rethinking loyalty

Thelma & Louise, Kristi Noem, and learning to exit the matrix

This past weekend, one of my closest girlfriends and I — the kind you can cry in front of with no explanation needed — met on one of those delicious edge-of-spring evenings for drinks and snacks, then walked a few blocks to a renovated Greyhound bus station–turned–theatre to watch Thelma & Louise, which originally came out in 1991.

Popcorn in hand, we settled into our seats, smiling with anticipatory nostalgia. I hadn't seen the film since my early twenties, a newly-minted college graduate heading into the 'what's next' portion of my life. Beyond the baby Brad Pitt hotel room scenes and the memory of two women driving off a cliff at the end, the plot had been lost to me entirely.

I had forgotten how small Thelma’s life was. I didn’t recall that her husband treated her like a piece of furniture whose main purpose was to keep him comfortable. Or that she and her older friend Louise, a waitress, were heading out for what was meant to be a simple girls’ weekend with fishing poles in the back seat.

I hadn’t remembered that beautiful, naïve young Thelma — who had moved directly from adolescence into marriage and was now wearing an absolutely enviable hot-cute prairie skirt, pearl-beaded baby blue jean jacket, and fully glossed lips — had been loyal to every expectation placed on her, while hungry for the fullness of a world she hadn’t yet had the chance to touch.

I had also forgotten about the roadhouse bar. The suave stranger, Harlan, who bought them drinks and danced with Thelma while Louise watched, wary, from their table across the room. I didn’t recall that, when Thelma felt tipsy, he guided her outside to the parking lot — where, after she resisted his advances, he shoved her face against the hood of a car and pulled down his pants to take what he believed was owed to him.

I hadn’t remembered that Louise, concerned and looking for her friend, arrived with a gun.

And that after he backed off, as they chose to walk away, he smugly declared that he should have finished the job.

Louise, in a moment that carried the weight of every man like him, turned around and shot him dead.

In an instant, the power they had surrendered to a system they had spent their lives being faithful to was reclaimed. And from that point forward, something shifted — not just in the story, but inside them.

With it came the knowledge that they were now on their own without protection, trying to outrun the system that had never protected them to begin with.

Two women on borrowed time, finally living for themselves.

The woman who introduced the film told us it was being screened as part of Women’s History Month — a tribute to Callie Khouri, who, in her early thirties, became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

I wondered what had prompted her to write it. What she had seen, or what had been done to her — or done in front of her, or done to someone she loved. What she knew and needed to give voice to.

I also wondered about my younger self watching this film in her early twenties from a comfortable distance — as if it were someone else’s story.

That wasn’t going to be my story.

I was a good girl.

And then it hit me. I had watched it for the first time safely curled up next to my boyfriend. The man who, according to the plan that had been laid out for me, was the next right step for me to take.

My husband of twenty-four years.

I. Was. Thelma.

I just didn’t know it.

I had been told — and believed — that I was different. Educated. Independent. Too aware to ever end up inside an unfortunate story like that.

Yet distance is not a substitute for clarity.

I was operating from a conditioning that told me what happened in that parking lot was about other kinds of women. Careless women. Women who hadn’t been resourced enough, good enough, smart enough.

That if you followed the rules, none of this would happen to you.

As the lights came up and people filed out, my friend and I turned and looked at one another, tears streaming down our faces.

We were the last ones to leave the theatre.

You know that feeling when a piece of art reaches through time and finds you?

That.

---

Just days before our evening out, while reading comments on my most recent Substack piece, what happens when women stop smoothing it over, a male subscriber sent me a message.

This man and I had corresponded before, after realizing we’d both spent time at the same retreat center in Todos Santos, Mexico. He had read a recent note I’d posted about my anger with the world — and how much of it tracks back to men and privilege: the Epstein files, the U.S. men’s hockey team, Trump’s seeming untouchability.

I had ended it with a question: Are there any good straight men left?

He came to tell me that he is a good guy. That he is friends with other good guys. That I have it wrong.

Correcting me.

Negating what I feel.

Centering himself.

NOT ALL GUYS, AVALON.

I engaged initially, then I caught myself.

What was I doing?

I noticed something so familiar it almost made me laugh. The discomfort rising, the old machinery warming up. The reflex to de-escalate, to explain myself, to soften what I had shared so he wouldn’t feel personally accused.

To take back the truth of my own words.

To say, of course it’s not all men.

That yes, he is one of the good ones.

I did not.

He kept writing anyway. Message after message came in, piling up against my silence.

I recentered myself, and closed the chat.

When I went back to look at the exchange a few days later, I saw that he had blocked me.

I thought of Harlan’s declaration in the parking lot.

Should have finished the job.

Whether it was shame or an attempt to reclaim some sense of power, I do not know.

But the pattern was clear: I had not given him what he came for.

So I had to be dealt with. Put in my place. The block on a Thursday evening was his version of my face on the car hood.

Loyal to a system he was certain he’d transcended — all while following, message by message, its oldest script.

This led me to wonder: Is the straightforward bad guy worse, or is it really the one who has convinced himself he’s different?

Then I realized: wrong conversation entirely. One I’m tired of getting perpetually sucked into.

Good guy, bad guy. Two ends of the same stick. One takes what he wants. The other needs you to know he’s nothing like the guy who takes what he wants.

In both cases, it’s their stick.

We have held it. Turned it over in our hands. Beaten ourselves with it without anyone asking us to.

The question is whether it’s time to set it down for good.

That’s it. The whole question.

---

When Black Lives Matter emerged, a chorus rose up almost immediately: All Lives Matter.

The people saying it believed they were being honorable. Accurate, even. After all, who could argue with all lives mattering? It presented as a benign move, a reasonable reframing, a gentle reminder that we are all in this together, stumbling through the same wild and bewildering world.

The trouble is, we are not, in fact, all in it together.

Some people carry considerably more than others. The load has never been evenly distributed.

And it was never meant to be.

When we dilute the specific with the general, the particular pain of particular people disappears. Smoothed over, absorbed back into the dominant narrative, returned to baseline — the conversation over before it ever really began.

Thelma and Louise were not in it together with the men trying to hunt them down. The women commenting on my piece and I are not in it together with the man who messaged me through the lens of his own worldview. And saying we are does not make it true. It simply makes the people trying to name the weight seem like the problem for bringing it up in the first place.

I grew up in white culture. I am white culture, in ways I am still uncovering — some of it uncomfortable to sit with, some of it so ambient it barely registers. It just feels like who I am.

And what I’ve begun to notice, the longer I look, is that the particular loyalty I was trained into didn’t even feel like loyalty. It felt like reasonableness. Like kindness. Like being part of a team.

What it does not feel like from the inside is erasure.

Until it does.

Because eventually I discovered that what I’d been erasing is my own self.

This is what I keep unearthing. The man who messaged me needed my observations to be wrong. The All Lives Matter chorus needed Black pain not to be named too clearly.

All of it in service of keeping discomfort contained at a tidy distance.

But the question I can’t stop pulling on is: whose discomfort, exactly, are we managing?

Because it was never really mine.

Which is precisely how the system keeps operating as-is.

The strange thing about seeing a pattern clearly is that you cannot unsee it.

Even when unseeing it would be so much easier.

---

Which brings me back to the man in my chat.

As I sat there watching him type, I slowed myself down and felt my options.

I could press my point — yet he had entered the conversation with no curiosity about my experience. Trying to unlock that door would require my labor.

Or I could smooth it over in thirty seconds. Toss him a couple of reassuring sentences, a virtual little hand job sure to satisfy. Give him what he came for and let him log off relieved.

So easy. So familiar.

Oh yes, Daddy, you are a real man. Thank you for saving me from those terrible ones.

Little strokes of reassurance, the kind that let him leave relieved while I disappear into a role — one I can turn up or down depending on how generous I feel in a given moment.

I suspect every woman reading this knows the particular service I’m talking about. We have been performing it in bedrooms and boardrooms, text threads and dinner tables, for so long it barely registers as anything more than a typical day.

But I did not want to smooth this over.

I wanted my rage to stand without being rerouted through his self-image. I wanted to stop being dismissed for something I was feeling so deeply it surprised even me — a grief, really, about men. About what so many of them have chosen to remain. About what that has cost all of us, including them.

And then something finally clicked.

Our individual choices in these small moments are exactly how the larger system continues.

Or does not.

Not in Instagram reels pointing out mansplaining — but in the tiny, lived exchanges that happen every day, in every register of our lives.

So I chose a third option.

I withdrew my energy entirely.

Being blocked was a little jarring. And also clarifying. Clean, even. He revealed himself so efficiently. No confusion. No performance required.

Just a woman who didn’t give a man what he wanted.

And noted what came next.

His block didn’t cost me anything.

It actually gave me something back.

It made me smile. The quiet kind. The kind that comes from knowing what you want more of.

And less of.

Then acting accordingly.

Every bit of energy I didn’t spend on him stayed inside me.

Alive.

Mine.

---

And then there’s Kristi Noem.

Whatever you think of her politics — and I think quite a lot of things about them — she is a precise illustration of where loyalty to the wrong thing often ends, as it has for legions of women before her.

She gave Trump everything. Remade herself around his approval. Traded whatever independent credibility she once had for proximity to a man whose favor she clearly believed would protect her.

It did not.

She was fired — discarded the moment she stopped being useful, when her loyalty became a liability rather than an asset. We might want to believe it was a culmination of failures. The actual reason is simpler: she had outlived her purpose.

This is the thing about loyalty to power. It doesn’t reward faithfulness. It rewards usefulness, and the moment that ends, so does the arrangement. Noem didn’t fail because she wasn’t loyal enough. She failed because loyalty was never the actual currency.

Like so many women, she believed that if she played the role well enough, the system would hold her.

Most of us know that belief from the inside.

Thelma had been loyal to her husband for years. It made her smaller, not safer. The man in my chat expected my validation as the price of the interaction. Noem devoted herself completely to a man who discarded her the moment it suited him.

The through line is not subtle once you’ve seen it.

That should be sobering for women on the right as well as the left.

The trouble with loyalty is that it promises something it cannot deliver. Safety. Belonging. Protection. The sense that if you give enough of yourself to the right person, the right system, the right idea, it will hold you in return.

It won’t.

Not when the system was never built with you in mind.

---

I write this Substack under the name Avalon.

It is not my real name.

Avalon is a mythical isle — a place of refuge and healing, somewhere between the world as it is and the world as it might be. I chose it deliberately. I have always had a penchant for magic and mystery.

I am writing from the in between.

Not because I am hiding. Because I am building.

I’m writing about deeply personal things — my upbringing, my marriage, my affair. Things that would devastate people I still love. And I still feel the pull not to hurt them.

Some days it sits quietly, like a well-behaved dog on its bed.

Other days it’s tearing the house apart.

The difference now is that I can feel it without obeying it. Without picking up the stick.

Distance was never clarity. And neither is being so close you can’t see at all.

I know now the learning can only happen inside each of us.

As does the remaking.

This isn’t only women’s work. The men who are doing it know who they are — the ones who get curious instead of defensive, who can sit with discomfort without needing someone else to absorb it. They exist. I’m seeing a few of them in my comments.

This is what it actually looks like to be in it together.

Not the smooth, managed, everyone-feels-comfortable version.

The real one.

They don’t need to identify as one of the good ones.

None of us do.

We just need to take responsibility for our own selves.

This is how the foundation changes.

Not from the top down.

From the inside out.

One small act of loyalty to ourselves at a time.