Sunday, March 27, 2022

The Feminine Urge



The feminine urge to disappear for a few days.

The feminine urge to announce your presence each time you walk into a room.

The feminine urge to turn your trauma into art.

To compliment other women on their earrings.

To revel in the sound of a loved one’s voice.

To sip your coffee slow, until it gets too cold to enjoy anymore.

To dance alone in your room.

To light a candle after vacuuming.

To stand in the rain for just a few seconds.

To bite and tear at the fingernails you just painted.

To clutch your pepper spray as you walk to your car.

To over-spend on holiday gifts for your favorite people.

To buy flowers for yourself at the supermarket.

To listen to the same song 20 times in a row.

To keep unfinished manuscripts on the desktop of your computer.

To wave goodbye to the person who delivered your Amazon package.

To twirl when you put on a dress.

To steep a cup of tea you know you won’t drink.

To paint one wall a different color than the rest.

To laugh at jokes you don’t find funny.

To fake orgasms even when he’s willing to continue.

To fall asleep rewatching one of your favorite shows.

To drink wine at lunchtime.

To give away tampons to strangers in the bathroom.

To dress in all black.

To decorate everything with stickers.

To take scalding hot showers.

To wear hats even on good hair days.

To collect mugs from thrift stores.

To send a “Thinking of you” text to the person you miss. 

To keep a journal. 

To burn that journal. 

To find beauty in ordinary things.

To try to please everyone and take no shit at the same time. 

The feminine urge to expose simple truths. 



It's Okay...

“Obvious” things I need to be reminded of today:

It’s okay if I stumble through my first year after graduation.

It’s okay if I don’t have a clear sense of direction at 23, or 26, or 30.

It’s okay if I want to try a bunch of different things in a bunch of different places.

It’s okay if I don’t know what a “dream job” might look like for me.

It’s okay if I want to focus on just a few things at once.

It’s okay if I want to keep my options open.

It’s okay to not feel like a real adult yet.

It’s okay to not want children.  

It’s okay to not be ready for a relationship.

It’s okay to fall in and out of love.

It’s okay to make small mistakes, and it’s okay to make big ones.

It’s okay to be new to things.

It’s okay to be bad at things.

It’s okay to fail.

It’s okay to celebrate.

It’s okay to feel unproductive.

It’s okay to rest.

It’s okay to be messy.

It’s okay to be quiet.

It’s okay to be loud.

It’s okay to disappoint people.

It’s okay to want approval.

It’s okay to not know what I want at all.

It’s okay.

It's okay. 

It's okay. 




 

Saturday, March 26, 2022

First Times

 

I’m writing a book and I hate it, but I also think it’s good. I hate the characters, but they’re well developed. I hate the dialogue, but it’s fluid and witty. I hate the setting, but it’s vivid and lively. I’m not saying I’m a good writer; I just finally have a solid piece of writing that I’m proud of… but I fucking hate it, and I think I’ve figured out why.

It’s the first draft of a first manuscript about first love. Now that I think about it, the story is full of firsts. I have to write about what I know, and I’m 22, which means all I know are firsts. I have no business writing a whole book. I don’t hate my characters because they’re bad characters; I hate them because they’re naive and self-destructive. I hate them because they’re my age, and their depth is limited to my 22-year-old understanding of the world.

I want to continue working on this book because I think I've started something that might be worth reading one day, but I’m afraid I’ll grow out of this project. Actually, I hope to; I expect to grow out of it. I’m about to finish college and move on from the concepts I’m writing about. Whole new sets of firsts are waiting for me on the other side of graduation.

That’s the thing about first times, we want them to be so monumental and significant, but most of us stumble through our first time doing anything. Our first job, our first serious relationship, our first fight with a friend, the first time we get behind the wheel of a car. Our first time doing anything remotely “adult” or scary might make for a funny story, but it’s rarely riveting or enjoyable. We get more pleasure out of the humor of the anecdote than we do from the experience itself. First times have no precedent. The idea that you have to do something multiple times to get good or comfortable with it is nothing new.

I know you already thought of this, so I’ll just point out the elephant on the page… I have yet to meet a person who has a romantic or even particularly pleasant story about losing their virginity. A person’s first time having sex is almost always awkward, uncomfortable, painful, messy, or (coughs) quick – if you’re lucky. Good sex doesn’t happen until later. The “later” sex is what people want to read about.

Firsts are sort of boring. They have a quality of innocence that might strike a tone of nostalgia or wholesome awkwardness, but I read to escape my awkwardness, not to relive it. So why would I put something into the world that’s already been stamped with a mark of mediocrity?

Maybe I should pay more attention to getting the “first times” out of the way and less attention to making them count. Maybe there’s more value in living for the repeats. I think that’s the problem with this manuscript I’m painfully working through. It’s not going to make it past the file on my desktop because it shouldn’t. It has no right to be read. It’s my first.  

I’m going to move on and experience more things to write about. Better things. More firsts times, but also more second times. It’s the second times that I should be writing about, and the thirds and fourths. I have a whole life of second times ahead of me. So this is me, putting the book project to bed… because at least this isn’t my first blog post. 

The Feminine Urge

The feminine urge to disappear for a few days. The feminine urge to announce your presence each time you walk into a room. The feminine ...