PUBLISHED January 5, 2015

January 5th, 2015: Women Behaving Badly

It’s uncomfortable peering out from this place. Where you’re looking back at that fast, young, furious version of yourself that couldn’t be told nothin’ never no how. Who had it all figured out. I hate writing or thinking or talking or musing about transitions. About the loss of innocence and wonder between childhood and adolescence. Or the gradual dulling of the edges of life as adult-hood bleeds through the page. Because we just end up repeating the same narrative, and I wonder if we really find it to be true…or robotically step into the story that’s already been written?

Everyone seems to talk about the same things and go through the same things and it bores me thinking my life could fit amongst the masses. I’ve come to terms with narcism so no use throwing that at me. Is it absurd to want to be exceptional? Tonight we talked about boys. Almost an entire evening devoted to dissecting. In that sense not much has changed. The same girls, the same feverish debate, the same reviewing of text messages, the same spiraling of opinions. That I don’t mind. We started watching Coven on Netflix, and in a particular scene Jessica Lang’s character is being wooed by her boyfriend to go off and lead a life of love and simplicity on a farm. “You’ve done so much,” he tells her, “But you’ve never really been happy.” What he’s offering her is peace, security, serenity. Love, comfort, companionship. And you can see it in her eyes that it doesn’t interest her one bit. Her character is evil. Literally told she has no soul by the voodoo, creepy, underworld dude. And to her there is just so much left to do than to be…happy, than to just be. 

That is how I feel.  Women for so long were taught that our lives lead to some golden peak of being loved, of being safe. Jessica Lang’s character is evil, and it just made me think how that’s just something girls don’t get to be very often. What would we be, what would we have accomplished, what chaos would we ignite if we could just be bad. The entire construction of our identities relies on how we are assessed by men (boys with beards). We have been denied the underbelly of life. The way I think about relationships, I’m finding, is pretty unconventional, and it makes me feel like a bad person. Like I’ve lost some piece of my humanity because true and absolute love is not of particular interest to me. My friends all seem to want the same thing, or at least are intensely focused on it. And I just don’t get it. A boyfriend is a step above a dog and a step below a baby.

I say this all from the comfort of having someone amazing in my life who loves me deeply. So I say this all from a safe place. But I can offer the following: too much of anything can turn it to poison.

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