Cycles

It's my dark day.

For the most part, women will not tell you this. In fact, we usually keep it to ourselves. Still, every woman I know, if you ask them, will admit there is one day at the end of the monthly cycle where nothing is ok. It's odd because people refer to PMS as a moody time and there is that, yes. Hormonal cocktails are potent stuff and the week leading into the whole event can be pretty stormy but it's nothing compared to the dark day at the end.

On the dark day you can't do yoga. You discuss important things with people you love at your peril. You can't be considerate. You have a messy house. As far as you're concerned, nothing will ever work out and more often than not, indifference is the most enthusiasm you can muster for anything. All your dreams are swirling around the drain, your life is ebbing away - nothing works and never has and never will.

If you've given birth, the dark day is very much like a diluted version of the transition stage of labor - it stretches out for a whole day and feels like it will be there forever. It's bleak. Nobody can change it. Right?

On my dark day, I can't write and yet must write. I resent everything.

My way of coping with it is to avoid people and try to get a lot done. But my nature is to be expressive. It's a quagmire, it's a mess. It's dark.

This morning I listened to two women arguing about whether the word "slut" could ever be reclaimed.

On the one hand, other, worse words, have been reclaimed and rebranded (like words in gangsta rap music) and I think, slut is a lot easier and more fun to reclaim than many other words. It also carries a smack of restoring sex and sexuality to the positive spectrum and I am all for that. On the other hand, as this much older and more staid academic argued, women are the only group of oppressed people who must be intimate with their oppressors.

I think I disagree with that, and not only because lesbianism is an option.

The urge to objectify, dismiss or oppress is not rooted in group identity, it is a personal impulse. When someone, male or female, tries to tie me down, possess me or make me feel terrible about my appearance, my sexuality, my expression of gender or just my somewhat unorthodox lifestyle choices, they're not doing it because they're male or female or from one ethnicity or another. They're not doing it because I have to be intimate with them. They're doing it because they are personally threatened by me.

Women have been as possessive over me as men and not (that I know of) for sexual reasons. Women have tried to exert the same levels of control as men and have acted out of jealousy as much as men. Some men have been free of these traits but you know, if I'm honest? In my own life, I've experienced more judgement, more jealousy and more possessive behaviors from the women in my life than the men - to the point where I have avoided most close associations with women. (which was wrong of me because those women were representing themselves, not women in general.)

People don't do anything as a group. We all act as individuals and we act from impulses that protect, benefit or even damage us personally - not as a flock of sheep.

Countries are made up of people and governed by individuals with individual agendas and physical realities that influence their emotional states. Be wary of an insecure leader, he'll be a tyrant and his political party has nothing whatever to do with it.

So today, I am feeling discouraged and frustrated. I'm listening to women argue on the radio and staring down the barrel of a Conservative majority that has cut funding to most women's organizations while they were still a minority and had to get those cuts past a supposedly compassionate opposition. I'm listening to a woman journalist talking about the prevalence of sexual assault while working as foreign correspondents. I'm realizing we haven't come a very long way at all, Baby.

I'm feeling trapped and smothered and it has nothing to do with the word "slut." The people who make my life hard are probably just like the people who make your life hard. They're just like the people who perpetuate sexual assaults or the insult of the word "slut." They're individuals acting on individual impulses and infusing their actions with individual meanings, many of which have little or nothing to do with any group and everything to do with their interior drama. And the same is true for the people who do this stuff to you - I guarantee it. They just use the social-communal stuff as an excuse. It's a comfortable place to rest their neurosis.

And - we are all held hostage to one degree or another by these things. I think the secret is to know it, even when you don't feel it (and today I certainly don't) even when you don't believe it, you have to tell yourself; "My actions and reactions originate inside me." You have to remind yourself of that and hang on to it until you can believe it because it's the truth.

When my body progresses past this stage, I'll start seeing hope again, I'll be grateful and happy and write about better things but this is a part of life. It's a part of life for most, maybe all women - and I want to acknowledge it.

Especially since it's possible that I will feel as though I have accomplished absolutely nothing else for the day.

Cycles are a bitch.
It's hard to be human if you want to do it consciously.