“Kafkaesque”
I began to drink black coffee
and smoke short camel blues as a
transition into adulthood
Those typical milestones surpassed me but I took a pretentious type of pride daydreaming of the day I would say in my memoir,
“No, my 20’s weren’t wasted away sloppily clubbing, stumbling home in the bliss of girlfriends I could tell anything to, or one-night stands, faces veiled from a drunken blackout…”
“Instead, I poured over studies of cockroaches in mazes,
Marxist prose isolated from modern consumption,
Haitian zombies as an attestation to oppression
Participated in passionate assumptions about Mother Mary’s free will.”
“No, I never drank expresso martinis at a bar or did karaoke
Instead,
I left tear stains on pillowcases staying up till 5am reading Sylvia Plath and crying myself to sleep with empathy for Degas’ ballerinas”
Somewhere in the footnotes, my loneliness became a watermark. My emptiness became sophisticated, if I squinted hard enough, the depression almost became romantic. I begged people to believe it, to memorialize my ache in stained glass, and applaud it as genius. Waxing on as a haunted bibliophile and not a friend-less child.“
While reading this over I thought within this, I seemed to reaffirm the trope that young women could not be fun and educated. Specifically, this seems to acknowledge my internalized misogyny within what I perceive as my artistry. It seems to say, “there’s no way a woman could be both” there’s no way a woman would want to drink expresso martinis, get drunk with her friends AND be any sort of pseudo intellectual much less actual intellectual & read philosophy or enjoy classic literature. In the same way, it’s like the second shift complex, where women are often a mother and a working woman but one of those jobs is often completely ignored by society.
Considering myself a feminist, this was a hard pill to swallow. I found myself wondering how deep misogyny runs in our subconscious. It is often acknowledged that “girls mature quicker than boys” but as all psychology majors know, very few things are primarily biological. It is the same with this. Girls often mature faster because of the sheer amount of extra work and performance they are asked to keep up, UNICEF reports that girls between ages 5 and 14 spend 160 MILLION more hours on unpaid domestic work and childcare than boys of the same age.
In the artistic sphere, women carry the connotation of being muses instead of the artists, even in our own minds, youth (a thing men seem to be obsessed with in women) forever frozen in print and paint. A quote by one of my favorite essayists Rayne Fisher Quan sums this concept up, performance wise “the desire to editorialize our own experiences (to romanticize the unseen, to live for our biographies) has become an autonomic facet of womanhood as unavoidable of breathing.”