So, when I moved to Austin, Texas and decided to start a life here, I'd experienced more than my fair share of heartbreak. I have "daddy issues," a penchant for sex, and past mistakes tend to come back to haunt me from time to time. It really is the perfect town for me! Well, maybe that's a stretch. But once you get through my sarcasm and my faults, however, you begin to realize that my problems are very common, even if they do manifest themselves differently in others.
When I met my boyfriend here, I knew I had found someone who could understand me. Not that he doesn't have his own problems, because there's never any shortage of challenges in our life together, but I knew even if he didn't understand fully, he would almost certainly try to empathize with me. And he has, and it's been great. But there's something that bothers me pretty consistently, and it's the fact that I'm 25 and my mental and emotional issues have only gotten worse. Good things are happening to me every single day and I have a wonderful partner that I share great times with, and who gets me through the bad times when they hit. Sometimes they hit hard, but he usually has my back. I've seen him and many others through their own breakdowns and temper tantrums, even while I wanted to kick and scream and have my own. Bottom line: I'm a nice person and a great woman to be with, but there's one thing that I can't seem to shake; that I
am a woman.
Now, don't get me wrong, I want to be a woman. I want to be a woman because we're great, even when we're fucked up inside from years of emotional and physical abuse. We prevail, even in the midst of tears as we crumple to our bathroom floor for the tenth time that week, sad about who knows what... But the truth is that I seldom think about why I do that. I'll be honest and say that I've been more likely to attribute that to my birth control or to my hormones not being right. I'm sure that all of that does hold true and that my hormones
are out of whack... but what about all the baggage that I've been carrying around my entire life? Is that enough to go crazy?
We all have baggage, and it comes in so many different sizes and different packaging. It sits next to us on planes and it seems to never go away, but to live in the back of our minds. For so long I've been telling myself that I'm okay with everything that's happened to me in my short life, but
maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm not okay with the fact that every single part of my body is its own commodity, and has the option of its own implant. We women are slabs of meat sold on the black market every single day, while I sit in my living room pretending it doesn't exist. When the boy that I lost my virginity to when I was 15 told me he was sorry for the way he treated me a few years back, I just told him it was "fine." I didn't want to talk about it then. But maybe it wasn't "fine"!
Maybe I'm not fine because every single day I get catcalled on the street and forced to examine myself the way that others see me, even when I don't fucking want to. If I'm in public, I'm not allowed to be me or to exist without being reminded all too often that I'm a woman. They assess me so matter-of-factly as if checking off some imaginary list that I've never had access to. I find myself asking, "what is it about me that people like, that people hate?" "That girl seems popular and attractive, how can I change myself to be like her?" I STILL DO THIS. Why should I ever do that?
But I can't stop, I just can't. This obsession with how I look and act and feel and think and treat others, and what I say and how I say it started long before I was born.
I'm just another casualty. All of us are.
Maybe I'm really really sick of people telling me that I hate men because I'm a feminist , when really I just fucking hate myself.
This might seem a little harsh. It's the only way to get an impression of how I feel out to the world and to show what goes on. What we do to women's brains is really quite extraordinary.
We convert meaningless things into obsessions and we reinforce them in everything we show the woman. Everything we offer her is contingent upon her own rejection of herself as she is, now. I want to do so many things and live and breathe free air, being one with myself and my sexuality, and not threatened by the selves and sexualities of others. But it all comes at a cost for me. I want to be able to watch porn with my boyfriend and not compare myself to everything about the girls on there. But to see someone get an erection over something that society teaches me that I should strive to be while denying everything that I already am, is hard to deal with. It's an uncomfortable thought. I didn't think it would be, but it was! I thought I could separate the two things, but I couldn't. My mind wouldn't let me! I want to explore life with my partner, but I feel like he's being forced to explore mine first. I have so many mixed feelings about these issues, even that of porn. I used to think that if you were cool with porn that meant that you were enlightened sexually and that you were adventurous and men would like that about you. And they do, it's all true. Except I'm starting to think that maybe I'm not so enlightened, and that I was wrong about a great many ideas that I've held deep down within myself.
When I was just a child, or at the very last an adolescent girl struggling to make her mark on the world, I was the prey. I never had a chance. I realize that now, plain as day. You can apologize for it ten years later, and say that you realize what a great person I really was and how sweet. Of course I was fucking sweet, that was how I would get you to sleep with me. Accommodating women are great, right? No,
you were the prize, for your body and your brains and your company, and I was not.
But it won't matter now if you tell me how great you really thought I was. I will already be that 25 year old woman wrestling with the demons of the past that writes this post today. I am that woman. In many ways I'm a bitter person, too. I'm bitter that I have thousands of insecure thoughts every single day and it cripples me and stops me from doing the things that I love. I don't know who I am any more, and I know it's because I never did. And that's a scary feeling at this age.
Because I never took the time to find out who I was in the first place. I defined myself and my sexuality by what others wanted, and what others thought they saw in me. Every day I live now is a nightmare filled with objectification, insecurity, missed opportunities, confusion about my own sexuality and beliefs, crippling jealousy that is caused by imagined fears that are caused by real-life events in which men have lied to me, cheated on me, told me they never loved me, they just "kept me around." Left me places, or locked me out on the street because they'd rather sleep with someone else and they were too chicken to just tell me the truth. Things that you or I would never dream of doing or saying to anyone; They've done it all. In many ways that has NOTHING to do with my current partner. The problem is that it's been the only reference point I've had to go off of. Women do these things too, of course, and it hurts people. But I haven't dated one, so I can't speak on that subject. And, as we know, attributing traits that some people possess to an entire group of people is bad and hurts others. The point of this is not to hurt men or their image, but to tell people what it feels like to be me, and a woman.
The worst part is hearing someone tell you that this is all a choice. How you choose to view something and what you feel is a choice. To a certain extent it's true, but it's like saying that even though you're only surrounded by pudding, it's your choice to eat it or not. Well, I'd rather fucking accept it than starve. And that's what I would do, again and again! I'm already starved for attention. I want it so badly, it hurts. Acceptance, sure! Give me a heaping plate of that as well.
But what I really want and
need, more than anything, is to be able to provide those things for myself. I just... never learned how because everything in my life has been defined by a man. And I can't escape that tendency no matter how hard I try. I could, maybe, but you know. It feels so foreign, and I don't know how to even begin.
So, that is my baggage. I am a woman.
