Reblogging Sarah’s notes here. So good:

Frances Farmer Is My Sister — All The Sad Young Pretty Girls

so I was reading this this morning because a friend had tweeted a line from this post that caught my eye, and I sent it to Melissa with the comments:

So we’ve had this conversation, but I think this reminds me once again of something I’ve been trying to claim, maybe all of my life: my right to be fucked up.

I think without any sort of understanding of the idea of privilege my parents cast me in this role that meant I had to live up to my privilege, work hard, do well, get a good job, make money, etc. And I spent my 20s wandering, yes, but always working hard, and except for a couple of years always taking care of other people on top of myself. Whether they were my parents themselves or boyfriends who couldn’t function in the real world or utterly damaged friends who clung to me as the One Who Had Her Shit Together.

And I could never have put my finger on why at certain points I had to fall apart, I just did. I had to set fire to a bunch of bridges at once—job, boyfriend, school, apartment, even some friends—or had to pack my shit and move across the country all alone without a plan.

And now I’m grown-up and have a real job doing what I love doing and an apartment and a dog and friends and yet I’m still searching for the moments when I’m allowed to be not perfect, not together, curled into a ball with someone taking care of me.

I said to K. this morning: “what’s the good of people who care about us if they don’t make allowances for the spots where we’re broken?”

And because I write, not as a job but as an identity, a boy I know asked me the other day how much time I spend working/writing/drinking as some sort of half-joking breakdown of my life but I told him also half-joking that writing is what I do for work but also what I do for me and so it’s nearly impossible to break that in two.

And because I write I write about the things that happen to me, my own personal tragedies and the moments when nothing is really truly wrong but even so I feel as though I might just fly into a thousand pieces.

And I get, oh, I get, why my story is neither “universal” as the blank slate of the male hero is supposed to be, nor particularly striking. Yet I don’t care, I’m gonna tell it anyway.

Yesterday I was on a radio program talking about a book I helped edit and a caller was determined to talk over me, and so I talked over him back. And he hung up grumbling about how I talked over him, and I laughed because he simply expected that his right as a man was to talk over me and he was pissed, really, that I wouldn’t let him.

I don’t like New Year’s resolutions but I always end up making them anyway, and this year mine is pretty simple: it’s to ask for help when I need it. Which is really, really hard for me. It is hard for me to admit that I need other people because what I’ve carved out for myself over these ten or eleven years is a person who can survive on her own.

But just like I don’t think one should have to write an “empowered woman” to be worthwhile or a good example or properly feminist or whateverthefuck, I don’t think I have to be able to do everything alone all the time.

Or rather, I don’t think that power is synonymous with individual. I think that’s a particularly fucked-up US capitalist fantasy of the bootstrap-pulling man (and it is a male fantasy, isn’t it? Luce Irigaray would talk about male sexual organ as singular and female as plural and maybe she had a point and maybe I don’t want to be reduced to my anatomy either).

I think we need to know when we’re broken and need help.

And sometimes that help is writing our stories, or reading stories of people like us. Other times that help is being willing to reach out to someone who can make it better and say “I need you now.”

I think I’m tired of being cast in other people’s lives as certain things and I think I’m really tired of my feelings being too messy for some.

Molly the other day, when we were chatting, said brilliantly “at first it was saving your purity until no one wanted it. now it’s your heart.” That the new myth of the pure woman isn’t one who hasn’t had sex but one who doesn’t have feelings. One who doesn’t have needs or wants. One who doesn’t cry.

The picture of women we want in literature is the same picture we want in real life, isn’t it? Women who are Strong and Handle Things and are Competent Like Men or some bullshit.

Yet I’m surrounded by men who are brilliant and talented and warm, loving people who do not know how to ask for help when they need it and are utterly knocked sideways by their feelings. And I do the woman’s work of asking them again and again what’s wrong until hopefully they tell me the truth.

Yet that’s exhausting, and it’s work in the way Laura Kipnis wrote of love as work. It’s work I love doing the way I love writing and researching and interviewing, but it’s also work that tires me out if I get nothing back.

And it’s also work that requires me casting myself in the role of the one whose  problems can wait, whose issues are not as bad, who’s doing well and thus doesn’t need a shoulder to cry on every now and then. And when I shake up those roles and ask for help (or do what I more normally do, which is tell my problems in the form of a story, half-joking and all-pleading under the surface, and wait for someone to offer me answers) people look at me like I’m an alien and what have you done with Sarah?

Except for the ones who don’t, and they are the keepers. The one who let me cry and reminded me that he’d seen me sad before. Yet even with them I remain afraid that my messy feelings will at some point be too much and drive them all away.

Too much.

All of these critiques of a girl are critiques of a girl being too much. Which is why Lady Gaga being called an egomaniac pings me in a broken place. Because I am too much for many, many people and have been too much for all the boys in my life up til now and I was too much for that guy on the radio who didn’t understand why I felt just as entitled to talk over him as he did me.

I cannot risk being too much if I don’t ask. If I save my overflow for a blog where I pretend at some degree of anonymity and hit the “private” button sometimes because I self-censor, women self-censor, we assume our feelings are not as important, our experiences not as important, our job is to ask the men again “What’s wrong?”

Why am I conflating my life with literature here? Because I think they’re related, I think that the lives we lead are so often constrained by the examples we’ve seen and the stories we tell are constrained by the lives we lead. If the stories we read are no good unless the heroines are really heroines then those of us who aren’t heroines are no good either. 

(The tag I put on these posts is “me me me me” which is partly a joke on the idea of the “egomaniac” “writing only about herself” and partly, well, me acknowledging that this is some more navel-gazing, feel free to TL;DR it and read my next rant about the lack of  journalists of color or whatever.)