Vision Board Delete

TikTok turned decentering into a religion almost overnight. One minute it was a quiet boundary practice, the next it was a full aesthetic: soft lighting, journaling prompts, and a woman carefully cutting his face out of the vision board with craft scissors. Delete him. Put yourself in the middle. The comments filled with heart emojis and “this is the sign I needed.” Fine, as far as it goes. Then the cats arrived, right on schedule, and the whole thing got messy again.

I watched it happen in real time. A girl I follow posted her before-and-after board. Before: a couple silhouette, a cheap ring emoji, the word “chosen.” After: her own face, a passport, a cat that looked expensive. She wrote that she finally felt free. Three days later someone quote-tweeted it with a picture of an empty litter tray and the caption “enjoy your thirties, queen.” The original girl replied that cats had already won on points and she was just catching up. The thread went nuclear. Selfish. Bitter. You will die alone. As if most of us were not already halfway there from the last soft launch that never hardened.

Decentering was never meant to be a spell. It is a boundary dressed up in nice fonts. You stop building the week around a maybe. Your friends keep their slot. Your sleep keeps its slot. Your work keeps its slot. He does not get to kick the door in and rearrange the furniture because he sent a heart emoji at 1 a.m. That is the clean version. The TikTok version added candles and a soundtrack. Suddenly it was content. And content needs a villain, so the manosphere supplied one on demand: the lonely cat lady who ruined feminism by refusing to orbit.

I get the appeal of the scissors. I have done the digital equivalent. Deleted the shared playlist. Removed the photo from the family WhatsApp. Stopped checking the location. It felt like clearing smoke from a room. You still want the warm house. You just want the thing that poisons the air dealt with first. The problem is the religion part. Once the algorithm decides this is the next girlboss upgrade, every small boundary gets filmed and scored. Did you centre yourself hard enough? Did you cry on camera or stay unbothered? The comments become the relationship you no longer have.

The cats were always winning

The backlash writes itself. You will die with cats. Your eggs will freeze and nobody will notice. A man will eventually save you from yourself if you just stop being difficult. I have heard versions of this since I was old enough to get on a train home to Basildon and listen to my mum tell me I look tired. The cats are a convenient prop. They stand in for the fear that a woman might organise her life around something other than being chosen. The litter tray is easier to mock than the actual arithmetic: rent, energy bills, the cost of looking after someone who still expects you to manage the calendar and the emotions and the proof that you are not difficult.

Cats do not text at 2 a.m. asking if you are mad. They do not soft-launch you to their mates then pretend they were never serious. They take the warm patch on the sofa and they stay there. Some days that is the whole argument. Other days I still want the human version, the one who does bin night without being asked and does not treat your friends as the B-team. The vision board can hold both. It just cannot hold the version where he is the sun and everything else orbits until the light runs out.

I planted a few seeds of my own last year. Told a friend she could keep the good sex and drop the rest of the unpaid internship. She did. Then she got cocky and started a Substack that digs at me between dates. Classic. The point was never that every woman should delete every man. The point was that plenty of them never get the promotion from guest to partner, and that is allowed. You can still want one. You can still text. You can still cook. You just stop building the entire week around the maybe and calling it loyalty.

What the middle actually looks like on a Tuesday

Putting yourself in the middle is less cinematic than the videos. It is noticing when your world gets smaller. Your politics become too much. Your flat becomes his default without his name on a bill. Your sleep moves to accommodate his schedule and nobody mentions it. The middle is the version where you still go home for the roast and you still think some bloke out there might be late, kind, and worth a hard launch. You just refuse to pretend the last few years of dating were a cute mix-up. They were a briefing. Algorithms. Cool boys. Courtship apps. Split bills with unsplit labour. Body-count tribunals. Bots that flirt better than half the real ones.

On a practical Tuesday it looks like keeping the group chat active even when he is in town. It looks like not moving the gym session because he might want dinner. It looks like answering the work message before you answer his. None of that requires a vision board or a public declaration. Most of it is invisible until you stop doing it and realise how much space you had been clearing. The TikTok version wants the before-and-after. Real life is mostly the during, the bit where you are still deciding whether the smoke is worth the warmth.

I still get the train home. Mum still does the gravy. She asks if I am seeing anyone and I give her the cleaned-up version because the full one would worry her. In the newsroom the air still smells like private school and I still feel like I snuck in through the fire exit. Decentering does not fix the class bit or the imposter bit. It just stops me handing the remaining energy to someone who treats attention like a scarce resource he is doing me a favour by spending. Some days that feels radical. Most days it just feels like not repeating the same argument with a different face.

Religion needs converts and converts need villains

Once the phrase left the group chats and hit the For You page it needed rules. Delete the photos. Stop checking the location. Journal about your “highest self.” The highest self, apparently, does not text back after midnight and does not cry over a man who never hard-launched. Fine. Then the counter-religion arrived: the one that says any woman who is not actively hunting a boyfriend has been radicalised by feminism and will regret it at forty. Both versions sell the same product in different packaging. One sells the scissors. The other sells the rescue. Neither is particularly interested in the boring middle where you want sex and company and still refuse to be infrastructure.

I have posted the table and not the man. I have kept him off the family chat like contraband. Not because I was evolved. Because I did not trust the product and I still wanted the feeling. Embarrassment is a social fever. It flares when the boyfriend is a performance. Look what I pulled. Look how wanted I am. The comments become the relationship. When he disappoints you, you still have the photo. Tragic little pension. The vision-board girls are doing the opposite performance: look how free I am. Look how centred. The comments become the new relationship. Same fever, different hashtag.

You can choose him. He does not get to be the sun. Want him. Text him. Snog him on a Tuesday that could survive without the audience. Just do not orbit. Orbiting is how you lose years and call it loyalty. The cats will still be there either way. They were never the threat. The threat was the version of the story where your only options were full service girlfriend or tragic spinster, and anything in between required a public confession and a pair of scissors.

Watch this space. I am not done with the middle. Neither, I suspect, are most of the women still quietly deciding what stays on the board and what gets cut.