Schrödinger's Girl

I will admit that being a small-town celebrity comes with its own set of rewards and challenges. I often joke that I am Schrödinger’s girl, sometimes loved and sometimes hated, and sometimes both in the same interaction.

For the most part, it is wonderful to live a life where you get to help people, and I do help many people keep smiles on their faces. Other people choose ignorance or feigned shock and denial, and insist I participate in their view of reality with them. But I keep my own counsel on reality.

For instance, I just got back from what I can only describe as the Dunder Mifflin of Mississippi — a paper supply store where I buy my shopping bags for my retail store and am, apparently, a recurring glitch in someone’s understanding of reality.

There’s a man who works there. Black guy, middle-aged, sits behind a desk like he’s auditioning for a corporate training video. And every time I walk in, I watch his brain try — and fail — to process me. I don’t fit into any of the categories he has available. So instead of adjusting his categories, he just... lectures me.

Today’s topic: how people outgrow sex.

Sure. I only run a business that specializes in sexual wellness products, but clearly, he’s the authority. From behind a desk. At a paper store. In Mississippi.

Since you can only be an expert in so many things…They got my order wrong. Again. Even though I called ahead. So I walked back in after they’d loaded my car, bought more supplies, and went to pay.

“You may want to use cash,” he said. “Won’t cost much.”

“Fine,” I said. “Save room on the card for more lingerie.” Because it is weeks before Valentine’s and I am buying inventory like crazy.

He looked at the card. Paused. Then, with absolute confidence: “You don’t buy lingerie with that card.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No. That card doesn’t work like that.”

And we went back and forth — three, maybe four times — him insisting I do not, in fact, purchase lingerie with my own business card, and me calmly explaining that I absolutely do.

Finally: “That’s my business card. I buy five to ten thousand dollars of lingerie every month with it. That’s what goes in the shopping bags I’m always carrying out of here.”

Silence. The kind that happens when someone’s entire framework just... stops rendering.

Here’s the thing about being Schrödinger’s Girl: you exist in a state people can’t resolve. Depending on who’s observing, you’re either a respectable business owner or a scandal with a credit card. You can’t be both. The box only holds one version at a time. But I won’t collapse into just one, so I stay in superposition — alive, dead, legitimate, outrageous — and it breaks people’s brains.

While this is happening at the front desk, I start noticing movement in the back. People walking past the door with the half-window. Peeking out. Waving. The entire back office is doing casual drive-bys, checking out the scene. They know. They’re entertained. He’s the only one still trying to solve the equation.

At some point in this exchange, I mention Dr. Ruth. You know, Dr. Ruth Westheimer — trained sniper, Holocaust survivor, groundbreaking sex therapist, cultural icon who spent decades talking frankly about intimacy on national television and remained sexually active well into her 80s.

“Look her up,” I say.

He doesn’t. Instead, he informs me — with the same confidence he used to tell me what I buy with my own card — that Dr. Ruth was definitely not having sex in her 80s.

I let it go. What else can you do?

He says he is too old for sex and that he is divorced. (Funny how those two things are often more interrelated than the storyteller is willing to admit. I wish he wasn’t so adamant about knowing my business I bet my products could put a smile on his face again too.)

And then, because this is Mississippi and life has a sense of humor, someone comes out from the back and sings my jingle.

“Shop Romantic Adventures...🎶 and thanks me for my military service.”

Out loud. In the middle of the store. On a Thursday.

I don’t ask why. I already know. That’s just what it’s like to be me.

You walk into a place. You get mansplained about your own life. You mention an internationally recognized expert and get told she’s lying. The back office treats you like a parade float. And then someone serenades you with your own theme song because apparently, you’re local folklore now.

Maybe that’s the strange power of being Schrödinger’s Girl. I don’t collapse. I refuse to pick one version of myself that makes people comfortable. I just keep showing up, fully formed, containing multitudes — and they can’t figure out how to file that.

I’ve been in the Navy. I can concatenate videos like it’s second nature. I move through the Atlantic festival with the kind of confidence that only comes from competence. Some days I think about going back to study Krav Maga, just because.

And I run a sexual wellness boutique in the Bible Belt. Successfully. For 11 years.

That guy at the desk? He’ll never understand that. But the people in the back — the ones waving through the window, the ones who sang my jingle — they get it.

I’m not one thing. I’m all of it. At once.

And honestly? I’m fine with that.

Let them wonder. I’ve got lingerie to buy.