in honor of assumption day
Lessons [mis]learned as a private school girl:
Being rich is great. When you’re rich, you can make yourself pretty, and hire people to at least cover you in the skin of intelligence, and parlay that into a recipe for power. You interact with other rich, powerful people, who also have the money to make themselves pretty and hire others to wrap them in the affectations of intelligence. And you will reproduce, and spawn copies of yourselves. You ask why the world is what it is now. Well. I give you the life cycle of the pompous and privileged.
If you’re pretty [and with a modicum of smarts], the world is your oyster. You can marry rich, at the very least. Beauty is a lubricant that opens all sorts of windows and doors, and oils the machines for an easier, nicer life. You bait the universe with a smile and a hair flip, and lay on the charm with a trowel, and sit back and see what comes a-biting. Sounds a little shallow, yes, but it’s survival of the fittest out there, and you work with what you have.
Cleverness can be a good thing too. Not quite good enough as pretty when you’re a girl, but a decent enough substitute. If you’re smart, you can at least endeavor to earn the things you want. True, making your own way isn’t quite as nice as things simply being handed to you, but being smart means you can buoy yourself with the noble notion that you at least worked for what you have.
Connections and social networks are the foundation stones of real, quantifiable success. In the absence of money or good looks or true intelligence, connections, if wisely used, can still pave a road towards a more comfortable [if indebted] future.
And what happens when you don’t have any of the aforementioned? Then you are relegated to the death bin called average. But really, there’s no shame in being a worker bee. Even the biggest productions need extras. Every genius needs the backdrop of mediocrity from which to shine. Every star in the sky needs drones on which they can cast their inspiring, edifying light. Hello, faceless nameless cog. In your own way, you matter too. Sort of. Maybe.
Where I come from, women talk much about navigating the tension of two desires: wanting freedom, and wanting to be loved. As if these two things were somewhat incompatible. Wanting more or wanting something different, and yet also, sometimes secretly, wanting what everyone else has.
On one hand, we feel we are smart enough and worldly enough and strong enough to want to stand on our own merit and hold the world in our hands, to want the good things for ourselves, to leave a mark on the world that is ours alone.
On the other, we face this ‘thing’, this inner voice that may just be impossible for a man to truly understand, that makes us just want to be, well, loved. For all that we are. For all that we’ve done. For all that we could one day be. [Forever and til death do us part.]
When we reach, ahem, a certain age, in the dark, damp crevices of our minds, we think about children, little feet scampering across a room we’ve made our own. We think about wedding dresses and riding off into sunsets. We think about princes, charming or otherwise, and how we would no longer have to sleep alone in a bed made for two. And we are choosing, always choosing.
Women who fancy themselves superheroes will try to have both. Some of them may even succeed, and at the twilight of their lives, they can give themselves well-deserved pats on the back as they smile beatifically at the empires they have built, and the well-educated children they have produced to inherit them.
But I sometimes fear that my own generation has lost its taste for superwomen. We are all too familiar with the flaws in this plan, the gaps and holes left behind, the gaping wounds, the neuroses, the therapy.
So some of us choose the other path altogether, but even as we do, part of us will always mourn a little for the life we chose not to live, because it is hardwired into our flesh and into our blood [living things are encoded with a need to propagate the species, after all], into the cells that die and reproduce the various parts of us, into our DNA.
I don’t know if that’s true, or something the world [my world] tells us is true. But some days, it feels real enough to make me long for a life I really wouldn’t know what to do with.
I’ve always hated that old Platonic fable of a whole splitting up into two halves, and these two halves being fated to look for each other to reform into something full and complete. I hate the idea of being only half a thing. I am complete unto myself, I say. And yet, part of me recognizes the romance in being so lost. Part of me nods to that notion, because then maybe there’s a reason for my failures and failings. There is a reason why I am not as good as I should be – I am still incomplete, pieces of me are missing, after all.
But then, the part of me with a brain snorts and scoffs and says, hell, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
And I sigh. And yes, there may be a tinge of regret there, but really, most of it is just relief.
Originally published on Tumblr, August 2010.