Life & Wisdom Quote by Audre Lorde

Self-definition isn’t framed here as self-care; it’s framed as survival. Lorde’s line moves with the blunt force of a warning: if you don’t author your own identity, someone else will draft it for you, then consume you for the comfort of their story. The verbs do the heavy lifting. “Define” is deliberate, almost administrative, but “crunched” and “eaten alive” turn social pressure into bodily violence. That escalation is the point: what looks like mere mislabeling is, for marginalized people, a slow kind of erasure.

The subtext is about power. “Other people’s fantasies” aren’t innocent misunderstandings; they’re projections that keep hierarchies intact. A “fantasy” can be flattering or romantic, but Lorde treats it as predatory: a script that demands you perform an identity that makes others feel enlightened, safe, superior, or unchallenged. It’s a critique of tokenization before the word became common currency - being rendered symbol, spokesperson, exception, muse. Once you’re reduced to that, you’re edible.

Context matters: Lorde wrote from the lived intersection of being Black, a woman, a lesbian, a mother, and a political thinker in a culture eager to compartmentalize or sanitize those realities. Her work insists that naming is not vanity; it’s resistance. The sentence is structured as conditional fate: define yourself, or be defined into death-by-a-thousand-assumptions. It works because it refuses the polite language of “representation” and “identity” and tells the truth underneath: people will take you, if you let them, and call it love.