Save Yourself From the Monsters

So once again, I can't make this long because I'm at work... but I just read this fascinating article on one of my all time favorite websites, The Awl, that looks at the modern day heroine, and juxtaposes the battles of feminism and saving yourself against movie monsters. If you have the time, I definitely urge you to give it a read.

The part that really hit me and literally gave me shivers, are the last four paragraphs (pasted below for you to read), particularly the last one that I've bolded.

I have a couple more posts I want to get in before the holidays, but until then... happy reading!

"It's going to be hard. That's the thing: It's always going to be hard. It doesn't end with you beating the creature, getting clear; there's always a goddamn sequel. It ends with the monsters pouring through the door or the Hellmouth or the air ducts; it ends, sometimes, with you broke and unloved in a movie theater, clinging to the story because it's all you have. It ends with you being disliked, still, being watched, still. Because you're anomalous: always pathologized, always strange and frightening. Because as far as a lot of people are concerned, you're not the heroine of the piece. You're the monster.

So keep going. There's no show without the monster, after all. When I look back through these papers, all these institutional perspectives on who I was, I don't like the girl they're talking about. I wish she could have been someone else. But I see that there was something in her that, no matter how many times it was framed as a failing—her reported sensitivity to injustices done to others; she cared. Considerable and conscious compensatory fantasies; she wanted to survive, she said she was going to go to New York and become a writer. Her aggressive and unusual verbal behavior; she spoke in her own voice—never got cured. What I see is that she survived.

There's one version of the story that goes: There is someone out there. Someone good and wise and kind. And when you are in danger, when you need him most, he will always come to save you. It's a good story. But there's another story, too, that I think is important.

Because: What if no one is coming to save you? Sometimes, nobody is coming. And who didn't come to save you, and when? What happened, on the day that you were not saved? That was the day that you saved yourself. "