They Used the Word Deprogramming. In a Barbie Film.

I had just written the book version of it.

I watched Barbie again last week. I still cried my eyes out.

Not sad crying. The other kind.

The kind that happens when something reaches into your chest and squeezes the part of you that knows.

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The first time I watched it, I’d literally handed my completed manuscript to my publisher that same day. Fully written. Beautifully edited. Done.

We went to the cinema as the celebration of it. Me, pink-adjacent energy, probably a bit smug, definitely exhausted.

And then Gloria opened her mouth.

“You have to be thin, but not too thin...”

And I wanted to whoop. Loudly. In a cinema. With strangers.

Because they were talking about deprogramming. The actual word. In a Barbie film. In a mainstream cinema with pick ‘n’ mix and sticky floors and families who’d come to watch a fun film about a doll.

And I’d just written the book version of this film.

I’d spent years putting language around something women had felt their whole lives but couldn’t name. The conditioning. The shrinking. The endless performance of being good enough, nice enough, small enough to be palatable. The layers and layers of shoulds that bury who you actually are underneath.

And here was Greta Gerwig, in Barbie pink, saying it louder than I’d dared.

I could have left the cinema then and been complete.

And then Billie Eilish started singing.

What was I made for?

And I was gone.

Because I knew the answer. I’d spent years figuring it out, living it, writing it all down. I’d just handed 300-something pages of it to my publisher that very morning.

But knowing something and feeling it land in your body are two completely different things.

I cried for hours.

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Not with sadness. With awe.

With that full-body recognition that this - this - is what I’m made for.

Helping women remember who they are. Underneath all of it. The conditioning, the expectations, the carefully trained instincts to make themselves smaller and safer and more acceptable.

The remembering. That’s the whole thing.

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I rang my publisher the next day and asked for my manuscript back.

I needed to sprinkle some Barbie magic in it.

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Watching it again. I still cried. Still got that squeeze in my chest. Still heard that song and felt it somewhere that thinking can’t reach.

What was I made for?

Some of us spend a lifetime being conditioned out of knowing the answer to that question. Trained to be useful, palatable, and convenient. Trained to want the right things, feel the right amount, take up the right amount of space.

The deprogramming is how you find your way back to it.

Home.

Mx

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If this landed somewhere in your chest, my book Good Girl Deprogramming is where we go deeper. It’s the Gloria speech, but make it a whole damn framework.

And I’m about to run a book read-along - a proper guided journey through it, together. How the book was written to be read.

If you want in, drop your name below, and I’ll let you know when doors open.

Sign up here