Meredith Reigle is a writer, producer, and professional noticer - taking from lived experience as a former people pleaser turned meaning maker. She believes what we notice shapes what we build.
This is where she put the posters on the wall.
(finally)
Girl with no posters.
I’ve spent most of my life trying not to take up space - on walls, in rooms, in decisions. This is a story about that. And about what’s changing.
In junior high kid I insisted on clear wheels for my Razor scooter so they’d match all my outfits. It wasn’t just scoots around the neighborhood, honey I was giving a moment. But when you flip to the other side of that coin I had a baseline of petrified. “If I stand for this, that might take me out of that.” So why not make the choice that encompasses it all? The 13 year old schemes into her Lisa Frank. That’s the safe choice. The smart one…right?
Looking back, anxiety and stress hummed in the background like fluorescent lights - always on, NEVER soothing and very unflattering. The sleepover where I had to profess my crush *bzz* declare which Spice Girl I was *bzz* choose between Backstreet Boys or N’Sync *bzz**bzz*. How could I be expected to take a stance like that? At that age? With so little life experience? Please. I knew better than that, nice try.
Hi my name is Meredith and I’m an ex-people pleaser. Ever since I can remember I strived for neutrality. I might have made “Everyone’s Best Friend” my aspirational high school superlative. But now? I’m left staring at a blank wall. Turns out aiming for the center of the xy axis graph keeps your results at 0,0. And I’m here to move the needle as far away from 0 as possible, and tell my ex-people pleasing self to just put a fucking poster on the wall.
This blog is my wall to finally start displaying parts of myself, not worried about how long they’ll stay up. A slow collage of the people, ideas and reflections I used to be afraid to declare affinity with, but am now choosing to put my love for them on display.
1st Poster: Joan Didion
She was the woman who made observation into art. She walked into a room and turned detachment into its own form of intimacy.
Joan Didion taught me that emotion doesn't have to be declared loudly to be felt deeply. That noticing is an act of love. That writing is a way of claiming space - not with volume, but with precision.
Her sentences feel like brushed steel: cool, exacting, unflinching. But beneath every polished clause is a woman who felt everything. And had the audacity to stay looking.
She didn’t soften her edges to make others more comfortable. She told the truth with a surgeon’s grace - and in doing so, made space for others to tell it messily, urgently, with whatever instruments they had.
Joan made me feel that it was okay to be both analytical and sensitive. That mourning and meaning-making could live in the same paragraph. That even if the center doesn't hold, you can.
She taught me how to hold contradictions and call it clarity. She let grief walk through the front door and sit at the table. She showed me what it means to survive with elegance and without apology.
Joan Didion is not on my wall because she was flawless. She’s on my wall because she was ferociously precise about being real.
And I think that’s the bravest thing a woman can be.
2nd: Eve Babitz
If Joan Didion stared the world down, Eve Babitz laughed at it through cat-eye sunglasses, cocktail in hand, fingers already smudging the edges of whatever came next.
Where Joan was precision, Eve was presence. She didn’t report on LA - she was LA. A swirl of lip gloss, cigarettes, typewriters, and barely concealed brilliance. She didn’t walk into rooms to observe them. She walked in, lit them on fire, and then narrated the scent of the smoke.
Eve Babitz is a woman who said yes. To life. To chaos. To beauty. To story. And then dared to write it down like it was no big deal.
She made bad decisions look like lifestyle choices. She wore art and scandal like perfume. And her power wasn’t that she seduced everyone - her power was that she didn’t care if you noticed.
I think what I love most about Eve is that she wrote like she knew the room wanted her, and she let it want her, without apology. Not in a pick-me way, but in a see-me-if-you-can way.
Where other women asked permission, Eve made a joke, poured a drink, and wrote it better than anyone else ever would.
She reminds me that indulgence doesn’t have to cancel out intellect. That sensuality is a form of intelligence. That women don’t need to be either wise or wild - we can be deliriously and deliciously both.
Eve Babitz didn’t tame her life to become legible. She turned the mess into myth. And I keep her on my wall as a reminder that art doesn’t have to be neat to be worth something. It just has to be yours.