Where evil grows

I've had darkness and evil on my mind due to a story I've been working on. Someone asked me what it was about the other night and I couldn't really say. I guess the topic is good and evil. It's all based on one of the best things a man has ever said to me (and I've written this before,) "You may pride yourself in evil girl, but you've got too much good."

The southern gothic notion of being a bad seed is something I've flirted with in my writing but never a position I could accurately claim to occupy. It's the stuff of myths and songs, "You'll never stop doing bad things because you'll never stop being a bad seed/You don't grow up from evil and you don't grow out of sin." Tagging along with my manhood post I think about the man who told me I wasn't evil and claimed to be that mythic bad seen himself. Both conditions, evil and darkness, are difficult to navigate within the identity of a woman. They contradict the earth mother nurturer ideal I hold somewhat dear to my future dream incarnation. Perhaps my flirtations with darkness play a part in my hesitation to call myself a woman just yet. I am not quite sure how to negotiate anger.

I'm not launching into a tirade about gender oppression here, but I feel that anger is an emotion that woman have been robbed of until recently. And our anger so often only gets attention when it is politicized. I am more interested in the primal response, the emotion of anger. It has been one of the hardest emotions for me to show. While I am a reasonably emotional person, I'd often pride myself on my ability to control my temper. I'd push myself into a state of non-caring enough to never feel true anger. It resulted in me being overly tolerant of the way certain others treated me and somehow transformed me into a woman who both self-identified and was recognized by others as "strong" but had a severe hesitance and perhaps even inability to stand up for myself.

Not that I want to embrace the identity of the "angry woman." Lord knows we saw enough of that in the 90s. Instead of classifying my identity along one primary taboo emotion I'd rather be able to freely express a breadth of them, from anger to fear to love to nurturing. Of course it's only fair for me to be able to do the same. But I can't help feel a sense of jealousy about men being trained to express anger as a woman who was raised to suppress it. What is often mistaken as an unflappable quality, is really an inability to confront the things that really, honestly, just piss me off.

I am not championing unadulterated wrath in all directions. But just an occasional expression. When life presents you with a series of indignities it's okay to call bullshit. That's all.

I have no idea how I got from the difference between evil and darkness to gendered expressions of anger. It's 5:25 am and I am on a sleep schedule that is totally fucked. Tired and hungry is the equivalent of drunk for me, so pardon my posting, I'm both tired and hungry and can't handle a picture post right now. But at least currently I am not angry about much of anything, not that I'm repressed, just that life is okay for the time being.

And on this note, I'll leave you with my current theme song. The video is pretty anti-climactic, but the song shines.