12.15.2023

as a girl, i knew i would live forever.

life happens to me and i allow it to happen to me. i float in it thickly. i allow myself to be swallowed by it over and over again. one must assume female collective experiences only cycle through the same variations on a theme.

beyond the understanding that i am vulnerable and small and easy to hurt, i have never felt like a woman in the way i felt i was expected to. maternal urges feel innate to what is left of my personhood, while femininity exists only in relation to my fragility. i have always kept company with women wounded in similar ways, who understand the safety in existing as an aesthetic, as image, as object. we perpetuate this as mothers, as sisters, as continual critics of ourselves. it is difficult to destroy that which is not tangible; it is easy to exchange a set of indistinct attributes rather than true affection. a partner i do not love is better than a partner who brutalizes me. a partner who brutalizes me is familiar. we compel our contentedness with either, for to be alone is ugly, to be alone is too vulnerable. concurrently, we hold onto the desperate idea that we may forcibly cultivate love, both given and received, through simultaneous performance and emotional distance. to be human is, simply, unimportant.

our partners too often fill a blurry and self-designed void. one that is not exacting in what it accepts and yet one that is indifferent to love, devotion, and true affection. men whose cruelty may be tolerated for hope of future tenderness, whose brutality may only exist in proportion to our indifference. similarly, we contour ourselves into something that may be loved, that may be worthy of love, despite us not knowing what love feels like, in our teeth and our bones and our hearts, and if we do, not knowing if we are capable of receiving it sincerely. we equate the mothering of our partners as the facilitator for potential fondness for each other, refusing to acknowledge the irreparable aperture between us. that, if i may feed you, if i may wrap your wounds, if i may lay honey under your tongue, eventually we may faithfully understand each other and exist as humans, jointly.

we succumb to the conclusion that inherent male cruelty sustains our condition. we believe andrea dworkin may save us, simone de beauvoir may save us, helene cixous may save us. it is an accepted helplessness that cannot simply be intrinsic to our sex and yet has become both internally and externally synonymous with it, simultaneously an excuse for survival and the mechanism by which we believe, or convince ourselves, we may survive.

i struggle to conjure images of female heroes that are not martyrs. yet, we have decided to settle for supinity than to willingly and eagerly die for love. somewhere, there must exist the impulse to allow ourselves to be wounded. if i must be prey, then i welcome the opportunity to be maimed, torn apart, and pierced for love and for love’s sake alone. i yearn for our collective sisterhood, i yearn for our collective martyrdom, i yearn for us to entangle ourselves with some Other, open-heartedly.