sorry if we ruin your lives

The bitch persona has moments of style and certain moments of substance, but quite often the attitude reveals itself to be about genuine anger, disturbance, or fear. It's the kind of female resentment and rage that produce girls like Sandy from Grease, for example. We all want to be Olivia Newton-John in the last scene, the girl swiveling her foot like a broken record to put out a cigarette with one of her red high heels (which are no longer "Fuck Me" pumps but rather "Fuck You" shoes), the girl with ratted hair, in slinky shiny black pegged pants. Yes, by the end of the movie Sandy has become your 1958 basic slut: the girl who, after suffering months of rejection for being a party pooper prude who didn't smoke or drink, has finally realized that you do have to "pet" to be popular, that you do have to put out to get the guy, that it isn't the blondes who have more fun- it's the sluts. Placing one's pretty power, one's pussy power, one's sexual energy out there for popular consumption no longer makes you a bimbo, it makes you smart.

We as girls already have ages of bad blood, beginning with Eve, ending our stay in Eden with her curiosity and lust for strange fruit, and to me it seems that even if we act like good people, the world is still quite likely to find us bad. So fuck dignity. It seems so much more exciting to be a Siren beckoning with her song or Calypso captivating on her island than to be Penelope, the archetype of female fidelity, weaving and unweaving, sending her suitors away while waiting for the errant Odysseus to return, waiting while he luxuriates in lotusland as he commits adultery with gorgeous, high-class women.

It seems to me, in the pageantry of public life, the one statement a girl can make to declare her strength, her surefootedness, her autonomy- her self as a self- is to somehow be bad, somehow do something that is sure to make her parents weep. We only seem interesting if something seems not quite right. Marilyn Monroe might have been miserable, but her death is immortal.

The Stupid Things You Do

Insight alone is not a transformative force. It doesn't work that way. Everyday you might come to a new conclusion about yourself and about the reasoning behind your behaivor, and you can tell yourself that this knowledge will make all the difference. But in all likelihood, you're going to keep on doing the same old things. You'll still be the same person. You'll still cling to your destructive, debilitating habits because your emotional tie to them is so strong- so much stronger than any cereal box insight you might come up with- that the stupid things you do are really the only things you've got that keep you centered and connected. They're the only things about you that make you you.


If only life were like the movies where characters muddle things through and do what's right in the end. In The Breakfast Club, a geek, a jock, a rich bitch, a girl in black, and a hoodlum become best friends and reconcile their differences in a few hours' worth of detention.... In real life, any momentary intimacy at Saturday school would result only in some forced, awkward exchanges on Monday morning, everyone returning to the same old cliques and clans, the same old lipstick shades and sunglasses.

"The Dead Girl", by Melanie Thernstrom

"It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry- school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, the fear of future, fear in general- but it was hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place."

I'm starting to feel like I can't maintain my facade any longer, that I just might start to show through, and I wish I knew what was wrong. I have this palpable, absolute sense that I'm breaking down and there's really no good reason as to why, and- even worse- there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm certain that they'll never understand the philosophical underpinnings of the state I'm in. Sometimes I'm just fine, I can cope with the ebb and tide of life, I can handle the setbacks with aplomb, I can be a good sport. But when my head is clean and clear of this clutter of reason and rationality, what I'm mostly thinking is: why? Why take it like a man? Why be mature? Why accept adversity? Why surrender with grace the follies of youth? Why put up with the bullshit?

The thing is that the nature of life- even normal, sane, not depressed life- has worn me down and will continue to wear me down even more. It's just a fact that if I am to grow up, and get married, and eventually have kids, and do all the normal, happy things, along the way I will have so much trial and error to go through, so much living that I can only anticipate with dread.

There will be so many more Nicks, so many more heartbreaks, so many more cycles of elation at the first kiss, and devastation when it's over. I accept this pattern as a perfectly decent way for people to make their way through the "mating game", but I can't handle it. I am so wrecked already, so unstable, a piece of work who was never given the tools it takes to deal with what everyone else considers business as usual. I am not equipped with any emotional resilience, can't go with the flow, can't stand steady when the boat rocks and rolls. I have been robbed of that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.

Measure of Mindfulness

The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity and our attention to responsibility. If you're still at the point when you're even just barely going through the motions (i.e. showing up at school, making small talk) you are still okay or okay enough. But you're not, and a desire not to acknowledge depression in ourselves or those close to us- better known these days as denial- is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you're actually flying out of a window, you don't have a problem.

I can't quite shake this feeling that we live in a world gone wrong, that there are all these feelings that you're not supposed to have because there's no reason to have them anymore. But they're still there, stuck somewhere, a flaw that evolution hasn't managed to eliminate yet, like tonsils or an appendix. I wonder if anything will work or if there is no drink, no drug, no pill, no potion, no serum, no shot, nothing under the whole black sun that can possibly penetrate a pain so deep. There must be something, some very strong hand with a very tight grip that can turn off the way I feel.

Jesus Christ

Every guy I fall for becomes Jesus Christ within the first 24 hours of our relationship.

I know that this happens, I see it happening, I even feel myself, sometimes, standing at some temporal crossroad, some distinct moment at which I can walk away and keep this all from happening, but I never do.

I always imagine the end, the despair I will suffer when it comes, and it makes any happiness I have in the present seem not merely ephemeral, but doomed. Because the happier I allow myself to be, the more miserable I will be later.

Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign on my forehead. Sometimes I wish there was a way to let people know that just because we live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt so bad the morning after. Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was alright for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left. Certainly deceit and treachery in both romantic and political relationships are nothing new, but at one time, it was bad, callous, and cold to hurt somebody. Now it's just the way things go, part of the growth process.

I grab at everything, I end up with nothing, and then I feel bereft. I mourn over the loss of something I never even had. I am a sick, sick girl.

Soviet Union

I am the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile- that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in cartoons- will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party or some picnic in the park, the one who looks vibrant and shimmery, but who is in fact remarkably insignificant and soon going to be gone. When you look at that picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because everyday that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible, getting covered over more thickly with darkness, coats and coats of darkness that are going to suffocate me in the sweltering heat of the summer sun that I can't even see anymore, even though I can feel it burn.

Snow Globe

I am a stranger wherever I go because I am strange to myself. My mind just goes off doing its own thing, never consulting me at all about whether it's alright to feel this way or that. I feel like one of those souvenir plastic domes that are full of glitter which you get at Disneyland or at truck stops, the kind that makes snow when you turn it over. That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant weather patterns of all sorts- blizzards, cyclones. I am the fucking Wizard of Oz. I am constantly standing several feet away from myself, watching as I say or do or feel something that I don't like or don't want at all, and I still can't stop it.