WEEK 37 - The Woman You Were Afraid To Become
You've spent years making yourself easier to be around. What if that was never the goal?
By Jennifer Dirksen · Sheer Photography, Youngstown OH · Est. read time: 5 min
There is a woman I see in my studio sometimes who walks in already knowing.
Not knowing how the session will go. Not knowing what she'll look like in the photos. Just knowing herself. Settled in it. Not performing ease or warmth or accessibility. Not managing how she's coming across. Just present, in her own skin, completely unbothered by whether the room adjusts to her or not.
She is, to be direct about it, a little intimidating.
And she is absolutely magnetic.
We were taught to be approachable.
Think about the feedback women get from the time they're small.
Smile more. Be friendlier. You seem cold. You're a lot. Soften that. Don't be so serious. Make people feel comfortable around you.
The message, delivered a thousand different ways across a lifetime: your job is to be approachable. Your job is to make everyone around you feel at ease. Your job is to sand down whatever edges you have so nobody feels the sharpness of them.
And most of us did it. We got very, very good at being easy to be around.
But here's what nobody tells you about approachable: it is not the same as powerful. It is not the same as magnetic. It is not the same as the kind of woman people remember long after she's left the room.
Approachable is comfortable. Comfortable is forgettable.
"The woman who knows exactly who she is doesn't need to make you comfortable. She's too busy being herself."
What intimidating actually means.
Let's be clear about what we're talking about, because intimidating has been used as an insult for so long that most women flinch when they hear it.
Intimidating doesn't mean cold. It doesn't mean unkind, distant, or impossible to connect with.
It means you walk into a room and something shifts. Not because you're trying to dominate it. Because you're not trying to disappear in it either. You take up the space you're in without apologizing for it. You say what you mean without editing it down to something easier to digest. You know what you want and you're not embarrassed about wanting it.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
The woman who is a little intimidating isn't performing power. She just stopped performing smallness. And the contrast (against a world full of women who have been making themselves smaller for decades) reads as enormous.
The women who intimidate me (in the best way).
I have photographed hundreds of women in my studio. And the ones I think about long after the session is over are not the ones who were the easiest to work with.
They're the ones who knew themselves.
The woman who showed up and told me exactly what she wanted. Who wasn't apologizing for her body or her age or her desires before I'd even picked up the camera. Who looked into the lens like she'd been waiting for this… not nervously, not performing confidence, but genuinely, quietly certain that she belonged here and that these photos were going to be worth something.
She wasn't trying to be intimidating. She was just done being the opposite.
And the photos? Unreal. Because the camera captures what's true. And what was true about her was undeniable.
Knowing yourself is the whole thing.
Here's what I've learned after fifteen years of doing this:
The transformation that happens in a boudoir session isn't really about the lingerie. It isn't about the lighting or the angles or what I do with the camera.
It's about the two or three hours a woman spends being asked to just be herself. Fully. Without the performance of smallness. Without the constant monitoring of how she's coming across. Without the good-woman filter running in the background.
And what happens when she drops all of that is not that she becomes more. It's that she finally becomes exactly who she already was.
That's what's in the photos. That's what she takes home. Not an image of herself performing confidence… an image of herself actually having it. Settled. Certain. Completely at home in her own skin.
A little intimidating. Entirely herself.
That's the most beautiful thing I know how to photograph.
You don't have to earn the right to take up space.
You have been managing your edges for a long time. Softening them, sanding them down, making sure nobody felt the sharpness of who you actually are.
You can stop.
Not because the world is ready for you. It may not be. But because you have been waiting for permission that was never coming, from people who were never going to give it, to be exactly who you already are.
You don't need to be more likable. You don't need to be easier to be around. You don't need to be any less than the full, specific, unapologetic version of yourself.
You're allowed to be a little intimidating. 🖤
The investment is smaller than another year of waiting.
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