I'm what the folks call a raging feminist.
I tend to announce my association with the movement and ideology at least once a day. If not in person, then certainly online. It's not that I'm afraid people may forget that I'm a raging feminist or not take me seriously when I say what I am, it's simply that I must remind myself.
Because I am a lot of things.
I'm insecure and jealous and hate my body on Saturdays during the summer when everyone wants to hang out. I'm oblivious and selfish and rarely understand when the right time to shut up is. I've wanted to be a mother since I was like 12 and I'm constantly begging someone, anyone to fall in love with me or to let me fall in love with them. I'm complacent and submissive and I don't speak up for myself enough. I can also be a massive jerk who projects my faults and emotions onto situations and friends and family completely removed from the circumstance. I have a thin sense of boundaries and walls built up to the sky and slathered in cement.
I give a lot of myself over to the possibility of becoming something to someone and still, my biggest fear is that I will settle.
I think a lot about what I will teach my daughters, about what I will tell them and what they will ask me when they're my age. I pray that I'll have daughters, I pray that I'll have children. I pray for my own needs and for the world to stick it out long enough to see these dreams through. I pray to God, the one from my childhood. And call on him when the fear seeps in. I could never tell when he was listening and when it was just the sound of my breathing. I ignore the news often. I can't remember when that started. Maybe after Sandra Bland? I know people are hurting, I occupy their pain and claim it as my own. I cry in bed and think about how fucked this all is and then I go to sleep. I go to sleep and ask my brain to forget and it does. Sometimes I feel sick about it but mostly I wonder where it all goes. The memories we ask ourselves to forget? I believe nothing can be created or destroyed in the universe and that it's all just one big recycling dump ground. And I think the trauma that we ask our little worlds to forget picks a little spot of its own in the universe and sits there and waits for us until we're ready to deal with it again.
It's a luxury of being not-poor-enough to constantly live in pain. I think about that all the time. About how painlessness is a privilege of the new world. How suffering is an ancient tradition linked to humanity and dying slowly. I think about how my ancestors lived with pain coursed through their bodies like it was blood. About how living and surviving were once synonymous and life without pain meant absolute death. I think about how it must be to have lived in a world of binaries. I never want to become someone my ancestors cannot recognize. I fear my daughters will not be able to find themselves in their mother. I pray I can heal the wounds my lovers cut open, I pray trauma will never be an inheritance for my children. I've felt kidnapped by life more times than I can count, I've had God raise the stakes and ask who was willing to fight for me. I know plenty of men who would pay my ransom in turn for my freedom.
And I'm a raging feminist but oh how I'd die to live for a lover.