A wise man once said never to trust anything that bleeds for a whole week every month and doesn't die.
I'm a girl. It is as much a curse as anything I know. Why?
•I'm not pretty, but somehow I find myself as the everlasting gobstopper of eye-candy for the sick fucks who come into my store. They think that just because I was born with a pair of tits and an ass that I'm not smart enough to realize that they're staring, or simply that I'm too vain to care.
•Everybody thinks I'm automatically a feminist. Ok, so I can handle myself in a fair fight, I can argue circles around most people, I can drink with the best of them and I can make an asshole feel like complete shit when I want to. But just because I'm not a typical damsel in distress doesn't mean I don't want to be rescued.
•I have the misfortune to bleed out for a whole week every single month of my life and not die.
•I inherently feel too much.
This last one is what gets me. It would be nice (who am I kidding...it would be fucking superb) if I could take note of what I feel and put it into a little box to save for later, and then decide never to open the box because what's in there might hurt me and other people will see me being hurt and might hurt me more because of it. But when I'm sad, or I'm happy, or I feel special, or loved, or scared, or ugly, or stupid, or protective, or infuriated, everyone in the whole world immediately knows it. Whether it's in my words, or the way I slam the steaming pitchers down on the counter, or the way I get that stupid fucking grin on my face, or the way I curl up as small as I can and hide my face, everyone knows what I'm feeling.
Bullshit.
Yesterday, I felt loved. And it was, without a doubt, one of the best moments of my life. And I loved back: and at that moment, I knew it could destroy me. I stood there with my hands open and empty, eyes wide and inside I'm as vulnerable as I've ever been. Because that's what happens when you love: you drop all of your weapons and your armor and you can't see the thousands dying on your battlefield because you're focusing on something you don't recognize. And you can't tell if it's going to heal you or kill you, but either way you know that whatever happens is going to change everything. It's either going to be exactly what you need to fill the bleeding hole under your chain mail, or it's going to rip you a new one in the most painful way possible. But to find out, you have to take off your mail and stand there and let it get close enough to kill you.
And after all this revelation, I got in my car and cried all the way home.
And this is why I should have been a boy. Or something without a gender. Or a three-toed sloth. My point is, I wish things were different. But they're not. I'm going to be female for the rest of my life. I'm going to be stuck like this...seemingly strong and fierce and lethal and impenetrable and I-will-slaughter-you-if-you-touch-me, but really I'm just a soft, confused, vulnerable mess with a tendency for self-hatred. I have made myself into someone you don't want to mess with, but I can't change who I am at my core: Ness. Small and weak and looking for what scares me the most: love.
Boy, do I feel stupid as fuck after writing this. I should go break a chicken's neck or shoot holes in a cow or beat the shit out of someone to offset the insane girliness that just happened.
Instead, I'm just gonna finish this post.
Hang on,
Ness
This is really well written, and that means a lot to me, and I hope it means a lot to you. It is an amazing gift to be able to take pain, or fear, or any feeling/experience and write it down. When the poet Anna Akhmatova was in a Siberian gulag/work camp, tortured and surrounded by hopelessness and senseless murder, another woman burst out in despair, "Who can ever describe this?" And Akhmatova turned to her and said, "I can." And she did. And it meant something. It didn't stop the suffering, but it somehow validated the people who suffered it. And you are writing your pains and joys and survival in valuable words. Keep at it.
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