Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

Female suffering is cheap and is used cheaply by dishonest women who are looking only for attention – and of all our cardinal sins, seeking attention must surely be up there.

It was my feeling that there were lucky people and unlucky people, and I was a lucky person. Even in my worst depressions, I had always known this. My misery seemed to come from knowing I was not good enough to warrant the objectively lucky life I had been given.

My understanding was that every action would lead me to where I ought to be ultimately,

Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once.

it was painful to be reminded so casually that everything I cared about was subject to the whims of others.

Being in love feels like nothing so much as hope; a distilled, clear hope which would be impossible to manufacture on your own.

The loss of someone you love can make you go mad in the best of circumstances.

It’s easy to disappear beneath the incessant cycle of chores necessary to keep a pleasant and clean home. Women who once were individuals despair of being made into nothing more than wife, housekeeper, mother – a person whose identity is secondary to their ability to make things easier for everyone else.

I envy women who are removed. I never really had that luxury.

I wanted with a frightening violence the blankness of that evening, which I had wasted so many of in the past, not appreciating their luxury. It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do. And it’s a peculiarly impotent sort of anger that domestic labour brings about.

How lucky I have been that so much of my pain is from fearing the loss of what I already have, instead of suffering the absence entirely,