sitting down with 'standing on the shoulders of complex female characters'
an extract from last summer
I found this extract in my notes app, dated July 2022. I was seventeen at the time, I am nineteen now, and I feel like I have lived a million lives since. Reading past entries is the strangest yet most self affirming experience. I feel for the girl who wrote this because I no longer feel the unique kind of entrapment I was referring to here. This was my preordained summer of Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion and Susan Sontag and Frank O’Hara and Anne Sexton and Sally Rooney and Sad Girl Media and I was purging, as you always are in your teens. This brought me a sense of relief that the world does not end just because you feel apocalyptic about things, and that shedding skin works. I use these entries as a form of palmistry (however navel-gazing that may seem). I trace the lines and they always come full circle. The extract is below:
Learning to create art about feelings with no previous record of being expressed in such a way, or with perhaps little social acceptability or potential for romanticising, is the journey I am putting myself on, starting today. As Rayne Fisher-Quann rightfully says in her essay ‘standing on the shoulders of complex female characters’, artfully placing oneself at the centre of enough glamorously painful media is somewhat fulfilling, but begs of young women: 'will this eventually feel like actualisation?'
Each time I write there is this glaring feeling of being watched. Yes, being watched by my own creative judgements, the voices I have developed- an amalgamation of young female artists talking about heartbreak and growing up, and identity, the cultural tastebuds I have curated from hours of scrolling on twitter and criticising tiktoks are inevitably bound to critique and hound and pick away at every word I put to paper. But there is another voice- a chorus of people I want to impress laughing at me and my emotions and my words and my way of placing those words. I feel watched in the most personal way. Maybe it’s the non-stop Phoebe Bridgers diet I am still indulging in, and have indulged in since I was 15, or maybe it’s my disconnect from the writers who are writing things I believe I never could (but still, when I write things of that quality, I choose to hound it anyway), but I can't seem to be sincere in a way that hasn't been done before. I can’t stomach being the first to be honest about something. It feels wrong, it feels gross, it feel strangely un-feminine. And as someone who hasn’t ever paid much attention to trying to be ‘feminine’, it’s odd for me to feel limited by anything with regards to expression. But in this harmful mindset I’ve developed, through distancing my art from the art of others, from romanticising the curated list of artists that I am allowed to like, from publicly performing my beliefs and interests, I feel that if Phoebe Bridgers has not admitted to doing something, or to feeling certain way, then I simply can’t have encountered the experience. It’s just like that being a young woman in the modern age under the new, more nuanced wave of oppression.