind that feeds off who you can take down to stay clean.

We don’t just want to be good anymore; that would be too simple.

We want to be immaculate, angelic, transcendent in our morality, clean enough to be untouchable, glowing from the inside out with the kind of curated ethical clarity that makes other women wilt in our presence, and we chase that glow like it’s a god we can earn if we just scrub hard enough.

And boy, do we scrub.

We exfoliate our bodies of hunger, of genuine empathy, we scrub our politics of contradiction, scrub our lives of women who voice their needs, scrub our timelines of women who make us uncomfortable with their unfiltered rage, or their visible grief, or their need to be witnessed in their chaos.

We scrub whatever less-than-desirable way of living is trending.

Because we are taught that the closer we are to clean, the closer we are to safety.
And chaos is dangerous, and desire is embarrassing, softness is something that must be earned and don’t even get me started on having needs.
Then, once you are the biggest and best in the room, you better be laying down the law to those you influence.

Goodness, that sacred shiny kind of goodness that trends and sells and gets you invited onto the right podcasts and into the right DMs and under the right kind of male gaze, that goodness has become our drug, our hunt, the new purity ring we suck on while telling ourselves it’s liberation.

And so, we police each other with comments soaked in faux concern, with posts that masquerade as analysis but are just thinly veiled public executions, with podcasts and captions and subtext and silence and the kind of passive-aggressive accountability culture that leaves no space for becoming, only performing.

And what a performance it has become. We are performing intelligence, performing healing, performing nuance, performing the perfect version of good that is aesthetic enough to be applauded and sterile enough to be sold.

We are so high on our own goodness we forget to notice how it stinks, how it rots from the inside out the moment we build our worth on the rejection of other women’s tools for getting by, how we recoil from a girl for promoting her only fans, how we shade the mother for putting on an iPad while she sobs in the bathroom, how we spit on the art that makes us uncomfortable because it’s too raw, too loud, too polished, too sexual, too broken, too unmarketable… as if we haven’t all been all of those things when no one was looking.

We want pure morality in every corner now.

We want it on our lips like gloss and under our eyes like concealer, we want everything to be our perfect version of good and moral, we are addicted to pulling the wings off things that were made to fly, simply because we were born to walk.

We are so terrified of being seen as wrong that we flatten ourselves into obedience and call it growth.

Some sit on high thrones now, their crowns gleaming with irony, their kingdoms built not from solidarity or softness or sisterhood but from strategic exclusion.

They declare themselves the cleanest, the cleverest, the most correct, and patrol the borders of collective expression with the cold precision of an algorithm, who sniff out art that doesn’t taste like theirs, that tastes too much like need, and then pull it apart for points.

Not because it’s dangerous, but because it reminds them of the parts of themselves they had to bury to be crowned.

We don’t scream anymore, not openly. We whisper, we imply, we say “hey babe, just a reflection” and “what would your highest self say?”, we float above the mess and call it clarity, but really, what we are is starving.

Starving to stay on top, starving to never get caught being human, starving to be seen as healed and holy and smarter than anyone else, and that hunger makes us cruel in the way only morally righteous people can be: smiling while they smite you, softening the blow with pseudo-compassion, gutting you with a caption that says “sending love.”

And we fall for it.
Hell, we chase it.
We hand them our necks and ask them to wrap their fingers and squeeze.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of gasping for air, when oxygen is my damn birth right.