Sweet Mariam,
I think the notion came to me last summer when I read The Colour Purple for the first time. The way that book enchanted me! It felt otherworldly, like it had been delivered straight from the heavens.
Part of its power comes from how it subverts the expectation of what a story about black women in the 1910s-1940s can be. Liberation and joy runs through it like a euphoric melody, so that by the end it felt as though the world was a more shimmering, mystical, beautiful place.
In so many books, by contrast, the power is in the tragedy. We watch film after film and book after book in which society, fear and convention breaks the character down, and we begin to think defeat is inevitable.
Enter: books where the woman gets out alive!
To get out alive is not, in my mind, to be literally breathing at the end of the narrative. To get out alive is to escape those nebulous forces that constrain you (shame, pressure, self sabotage), to live fearlessly and unapologetically, to never be tamed.
The female protagonist walking off into the sunset, older, wiser, still intact. Still Free. Living life on her own terms.
That is the Woman who gets out Alive.
*
Revolutionary Road is one of the most chilling films I’ve ever seen. (spoiler alert) It tells the quietly devastating story of two people who decide to live life on their own terms, and move to Paris, rather than do what is expected of them in suburban USA.
We know they will not go.
We know they will not go because our biggest fear is that we will not go-
that life will suck us dry, constrain us-
that we will never free ourselves from the judgment of others.
We know, we know in our bones, that in stories of Society Vs The Woman, the woman is often last seen bleeding into the floor.
Unless.
The Woman who gets out alive is not some sort of trope in my head- but a mood!!
As in: “I want to have Woman who Gets out Alive energy” or “this is my Woman who gets out alive summer” or even “That isn’t very Woman who gets out alive of you”.
The woman who gets out alive has nerve. She has agency. There’s something almost careless about her. It’s shocking when you read or watch her because it’s like she doesn’t know how stories work- she keeps getting pregnant and still being liberated! She keeps breaking up with her boyfriends! She keeps doing whatever the fuck she wants!
A few years back I watched Agnès Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t. It is the story of two friends, their lives plodding along parallel to one another. Both get out alive, but it is the character of Pomme who struck me.
She falls in love, moves to Iran, gets married, has a baby, decides she actually doesn’t want to be a wife after all... so she has another baby so that they can have one each and then goes on tour with her band promoting reproductive justice in song.
There is something about her energy in the film- the way the women exist within such oppressive systems and yet are so lit from within, so liberated in their hearts and souls, that makes me want to rejoice.
This week you’ve been talking a lot to me about the idea of being an agent in your own life, being more free, claiming and owning your desires.
It dawns on me now that what you want, what I want, what we all want, maybe, is to be a woman/person/human who gets out alive.
To feel like the story we tell with our life is an airborne thing, full of magic and creativity and irreverence, not some weighted and inevitable submission.
And yes, obviously, the problem is structural. It is how we are treated, it is how our society functions, it is capital and gender and class.
But that resistance we want to cultivate, that energy and courage that I yearn for, that I want my actions to spring from- that’s the woman who gets out alive.
*
When a woman gets out alive, she invites a level of shamelessness in those who surround her. To be unapologetically striving to get out alive, to be free, grants those around you the permission to see you and whisper “me too, I want to get out too”.
It’s a commitment to wholeness, or the pursuit of wholeness. It is to be uncompromising.
It is to say- what is it that I desire?
And then believe it is your divine right to fight for it.
Yesterday in the evening we sat at a table with our journals and discussed what it means to truly desire something.
I suggested that maybe dreams that would grant us approval, respect (marriage, for example, or a college degree, or beauty, or a successful career) are not exactly desires. They are ambitions, dreams, wants.
I suggested that a desire must be something that has no justification, that nobody will particularly respect or admire- something that’s sole significance is your own pleasure, your feelings of fulfilment.
You are saying: you know what? Regardless of whether or not I’m in college, I’m going to move to NYC. I need new space to grow.
I am saying: Dublin seems to make my health worse, and as scary as it is to leave my home, I cannot in good faith say that I believe it’s right for me. I’m ready to try committing to something new.
We both are saying, with shaky voices: I know it may not seem like the best or most practical idea for a whole bunch of reasons. And that’s okay. But I know what is good for me. I know what I want. I know, deep down, what I’ve always wanted.
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Queer people know what it means to get out alive. Many of us have had that moment when nothing was more frightening than truth, when the trapdoors were opening, when for a brief moment we thought: but wouldn’t it be easier to be less authentic? To hide forever?
To be a woman who gets out alive is to know it’s never easier to suck your soul all the way down to your feet. It’s never easier to keep it quiet and well behaved and suffocated.
Whitman said: dismiss whatever insults your own soul.
*
~an affirmation~
I am learning to listen to my own compass, and to fear the truth less.
I have overcome pretending not to know what I want because I think I don’t deserve to pursue it.
I deserve to feel pain, love, connection- whatever is REAL!
I do not tell myself that what is sad is happy, or that what is bad is good, I do not lie to myself because:
I deserve the real thing.
I deserve the realest things!!!
Each evening this week I have walked to the garden table at 9pm when the heat has died down a little and have had to stop at the garden wall and look. I watched you and Megan set the table and talk and thought about how much this moment resembles the kinds of dreams I used to barely permit myself to dream.
Summer dresses, plates filled with local vegetables and glasses filled with local wines. Loving, beautiful humans who make me want to be more of myself rather than less, who make me braver-
Singing bob Dylan under the freaking stars!!!!
The woman who gets out alive has pain, has insecurities, has setbacks. But they don’t dim her, not forever.
I summon her to me and to you this summer.
Whatever force it may be that makes us small (and there are many), when we honour our desires, when we make ourselves agents of our lives, we move towards the best kind of life, the best way of being-
we become airborne.
Conclusions are no fun so let’s end with some questions!
what is it that you need to get out of alive?
what is a desire that you feel burning inside of you, that is truly only for you?
what would it look like if you were FEARLESS?
k.
Love you.
Bye.
Feargha xxx
The Woman gets out Alive
@nera thank you so much for your comment ❤️❤️❤️ Autonomy is the perfect word! I wish you the same!
I love this. What it feels like to me: Autonomy, but when the cards are stacked against that autonomy. That is worth fighting for.
I hope you both get out alive. And I as well.