The Thought Daughter Experiment
The echo chamber plays Mitski and offers pomegranate seeds on arrival.
After nearly two decades of Internet actualization, I have found my subculture: Thought Daughters.
Thought Daughtership is a riff off “gay son or thot daughter” meme (and tbh, a very good riff. Sometimes the Internet really shows up for you.), but besides that, I’m not sure where the concept comes from.
And because my brain is literally the bit of fried egg that gets stuck to the pan because it’s been so sizzled to nothingness, I can’t even remember where I first discovered the term. Perhaps the idea of “Thought Daughter” speaks to my inner truth so deeply that my own self-concept obliterated its memory of discovery or decided there was no difference between memory and experience with regards to this very particular personality nomenclature, and warped the time-space continuum so that I may simply…enjoy and exist.
But – being a thought daughter – that doesn’t seem like something my subconscious would do. What my thought-daughter subconscious is actually doing instead is searching desperately for an anchor for this experience because A) I overintellectualize everything and B) I live in constant anxiety of getting sued on the Internet because I don’t really know how copyright infringement works here????
All of that to say – credit where credit is due to the first person on the world wide web to bring this term public.
If you haven’t already figured it out, a thought daughter is a woman who overthinks. There. That’s it.
The meat of thought daughtership, however, is in what she overthinks about, which is, to sum it up nicely: everything.
I think psychiatrists have a different term for this: “generalized anxiety disorder”.
If you’re wondering if you’re a thought daughter, please answer a simple “yes” or “no” the following questions:
1) Do you keep each and every card you’ve ever received from a loved one (because if you throw the card out, you run the risk of one day wanting to reread their kindly words?)
2) As a child, did you sleep with all your stuffed animals (because it isn’t nice to leave someone out?)
3) Do you rely on any or all of the following to make important decisions about your life: tarot cards, enneagrams, horoscopes, divining rods, Meyers Briggs personality descriptions?
If you answered “yes” to one or more of the above – congratulations! You are a Thought Daughter!
I posted a TikTok about Thought Daughtership that performed decently well. In the video, I list my “Thought Daughter Essentials”, which range from a pack of Rider-Waite tarot cards to my “anxiety pouch”, a cloth zipper bag stuffed with tampons, mini bottles of lavender essential oil, and maybe-expired Advil PM I’ll never use (because, obviously, I might have a bad reaction IF the Advil is expired but I can’t quite tell if it is or isn’t and because I know I won’t use it what’s the point in replacing it? I know. Imagine LIVING in here.)
Within minutes, comments rose like Alka-Seltzer (also in my anxiety pouch) bubbles to the top of my notifications tab:
My gang!
I’ve never had an original experience I fear
I feel…so seen. Omg.
I’ve found my people.
The dual dopamine hits of Getting Likes and the very real joy of finding people online who share my many, many anxieties had me spinning. Buzzing. Quaking. Almost foaming at the mouth.
See! I could point out. I know who I am!
…except. I don’t really need a viral TikTok video to show me who I am (A 30-Year-Old Woman With Generalized Anxiety Disorder). And besides…that’s not really the point, is it?
Just to clarify: I am not a mental health professional. Just a woman who thinks about herself quite a bit.
There’s a lot of conversation these days about naming, identifying, diagnosing, what it does for your experience of an illness or mental health issue, and whether or not self-diagnosing in particular helps you heal (finding a community and new ways to discuss your experience anecdotally with others) or facilitates a kind of statis (I have certainly fallen into this cycle, where it’s easier to blame a behavior – aka refusing to travel without a particular comfort item – on a diagnosis than work through it).
With my anxiety in particular, this latest stage of healing has been about moving away from intellectualizing and into feeling. For example, if I feel hurt, I can explain exactly why I feel hurt (so-and-so said this, which brings up memories of this childhood experience), but I’m not great at feeling the hurt.
That’s a conversation for a whole separate dispatch, but in the meantime, let’s go back to my quiz.
1) Do you keep each and every card you’ve ever received from a loved one (because if you throw the card out, you run the risk of one day wanting to reread their kindly words?) Read: Rather than feeling the love of the people in my life, I need a document that proves that emotion exists.
2) As a child, did you sleep with all your stuffed animals (because it isn’t nice to leave someone out?) Read: People pleasing.
3) Do you rely on any or all of the following to make important decisions about your life: tarot cards, enneagrams, horoscopes, divining rods, Meyers Briggs personality descriptions? Read: I don’t trust my own emotions, experiences, or feelings enough to make decisions, there must be a logical (or at least in the case of horoscopes and tarot cards, formulaic) process for my next step.
Thought Daughtership is a nexus of all these issues. By finding an online community, and being applauded for intellectualizing by that community, I can stay happy and comfortable in the patterns I already employ: I can think about issues and I think about them really really well.
(I mean, Jesus. It’s in the name.)
An important part of dealing with anxiety is being able to talk about it, to connect with others, to laugh about it (case in point: this literal newsletter going out to the ether???). But for me (and likely, for those who have to handle me day-to-day), it’s also important to move the fuck on.
I love Joan Didion. I need to unplug my straightener, wait for it to cool, wrap it in its own cord, and firmly shut the bathroom cabinet door before I leave the house. I refuse to board a plane without a pair of socks daubed in lavender oil (honestly such a hack). I will always be a Thought Daughter.
But I don’t have to be the Thought Daughter forever. After all, isn’t that just a bit of arrested development?
Weekly Rankings
The “Please Please Please” Sabrina Carpenter music video feat. bad boy BF Barry Keoghan
It’s perfect. Carpenter, who toured with Taylor Swift for part of her Eras tour, is clearly taking a page from the book of Swift, leaving Easter eggs and clues for eagle-eyed fans in her beautifully produced, bubblegum pop-fun music videos. And when I say eagle-eyed I mean people who have literal mole eyes like myself. “Please Please Please” makes no bones about addressing the Barina rumors and includes some literal drool-worthy shots of the man himself as a 1950s-style Brando bad boy.
Library Sales
The Denver Public Library Friends Foundation hosted a used book sale to raise funds for everyone’s favorite public amenity this weekend! Spanning three days and and over 18,000 titles, I snagged cookbooks, contemporary fiction, essay collections, and more between $2-$4 a book. Defffffffo check out your local library to find out when / if they host similar events!
Air Conditioning. Ice Cream. Living in O’Neill’s Shorts.
Forget my last dispatch. It’s summer-summer and I vacillate between pure joy and agony. Pros: ice cream sandwiches. 7 am walks in shorts and bare arms. Cons: our A/C unit makes this god-awful buzzing sound, and not even with any consistency (it goes off maybe every hour, then every twenty-six minutes, then stays silent until 3:42 am).