Speak out (that’s enough,
the mouth on her) about
only that deemed
to meet Her standards for
polish (uphold the shine),
did I seem fine? credit
force of will, no matter
how many (countless) times
I said it, the sloughed off no;
flip me between realities; which
resting place
switches on truth?
How have others held power over you?
What does it mean to feel powerful?
How have you begun to reclaim power?
Rough week. Fighting one of the inevitable depressive states that accompany being mostly housebound, always in pain, always in my head. My thoughts have been ugly, dark. Cruel ironies aimed inward.
I keep returning to this central conundrum. On one hand, the ruthless expectation that I achieve (only the most elite, most demanding, most male-dominated) because I was (would be) woman. It was my mission to carry this imposed feminism, the one she positioned herself as having made possible for me, though she hadn’t set any radical example, had taken little tangible action unless it centered her performance.
And on the other hand, often in the same pool of breath:
The obsessive scrutiny of every bite I took, the withholding or punishment around sweets, the forced weight loss programs. The open discussion of every pound with her circle, often forcing me to justify the week’s scale numbers to the men and women who looked me up and down.
And of course, the permissions granted to the grandfather (overruling my voice every time, the voice I was meant to use to reach the expected heights of achievement), to treat his granddaughter’s body like meat, to spit his twisted contemptuous ownership of my femaleness, my fat, my mind, my words. The explicit message that his ego, his sickness, his need – these were what mattered, that making it OK for him was my responsibility.
Where in this does a little girl, an adolescent, a young woman… where does she find power? How many decades does it take her to internalize the idea that she has any, at all?
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