How to create your own kingdom, not give two fucks, and stop treating everybody else’s opinions like they’re thunderbolts from Mount Sinai.
Somewhere out there, a star is dying so spectacularly that it briefly outshines its entire galaxy. It doesn’t apologize for the light show. It doesn’t send a quiet text afterward saying “sorry if that was too much.” It collapses in on itself with such force that it detonates into the most luminous event the universe knows how to produce, and for one glorious window of cosmic time, every telescope on Earth turns toward it whether it asked for the attention or not. That, my darling, is a supernova. And somewhere out there is also a woman or a man at a dinner party, shrinking their laugh down to a polite titter because someone two seats over raised an eyebrow. That person is not a supernova. That person is a nightlight with a guilt complex, and we are going to fix that tonight.
This article is not a gentle nudge toward “self-confidence.” You’ve read those. They told you to stand in a power pose for two minutes in the bathroom and visualize your inner light, and then you went back out into the world and immediately apologized to a chair for bumping into it. We are not doing that here. We are talking about total stellar transformation — the kind that happens when you stop managing everyone else’s emotional weather and start burning at your actual, factory-installed brightness. It is going to involve some profanity. It is going to involve some theology, because I happen to think your magnificence is a spiritual fact and not just a self-help slogan. And it is going to involve learning, on a cellular level, how to give exactly zero poots about the opinions of people who were never going to love you at full wattage anyway.
Poots? For those unfamiliar with the term, a poot is a tiny puff of air that escapes from your butt. Brief. Unremarkable. Gone almost as soon as it arrives.
The problem is that life gives us far more poots than fucks. If the ratio were reversed, we’d probably give neither.
Now, the relative value of poots versus fucks depends on a number of factors, including your libido, your life circumstances, and frankly, your stamina.
Personally, after extensive research and several moments of deep contemplation, I have concluded that one trillion good poots equals one good fuck.
This is not peer-reviewed science.
It is, however, a strongly held belief.
Economists may disagree.
Economists are wrong.
So buckle up, Buttercup. We’ve got roughly five thousand words of cosmic-grade audacity ahead of us, and not a single one-sentence paragraph, because even my formatting refuses to be small.
What a Supernova Actually Is, Cosmically and Spiritually
Let’s get the science out of the way first, because I am, among other things, a person with two doctorates and an allergy to woo without backbone. A supernova happens when a massive star runs out of fuel to fight gravity, and instead of fading gracefully, it collapses and then explodes outward with a force that can briefly outshine billions of other stars combined. The explosion doesn’t destroy what the star was. It redistributes it. Heavy elements forged in that star’s furnace — the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the oxygen you’re breathing right now to read this sentence — get flung across the universe and eventually become the raw material for new stars, new planets, new people. You, reading this, are quite literally made of old supernova debris. Stop and let that sit for a second, because it matters for everything that follows: the explosion that some outside observer might call “destructive” or “too much” is the exact mechanism by which life becomes possible at all.
Spiritually, I believe the same architecture is built into us. Most of us spend decades collapsing inward under the gravity of other people’s comfort — shrinking our voice, dimming our desire, swallowing our weird, glorious, too-muchness because somebody once flinched at it. And here’s the part nobody tells you: that collapse is not the end of the story, it’s the ignition sequence. The very pressure that’s been crushing you down is also what’s building the fuel for the most luminous version of yourself, the one who finally stops curating her existence for an audience that was never going to applaud anyway. Several people have suggested I be more realistic. Curiously, none of those people were having nearly as much fun as I was. Becoming a supernova isn’t about becoming louder for the sake of volume. It’s about reaching the point of internal density where holding back simply costs more energy than letting go, and the light comes pouring out because there’s nowhere left to put it.
I’ve watched this happen in my therapy office more times than I can count, usually around year forty, sometimes later, occasionally — God bless them — in someone’s twenties if they were lucky enough to get a head start. There’s a particular look on a person’s face the day they decide they’re done managing everyone else’s discomfort with their existence. It’s not anger, exactly, though anger is often the fuel that lit the fuse. It’s closer to relief mixed with mischief, like they’ve just remembered they’re allowed to take up the entire room. That look is the moment of stellar collapse turning into stellar explosion, and once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee how rare it is, and how badly the world needs more of it.
The Poot Physics: Why You Give So Many Poots in the First Place
Let’s talk about the poots themselves, because before we can stop giving them, we need to understand the absolutely insane evolutionary and social machinery that’s been manufacturing them in you since approximately age four. Caring what other people think isn’t a character flaw, it’s a survival mechanism left over from a few hundred thousand years of being a social primate whose continued existence depended on not getting voted off the tribal island. Back then, social rejection didn’t mean an awkward Thanksgiving. It meant no food, no protection, no mate, and a fairly short, miserable life as a solo human on the savanna trying to fend off a leopard by yourself. So your nervous system built an extremely sensitive smoke detector for disapproval, and it has been going off at the smallest provocation ever since, mistaking a stranger’s raised eyebrow at a dinner party for an actual existential threat.
The problem is that the smoke detector never got the memo that the world changed. You are not going to die because your cousin thinks your business idea is silly, or because a man on a dating app didn’t text back, or because your mother sighed audibly when you mentioned therapy again. And yet your body responds to those moments with the same biochemical cocktail — cortisol, adrenaline, that horrible hot-faced shrinking feeling — that our ancestors got from being actually, literally exiled. You are running Paleolithic software on a modern operating system, and it is glitching constantly, and most people go their entire lives never once questioning whether the alarm is even accurate anymore.
On top of the biology, you’ve also got several decades of very specific cultural training, and depending on who raised you, that training was probably gendered, religious, generational, or some delightful combination of all three. Women in particular get a master class from birth in modulating their brightness so as not to threaten anyone — speak up, but not too much, be smart, but not intimidating, be sexy, but not slutty, be confident, but not arrogant, thread that needle perfectly or be punished socially for missing it by a millimeter in either direction. Men get their own version, usually built around never appearing weak, needy, emotional, or uncertain, which is its own kind of dimmer switch, just installed on a different wall of the house. Either way, by the time you’re an adult, you’ve got a fully automated internal committee whose entire job is to scan every room you enter and adjust your volume, your laugh, your opinions, and your desires down to whatever level keeps the most people comfortable. At some point I realized I was seeking approval from a committee that I had personally invented and then accidentally given voting rights.
Here’s the part that should make you a little furious, in the productive, fuel-for-the-explosion kind of way: that committee was never actually protecting you. It was protecting other people’s comfort at the direct cost of your life force, and it called that protection because it kept you “safe,” when what it actually kept you was small. Comfortable people rarely change anything. They rarely fall in love at full intensity, build the thing they were meant to build, or become the person whose name gets said with a kind of reverent disbelief twenty years later. The poots you’ve been giving were never a measure of your character. They were a tax, and you’ve been paying it for decades, and tonight I’d like you to consider what happens if you simply stop filing the return. I have never trusted life advice from people who seem exhausted by their own existence.
The Sacred Audacity of Taking Up Space
I want to bring God into this, briefly and unapologetically, because I think the secular self-help world has done us all a disservice by stripping the spiritual stakes out of confidence and turning it into a productivity hack. I am a woman of deep Christian and Taoist practice, and in both traditions, I find the same scandalous idea sitting at the center: you were not created to be a smudge on the wallpaper. You were created — deliberately, with intention, out of whatever cosmic or divine material you believe in — as a singular, unrepeatable expression of something larger trying to know itself through you. To dim that on purpose, to sand yourself down so other people don’t have to deal with your full wattage, is not humility. It’s a quiet, ongoing rejection of the gift you were handed at birth, and frankly, it’s a little insulting to whoever or whatever did the handing.
The Taoists talk about wu wei, often translated as effortless action, the idea of moving in alignment with your own nature rather than forcing yourself into a shape that fights it. A supernova in collapse isn’t fighting its own nature, it’s finally surrendering to it completely, and the explosion is what effortless, total alignment looks like when a few hundred thousand years of pressure finally release. Christianity, for all its complicated cultural baggage around humility, also contains the wildest permission slip in religious literature: you are made in the image of the divine, you are called to let your light shine rather than hide it under a basket, and somewhere along the way a lot of very well-meaning, very anxious institutions decided that meant a soft, apologetic flicker rather than an actual fire. I happen to think the basket comment was about something closer to a damn bonfire.
There is something almost obscene, in the best possible sense, about a person who has stopped negotiating their own existence down to a size that’s comfortable for everyone else in the room. I use that word on purpose, because I think the sacred and the obscene live closer together than most people are willing to admit — both involve a kind of nakedness, a refusal to keep covering up what’s actually true and alive underneath the polite version of yourself. A woman laughing too loud at her own joke in public, unbothered by the heads turning, is doing something quietly holy. A man crying at his daughter’s wedding without performing the manly half-laugh-half-cough to cover it is doing the same thing. Taking up space without apology isn’t arrogance, it’s worship, it’s the most honest prayer you can offer with your actual body in real time, and it costs nothing but the willingness to be seen.
Turning Off the Dimmer Switch People
Now, the uncomfortable part, because every supernova has its dimmer switch people, and you need to know how to identify and handle them before you go full ignition, or they will absolutely try to talk you down off the ledge of your own becoming. Dimmer switch people are not always villains. Most of them genuinely love you, and most of them have no idea they’re doing it, because they were taught the exact same volume-control programming you were and they’re simply running theirs on you the way it was once run on them. They show up disguised as concern. “Are you sure you want to wear that?” “Don’t you think that’s a little much?” “I just don’t want you to get hurt.” Translation, almost every time: your current brightness is requiring an adjustment in me that I don’t know how to make, so please go back to the setting where I don’t have to grow.
The trouble is that dimmer switch people are often the ones closest to you, which makes them devastatingly effective, because the threat of losing connection with people you love is one of the oldest and most reliable levers there is. A mother who flinches every time you mention leaving your safe, soul-crushing job. A friend group built entirely around mutual smallness, where the unspoken rule is that nobody is allowed to outgrow the table. A partner who fell in love with the dimmed-down version of you and now has a vested interest in keeping that version around forever, because the supernova version requires him to either rise to meet you or get left behind in the debris field. None of these people necessarily deserve to be cut out of your life with surgical cruelty, but all of them deserve to be seen clearly for what they’re doing, which is asking you, consciously or not, to keep paying the poot tax on their behalf.
Here is the practical, slightly profane truth you need to hammer into your skull: it is not your job to manage anyone else’s discomfort with your light. Full stop. If your becoming makes someone else feel insecure, threatened, abandoned, or weird, that is data about their relationship with their own dimmer switch, not a referendum on whether you’re allowed to shine. You can hold compassion for that discomfort without taking responsibility for fixing it by shrinking yourself back down, and frankly, the people who truly love you will eventually either expand to meet the new wattage or reveal that their love had a ceiling on it the whole time, which is brutal but genuinely useful information. Either way, you don’t get the supernova by staying small enough to keep every relationship in your life exactly as comfortable as it’s always been. Something has to give, and I’d strongly recommend it not be you.
The Supernova Body: Somatic Practices to Ignite the Damn Thing
I am not a person who believes confidence lives only in your head, because I have spent over two decades watching people think their way around a problem for years while their actual nervous system stayed locked in collapse the entire time. The body holds the dimmer switch every bit as much as the mind does, which means becoming a supernova requires some physical work, not just a journal entry about your worthiness. I want to give you a few somatic practices here that I use both clinically and personally, and yes, some of them are a little intense, and yes, intensity is rather the point of this whole exercise.
Start with your breath, because it’s the cheapest and most immediately available lever you have. Most chronically dimmed people breathe in a shallow, high, apologetic little sip at the top of their chest, as if they’re trying to take up as little air as possible, which, not coincidentally, is exactly the metaphor for how they’re living. Spend five minutes a day breathing all the way down into your belly, low and slow, and notice how almost unbearably vulnerable it feels at first to occupy that much of your own torso. That discomfort is information. You are not used to taking up that much room even inside your own ribcage, and the body keeps score on permission long before the mind catches up to it.
From there, I’d point you toward fasting, which I’ve practiced for nearly thirty years and which I genuinely believe is one of the most underrated tools for burning off the noise that keeps you small. There is something about voluntarily going without food for a defined stretch of time that strips away the constant low hum of distraction and comfort-seeking and leaves you face to face with what’s actually true underneath it, including the parts of yourself you’ve been managing other people’s feelings about for years. You don’t need to do a multi-day water fast to get the benefit; skipping a single meal with full presence and intention, rather than out of restriction or punishment, can crack something open. I’d also encourage sauna work, which does something similar through heat rather than hunger — there’s a reason cultures across the world have used controlled physical intensity as a doorway to clarity, and your living room is not going to cut it as a substitute.
And then there’s the simplest practice of all, the one I give almost every client at some point regardless of what brought them in: stand up, plant your feet wide, lift your chin about an inch higher than feels natural, and stay there for two full minutes without apologizing for it internally. Notice every urge to collapse back down, to make yourself smaller, to soften the stance into something less confrontational, and don’t do it. This is not about performing confidence for an audience. It’s about teaching your nervous system, through repetition and lived experience, that occupying space without immediately retreating from it is survivable. The body learns through evidence, not through affirmations taped to a mirror, and every minute you spend standing in your own full size without flinching is evidence your nervous system will eventually believe.
The Mouth: Speaking Like You Actually Mean It
Once the body starts to believe it’s allowed to take up space, the next frontier is your mouth, because most chronically dimmed people have spent years editing themselves in real time before a single word makes it out into the air. You know this habit. The sentence forms fully formed in your head, sharp and true and a little too much, and by the time it reaches your lips it’s been softened, qualified, apologized for in advance, hedged with three “I might be wrong, but” clauses, until what comes out is a pale, inoffensive cousin of what you actually meant. This is exhausting, it’s dishonest, and it is single-handedly responsible for half the relationships in your life being shallower than they could be, because nobody can fall in love with, hire, trust, or truly know a person who never says the actual thing.
I want you to start practicing saying the unedited version, at least some of the time, in low-stakes situations first if that feels safer. Tell the waiter the food was actually not good instead of performing the polite “oh, it was fine!” Tell your friend you didn’t love the movie instead of nodding along to avoid a five-minute disagreement. Say “I want that” out loud about something — a raise, a relationship, a particular kind of sex, a career pivot that scares you — without immediately following it with a disclaimer designed to make the desire smaller and safer for everyone listening, including yourself. The first few times you do this, your whole body may light up with the ancient alarm bells of disapproval, and you need to let it ring without obeying it, because that ringing is just the old smoke detector mistaking honesty for danger again.
There’s also a particular kind of humor I want to give you permission for here, the kind that’s a little too loud, a little too dirty, a little too unfiltered for the room, the kind you’ve probably swallowed back down a thousand times because somebody once looked at you funny for it. Let it out. A supernova doesn’t laugh at forty percent volume to keep the table comfortable, and a good, filthy, perfectly timed “well, shit” in the right moment can do more to disarm a room and build real connection than an hour of careful, polished small talk ever could. People don’t actually fall in love with your polish. They fall in love with the moment you forget to be careful, the unguarded laugh, the swear word that slips out because you meant it that much. Stop saving that version of yourself for only your closest friends after three drinks, and start letting her out into daylight.
The Haters, the Critics, and the Particularly Loud Inner Heckler
Let’s address the elephant in the room, because the second you start dialing up your own brightness, you are going to encounter actual external resistance, not just the polite, well-meaning dimmer switch people from earlier. Some people will say something genuinely unkind. Some will roll their eyes, gossip behind your back, or tell you directly that you’ve changed and not in a way they like. This is not hypothetical, it is essentially guaranteed, and the sooner you make peace with that guarantee, the less power it has to stop you before you even start.
Here’s the thing about criticism from people watching your light increase: it is almost never actually about you, no matter how personally it’s delivered. People who are deeply at peace with their own dimness rarely feel the need to comment on yours, because your supernova doesn’t threaten anything in them, they’re simply not paying attention to the comparison at all. The people who do comment, who do sneer, who do feel compelled to take you down a peg, are almost without exception people standing in their own unlit collapse, watching you do the thing they haven’t given themselves permission to do, and it stings them in a place they probably can’t even name. Their criticism is a mirror held up to their own dimmer switch, not an accurate review of your worth, and you are under no obligation to accept a delivery you didn’t order.
But the loudest critic you’ll face isn’t external at all, and you already know exactly who I mean, because she’s been running commentary in your skull since approximately your teenage years. The inner heckler is the internalized version of every single dimmer switch person you’ve ever encountered, all compressed into one relentless, sneering voice that activates the second you try anything resembling full wattage. She tells you you’re being arrogant. She tells you people are laughing at you, not with you. She tells you to sit down before you embarrass yourself. I want you to start treating her exactly like what she is: an outdated security system installed by someone else’s fear, not an accurate narrator of present-day reality. When she pipes up — and she will, probably mid-sentence, probably at the worst possible moment — the move isn’t to argue with her or silence her entirely, it’s to thank her for her concern, note that the threat level she’s reporting no longer matches the actual danger in the room, and keep talking anyway.
The Magnificent Permission Slip
I want to give you something concrete to walk away with here, because abstractions are lovely at three in the morning and useless at a Tuesday staff meeting when you need to actually say the thing. I’m calling this the Magnificent Permission Slip, and it works exactly the way it sounds: a brief, deliberate internal ritual you run before any moment where the old programming would normally have you shrinking. Before you walk into the room, send the email, make the call, or say the true thing out loud, pause for ten seconds and say to yourself, silently or out loud if you’re feeling bold, “I have permission to take up exactly as much space as I actually need right now, and not one inch less for anyone else’s comfort.”
Pair that with a physical anchor, because the body believes repetition far more readily than it believes a sentence. I like a hand pressed flat against the sternum, a small but deliberate gesture that says, wordlessly, I’m choosing this on purpose, this isn’t an accident or an outburst, this is intentional. Do this enough times, in enough small moments — the meeting where you’d normally stay quiet, the date where you’d normally downplay what you want, the family dinner where you’d normally swallow the opinion that would ruffle feathers — and you start building an actual track record of evidence that the explosion doesn’t kill you. It just rearranges the room around your actual size, which, it turns out, was the size you were always supposed to be occupying.
I’d also encourage you to get specific and a little ceremonial about it, because ritual works precisely because it bypasses the part of your brain that wants to argue you out of change. Write down, in actual ink, three areas of your life where you’ve been giving the most poots — career, romance, family, friendship, your own body, wherever the dimmer switch has been turned down hardest — and next to each one, write the specific, concrete action that would represent ten percent more wattage this week. Not the full supernova on day one, that’s how people burn out and quit by Thursday. Ten percent more truth, ten percent more volume, ten percent more unapologetic want, repeated and compounded, week over week, until one day you look up and realize you’re standing in a completely different relationship with your own existence than the one you started in.
The Actual Cost of Staying Small
Before we get to the closing pep talk, I want to sit with something heavier for a moment, because I think we do ourselves a disservice when we talk about playing small as a safe, neutral default. It is not safe. It is not neutral. It has a cost, and the cost is simply hidden from view because it gets paid in increments too small to notice on any given day, the way a slow leak in a tire doesn’t announce itself until you’re stranded on the side of the highway wondering how this happened. Every time you swallow the true sentence, downgrade the ambitious plan into the safe one, or settle for a love that asks you to be smaller than you are, you’re not avoiding loss. You’re choosing a slower, quieter, more socially acceptable version of it.
I have sat across from people in my office, decades into careers they never wanted, marriages built on a version of themselves they stopped recognizing somewhere around year twelve, and the grief in that room is not loud, it’s not dramatic, it’s a kind of low, exhausted ache that sounds like “I don’t even know who I would have been.” That is the actual price tag on chronic dimming, and it is a far steeper bill than the temporary discomfort of someone raising an eyebrow at your full brightness in the moment. The poots you’re so carefully managing are not protecting you from pain. They’re simply trading a sharp, immediate, survivable pain — somebody’s disapproval, a moment of social friction — for a dull, accumulating, decades-long one that you don’t fully feel until you’re standing in the wreckage of a life that was never quite yours.
So when the fear shows up, and it will, because becoming a supernova doesn’t mean the fear disappears, it means you stop letting it cast the deciding vote, I want you to ask yourself a slightly different question than the one you’ve been asking your whole life. Not “what if this goes badly and people judge me,” but “what does it actually cost me to keep doing this exact same dimming for another ten years.” Put both numbers on the table, side by side, and look at them honestly. I promise you, almost every time, the explosion turns out to be the cheaper option.
Go Be the Damn Supernova
Here’s where I land you, because every good piece of writing has to actually send you somewhere instead of just describing the scenery. You were not built to flicker politely at the edge of your own life, taking up exactly enough space to avoid comment and not one inch more. You were built, quite literally, from the debris of something that exploded with enough force to seed new worlds, and that same architecture is sitting in you right now, fully loaded, waiting on a decision you keep almost making and then talking yourself out of around the third glass of wine. The collapse you’ve been calling humility, or politeness, or just being realistic, was never the end state. It was pressure building toward exactly this moment, the one where you finally stop asking the room’s permission to be the size you actually are. The universe has repeatedly failed to consult me about its plans. I have decided to proceed anyway.
So laugh too loud at your own jokes. Wear the thing that makes your aunt’s eyebrows do that thing. Say the true sentence, fully formed, with the swear word still attached, and let the silence that follows be someone else’s problem to sit with instead of yours to apologize into. Skip the meal, sit in the heat, stand a little taller than feels comfortable, and keep standing there until your nervous system finally gets the memo that you survived it. Let the people who only loved the dimmed-down version of you find that out about themselves, painful as that discovery will be for both of you, because that’s information you needed and they needed too, and neither of you was going to get it any other way. The dimmer switch people will say something. The inner heckler will say plenty. None of it changes the physics. A star under enough pressure does not quietly negotiate. It goes nova, it lights up the whole sky for a moment nobody in range will ever forget, and then it gets on with the considerably more interesting business of becoming something new.
And if you decide to become a Supernova please let me know. Maybe we can discuss possibly transitioning to a Super-Fucking-Nova. That’s where you’re handed a pair of velvety steel balls. But that’s another story.
So … roll with it. Give exactly zero poots about who flinches at the light, because somewhere out past every person uncomfortable with your brightness is an entire life, an entire love, an entire version of yourself that has been waiting this whole time for you to finally stop apologizing for taking up the damn room. I have achieved maximum wattage. Further instructions are unnecessary.
And in the event I haven’t been abundantly clear, not only do I not give a poot I don’t give any fucks either. I’m keeping all of those that I can get.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Chapter Companion Song Recommendation:
— Tom Sawyer, Rush 1981
This article is an excerpt from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author, psychotherapist, and leading expert in counseling, communication, and human connection. Her first published study, released in 1993, explored the impact of family dysfunction on intimacy and communication in adult relationships. For more than three decades, she has developed innovative therapeutic models to help individuals and couples create deeper connection, emotional resilience, and extraordinary relationships. Her work explores the intersection of psychology, spirituality, humor, eroticism, and human magnificence, helping people live more fully, love more deeply, and embrace the extraordinary possibilities of a beautiful life.
