Letter to an asshole

When a woman is frozen of feeling, when she can no longer feel herself, when her blood, her passion, no longer reach the extremities of her psyche, when she is desperate; then a fantasy life is far more pleasurable than anything else she can set her sights upon. Her little match lights, because it has no wood to burn, instead burns up the psyche as though it were a big dry log. The psyche begins to play tricks on itself; it lives now in the fantasy fire of all yearning fulfilled. This kind of fantasizing is like a lie: If you tell it often enough, you begin to believe it.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, from Women Who Run with the Wolves (your blog entry a couple of days ago)

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Oh wow… what an obvious innuendo, Greg.

One thing I’ve learned at this stage in my life: One can’t easily espouse stuff they read from ostensible experts as bonafide doctrines of our existence. Especially if the author is younger, their proclamations textbook-based, and has practically glided into their adulthood with minor glitches.

Somewhere I had read Rachel Weisz’ no-nonsense remark “Someone can do whatever gets them through the day” — and I’m like Oh yes.

Nov of 2017, while my mother was in the ICU taking her last breaths, I was tossing and turning in bed, seriously traumatized by the speed of her decline. Extremely on the edge, I couldn’t sleep for days. I forced myself to think of something else, anything, that might somehow help preserve my sense of balance. So I thought of Pedro Pascal (no clue then he was actually gay) because I was smitten with the guy after I had watched his action movie a few months before. In my mind, we were in love…doing a slow dance. Anything… anything that would make me survive those horrible moments.

I have a fantasy life, yes. Since I was 9 or 10 years old in fact. And I feel fortunate to have had an alternate reality throughout the years when oftentimes it’s not possible to acquire everything we wish for in this world. There is nothing wrong with that.

I’d been married once. I hardly consider it the happiest phase of my life. Maybe my kind finds more calm and delight in singlehood. Yet that could raise a form of anger in some people, I discovered.

Traditional thinkers and most men ridicule or look down on unattached women. Probably unaware of the truth they are desperate themselves for being trapped in their own marriages; they couldn’t choose divorce for its complexity and for fear nobody’s gonna look for them in their cold old age. Which render them constantly reassuring their wives of their undying devotion while secretly falling in love with far younger ladies left and right. I believe that’s more appalling than a woman’s solitary status.

And perhaps it’s one of my idiosyncrasies: I had previously either blocked or asked at least three of my FB acquaintances to quit messaging me when it was plain evident they were simultaneously chatting online with other female chatmates in some alternate fashion. I don’t know how they do it (How disgraceful, imo).

It’s simply the way I am — period.

You deem me queer — a misfit, an outcast, whatever (I say yes to all such labels) — more or less, it seems. One thing is crystal clear: Your conventional mind cannot afford to comprehend and welcome people like me. No different from the past when you judged me by virtue of my oddity and couldn’t accept me as a friend, for the way I really am. You, therefore, have no business sauntering anywhere near my realm.

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You can delete this blog anytime you wish. I have no use for it when lockdown gets lifted on April 30. I confess I had aimed to utilize this to finalize my old notes and be somehow creative while under house arrest. But I really want OLB removed as soon as I’m done with it.

I do wish you well.

#april 19 2020 letter#pls do not respond thank you