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The Seduction of Cinderella May
8, 2009
By Sasha Wild (that other me)
I don’t know when it happened but somehow I became another
victim in the fairy tale conspiracy. I
began despite all my best efforts not to, believe in the idea that somehow I
can just find that one true love, my soul mate and it will all be ok. Of course add to that all my post-feminist,
modern day cynical and still relentlessly and pointlessly rebellious younger
woman addendums like, ‘I know relationships take real work’, ‘nothing’s
perfect, you have to give and take, accepting the imperfections in one
another’, ‘don’t expect to get everything from one man, you have to have your
own life outside of the relationship’, … blah blah blah and so on… Just to show
that I am paying attention and that I GOT it, still GET IT and that some doofus
on a horse is not going to save me and make it all better. Yet way back in the recesses of my primordial
dumbass brain, I keep hoping he will.
Despite everything I know and
believe to be true otherwise, I want it. That some guy I really like will
simultaneously find ME utterly sexy and amazing, but not in that objectifying
kind of way, not just thinking about pounding me all the time sexy, of course,
but that, ‘you’re so smart and such a strong individual with a nice sexy ass,’
kind of sexy….. So even though I know better I have found myself doing it,
daydreaming about a man and when I find him my life will be happier, and it
will all be ok after we fuse together in some amoebic mess of something called
love and so on… DOH!…when did this happen??
I thought that all the hardcore rhetoric about being an
independent woman who didn’t NEED a man to feel complete really stuck to
me. I mean, no man has ever made me feel
complete, whole or even fulfilled for more than a few moments here and there
when I didn’t know anything and then one of us opened our mouths and closed our
hearts and said something stupid or destructive and then poof! It was all gone and I was back to square one
with a little more scar tissue and a lot more cynicism. Love hurts.
Yea yea.
Or whatever that was.
So here I am about to turn 40 or soon to sort of turn 40 in
two years or so….hey when you get this close to 40, it feels like tomorrow and
you have to act quick! Maybe if I just keep saying 40 over and over again I
will get used to it. Nevermind! You’re brain starts to speed up at around age
33 and like a fiery hot snowball from hell it cascades and builds with worry about the time you have left until
you get closer to 40 like somehow 40 means something other than two numbers
stuck together to describe chronological data and your thoughts become like mad
gerbils rolling around in their own shit on speed, you become filled with
ridiculous thoughts that indicate that you no longer feel good enough just as
you are and that you have to go on some fascistic rant of self-improvement just
to be ok by this magical age. Things
like: ‘Get on the ball girl, do
something, make some major life-affirming changes, take Tai Chi, bleach your
teeth, quit drinking soda, move to a really fucked-up foreign country and
volunteer to feel alive again, buy those sexy butt-kicking boots that cost a
week’s pay that you cannot afford but have wanted for 10 fricking years now
already, jeezzz, join a gym and THIS TIME use it, get better toys… wait, BUY a
toy period!! (Get over your embarrassment about that one dork!) You’re not
getting any younger, you should do those facial exercises so you won’t need a
face life at age 50 even though you used to be vehemently opposed to them. Just
in case. What about laser resurfacing,
for my face?….oh wait my whole front area??
Start using that old bicycle in the storage at your mother’s house to
exercise, by the way give your mother her space back you selfish little child!’ Pant pant….stuff like that happens. PANIC from the depths of who knows
where! Oh shit, and then you stop and
ask yourself, where have the last 10 years of my life gone?? I didn’t mean to end up here.
Then you calm down a bit, eat a half pound or more of chocolate
while watching some new crime show so you can stop thinking about it for a
minute or a day long enough to try and build up those reserves of serotonin
that everyone seems to be so low on nowadays, esp. older women. By the way chocolate gives you a temporary
high of endorphins and serotonin. Things that make you go hmmm??
It’s recently occurred to me, to ask myself… am I waiting
for something?? It seems that I am. Somewhere along the line I stopped acting and
started waiting for the right thing to happen that would make everything fit
better, make me feel better and stop looking at that damn carrot blinding my
vision of everything else and causing me to keep bumping into brick walls head
first. Delusions of grandeur and life
and goals that I felt I had to achieve that kept getting in the way of
living.
No it’s not as though I don’t work at things, try to make them happen, plan, plot, prepare and research all the great things I can do to be a fabulous contributing human being on this planet. I have had desires to be somebody and do great things…but as I get older it seems that the energy to do it all ebbs and something else is flowing in very slowly and little by little but so quietly that I’m not always sure that it’s really what I think it is. So I ignore it and keep on keeping on looking for more carrots and dip to stick them in. More lofty goals to fill and dreams to make me full in hopes that they will satisfy this lust that so often propels me into each new adventure. Blindly continuing without actually listening to what I want deep inside because of all the other ideas I have buzzing around in my head. The ideas that tell me that those fairy tales are not real. Never were, that the Grimm brothers were macabre German weirdoes that wrote dark tales about women who went mad trying to find a groom and ate little children. Like in the original Cinderella, one of the sister’s couldn’t fit into the shoe so she tried to hack part of her foot off to make it fit the glass slipper?? Yikes. Talk about desperate. Phh…Is that the same thing as when a woman lets the man order her dinner even though she doesn’t like veal?
No it’s not as though I don’t work at things, try to make them happen, plan, plot, prepare and research all the great things I can do to be a fabulous contributing human being on this planet. I have had desires to be somebody and do great things…but as I get older it seems that the energy to do it all ebbs and something else is flowing in very slowly and little by little but so quietly that I’m not always sure that it’s really what I think it is. So I ignore it and keep on keeping on looking for more carrots and dip to stick them in. More lofty goals to fill and dreams to make me full in hopes that they will satisfy this lust that so often propels me into each new adventure. Blindly continuing without actually listening to what I want deep inside because of all the other ideas I have buzzing around in my head. The ideas that tell me that those fairy tales are not real. Never were, that the Grimm brothers were macabre German weirdoes that wrote dark tales about women who went mad trying to find a groom and ate little children. Like in the original Cinderella, one of the sister’s couldn’t fit into the shoe so she tried to hack part of her foot off to make it fit the glass slipper?? Yikes. Talk about desperate. Phh…Is that the same thing as when a woman lets the man order her dinner even though she doesn’t like veal?
Lately I have begun to give up on everything out of sheer
fatigue from searching all the time. I
can’t seem to sustain interest and have practically given up on men, myself,
people and even life a little. I fought
it, I went to therapy, ate a lot of chocolate and still ended up in the same
damn place I started when I started this whole self-realization/healing crap
too many years ago. SO I cannot help but
ask myself and the world::::::::how did I end up in this place, when I took SO
many different roads? When did someone slam on the brakes of my life and cause
me to go head first into reality bites?? Was I living under false notions and
fairy tale endings until now despite how smart and brilliant I thought I was???
Despite every grain in my body going the opposite way, I
think I was.
In between going to protests at the local nuclear plant and
hippie concerts in Golden Gate park, I drew pictures of princesses with those
funny cone hats with the sheer veil streaming down alongside it. Over and over
I was obsessed with them. I either
really wanted to be a princess or was fascinated by the odd architectural shape
of that cone hat?! I grew up with
feminist rhetoric and the book Our Bodies Ourselves laying around with pictures
of women looking at their vaginas in mirrors.
I was nothing even close to a typical American child. Sure I was read some old school fairy tales
along with ones by old English authors and hip books like Where the Wild Things
Are and Leo the Late Bloomer, which I fully identified with as me. But I was not raised on white bread and
lies. But grainy wheat berry bread and
Marxism. I grew up sneaking peaks at books
like The Joy of Sex, the pictures of course cause I wasn’t the best reader and
was sooooo fascinated with them at age 8.
I saw other books on the shelf of my parents about revolution and
communism and race relations and government lies and the evils of
religion. I rode my boy’s bike with the
long banana yellow seat off real ramps at the local Catholic school yard, took
joy rides with equally fierce friends while we snuck into a local mortuary and
thought the spirits were trying to talk to us because the gowns were blowing
and one of the coffins slammed shut. We
flew out of there like, well, bats out of hell.
High on adrenaline and excitement there was nothing girlish about us, we
rode in the streets with our corduroys and floppy hair swinging in the wing
laughing all the way home thinking we saw the dead. I hung out with tough black and white girls
who constantly threatened to kick each other’s asses and refugees from Vietnam
who didn’t understand anything that was going on but that they were living in
the enemy’s country. I swore like a
drunk sailor on leave that put my parents to shame and made my friend down the
street’s parents forbid her from hanging out with me, I was 8. Nothing in my life was standard or what I
would consider ‘normal’ now that I am mostly grown up. That’s another story
altogether.
The chatter at the time was all about what a woman could do
and that any idea of her being a domesticated house slave was as stale and out
of date as the old ass Grape Nut Flakes cereal my dad had in his cupboard for
like 10 years until the mid 80’s. I
think he forgot about them like I forgot about all that rhetoric of
change. We were told we didn’t need men
to function or be happy and that we could do whatever we pleased because we
were not put on this planet to serve men.
Therefore, ladies, you are now free.
Be yourselves and go out into the world and conquer it, but do it
nicely!
With a mom who was one of the first technicians at the phone
company and a dad who didn’t raise me as a girl but as a person, teaching me
about tools and gear shifts as well as how to make SF Joe’s Special and a
grandpa who tried to teach me Black Jack at age 13 but I sucked at math
anyhow. There was no gender propaganda
here. There was no brainwashing going
on about how I needed to get married someday to complete the circle and in
fact, after my mother’s 3rd divorce, that just about sealed my
impression of marriage as a danger zone: Something not to be entered into
lightly or carelessly. BIG RED FLASHING
LIGHTS: WEAR PROTECTIVE GEAR, DO NOT
ENTER WITHOUT PROPER TOOLS! I thought I
got the message?? Until now.
I don’t know how it happened but somehow as I have begun to
crack open that cauldron of anger and fear that is around my heart from a long
and exciting life of craziness, chaos, joy and mystery I am seeing that even as
I fight the traditional ideas of marriage and men, gender and balance, love and
romance, the power and faith of succumbing to a relationship that requires
trusting a man despite all the destruction they perpetrate on the world, and
all the times they’ve personally let me down.
This very thing, I am so bloody aware of and fuels my frustration;
despite all this counterculture brainwashing, reverse cycle washing, delicate
cycle washing, in the back of my heart, way way back there in the cold corner
that is often ignored, I think about love.
Actually, I dream about it. I
don’t know what I think about it.
Whether I get it or not. I don’t
know what it is or what it really means, but I think about it. Constantly.
And that is why I am confused and confounded. Everyday I hear about some relationship going
to pot because of one person doing something to the other. I will see some TV show some funny or dark
scene will come on or I’ll hear about it from a friend, some horrible event
that happened in the characters marriage or relationship and poof, I’m like,
‘yet another reason not to get married’.
I remember all the ‘relationship’s or whatever you can call them, blips
and burps of passion in my life and wonder, ‘what was I thinking’?? Was I even thinking?? That’s why they blame
it all on hormones. And when I read
about statistics and incidents of molestation and rape and abuse and murder and
wars being waged by men around the world, I think, ‘yet another reason not to
be with a man’. Or much less trust
one. And then I am deeply saddened by
those thoughts and wonder if despite all the negative reasons I have collected,
am I missing out on something? Or am I
deluded that I am missing out on something.
Or have I been sold the fantasy of what a relationship can be in fantasy-land
but in reality never is?? The question is, Have I been brainwashed? And in which way?
Because I cannot seem to stop thinking about finding ‘love’,
despite this.
How do you move past knowing these things about men, the
wounds you’ve sustained and seen, the mistrust that so easily builds up from
knowing all these things even if they are not my wounds. How do you move past years of subtle
education on the lies of love and romance through media and fairy tales to
understand how reality really works in the world of love? Does it really exist between people or are
those just hormones running amok? How do you forgive enough to love?
So here I am. A
bedraggled Cinderella. A walking
conundrum of riddles and contradictions.
I fight being needy and dependent of a man. I fight wanting one in my life to the point
that I don’t even think men know how to approach me. I am not open or light enough. And I know that is less threatening.
I try to live my life pretending I don’t want to be with a
man or be in a relationship because when I think of the actual men I know and
the relationships I’ve had and seen with others and I am almost repulsed. They
are not appealing at the moment. Is that
possible or is that hurt? But I can
always imagine myself with some interesting or hot actor?? Now why is
that? I don’t believe men are like that
in real life but oohhh, somehow I’ve bought into fantasizing about the fancy
ones despite my better efforts not to.
The fantasy of good sexy looking men, listening to everything you have
to say and still finding you sexy when you get angry with them? They’ll fight for you till the bitter
end. Duh…right.
So I have no idea how to get out of this puzzle I’ve landed
in. And when I wrack my brain for
reasons and rationale I am shocked to see that beneath all the intelligent
prose and fodder of a non-traditional woman attempting to live her life
rebelliously with true individuality and vigor, paving bold new paths and
thinking new thoughts, not living in a perpetually needy state of dependence
like so many woman who build their lives around their man and write songs about
their men, get tattoos about their men and then wail and sob when things go
wrong not understanding why, beneath all this is the simple desire to find what
we all call love but so eludes us. It
eludes me. Perhaps it’s my hormones that
have changed me.
I can’t for the life of me figure out what to do next
because my brain and my heart are so far from each other and have yet not
learned how to work in harmony. And
somewhere in that mix is my crotch piping in always leading me astray.
So until then I will continue to be this puzzle, a living
breath testament against fairy tales and romantic hoaxes like Valentine’s day,
white horses and diamonds are a girl’s best friend hype. That’s just the outside of me. I have to keep the good fight going. Inside, I still dream about it, the seed in
the shiny apple, not the apple. But I haven’t
sold out yet. I still want to remain
that strong fiery emotional person who is in charge of her own destiny and
doesn’t have to cow tow to a man to get his attention. Chisel myself into a soft bar of soap to
become more palatable. Or reduce myself to a silly mess of boobs and cheeky
grins. And still be that woman who can
complain about rape like it is still a bad thing and it’s still tragic that
women prostitute themselves and a man isn’t threatened by that but actually
engages in a discussion about it with me.
Perhaps I am an idealist at heart despite all the cynical blasphemed
statements I am constantly spewing.
Who I am is a woman who wants to be loved and adored and
appreciated right in the middle of a rant against sexism, wearing nothing but a
robe and my shit-kicking boots on while eating chocolate and pacing up and down
over a nice Persian rug making grooves in the floor of the man of my dreams
that he just finished sanding. But I
promise to re-sand it for him and it all works out. He takes me in his arms and instead of
trying to placate me into quiet repression of my fire, telling me it will be ok
with a loving lie, he looks me straight in the eyes, brushing my mad hair
gently off my face and says he sees what I am saying and shares with me one of
the many secrets of a man’s weakness that may drive him to do these vicious
things. And for a second, I am stunned
into quiet shock, profound awe and gratitude at his honesty and bravery and
love and for a moment I am softened into a woman that temporarily stops hating
men, lets down my guard and understands them, even loves them; Weaknesses and
all.
That is what I want.
All of it, without compromise. We can buy the white horse together and I
can clean up it’s shit with a smile on my face while he goes to the store to
buy me more chocolate. That could
work. J
(The 2nd to last paragraph seems familiar in an odd way, not sure I wrote it or not…If I plagiarized it oops…if I wrote it then, hot damn!!). I'll remember soon..I hope.
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