A four-way CherryCoBiz reflection on Erika Kirk, Jennie Gage, performance femininity, and the truth beneath the roles we inherit

Welcome to anyone who is new here.

And welcome back to my regular readers.

This post is going to be a little different.

If you have followed CherryCoBiz for any length of time, you know I write across a wide range of topics: wellness, cooking, meditation, media, politics, personal growth, spirituality, psychology, and the strange little intersections where all of those things meet.

Sometimes I write something quick and punchy.

Sometimes I respond to a video.

Sometimes I follow a writing prompt.

Sometimes I sit with something inward and let it become a QuietQuest reflection.

Sometimes I step into Civicus because the world demands that we pay closer attention.

This piece is all of that.

It is Reverb because it began with a video.

It is Civicus because the video opened a door into politics, power, Christian nationalism, gender roles, public performance, and the machinery that turns people into symbols.

It is QuietQuest because underneath all of that is an inward question: How do we know when we are living from truth, and how do we know when we are performing a role we inherited before we were old enough to question it?

And it is also a writing prompt, because the question that kept rising for me was this:

What’s a moment that made you question reality?

This may be my first true four-way CherryCoBiz reflection — Reverb, Civicus, QuietQuest, and writing prompt all meeting in one place.

And that feels appropriate, because the subject itself is layered.

This is not something I woke up one morning and randomly decided to write about. CherryCoBiz began with a holistic health and wellness mindset, and while the content has grown in many directions, that foundation has not disappeared.

It has expanded.

Because we do not reside in a vacuum.

I know I do not.

Our bodies are affected by stress. Our minds are affected by media. Our nervous systems are affected by politics. Our families are affected by culture. Our beliefs are affected by power. Our sense of self is affected by the scripts handed to us before we know we are allowed to question them.

That is why civic awareness belongs here.

That is why psychology belongs here.

That is why meditation, media literacy, truth-telling, and personal reflection all belong here.

A holistic health and wellness platform cannot honestly talk about wellness while pretending the world around us does not shape the people we become.

So yes, this piece is different.

It is heavier.

It is longer.

It asks more from the reader.

And maybe I will start bending more often into these longer, meatier pieces when the subject calls for it. Not everything can be reduced to a quick reaction. Not everything should be designed for skimming. Some topics need room. Some topics need weight. Some topics need the reader to stop, sit down, and breathe with the words for a while.

This is one of those topics.

Because we need to talk about it.

Not in a cruel way.

Not in a gossipy way.

Not in a way that makes spectacle out of another woman’s grief.

But in a serious way.

A human way.

A truthful way.

Video Feature:
Life, Take Two! — “It’s All Fake”
Creator: Jennie Gage / Life, Take Two!

I could answer the writing prompt a hundred different ways.

Life has given me more than one moment where the floor shifted, the script cracked, and I realized the world I had been taught to understand was not the whole world at all. Sometimes those moments came through grief. Sometimes through motherhood. Sometimes through marriage. Sometimes through politics. Sometimes through meditation. Sometimes through the slow, uncomfortable education of simply living long enough to realize that certainty is not the same thing as truth.

But this time, the question came through a video.

I started watching Jennie Gage from Life, Take Two! talk about Erika Kirk, performance, grief, femininity, public image, and the word “grift.” I expected to write a Reverb. I expected to respond to a video, pull out key moments, and offer commentary the way I often do.

Instead, I found myself sitting inside something much larger.

Because this is not only about Erika Kirk.

It is not only about Jennie Gage.

It is not only about one woman, one speech, one movement, one public image, one belief system, or one video.

It is about the script.

Who writes it.

Who performs it.

Who profits from it.

Who gets trapped inside it.

And what it costs us to finally tell the truth.

I want to be clear before this piece goes any further: I am not writing this to attack Erika Kirk. I am not writing this to mock grief. I am not writing this to claim I can decode another woman’s private heart.

Her loss is tragic. I cannot imagine the horror of losing a spouse violently and publicly, under the weight of cameras, commentary, politics, outrage, and expectation. I have written before that grief deserves dignity, and I still believe that.

But grief does not erase the public stage.

And it does not erase the question this video opened for me:

What happens when a woman becomes useful to a movement not simply because of what she believes, but because of what she performs?

That is where this begins.

Not with condemnation.

With concern.

With observation.

With the uneasy feeling that something much bigger is happening beneath the surface.

The Word That Would Not Leave

Jennie’s video circles around the word “grift,” and I will admit, at first, I stumbled over it.

Not because I thought she was entirely wrong. Under the definition she gives, the word makes sense. She describes grift as a kind of crafted persona or belief system performed for money, power, acceptance, influence, or status.

That is not nothing.

That is a real pattern.

But the word carries weight.

It can sound like a clean accusation: she knows exactly what she is doing. She is consciously deceiving people. She is faking grief, faith, femininity, loyalty, or love for gain.

And I do not know that.

I cannot know that.

That is where I want to be careful.

Because one of the dangers of writing about public women is the temptation to flatten them into symbols before we have finished remembering they are human beings. Erika Kirk is not only a public figure. She is also a person. A widow. A mother. A woman with a private history I do not fully know.

But the more I sat with the word, the more I realized it would not leave because the deeper issue really is trust.

Grift is not only about money.

It is about the manipulation of trust.

It is about performing sincerity in a way that gains power, access, loyalty, protection, influence, or status. It is about knowing which words people want to hear and arranging yourself around those words until the performance becomes useful.

And that is where the conversation became bigger than Erika Kirk.

Because when I hear “grift” in this moment, I do not only think about one woman on a stage. I think about a country where trust itself feels like it is being stolen in broad daylight.

Faith gets used as packaging.

Family gets used as packaging.

Freedom gets used as packaging.

Patriotism gets used as packaging.

Grief gets used as packaging.

Truth gets used as packaging.

And underneath all that packaging, people are still being manipulated, divided, distracted, and told to call the performance reality.

That is the theft.

That is the grift.

Maybe the question is not whether Jennie’s use of the word makes us uncomfortable.
Maybe the question is whether we are willing to follow that discomfort all the way down.

Because at its core, grift is not always a man in a cheap suit selling fake miracle cures from the back of a wagon. Sometimes it is softer than that. Sometimes it is prettier. Sometimes it wears curls and lip gloss and scripture. Sometimes it smiles from a stage. Sometimes it cries into a microphone. Sometimes it tells women they are free while handing them a smaller cage.

And sometimes, most painfully, the person performing it may not fully understand where the performance ends and the self begins.

That is the part that bothers me.

That is the part that feels human.

That is the part that made this video linger.

The Script Women Are Handed

Jennie talks about performance femininity, and this is where the video stopped being only about Erika.

I want to be clear with language here. This is not performative feminism. Feminism, at its core, is about the autonomy, equality, and full personhood of women.

What Jennie is describing is performance femininity.

The trained performance of acceptable womanhood.

Be soft.

Be pretty.

Be modest.

Be nurturing.

Be desirable, but not too sexual.

Be smart, but not intimidating.

Be confident, but not arrogant.

Be different, but not difficult.

Be honest, but do not wound the room.

Be strong, but not threatening.

Be independent, but not too independent.

Be careful with men.

Be careful with women.

Be careful with your body.

Be careful with your voice.

Be careful with your appetite.

Be careful with your ambition.

Be careful with yourself.

That list may look different depending on where you were raised, what religion shaped your home, what kind of men held authority around you, what your mother carried, what your grandmother survived, what your church taught, what your community rewarded, and what your body looked like when the world started noticing it.

But the pattern is familiar.

Girls are often taught to become readable before they are taught to become free.

Readable to parents.

Readable to men.

Readable to churches.

Readable to future husbands.

Readable to social systems.

Readable to audiences.

Readable to brands.

Readable to power.

I was not raised Mormon. I was not raised in Scottsdale. My mother never handed me a book telling me how to prepare myself every day for my husband, and for that I am grateful, because that feels like its own unique brand of trauma.

But I was not immune.

None of us are immune to the culture we are raised inside.

I grew up around evangelical belief, mixed religious ideologies, and family systems that carried their own contradictions. Some of the training I received came through my father. He worried about how his daughters would interact with men. He taught me, in different ways, that men’s egos were fragile, that I needed to be gentle, careful, aware.

I do not say that to villainize him.

I say it because this is how generational training often works.

People pass down what they believe will protect you, even when the protection becomes another kind of cage.

That is one of the hardest things about growing up.

You begin to realize that not every cage was built out of cruelty.

Some were built out of fear.

Some were built out of love that had never been allowed to examine itself.

Some were built by people who were also handed cages and told they were homes.

Girls learn early to monitor the room.

We learn to soften our tone before we even fully understand our own voice.

We learn to manage how we are perceived.

We learn that our bodies can become someone else’s concern, someone else’s temptation, someone else’s moral battleground.

Jennie tells a story about being pulled aside by a bishop after speaking in church because of her shirt. Not because of her words. Not because of her effort. Not because of her humanity.

Her neckline.

That moment is not just about a shirt.

It is about surveillance.

It is about a grown man feeling entitled to comment on a woman’s body in a religious setting and frame that correction as spiritual care. It is about adult preoccupation with sex, modesty, purity, temptation, and control bleeding directly into how girls and women are taught to exist in their own bodies.

Children are not born ashamed of their bodies.

Shame is taught.

Surveillance is taught.

The idea that a girl’s body is responsible for the spiritual condition of the room is taught.

That does not mean every conversation about clothing, safety, discernment, or self-presentation is harmful. Parents do have to guide children. Communities do have values.

But there is a difference between teaching discernment and teaching a girl that her body is a problem other people must manage.

That is how performance femininity gets installed.

A woman learns to see herself from outside herself.

How am I being perceived?

Am I respectable?

Am I modest enough?

Am I feminine enough?

Am I safe for this room?

Am I representing the brand?

And eventually, if no one interrupts the script, she may mistake that surveillance for virtue.

A Woman Is Not a Brand

One moment in Jennie’s video stayed with me more than I expected.

She talked about how she used to ask whether she was “representing the brand” before leaving the house. Not whether she looked cute. Not whether she felt like herself. Whether she was representing the brand.

Then she admitted she still says it sometimes and added, almost casually, that she should probably stop doing that.

And I found myself thinking:

Yes.

You should.

Not because I am judging her. Not because I do not understand how old language lingers in the mouth long after the mind has begun to change.

But because she is not a brand.

She is a human being.

And that matters.

Jennie says that when she first asked her partner Kevin whether she was representing the brand, he thought she was insane. Honestly, that reaction matters. Sometimes the person outside the system can hear the old script more clearly than the person who survived it.

To Jennie, the phrase had history. It had muscle memory. It belonged to an old world of image, approval, religious performance, and being watched.

To Kevin, it sounded absurd — because it was absurd.

Not because Jennie was absurd.

Because the system that taught her to think of herself as a brand was absurd.

The phrases we repeat are not harmless just because they are familiar. They become little grooves in the mind. They reinforce old roles, old loyalties, old fears, old versions of the self that may no longer be true.

A sentence can become a leash if we keep saying it after we have outgrown the system that taught it to us.

That is part of becoming.

Sometimes growth is not dramatic. Sometimes it is not a grand exit, a public declaration, or a complete reinvention. Sometimes it is noticing the old phrase before it leaves your mouth and asking:

Do I still believe this?

Am I representing the brand?

Or am I living as myself?

That is not a small distinction.

Because if love requires truth, then truth also requires alignment. It requires noticing when the words we breathe no longer match the life we are trying to build.

When Ambition Needs to Be Baptized

Jennie’s reading of Erika’s phrase “written on my heart” is one of the most interesting moments in the video.

She argues that the phrase reveals something deeper than religious language. It may be Erika’s way of making ambition acceptable inside a world that does not always know what to do with ambitious women.

I do not know Erika Kirk’s private heart.

I do not know whether leadership, motherhood, faith, public influence, or self-reliance sit at the center of her true values.

But I do think the phrase matters.

“God wrote this on my heart” does a very specific kind of work.

It authorizes her.

In a movement that tells women they are called to nurture while men are called to lead, a woman stepping into major public leadership has to explain herself. She cannot simply say, “I am capable.” She cannot simply say, “I want to lead.” She cannot simply say, “This work matters to me.”

She has to frame leadership as obedience.

That is not a small contradiction.

That is the system revealing itself.

If a woman must invoke divine assignment to justify holding power, then the problem is not her ambition.

The problem is the audience that needs her ambition baptized before it can accept it.

This is where Paula White came to mind for me — a longtime religious-political figure in Trump’s orbit who has helped wrap political power in spiritual language.

Not because she and Erika Kirk occupy the same role.

They do not.

But both reveal how useful religious language can become around power. Paula White does not merely support political power; she helps sanctify it. She gives it spiritual vocabulary. She makes ambition sound like assignment, proximity sound like calling, and loyalty sound like faith.

And that is the larger pattern.

The problem is not women leading.

The problem is women being required to translate leadership into submission before the room will tolerate it.

The Women Who Sell the Script

This is also where I thought again about Pearl Davis.

Pearl may not be the same kind of Christian woman as Erika Kirk. She may not come from the same religious background Jennie describes. But she gravitates toward the same side of the argument because that side rewards women who sell the script.

Submit.

Soften.

Obey.

Let men lead.

Reject feminism.

Return to tradition.

But look closely, and the contradiction becomes hard to miss. Many of the women selling this script are not actually living the quiet, submissive lives they prescribe for everyone else.

They are public figures.

They are entrepreneurs.

They are speakers.

They are content creators.

They are brand-builders.

They are using the freedom feminism helped secure while telling other women feminism ruined them.

That is not tradition.

That is performance.

And performance becomes dangerous when it is sold as truth.

Pearl matters here because she reveals the performance from another angle. She is not merely talking about submission from the privacy of a traditional household. She built a public platform by telling women to retreat from the very freedoms she uses to speak, build, earn, and influence.

She uses an aggressive, autonomous, highly public form of power to sell passivity as virtue.

That contradiction is not a side note.

It is the point.

I want to be clear here: my issue is not women in power.

Women should hold power. Women should lead. Women should govern, argue, build, negotiate, legislate, command rooms, shape institutions, and speak with authority.

I reject the old, tired claim that women are too emotional, too unstable, too hysterical, too feminine, or too biologically unsuited for leadership. That argument has been used for generations to keep women out of rooms where decisions about their lives were being made.

My issue is not women holding power.

My issue is women performing domination-system power and calling it liberation.

Women can participate in harmful systems too. Women can protect cruel hierarchies. Women can sell scripts that shrink other women. Women can become messengers for the machinery.

That does not mean they are weak.

That is what makes the performance so revealing.

They are powerful women helping sell a script that tells other women to be smaller.

And we need to be honest about that.

Not because we hate women.

Because we respect women too much to pretend that all female power is automatically liberating.

Power still has to be examined.

Even when a woman holds it.

Especially when a woman uses it to tell other women to kneel.

When the Audience Moves Into Your Head

There is a point where performance stops being something you put on and becomes something you consult.

The audience moves into your head.

What will they think?

What will they say?

What will they punish?

What will they call holy?

What will they call rebellious?

What will they call feminine?

What will they call selfish?

Jennie describes this from her own life when she says she did not ask herself how many children she wanted, but how many children she needed to have so people would see her as righteous.

That sentence matters because it shows the shift from desire to performance.

From selfhood to optics.

From choice to script.

I cannot say what Erika Kirk is asking herself in private. But I can say that movements built on rigid roles make private desire harder to hear.

That is the danger of the mask.

It does not only hide you from other people.

It can eventually hide you from yourself.

When women in these systems lead, they often have to lead in disguise. Leadership becomes obedience. Ambition becomes calling. Power becomes sacrifice. And the woman herself becomes a walking explanation for why her authority does not violate the rules she is still expected to preach.

That is exhausting.

And it is not freedom.

The Mask We Mistook for a Face

Near the end of the video, Jennie talks about her hair.

She says she spent her whole life performing Jennie instead of simply being Jennie. She says her fakery days are over. She says she does not care what people think.

And then she admits that, for a moment, she did.

She changed her hair because her audience was reacting to how she looked.

That moment matters because it is honest.

It shows that leaving a system does not automatically remove the system from your nervous system. Sometimes you leave one audience and find yourself performing for another. Sometimes you stop trying to please the church, the husband, the movement, the family, the ideology — only to realize you are still asking, in some quieter form:

How am I being read?

I understand that more than I wish I did.

I have been performing in one way or another for much of my life. Not always consciously. Not always dramatically. Sometimes performance looks like being careful. Sometimes it looks like being agreeable. Sometimes it looks like being strong. Sometimes it looks like being the one who understands, manages, absorbs, explains, softens, survives.

I am fifty years old, and I am still learning how to fit inside this world with an identity that has been changing for years.

It did not all happen at fifty.

Becoming is rarely that sudden.

But it has taken years to unwind what happened, how I interpreted it, what I carried, what I thought was mine, and what was really someone else’s script living inside my body.

Sometimes I feel slow to the party. Like everyone else figured out how to be real before I did.

But maybe that is not true.

Maybe many of us are still figuring it out.

Maybe we are all walking around with masks we inherited so young that we mistook them for our faces.

And I want to be clear: living your truth does not mean putting every private thing on display. Privacy matters. Boundaries matter. Not every wound belongs to the public. Not every story needs an audience.

There is a difference between privacy and performance.

Privacy protects what is sacred.

Performance protects what is false.

Maybe the work is not to rip off every mask at once. Maybe the work is slower than that. Maybe we notice one phrase, one posture, one fear, one old reflex at a time.

Maybe we ask:

Does this still belong to me?

Is this still true?

Or am I still trying to be readable to an audience that no longer gets to define me?

That is becoming.

Not perfection.

Not exposure.

Not confession for the sake of confession.

Alignment.

Turning the Lens Inward

And this is where I have to turn the lens inward, because it would be too easy to analyze women on screens and stages without admitting that these scripts also move through ordinary homes, loving families, good parents, and complicated histories.

This is where I think about my own mother, and I want to be careful because I love my parents. I am not interested in reducing their marriage, their choices, or their lives into a public lesson. They are whole people, with stories and wounds and histories of their own.

They are good people.

They have been good parents.

They led from love, even when some of the lessons I absorbed were complicated, incomplete, or shaped by their own histories.

That is part of growing older. You begin to realize that the adults who raised you were not simply right or wrong. They were people. Layered people. People with their own childhoods, their own pain, their own faith, their own survival strategies, their own misunderstandings, their own hopes for you.

If you knew the complexity of their stories, you would understand why certain things looked the way they did.

That does not mean every lesson was true.

It means every lesson came from somewhere.

My mother was raised in a conservative Christian home. She is brilliant. An author. An engineer. A woman with a mind that has always amazed me. And yet, growing up, I sometimes found myself wondering why someone so capable, so intelligent, so powerful in her own right, had to carry so much.

I have looked at her life and seen strength.

But I have also seen weight.

That is where weaponized incompetence becomes more than a phrase from the internet. It becomes a family system. A household rhythm. A quiet transfer of responsibility so normalized that the person carrying the most begins to wonder what she did to deserve it.

But maybe she did not do anything to deserve it.

Maybe none of us did.

Maybe women have been culturally positioned to absorb the weight of the world and then blame themselves for feeling tired.

I know that weight in my own way. My life is different. My marriage is different. My household is different. I am grateful for the team I have. But I also know what it feels like to be the manager of invisible things — the remembering, the planning, the emotional weather, the next step, the backup plan, the quiet keeping of the whole machine.

The mental load is enormous.

And if I can say that from my life, then I have to imagine the weight my mother carries in hers is enormous in ways I am still only beginning to understand.

This is why I keep coming back to Sliver.

My parents had theirs.

I have mine.

My children will have theirs.

We are all born into someone else’s unfinished understanding before we ever get the chance to build our own.

The work is not to blame every person who handed us a script. Sometimes they handed it to us because they thought it would protect us. Sometimes they thought it was truth. Sometimes it was the only language they had for love.

But becoming requires discernment.

What was love?

What was fear?

What was culture?

What was religion?

What was survival?

What was never mine to carry?

Psychology as Discernment

I also want to be careful about my own authority here.

I am not a doctor. I am not writing from a place of clinical authority. I am writing from study, lived experience, reflection, and a deep respect for the complexity of human behavior.

That matters.

Because psychology gives language to patterns people often live inside without being able to name.

Why do people perform?

Why do people obey?

Why do people defend systems that hurt them?

Why do children absorb adult fear as truth?

Why do women learn to manage men’s emotions?

Why do people mistake certainty for wisdom?

Why do old scripts feel like identity?

These are not small questions.

This is one reason I believe psychology should be taught much earlier and much more broadly. Not as a replacement for faith. Not as a weapon against family. Not as a way to tell children what to think.

As a way to help them understand themselves.

Children should learn the basics of the brain. The nervous system. Emotions. Fear responses. Attachment. Boundaries. Cognitive bias. Groupthink. Manipulation. Empathy. Accountability. How memory works. How stress works. How belief can shape perception.

Imagine how different the world might look if people understood their own minds before someone else learned how to exploit them.

To me, psychology is not a replacement for meaning.

It is a tool for discernment.

It helps us understand the sliver we are standing in — how it was shaped, what it can see, what it may be missing, and how to become responsible for the way we move through the world from that place.

The Grace Gap

This is where my earlier writing about the grace gap comes back to me.

Most people do not understand how profoundly limited their own perspective can be. We move through the world with our own maps, our own wounds, our own assumptions, and our own emotional histories. Then we meet someone standing somewhere else and assume they are irrational, ignorant, malicious, or defective.

But often they are standing in a different patch of light.

That does not mean every belief is harmless.

It does not mean every opinion deserves equal weight.

It does not mean cruelty becomes acceptable because someone was shaped by something.

But it does mean understanding requires more than reaction.

This is what is missing from so much of public life right now.

Thoughtfulness.

Not politeness for the sake of politeness.

Not sweetness for the sake of silence.

Not “both sides” cowardice.

Thoughtfulness.

The willingness to ask where a belief came from. Who benefits from it. What wound it protects. What fear it feeds. What truth it avoids. What person it reduces. What system it serves.

That is the gap psychology can help thin.

Not close completely.

Thin.

Because the world is too layered for easy answers. There are billions of people on this planet, which means billions of windows, billions of nervous systems, billions of histories, billions of attempts to make sense of being alive.

We are nervous systems reacting to a modernized world that often disconnects us from the actual world — the ground, the sky, the body, the breath, the grass beneath our feet.

And into that disconnection comes the script.

The algorithm.

The sermon.

The influencer.

The politician.

The brand.

The movement.

The grift.

And that brings me back to Jennie, because she is not outside this system either. None of us are. Even the person naming the performance still has to survive inside a culture that rewards performance.

Even Liberation Gets Branded

Jennie’s video ends in a complicated place.

She gets emotional. She says she feels like she is talking to herself. She says that if she had a few minutes with Erika Kirk, she would tell her to let it all go and live her life.

I understand why that moved her.

Jennie sees the issue clearly from her sliver. She has lived close enough to certain systems to recognize their architecture. She understands what can go into creating a woman who performs for approval, faith, power, and belonging.

I have written about Jennie before. I respect the courage it takes to publicly deconstruct. Transformation is fragile. It requires compassion as much as it requires truth.

But then the video does something that complicates itself.

Jennie moves from an emotional invitation — let it all go, live your life, come to the other side of cults — into merchandise.

I am not saying that to shame her. Creators have to survive. Platforms reward branding. Commentary channels sell shirts, mugs, water bottles, phrases, inside jokes. That is the internet we built.

But it is still worth noticing.

Because even a critique of performance now has to move through performance.

Even a critique of grift can become branded.

Even a plea for liberation can end with a product link.

That does not make Jennie wrong.

It makes the whole thing more revealing.

That moment does not cancel Jennie’s message. It confirms the problem. Even liberation now has to pass through branding. Even deconstruction has to survive the algorithm. Even the woman saying, in essence, “you are not a brand” is still forced to exist inside a system that asks her to become one.

Maybe that is why this piece feels different from my earlier Reverb about Jennie. Then, I was focused on the courage of leaving MAGA. Now, I am thinking about what happens after leaving — when the old performance is gone, but the new platform still has its own demands.

The audience still watches.

The algorithm still rewards.

The brand still forms around you, even when your message is that you are not a brand.

That is not hypocrisy as much as it is evidence of the water we are all swimming in.

Power Hides Inside Trusted Language

This is why the world has started to look cult-like to me.

Not because every person belongs to a literal cult.

Not because every church is a cult.

Not because every believer is manipulated.

But because the architecture keeps repeating.

The performance.

The script.

The loyalty test.

The sacred language.

The enemy.

The protected leader.

The woman turned into a symbol.

The survivor asked to prove what power already knows.

The public trained to doubt its own eyes.

Power learns how to hide inside trusted language.

Faith.

Family.

Freedom.

Tradition.

Love.

Protection.

Calling.

Order.

And once those words are captured, people can be trained to defend almost anything as long as it arrives wrapped in language they were taught to trust.

When the Story Stops Matching the Script

This is also where the larger cultural wound matters. When people lose trust in institutions, they do not lose it in a vacuum. They lose it because over and over again, powerful people have shown the public that certain kinds of harm can be hidden, protected, excused, or delayed until ordinary people are left trying to piece together the truth from fragments.

That is why Epstein still haunts the cultural conversation.

Not because every public rumor should be believed.

Not because every online speculation deserves oxygen.

But because Epstein revealed a sickness people cannot unsee: wealth protecting exploitation, institutions failing victims, powerful people moving through hidden networks, and truth arriving far too late.

In another Reverb reflection, I wrote about Epstein as an x-ray of elite protection — not merely one man’s evil, but the architecture that allowed harm to remain comfortable around wealth, access, and power.

That larger concern matters here because the same question keeps returning:

What are ordinary people trained to ignore so powerful systems can keep functioning?

I have also written about the moment Epstein began cracking MAGA’s own mythology — when loyalty, conspiracy, exposure, and political self-protection started colliding in public. That was another version of the same problem: the story stopped matching the script.

This is why I keep returning to these cultural fractures in my writing.

Epstein.

MAGA.

Christian nationalism.

Trad-wife content.

Public grief.

Political performance.

They may look like separate topics, but they keep teaching the same lesson:

When power controls the script, truth becomes something ordinary people have to fight to recover.

Once people have seen that kind of rot, they start looking for it everywhere.

Sometimes they are right to be suspicious.

Sometimes they are wrong about the target.

But the suspicion itself comes from a real wound.

And this is part of why the conversation becomes so hard.

Because people are trying to make sense of nonsense.

People are trying to interpret public performances in a country where the line between politics, entertainment, religion, branding, and propaganda has become dangerously thin.

People are trying to understand why so many powerful people keep asking for trust they have not earned.

People are trying to understand why women are still being sold submission by women who are not submissive.

People are trying to understand why so much cruelty keeps arriving wrapped in words like love, family, truth, and faith.

And that is why I do not want to stay sweet for systems that rely on silence.

Sweetness has its place.

Gentleness has its place.

Compassion has its place.

But when “sweet” becomes a command to endure confusion, shrink from truth, tolerate control, or smile through harm, it is no longer virtue.

It is training.

This is not about polite society anymore.

It is about learning how to tell the truth without losing our humanity.

The Script Beneath the Grift

So I come back to Erika Kirk.

Carefully.

Not to decode her.

Not to claim I know where belief ends and performance begins.

Not to say her grief is fake.

I do not know what grief sounds like when the cameras are gone.

But I do know what it looks like when a movement turns a woman into a symbol.

I do know what it looks like when public grief becomes messaging.

I do know what it looks like when faith becomes branding.

I do know what it looks like when gender roles are softened into “calling.”

I do know what it looks like when women in power tell other women to be smaller.

And I do know what it looks like when the script is treated as truth.

Maybe Erika believes every word she says.

Maybe she is performing some of it.

Maybe both are true.

Human beings are complicated that way.

But the public question remains:

Who benefits from the performance?

Who is being asked to trust it?

Who is being told to shrink because of it?

Who is being handed the script next?

That is why this matters.

Not because one woman is fake.

Because millions of people are being trained to mistake performance for truth.

Truth Under Love

I recently wrote about growing out of fairy tales, about how marriage, love, and family are often sold to girls as a finish line instead of a living, complicated structure that requires truth, effort, autonomy, and time.

That matters here.

Because the “happily ever after” script is not harmless when it teaches girls to wait for rescue, mistake structure for safety, or call endurance love.

I have also written about love as part of the meaning of life.

I still believe that.

But this piece has made me sit with something deeper.

Maybe at the root of love is truth.

Not truth as cruelty.

Not truth as domination.

Not truth as “I am right and you are evil.”

Truth as care.

Truth as clarity.

Truth as the refusal to let people be manipulated by beautiful words wrapped around harmful systems.

Love without truth becomes performance.

Faith without truth becomes control.

Tradition without truth becomes confinement.

Grief without truth becomes propaganda.

Family without truth becomes a stage where everyone plays a role and no one is allowed to speak honestly about the cost.

That is why we have to unwind this.

Not just for women.

For all of us.

Little girls are scripted.

Little boys are scripted.

Men are wounded too.

People across the full spectrum of identity are shaped by families, faiths, cultures, algorithms, schools, politics, and pain.

But this particular thread runs through womanhood in a specific way because so many girls are taught to become readable before they are taught to become free.

We do not unwind this by staying sweet.

We unwind it by becoming thoughtful.

By learning psychology.

By questioning scripts.

By refusing grift.

By protecting truth.

By telling the difference between love and control.

By remembering that every person is standing in a sliver — but no one’s sliver is the whole sky.

CherryCoBiz did not begin because I planned to write about all of this.

I did not set out to become someone tracing the threads between wellness, politics, faith, media, psychology, gender, and truth.

But the world flipped the script, and I had to pay closer attention.

And once you start paying attention, the categories do not stay separate.

Wellness is not separate from politics when policy shapes bodies.

Faith is not separate from psychology when belief shapes fear.

Gender is not separate from power when children are taught scripts before they can question them.

Truth is not separate from love when love without truth becomes performance.

So if you ask me what moment made me question reality, maybe it was not one moment at all.

Maybe it was the slow accumulation of moments where the script cracked.

The fairy tale cracked.

The political performance cracked.

The religious certainty cracked.

The gender role cracked.

The public grief cracked.

The brand cracked.

And underneath it all, I kept finding the same question:

What is true?

Not what was handed to me.

Not what was performed for me.

Not what was sold to me.

Not what someone told me love required.

What is true?

That is the work.

That is the beginning of freedom.

And maybe that is how we start to find our way back to one another.

Not by pretending we see the whole picture.

But by telling the truth from our sliver, listening for the truth in someone else’s, and refusing to let any system turn our humanity into a role we were never born to play.