Difficult Women

Last night I had a dream I was drowning. Or rather, I had a dream someone was trying to drown me.

I've been watching a lot of shows and reading a lot of books about "difficult" women. It seems fitting with everything going on in the world that I turn to complex and honest representation of women in the arts for comfort and perhaps hope. If you haven't seen the Handmaid's tale, you should. If you haven't read Shrill by Lindy West, you need to. Even Big Little Lies was an extraordinary series about womanhood, despite how much I hated the book.

In 2017, being a women is still incredibly hard and for the first time in my lifetime I see myself and identify myself as a women and not just a girl anymore. This is a very hard admission; one that actually occurred after reading one of those age related list (things to do before you are 30) on Buzzfeed that suddenly I was excluded from. By a whole damn year of all things. I have some how surpassed that "I'm not a girl, not yet a woman" phase and am aware that despite the fact that yes, I ate waffles for dinner last night wearing a buffy t-shirt while watching a marathon of Top Chef on Hulu...I am not really a girl anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I have more girlish moments than womanly ones but as I watch the world unfold around me, as I try to circumvent my life and figure out my wants, I recognize that my anxieties and fears and apprehensions and even dread have much to do with the fact that I am a woman all of a sudden. I have this newly acquired agency, one of those being my womanhood, in a world which constantly tells me I am less than. And this is terrifying.

So it's no wonder that I had a dream last night about drowning. I was on vacation with my dream husband and dream best friend. We had a house on the lake with a small boat port overlooking the water. My dream husband starts walking down the port towards the boat and that's when my dream best friend tells me she has been sleeping with my husband. I am of course filled with rage and anger and even a little bit of jealousy. She saunters after him and it is at this moment that I yell that i have been sleeping with her husband (his best friend) because I am full of spite and fury. She charges at me and I fall into the water. There is a moment where I am sinking, sinking, sinking towards what can only be the abyss and then suddenly I am gasping for air and swimming towards the shore.

My husband(now also in the water) is shouting at me. He is wearing a red shirt, so I almost mistake him for a life vest, I think he is there to save me despite both of our betrayals . But instead of rescuing me, he grabs at my legs and starts to drag me back under water where I can't breathe. There is a struggle and flailing limbs. There is so much water, I am blinded by it until there is nothing but the sea. And then I wake up because where else was my crazy drowning dream supposed to go. I was drowning.

I wonder if the dream has anything to do with my own feelings of being a "difficult' woman. Of my sudden feeling of submergence. Because in my transition from difficult girl, to difficult teen to difficult young adult, I know that I was born to be a difficult woman. I was born to want things that I shouldn't want and to say things i shouldn't say and act in ways that are counter productive to what is expected of my "gender" And for most of my life I have been proud of this title, even when i didn't know it applied to me, because there hasn't been any direct consequence.

But now, I feel on borrowed time. Now I feel as if I am supposed to all of a sudden know exactly what I want in life so I can set the course of my future. But i honestly don't know what I want. I never have. It's a part of what has and will always make me difficult. But when I was a  teenager that's to be expected, when I was in college this directionless, without a clue way of life was okay, in my 20's it's pretty much what was to be expected. But now i'm in my 30's it feels a little irresponsible and scary because I am still this difficult person who is now struggling to stay afloat. I often feel like I am flailing in turbulent waters, and no matter which way I turn, I am no closer to the shore.

Maybe I should stop overthinking it all.  Maybe I should look at all the small achievements I have thus far accomplished. Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself.