Thought Daughter / Thot Daugter

Does one equal the other?

There is no greater, no, iconic spelling mistake than that of 2024’s Thot Daugter. The missing H encapsulates the entire being of Thot Daugter, most likely without trying. Do you hear what I’m saying?

I am the eldest daughter. The only daughter. The catastrophizing, over analytical, self critical, depressed daughter who never felt good enough and was responsible for everything. I am the daughter of two people who wouldn’t be together without me cruelly tying them together. That is the one of my darker repetitive thoughts. One that has rattled around in my brain longer than I think I could even form the words to utter it. Sometimes it’s loud, sometimes quiet. Often bargaining but never silenced. I get so lost inside my own screaming mind that the taut space between what I think and what I say, becomes more strangled with every fear I can’t articulate. I am not alone in this plight. Despite it feeling unbearably lonely. Such is the burden of a thought daughter.

But the introspective often intrusive reality of being a thought daughter, made me wonder if the two go hand in hand. Does being a thought daughter pave the way to thot daugter?

I ask, as my own mood switches from Bon Iver’s Holocene to Charli XCX and Troye’s Talk Talk blaring in my kitchen. Thought to thot, over and over. One dulling the edge of the other whenever necessary. One to catch, the other to release.

Growing up, I had a boundless rage that I couldn’t get to the bottom of. I would scream and lean into cruelty, which I can only now understand with the gift of hindsight, distance and age. But that rage still simmers whenever I am thrown back into its birthplace. My family home. I never understood why I constantly felt sad, bone achingly sad. I would remind myself, sometimes multiple times a day, that nothing bad had actually happened to me. No one was dying or had died and I was physically healthy. Perfectly, seemingly fine. There was no reason for my sadness.

I had no idea I was born into a burning building with flames that couldn’t be seen.

Drinking came early and easily. When drinking escalated into more, the dulling of edges from serrated to prickling at best, felt liberating. And I became intoxicated in playing puppet master to myself. To over achieving and excelling when no one in my family cared to see. To controlling, restricting and punishing my body when the anger had nowhere to go but in. To exploring dark corners in the early hours of adolescence, and seeing how far I could separate my mind from my body. Surprisingly well it turned out.

Hindsight, distance, age — none of it has become more vividly clear to me than through having my own daughter. When I see her, I think of myself — playing alone, crying alone, existing alone — careful not to disrupt the already fractured foundation of my home. As she grows, I know I’ll see glimpses of my younger self too. The screaming, distraught girl who couldn’t make sense of her own pain. The girl who pushed the world to hurt her back so there would be a reason for the ache she carried.

But in a very strange way, as much as I want to coddle and shake the various past versions of myself, I am also incredibly proud of the little human who made it out of the burning inferno. Whether through introspection, liberation and more often than not, a mingling of the two.

The thoughts that hook into my shoulder blades and beg for me to fall are always there. The guilt, the dread — those horrible thoughts that howl through the night. They are regular visitors, but not the sum of my being. The nights that bleed into morning, the heady lust for freedom that allows me to forget, the hangovers that seem to start before I’ve even had a drink, are still there too. Quiet for now, but there.

Thought and thot, thought and thot. Two sides of an equally pretty as it is heavy coin.

Less shame, more grace and space for both.

Thought and thot, 365.