Being your own muse

On women fighting erasure from their own lives

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Here is my essay this week, about how I accidentally cancelled my boyfriend on TikTok. Hope you enjoy…

For whatever reason—whether it’s how I look, how I behave romantically, how I am wired through nature and nurture, or the situations I consciously or subconsciously put myself in—I have been considered, in several circumstances, to be a “muse.”

The muse has existed since the dawn of time, usually defined as a beautiful woman with a “je ne sais quoi” who inspires a “genius” man to create. Male artists are most known to be inspired by muses, but inventors, architects, entrepreneurs, scientists, and many others can have muses.

Sometimes the muse’s contribution is quantifiable in financial terms, in that her image is sold for a certain price, or she is literally a co-collaborator as a writer or filmmaker or business partner. Other times she is nebulous, unspoken, in between the shadows and light: giving a charged glance that says “keep going,” sharing a stream of consciousness during pillow talk that sparks a real idea, and providing dozens of composite pieces of advice that could, if measured, be assembled into a whole.

We are hesitant to measure the contributions of the muse tangibly, though, because that would be at odds with her dynamic. For a muse to add up everything she has contributed and present it in a slide deck like a forensic accountant would be totally contradictory to her purpose and her somewhat-enigmatic being, at odds with the romance and beauty of the magic imbued within a creatively-inspired relationship.

Recently, an art collector connected my painter boyfriend to a documentary film crew. I was thrilled for him when he told me; after a few difficult years for him I was genuinely ecstatic that his work was getting interest. The documentary crew came by the studio one day, so I left the house and told him I’d be back at 1pm for my Zoom appointment.

When I opened the door to my home, I encountered a group of people bewildered to see me entering my home and my personal space, about to start my video call. My boyfriend gestured to the two paintings of me on the wall, noting “this is Ari, those are paintings of her.” From my vantage point, the documentary crew looked a bit baffled to see me there. He chalks it up to me walking in suddenly and one of the documentary filmmakers being a stoic Russian woman who had a harsh affect.

But when he told me that they wanted to understand him, the painter, and that I had to be “out of the apartment” from 9am to 3pm so he could be in his “natural element” and speak privately—something rubbed me the wrong way.

I have been told in my relationship that my energy, presence, joy, and emotional support in past scenarios had led to him feeling confident enough to fight for his art career. They wanted to watch him put down the Murphy bed in which we both sleep to show his live-work situation, but not show a trace of my face creams on my nightstand.

Beyond this, I was being asked to leave my personal space. Although it contains both of our names on the lease, I came to understand that he still views this primarily as his art studio, not as a place where we both live and work.

Many women in their early 30s have spent over a decade “taking up space,” pushing for equity in an inherently unequal financial and physical world. How many women have pushed to be noticed and compensated and to have our needs met? Or kicked out of our spaces if we don’t have the financial upper-hand; told we are asking too much for requesting simple courtesies?

I was annoyed, and I needed an outlet to share my feelings. I posted a TikTok explaining the situation, asking for advice. My qualms were with the documentary filmmakers, positing that it was strange to film an artist in his studio and to not inherently assume that a woman living in the art studio is part of the “natural habitat.”

But nearly 200,000 views and over 1,500 comments later, people from across the internet were in on the debate, saying that I should scoop my cat and leave my boyfriend and the Murphy bed immediately. They invoked the muses and painters’ wives and girlfriends of eras past, told me to focus on myself and stop being some guy’s muse, and insisted that I follow my gut instincts, whatever they may be. It was my boyfriend’s issue for not insisting that I be in the space, not the documentary filmmakers, they said.

My boyfriend was bothered for some time, but then took it all in stride; joking when I was approached in an art gala by a woman who liked my TikTok that he had become the most hated man on the internet. Some of my boyfriend’s conventional finance friends who don’t love my content creation (ha) circulated it among their friend group, with one particularly bro-y guy in the group texting my boyfriend: “Run.”

And herein lies the conundrum for the muse: if she activates any bit of her ego and takes a stance in such situation, she is an opportunist, “high maintenance,” or dangerous in some way to her partner’s reputation. But if she removes her ego from it all, murmuring in a sultry manner “it’s all cool babe” to everything he wants, then she risks fading into obscurity, remaining a memory rather than a fixed, tangible entity that traverses past the inspiration of one euphoric moment to the next. It’s hard to win either way.

And even if I were asked to lie naked in front of the camera the whole time for these documentarians, that doesn’t solve the problem of erasure either.

Case in point: several years ago I was set up with a high-profile actor thirty years my senior. We went on a group date together. He texted me once I left that he was “dazzled” and invited me to a very public event at the Kennedy Center with the Clooneys. Bringing me to a human rights gala onto the red carpet was perhaps the opposite of me hiding away in a cafe as my boyfriend talked about his solo artistry and his soul.

But here, although I would not be physically erased from the equation, I would be promoted as a sort of arm candy, even if not just by him, by society—a different kind of erasure. This would be an erasure of my career and my intelligence and my human rights work, condensed into a tabloid article about how “[A-list actor’s] new girlfriend is 30 years younger than him.” So I decided not to go.

I don’t think the TikTok commenters coming to my defense are right about a lot of things, as a two-minute TikTok can only convey so much nuance, and there is a lot of love in the relationship with my boyfriend—as well as boundary-setting issues he has in himself that could have led him to cave to whatever the filmmakers wanted. Only a fuller piece of writing, maybe even a novel could really encapsulate the complexities of a relationship.

But they are right about one thing: it is okay for women to have an ego. And if he tells you that you are are taking up too much space? Well, darlings, be your own muse.