Done Starving

My mother starved herself. Denied herself of the very animal that lived in her.

Who’s kidding who? Every woman I knew growing up starved and denied themselves.

Not always of food. Of permission. Of hope. Of the simple animal right to want something and reach for it. My mother looked in the mirror her whole life and found a loathsome problem that needed fixing. And because I was hers, she constantly tried to fix me, too. Handed her starvation down like an heirloom.

But I had a compass. A GPS of my own, and it loved to eat life.

Then my father and my brother were murdered. April 30, 1997. And the way my father died was how I had wanted him to die.

The guilt became an all-consuming wound, and I did what the wound demanded. I turned my mother's self-loathing into my own and aimed it inward. I starved. I denied myself.  I stopped singing. I stopped acting. I stopped trusting the sound of my own knowing.

Patriarchy was right there waiting. It always is. It speaks first. It speaks loudest. It knows exactly where you're already broken.

That was twenty-nine years ago.

I am fifty-nine years old, and I am done starving.

Done.

I want sex. I want adoration. I want my hunger satisfied and my ambitions fed and my voice heard in rooms that were never built for me. I want it all, and I want it now, and I have earned every yearning and wanting.

In this “too old” body, I feel beautiful in a way this pedophilic youth-revered world has no infrastructure for. Beautiful past the point of being decorative. Beautiful past the point of being chosen. Beautiful in my bones, in my fury, in my absolute refusal to disappear.

Thank Crone.

Fuck what the world says. Fuck what men say. Actually, just fuck men. And fuck all the women who carry water and punish those of us who refuse to play nice.

This world was built to manage women like me. Like us.

“Too old" is not a fact. It is a management strategy. A way of silencing the ones who’ve lived long enough to become ungovernable.

I am animal. I am untamable, unreachable, wild, and dangerous.

I am fifty-nine. I am at my most fertile, my most aliveness, my most sexy, my most powerful. My most usefulness. Fuck me if I am not ripe and ravenous.

If there is no place in this world for a woman like me -

I will take my place in a world of my own making.