In primary school, I stole two rhinestone buttons during a counting exercise. We were probably learning something horrible, like maths. All I remember was how shiny those buttons were. The teacher even shook the jar afterwards and asked, "Now, did everyone return their buttons?" And oh my god, I nodded yes. Meanwhile, from my pocket, the rhinestones stared up at me with their tiny diamond eyes.
For years, I was so plagued by my sin that I had night terrors. I wet the bed. I thought my soul was, undoubtedly, damned. I’d cry — sometimes for hours on end. Eventually, I confessed to my mother — who, in an effort to liberate me from my own hysteria — finally suggested that I write a confession to my teacher. We were living overseas at this point, which meant my mother had to shell out the postage to mail my confession and return my contraband internationally. And would you believe it? My teacher wrote back with the incredible news that both she and Jesus forgave me.
Love is hard – could TikTok really hold the answers?
I never stole again after that, but I did graduate to other sins like swearing under my breath, smoking cigarettes in high school, and eventually going all the way with boyfriends post-college.
To this day, I’ve never quite shaken my wish to be very good. And I’m starting to think this desire holds me back — as both a woman and a writer.
.jpg)
In groups of women, I notice I’m not alone. There’s a lot of performative goodness and tortured ethics in femme circles. Research supports this, too. Women often pay far heftier prices than men for breaching arbitrary standards of morality. Not to mention the “nice girl tax” — the invisible psychological and social penalties women pay for maintaining agreeableness.
I remember driving once with a friend in Montana, who I recognised as secretly competitive. Like a lot of women, she’s brilliant, a perfectionist, and likes to always get it right. It’s totally okay to be competitive, I say with my hand out the window, I’m plenty competitive. Own it. She flinches in the passenger seat: I’m only competitive with myself.
Okay, I laugh.
As women, we not only impose impossible standards on ourselves, but on one another. We cancel and unfriend women who don’t meet our virtuous ideals. Time and again, I’ve seen women authors eviscerated online for revealing their own humanity. And I think this keeps us from fully seeing ourselves — squarely — as glorious and imperfect creatures.
Because for me, splitting the bill is the most romantic thing you can do.
As I get older, I’m moving in the opposite direction. I crave knowing where women are cracking at the seams. I live for it. One of the most endearing things I like discovering about my friends is what I call their tiny evils.
This is just to say: I want to know where women are delightfully devilish. I don’t want to hear how they were bad by eating a custard cream or texting their ex or skipping spin class. Tell me, instead, where they’re kinda wicked, a little sideways, a bit bent.
Side note: Tiny evils ought not to be confused with guilty pleasures. Guilty pleasures are defined as low-brow, but pleasurable behaviours — like binge-watching Love Island or ordering late-night McDonald’s. Tiny evils also are not the same thing as vices. A vice is something that is inherently harmful to you, but not generally to anyone else (e.g., smoking, stalking your ex’s Instagram, or *shifts uncomfortably* reading your Goodreads reviews every day).
But TINY EVILS? They’re their own delicious and philosophical category.
Here’s my tiny evil:
Sometimes, at the store, I walk down the aisles and look for specific kinds of food to crunch. Freeze-dried blueberries are an excellent candidate. Ritz Crackers are also ideal. When no one is looking, I like to crush one or two pieces at the bottom of the bag before leaving the store without purchasing them. There’s something about the sneaky little crunch that really satisfies me. This qualifies as a tiny evil.
My friend, K., loves giving wrong directions, but only to men. When a man asks which way, she gives a detailed and wrong account: “When you see the water tower, turn left. You literally cannot miss it.” Joke’s on them — there is no water tower. It’s her way, K. says, of balancing the emotional labour in the world.
I’m obsessed with K.
Another friend confesses that she once stole back her wedding gift at a reception after not being compensated for helping plan the ceremony.
My pal, S., never pays for parking and religiously parks in tow-away zones. Another friend admits she routinely pees in the pool. Once, a stranger admitted to me that she always arranges letters in her local art store to say: Eat more p*ssy.
Jennifer Aniston will star in Apple TV+ adaptation of the controversial memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died.
Another friend — let’s call her Robin Hood — confides in me that every time she throws a party, she always serves shoplifted fancy cheese from Whole Foods. Some tiny evils, it turns out, are also tiny crimes.
The truth is, we all have tiny evils — the trick is to see whether we own up to them or not. This is not to say I enthusiastically support all of the deviances confessed to me. But the reality is – I don’t have to endorse every tiny evil to find it wildly endearing and rather exhilarating. I like knowing what some women call tiny and how they define evil and how we all add up, in the end, to being stunningly human.
And sometimes, I wish I could go back in time and keep my two beautiful rhinestone buttons.
A version of this article was originally published on Joy's Substack, Necessary Salt, which you can subscribe to here.
