All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns

If the brain is a house, I like to get right to the terrifying attic and haunted second bathroom of truths and just bypass the vestibule of small talk and boundaries.

Do you love me? The curse is that this question is the most addictive, distracting pursuit. Do you love me? It is the most tempting diversion from your own actualization, from your exploding into your fullest potential.

Running around the world trying to feel loved does not compare one grain to loving someone else.

I need you to listen to me, and probably a hug...I was 17 and every system I'd built to protect myself was only to hide, and in a vacuum I treated myself like I didn't exist...how could I be angry at the people I trained never to look behind the curtain, to do exactly as I asked?

I watch with awe as some women reclaim things like beauty and sexuality as their own, both lasting much longer than a magazine tells them it does. I also marvel at women who can mute shame to let a dream take shape.

Everywhere here, pain and experience become windows and ideas. Used and fed correctly, this is your superpower.

Having to cycle through identities to give whoever is in front of you the girl they want, feeling like you have to audition for the job you already have, having a quarter of the time that men do to achieve your dreams before your tits are in your shoes and the government deems you disgusting and banishes you to eat sleeves of tear-soaked saltines in bed until you die.

Because the noise in my brain was deafening. I had weirdness and thought and power in there somewhere, but the stop and wait and hide was so much louder. In theatre school I saw that of course this feeling was not unique, that my classmates and Matt Damon felt it, too.

... it is going to take centuries to stop the chorus of people telling you that your highest purpose as a woman is to minimize your waistline and being, Your realizing that that's bullshit before they do will just be more efficient.

In my humble, probably wrong, select-all-delete opinion, we womenfolk today are faced with a decision: Salem or Barbie. We can either rip off the internal trapdoor that your Alanis Plath of Arc has been suffocating under or cement over it and instead luxuriate in a Hello Kitty porny Instagram-filtered cell where the validation is better than heroin and the thoughts are shorter than Mickey Rooney. (HEY-YO!)

It’s one of the things I will try my best to teach Mary Babe.

Keeping the trapdoor open means being uncomfortable and uncertain. It means treating the world as a question and yourself as a worthy seeker of answers. That can be wholly terrifying. Or immensely depressing. Or honestly? Just … boring. The modern attention span combined with our learned shame is a perfect excuse not to open the trapdoor that day. Who am I to be a sorceress? I don’t want to swim in the needle-water of my full capacity of aliveness today. I’d like to be a little less sad and work a little less hard. I don’t want to know myself—I don’t love what I’ve got so far.

We all have it at some point: the horrific adult realization that no one is going to hold you down, cut you open, and forcibly extract your centimeter-tall scroll of inner magnificence for the world to read.

The cycled selves and darkness and wonder... all of these are powers. What we are told is shameful or cute are actually fucking powers. We just have to stop using them to hurt ourselves. Point your barrel from your temple to the sky.

With no proof whatsoever, just somehow knowing as 1,000 percent fact - I come from a long line of women who stayed in bed all day. Or who dreamed about it when society forced them to a luncheon or crop event. I can see in the pictures of the women on either side of my parentage that their eyes were searing fuck this into the camera, both in the fun-wink and the yikes-Reaper ways. I've always had a little postpartum sheen to my style, a little matted tangle and stained Henley for your nerve. There is a constant low voice encouraging me to untie the raft and drift out to sea. To float through space braless, the day's only assignment pretzels, porn, and regret.

As only the Irish can do, she had a tacit understanding that life was hard so why not laugh at how embarrassing every milestone was.