What is the sound of your own voice?
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I have this innate impulse to apologize. This is not a permanent disposition by any means. I just happen to be “going through something” at the moment, and I feel exceptionally large and bulky: a bit like a Macy’s Day Parade balloon trying to navigate through Venice. One made of raw meat.
The other part of that is my apology is for feelings in general. It’s a perpetual sense I’ve had that feelings are not particularly welcome — anywhere. Not even in so many relationships.
The “How are you?” pumps out from everywhere, but the answer had better be “fine.”
You’re Too Sensitive
Over the course of my life, here’s how I think that has played out. I was always sensitive to feelings and desirous of love. I fell into the wrong place in the birth order, in a too-German family to accommodate all that.
Over the course of my life, those feelings started to come out anyway — sideways. They particularly came out as anger and frustration.
It’s not acceptable for a female to be an angry sort of person. That does not work in any sort of context, but least of all in our Western world. The female is supposed to draw only from the parts of the yin/yang which suit the male ideal in our culture. So the female should be bright, positive and passive — She should lay down whore and wake up madonna. She should be mother to our children and yet not-mother — a perfectly young beauty without smirch.
Above all, she is an object to serve the needs of others.
Woman as Vending Machine
This is the story of the female that is always being told in our culture. It swirls around us and it is a force that is more powerful — naturally — than Mother Nature herself.
So, my voice is one that cries out in protest. It is ANGRY. My voice responds to the rage I feel toward the abuse females have been submitted to — from rape and murder to the everyday expectation that we will just be dismissed of value, or kicked down the human ladder a few steps.
This despite all the “progress” that has been made.
My feelings have grown expansive since I have become a mother.
Love is Not Enough
I feel uncomfortable wearing any sort of “fake niceties” to pretend this isn’t the way the world is. I can’t stand the singsong fakery of women wearing some mantle of femininity. I recoil at any kind of insincerity. Do I find joy in kindness and love?
Of course. These are feelings, in their own moments, which serve a greater life energy.
But “life energy” lies at the heart of human choices, and sadly this sickness is one of the mind of our culture. It’s a way of thinking. An infection that so many seem to not even want to be cured of.
I know that anger and frustration are not the answer. But I cannot find the answer. Love does not seem to be the answer. Because there is NOTHING ELSE that women — mothers, wives, daughters — have been doing all these years but make and make and make more love, in every form, for every person they meet and to give it away.
The response is still — violently — the same.
Love it not enough.
Do you hear why I’m shouting?
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This post is part of the December group posting project, #reverb14, hosted by the wonderful Kat McNally. Follow reverb14 on Twitter.
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