I'm a real! live! girl! Welcome.
I’ve done it. I’ve finally become a real girl. A real! Live! Girl!
Welcome.
I’ve been wanting to launch this project, loloto, for months, but knowing what exactly I had to share kept escaping me. What could I offer anyone in this world? What was my value? Why would anyone want to listen to me?
Then one day, it came to me: “I’m a real girl. A real LIVING girl.”
Remember that pinnacle moment of Pinocchio, when that ridiculous little puppet finally learns how to live a good, true life? His reward is his humanity. Realness. A sense of being an active player in his life, living by his sovereignty and purpose.*
(*So his purpose was actually to take care of his ailing father. Discussions on familial duty vs. conditioning later. :))
I did not become a real girl overnight. For the past three or four years, I’ve orbited my becoming and, like Pinocchio, I was a brat about it. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I dreamt of a life defined by my own standards of beauty, fulfillment, and freedom. Contrarily, I also wanted universal approval and conformity. I wanted results, but not the responsibility. Most of all, I didn't want to have to admit the glaring hypocrisy between what I truly wanted and the frameworks I followed.
There was a price of entry to the life I wanted, and I thought I could get it through a discount code.
Authenticity is not cheap because it cannot be feigned nor rushed. It requires the design and implementation of a whole new operating system. For myself, I’m referring specifically to:
- Diving into my familial lineage, unraveling cultural conditioning
- Exploring and accepting my human design makeup
- Understanding my astrological detriments and exaltations
- Unlearning and revising how I view myself in my relationships (romantic, platonic, familial)
- Trusting that I am the answer to my life.
Seems like a real walk in the park, right?
Yet for every “shadow” I encountered, there was a higher expression of myself waiting to be recognized, invited, and unrestrained. In each wound I uncovered, I also found the medicine.
That's why I am really here:
The more I’ve learned about myself, the more I’ve found a tremendous awe for the human experience. We have these vast potentials for resilience, beauty, cruelty, creativity, and contradiction. Our deepest needs are so simple, primary, yet we continue to tie ourselves down in complexity.
To become real is to wake up to this, to ourselves—not to banish the complexity but to accept both the untangling and whatever we find beneath the knots.
It's also realizing that none of what we learn is ever solely about ourselves.
I can sit here and talk all day about what I've learned, but ultimately, it's not about me.
The nuggets of insight and gravitational shifts I've gathered are not mine to hoard or to keep. These are mirrors, frameworks, fables, and frameworks for you and whoever else to find their own paths to becoming real, in whatever way that means.
Disclaimer: I am not a guru or a coach. I am not here to fix, improve, or instill.
I’m just a girl who, like you, is bound to this human lifetime.
All I have are my feelings,
my words,
and a belief in the riches that we can find in the depths of ourselves.
The manual for becoming REAL is buried under your Labubus
“I’ve had enough metaphors, Cara—give me something real to work with!”
Okay, here we go! Recently, my cousin announced that she wanted to buy a designer bag... so she could have a Labubu.
Mind you, this is a full-grown adult who has never shown an interest in fashion, self-presentation, or self-care. They could go years without a haircut and barely wash their face. Their days consisted of sleeping until 12pm and watching TikTok until it was time for work (for which they were often late and unshowered), and they had not shown any interest in a hobby or creative outlet since the pandemic.
Yet they wanted to buy a $1,500 bag... for their yet-to-be-bought Labubu.
Who’s in the wrong here? My cousin? The Labubu? The capitalist-consumerist complex? None? All of the above?
Do we live the life? Or does the life live us?
I read something interesting the other day:
“We think we are here to change our lives, but, actually, life changes us.” - Ra Uru Hu
WHAT? So who the hell is driving this damn boat? If it's not us gripping the wheel, then whose fucking hands are those?! Who is to say where the hell we'll end up?
Those are still our hands. No one's telling us to live our lives with our eyes closed, hoping we don't careen into a rock. We're just switching operating systems. Instead of relying on totality, domination, and control, we allow our innate compass to come forth. The map transforms from a guide to where we should be to a guide to where we inherently need to be.
Let’s be honest: the pursuit of control is a hamster wheel. Next thing we know, we’re running up our cosmic credit, tearing across life for experiences and relationships like we’re on PopMart. Our resumes and social media stories slowly become synonymous with our personalities. We fly to Bali and take cruises to Antarctica, just to come back home, just as hungry, flat, and boring as ever.
All of this just in the name of being FIRST, faster, and better. We’d rather be exceptional than real.
How ironic that we end up feeling like mannequins—immobile, at the mercy of our conditionings, and covered in that shit someone else picked for us. It doesn’t matter if we’re in MiuMiu or Shein—if we didn’t really pick it, what meaning could it possibly have?
I can’t tell you that every single person is living a flat-out lie because I don’t know that. I don't believe it either. But I’ve seen enough to say that there are plenty of people who don’t even believe that becoming real is worth a damn in the first place.
“Let life change you.”
The clues to becoming real are buried beneath the piles of (proverbial and literal) Labubus, familial patterns, social conditionings, and whatever else we’ve collected or were given to bear.
Computation and outsourcing are very modern and Western concepts and methods. Great tools, but not for this type of work. Everything we need to know about who we are is not only embedded within us, but actually waiting, fighting to be released.
So what the hell do we do?
Do we stop the chase, cease all ambition? Blame AI, the Labubu, or the government for everything? Become suspicious of pleasures like wine, feeling attractive, or a nice pair of sneakers?
Do we put Jesus in the center of our lives? Or do we evict, delete, and block him? Do we call ourselves the culprits, the fools, and give up?
Good news: you can keep the Labubu
Condemning your Labubu is not a speedway to finding out who we really are.
In fact, keep your Labubu! Hold on to it like a string of rosary beads, and meditate on how it ended up in our possession in the first place. Let the furry little abomination tell you what you hoped it would buy you.
Another idea! Let's create a prayer-circle-hybrid-support group. We'll play binaural beats, cling to the symbols of whatever we thought we were and wanted, and reverently ask them, "Who have I been? What am I running from?"
“This girl HAS to be joking,” you're thinking. And you’d be right… but only half right!
The other half would be wrong because, in all seriousness, the journey of diving into ourselves is both messy and glorious,
mundane and profound,
comical and grave,
painful and incredibly rich.
If we choose this path, we ABSOLUTELY need people who are not only willing to do the hard work but who can laugh at the absurdity and humanness of our mistakes. One of my favorite teachers, Pea the Feary, proposed an idea that I can't shake:
what if humankind isn't so much broken but just really… young? What if we are just really immature, cosmic toddlers, even?
On that note, I was shocked when I realized how many people in my social circles not only found my journey to authenticity strange, but were actually affronted by my freedom. But it makes sense: anyone who outsources their authenticity or depths will feel pressured, confronted by the presence of someone who says, "What if I can trust who I am, exactly as I am?"
It’s like being invited to a party and deciding to make butter and bread from scratch. You show up, gifts in hand and wrapped in nice paper, and are encountered by two groups of people:
1) the ones who find you crunchy and deviant and make passive-aggressive remarks about how they "could never" be so frivolous with their time when there is a Safeway down the street.
2) the ones who geek out about what kind of cream and flour you used, want to share their own recipe, or go back for thirds.
The latter group—that is who I know I am and aspire to be. loloto is for me and loloto is for you.
And to the former group—there is space for you too. But heres' the thing: it's not just about plowing into all the actions and deconditioning. The first step is simply to want to believe there's something here.
All I want to be is a witness—to you, to myself. I cannot offer answers, just a roof for anyone who comes under this space.
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