#grand unified theory on female pain

[lover-praxis]

quick thoughts on "grand unified theory of female pain" bc i promised myself to read critically and actually write down the thoughts i have about content i consume.

felt really seen by it. i am not a melodramatic person, but i am, and i always have been. my ex-boyfriend disdained me for crying over books we read in ap english lit. i spent a lot of high school crying over everything, every piece of media, often to the point where i'd make myself nauseous. i still do this, occasionally. i hurt, and i feel the hurt, and maybe i even revel in it.

on the flipside, i'm about to hit my 20s, and my therapist keeps having to remind me that i've been through a lot, so i should show myself some grace. i've stopped languishing in my wounds but overshot, to the point where i now refuse to process any trauma in the hopes of just being able to move on.

re: art. i haven't written any poetry since november. i've done some writing, some fanfic, some journaling. i've done a lot of work with choreography--fitting, since words seem to have failed me. fitting, too, that my last poem that i wrote and performed felt like a desperate cry for attention, that same feeling of look at my ribs, can you not see that i am struggling, that i am in so much pain? in the end, i don't think my pain was seen.

also, maybe another flipside, i've been saying i'm in my rom-com era this summer, and i mean it. i'm tired of being the girl you fuck but not the girl you date. i'm tired of "falling in love" with every boy but never really loving them. i like the fall; i struggle with the love, despite how much i want it. there's the wounds, in the way. my blood that i can't love, so how could anybody? that mental, emotional, physical, spiritual block.

so. finding a balance between acknowledging my pain and loving through it? there's a strategy i think i've developed, of feeding my pain to some beast inside of me, a thing i think of as separate but inextricably linked to who i am. last week, the homily went that if we, hasty humans, try to pull out the weeds that the devil has sown in our hearts, we will pull out the good wheat too, so we should wait for god to weed us, in his own time. in the meantime, then, what do i do with the beast?

in the meantime, listening to fiona apple and taylor swift and halsey and women who have been mocked for writing and making music about their wounds. if i can do that without shame, maybe i can start to learn to be unashamed of my own state of woundedness. i think that shame is the worst enemy of all.

[galechives]

Women are born with pain built in. It's our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t. They have to seek it out, they invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby. We have it all going on in here inside, we have pain on a cycle for years and years and years and then just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes, the fucking menopause comes, and it is the most wonderful fucking thing in the world.And yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get fucking hot and no one cares, but then you’re free, no longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person.

from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag s2e3 (2019)

[nataliewaitesnotesapp]

[marxism-transgenderism]

"Baby, why are you crying?” Reese had asked. Because some combination of hormones and poppers had made possible the sex that Amy had given up on. The poppers made her too dumb to flee into herself, to send herself somewhere. So there she was with Reese. Not off elsewhere working to see herself as a woman when she lay on top of a woman, or replacing a man with someone else while he lay on top of her. She simply was a woman present with a woman. It felt like some kind of healing, some kind of redemption. And all she could do was cry.

Later that night, Reese stroked her hair and whispered to her, “I’m sorry you’ve been in so much pain for so long."

Any night before that one, Amy would have denied it, would have told Reese about all the privileges she had, about how lucky she had been compared to other trans women, how many advantages she’d been granted. How few of the readily nameable traumas she ever suffered. And without legible traumas to point to, what would pain make her? At best, a trans version of those Didion-worshipping bourgeois white girls who subscribed to a Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, those minor-wound-dwelling brooders with no particular difficulties but for an inchoate sense of their own wronged-ness, a wronged-ness that fell apart when put into words but nonetheless justified all manner of petulance and self-pity. In pain? No, not Amy.

That night, however, she gaped at Reese, shocked at how easily Reese had named what she’d gone through. She remembered Ricky telling her about Reese’s uncanny ability to say what you need. Whether she could trust Reese or not, no one had ever said such a thing to her. No one had so casually seen through her hollow stoicism to the accumulated disdain and disgust she harbored within. No one had ever implied that Amy might be wounded or suffering too, least of all Amy. She didn’t know she needed that kind of permission until that moment. She opened her mouth to protest, gulped once, and collapsed into tears all over again, sobbing onto Reese’s chest at all she had done to herself for years, at the hurt she’d inflicted upon herself and on the people she’d been with, while Reese gripped her and didn’t tell her to stop.

— Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

[citylawns]

the grand unified theory of female pain

[dhaaruni]

Watching Girls in full for the first time so I returned to my version of the Bible, Leslie Jamison's "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain"

[dearorpheus]

“What’s fertile in a wound? Why dwell in one? Wounds promise authenticity and profundity, beauty and singularity, desirability. They summon sympathy. They bleed enough light to write by. They yield scars full of stories and slights that become rallying cries. They break upon the fuming fruits of damaged engines and dust these engines with color. And yet—​beyond and beneath their fruits—​they still hurt.”

— Leslie Jamison, A Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain

[dwellordream]

These girls aren’t wounded so much as post-wounded, and I see their sisters everywhere. They’re over it. I am not a melodramatic person. God help the woman who is. What I’ll call “post-wounded” isn’t a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect—these women are aware that “woundedness” is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much. The post-wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: don’t cry too loud, don’t play victim, don’t act the old role all over again. Don’t ask for pain meds you don’t need; don’t give those doctors another reason to doubt the other women on their examination tables. Post-wounded women fuck men who don’t love them and then they feel mildly sad about it, or just blasé about it, more than anything they refuse to care about it, refuse to hurt about it—or else they are endlessly self-aware about the posture they have adopted if they allow themselves this hurting.

Leslie Jamison, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” in The Empathy Exams: Essays

[gracedenton]

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[nyreaeryn]

my must read essay would definitely be: Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain by Leslie Jamison

i fr cried while reading it 😭😭

[lover-praxis]

Hating on cutters—​or at least these cutter-​performers—​tries to draw a boundary between authentic and fabricated pain, as if we weren’t all some complicated mix of wounds we can’t let go of and wounds we can’t help, as if choice itself weren’t always some complicated mix of intrinsic character and agency. How much do we choose to feel anything? The answer, I think, is nothing satisfying—​we do, and we don’t.

Leslie Jamison, “Grand Unified Theory on Female Pain”

[oolong-strawbby]

“We may have turned the wounded woman into a kind of goddess, romanticized her illness and idealized her suffering, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t happen. Women still have wounds: broken hearts and broken bones and broken lungs. How do we talk about these wounds without glamorizing them? Without corroborating an old mythos that turns female trauma into celestial constellations worthy of worship?

[…]

The ancient Greek Menander once said: “Woman is a pain that never goes away.” He probably just meant women were trouble, but his words hold a more sinister suggestion: the possibility that being a woman requires being in pain, that pain is the unending glue and prerequisite of female consciousness.”

[poetrywillsaveme]

The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain By Leslie Jamison

[lifeinpoetry]

I think dismissing wounds offers a convenient excuse: no need to struggle with the listening or telling anymore. Plug it up. Like somehow our task is to inhabit the jaded aftermath of terminal self-awareness once the story of all pain has already been told.

— Leslie Jamison, from “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” The Empathy Exams

[citylawns]

Last anon message got me thinking about my favourite ever essay again

The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain by Leslie Jamison

[needsmustleap]

the mountain goats, no children / leslie jamison, grand unified theory of female pain (via @avantgardener) / twitter user @matildaeklund22