There Is Something So Darkly Comical About Tumblr Potentially Outliving Twitter

I hate how the booktokification of the “unhinged woman” genre has completely reduced the concept of female rage to just “girlboss” without taking seriously how important it is to unequivocally portray female rage.

Throughout the history of literature, we’ve been given countless instances of women in despair and in sadness but save for a few writers (take Euripides, for example), we’ve rarely ever been given angry women who aren’t the villains or the foil for the perfect poised passive princess. Female rage has constantly been subdued and erased or warped into “she’s just batshit crazy” in pretty much every society.

And now that publishing and media marketing has reduced women showing rage in books to the “white hypersexual girlboss with a knife”, instead of uplifting the way women are allowed to have more dimension and sympathy in their visible anger than ever in literature, the media still isn’t taking this subgenre seriously.

He asked me when I fell in love with him and I knew it sounded dramatic to say the moment I saw him, so I told him this story of my grandma who had Alzheimer's- she forgot her name and the words for fruit and food, she forgot her address and how to use the washroom, all her life lost to the disease. The only thing she remembered was her son's name and when that began to fade, the one thing she always remembered was that she loved him, even in illness, even in insanity. She saw this 6 foot 2 man with a scrubby beard and she didn't know him but she said she trusted him, she asked him to hold her hand when she died. When does memory end and love begin? All I know is- she loved him before she remembered him.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

Ah, fine literature.

Pt.2

No one talks about the transition from being the girl everyone respected too much to come forward to and the girl that everyone desires. To feel like you are never someone's first choice, just a woman they would eventually settle for. To never be the girl they passionately, intensely ache for. To be the one they're afraid to taint. The one they will compromise with. To be the girl that becomes the mother of their child, but never their love.

And suddenly, suddenly you're the girl of their desires. The one with a free spirit and reckless behaviors and self-sabotaging actions. The one that hates herself so much, she throttles her own soul to fit an ideal image of what a man yearns for. To be savage and soft, simultaneously. To gaze at a man like a siren and never admit to being hurt.

No one talks about how you slowly feel both of these girls within you amalgamate. So achingly, so abruptly, you feel yourself spiralling out of control. You jump, face first, infront of a moving train, you wrench your heart inside of your chest. You swallow the thought of not being loved. There is a perpetual knock at the base of your mind of someone burning to come out, to be heard, to be felt, to be accepted.

You either become the trophy wife, or the girl they never wed. No one talks about girls like us.

Truly eye opening how selfish the men around me are

“Suffering – well, it is the sole determinant of consciousness. I did, though, set out at the beginning that consciousness, in my opinion, is man’s greatest misfortune, but I know that man loves it and wouldn’t trade it for any gratification.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

I don't want to be a productive member of society. I want to be a poet and a menace.