so much joy it hurts

Feb. 6, 2012 at 10:23pm with 35 notes View comments

Reblogged from hysteriarama

I keep returning to male approval as something that infuriates me leaves me feeling helpless and crazy and abject and desperate because my feminism is always tainted and complicit. I feel traitorous all the time. I wonder if everyone else does too. I wonder how I’m supposed to reconcile my conflicting desires. This is a quote from my fifteen-year-old diary: “I want to write but not to die. I want to fuck but not to die. I don’t want to be a human sacrifice”.

My favorite quote at that age which I found in an Adrienne Rich poem which I found in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women which I found on my mother’s bookshelf which saved my life: “You all die at fifteen” (Rich quoting Diderot talking to Sophie Volland). I say favorite but I mean I was obsessed I’d smoke pot with my best friends in forests after our Animal Farm rehearsal and then I’d have to leave and I’d hate my life and carve that quote on my bedroom wall and hide it under a Leonard Cohen poster so my dad wouldn’t yell at me for fucking up the walls. I wrote it all over my binder and on my thigh after baths which felt tragic and sexual. I ranted about it to my faithful best friend, a scruffy little blonde boy who years later I would write heaps of poetry for, totally bitter and dejected because I thought he was on my side but he stopped calling, got taller, we couldn’t cope with each other’s bodies anymore and it was like he was a man and everyone loved him for being an artist and not me and it was so unfair.

Anyways I keep thinking I’m over wanting that approval and sometimes I feel hopeful but it’s late and attachment is so complicated. This is also the story of my privilege, Adrienne Rich talks about the same thing when she says, “we have liked to think of ourselves as special, and we have known that men would tolerate, even romanticize us as special”. There may be ways in, there are sometimes ways in, they are unacceptable and I use them all the time and when I don’t I resent my marginalization.

I am continually tempted to compromise myself in ways that would be fulfilling and intolerable, sometimes I know it and I do it anyways, sometimes I don’t, sometimes I don’t realize but I do it all the same, and that says so much about what I value, and that says so much about the power I wield and the ways that I’m lucky and humiliating