I Can't Handle the Truth

When I was in the fifth grade, the time finally came to join band at my elementary school.  I had long been anticipating this event and after little deliberation I chose to play the trombone.  I chose low brass specifically because there were too many boys and not enough girls playing in the back of the room.

Five years later, I began writing a story about a businesswoman who lived in New York City and worked in a male-dominated profession (advertising?).  She often presented her ideas in front of a group of powerful men, her bosses, whom she referred to privately as “The Assholes.”

The next year, I became a volunteer firefighter.  During one training session at the age of eighteen, I sat on the roof of a house wielding a chainsaw and, with the help of the trainer, cut a (what seemed to me) huge ventilation hole in the roof.  I was the only woman to do it and I was beaming with pride in that moment, even though I couldn’t start the chainsaw by myself.

After that, I went off to college- in New York City with an International Business major and Japanese minor (which only lasted nine months)- and volunteered with a great organization called LIFEbeat that distributes condoms at various music venues throughout Manhattan.

As I aged, I dreamed of being a powerful attorney and have four years worth of booklets and prospectuses from various law schools across the country, and even visited one in 2006, before I graduated from college.

Whether I was conscious of it or not, I have worked my entire life to break out of the role that was given to me by society because I have a vagina.  When I wrote that story, I was simply putting a dream on paper, with a few embellishments that would allow me to call it fiction and consciously separate it from my real life.  I no longer want to be a lawyer (though I still wrestle with law school) or feel the internal pressure to work in a high-rise.  I probably wouldn’t even call a group of my bosses “The Assholes” (at least not because they were men).

But the underlying sentiment is still there.  I feel drawn to knock down walls.  It feels necessary to fight power.  I do not want to work within my “role.”  Don't get me wrong- I'm no martyr.  I'm not trying to bust through glass ceilings to free the oppressed women who come after me (though some will argue that's the only responsible thing to do)- I just don't feel comfortable following the grain.

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I guess that is why I am struggling so much with becoming a foreign language teacher and the reason the pangs of domesticity are so very painful.