As very proudly proletarian, and in opposition to acceptable bourgeois femininity. Like if I can’t wear where I’ve ended up as a badge of pride, I’m back to feeling like a failure for not managing to be college educated, middle class and respectable.
I can’t be respectable, so I’ll be aggressively disrespectable. Aspiration isn’t an option for me, I couldn’t do that with the deck stacked near perfectly for me, so I feel like that’s pretty much a “Not in a million years” for me now.
So like being aggressively “prole” and being proud of how hard I work, and of managing to keep struggling with shit even when life is scary and hard is kind of what I have in terms of an identity that allows me to keep functioning because it doesn’t make me feel like a failure for not achieving “more”