Little boxes….

Do not put me in a box.

Do not make me conform to your patriarchal rules.

Do not define me with your labels.

Do not force me to accept your limitations.

Do not constrain me either politically, emotionally or literally.

Do not impose your boundaries on me.

Do not make me who you want me to be.

Do not tell me what I can and cannot do.

Do not limit my dreams.

Do not enforce your domination and desires upon me.

Do not expect me to blindly agree with you.

Do not bombard me with your misogyny, bigotry and prejudice.

Do not accuse me of your misogyny, bigotry and prejudice. 

Do not accuse me of intolerance while your own intolerance flays the skin from my back.

I need only a very few labels unconditionally and those are my name and the words "friend" and "mother".  All else is irrelevant and slides like washed off dirt.

I am myself and that is enough.

‘discomgoogolation’

Feeling stressed or anxious at an inability to access the Internet? Don’t worry, you’re not alone and now there’s a word for it: "discomgoogolation".

Nearly half of Britons — 44 percent — are discomgoogolation sufferers, according to a survey, with over a quarter — 27 percent — admitting to rising stress levels when they are unable to go online.

I like that, it’s a good new word. 

You’re wandering along through life and you see a mark on the ground, and you stop to look at it. Maybe someone pointed it out to you but you stop to look. You hear a noise and peer into the dark, knowing something is there but you’re not sure what it is, what it could be. You start to see.

Then you’re hit with a sinking feeling. There is more, so much more. You’re alone and isolated and that small mark, that subtle thing you saw isn’t the whole thing, it’s just the tip of the claw. It’s the claw mark and you look round to see you’re standing in the footprint of the most enormous thing you can’t even imagine.

At that point the dark is suddenly terrifying and every movement and noise is that huge predator approaching and you may as well lay down and die because you have no chance of survival, let alone doing anything about the predator. You can’t even scream, because no-one will hear and no-one will come, and IT may hear you instead. Then it’ll come and it’ll get you.

It’s not just anything, it’s everything and everywhere - and I don’t want to see it any more. It’s called Patriarchy and it’s terrifyingly real.

She stands there with a smile just curling her mouth as she tells him all the things that have happened and that will happen. She tells him who sold him, who bought him, who designed and bred the creature that will kill him. She tells him how he is to die and that he can’t escape it. She tells him that the same people made her who she is, and that they will all die in the end. She tells him coldly and he screams into nothingness as he fails to understand.

He asks her who she is.

"I’m the monster’s mother."

She grins, raises a hand to his face and holds his gaze for a moment before walking away, leaving him shocked with the knowledge she just handed to him.

In the first film she is a woman alone, fighting against the dark. She is alone, disbelieved and undermined. Yet she prevails. Somehow the maiden in the first film survives.

Second film and she becomes a mother, loses a daughter and gains another. In a devastating, male dominated battle she and a girl child are left alone to take on the all powerful queen. She wins again.

Third film and she is alone again, stripped of her child and protector (who she had to save in the first place). She finds herself again disbelieved and dismissed as a mere female in a male world - with no resources and no hope. This time she dies.

By film four she is reborn, and yet she still hasn’t shaken off the monster or the patriarchy. Men still control her life as she moves through into something beyond human but still essentially female. Yet somehow the monster she birthed is important to her and despite it’s evil she still loves it and weeps as it dies - as only a mother can. In this final film she gets to kill herself several times, destroying previous versions of herself in a cleansing rage as the men look on and fail to understand her. 

"It must be a chick thing" He says, shrugging as she blasts the room in anger, weeping as the flames devour her previous incarnations.

He doesn’t get it and he never will. It’s a woman thing. She is first terrified by the monster, but everytime she thinks she’s destroyed it, it just keeps coming back. Eventually the only way to connect and change the monster is to become the monster’s mother.

We can recreate ourselves over and over, but within this patriarchy we have no hope of becoming anything other than that which we are made to be. We move through life with our anger growing hotter and hotter until it burns us and we emerge anew, but as many times as that happens - we are still bound by the power held over us and by the conditioning that begins the moment someone says "It’s a girl."