Many women who announce themselves as feminists often start with surface-level reasonings for claiming the title. Perhaps as a response to a breakup or thinking that women upholding signs that say “We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn!” look kick-ass and engaging. I think mainstream feminism enters girls and younger women into a status of festering hunger. A student sitting in her 12th grade English class would most likely not grasp how essential the protagonist in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is to womanhood, but may notice certain details, such as how the protagonist remains childless, has her story followed into middle-age, and seems to reject what was expected from women at the time the novel was written. If encouraged properly by teachers, said student might be engaged to learn more about who the author was as a creative and a human, and how her novel was one of many that inspired new feminist theories.

How much have I grown? Soon, legally, I will be twenty-four. Yet, I still feel like I am going on fourteen. If others feel like me, then I wish I could know their names. Maybe we could start a support group. Well, I guess I would have to rent out the entire world as a facility. This has been a very trying year to say the least. Some days, there are traces of meaning, others, death becomes her. If God’s humor is as dark as mine, well then touché, my friend.

If I wanted to become an English teacher, then it would have to be the 12th grade. More mellowed out students who simply just want to pass. Well some of them, by what my mother tells me. But if you can get one student engaged, you have done your job as an educator. Teenage girls are an underserved population. What really caters to them nowadays? The best time to prepare a girl to be a woman is in those unbalanced years.

Life is a metamorphosis and it starts at puberty. When I read Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time I felt engaged with the text, not only because the story is good, but also because we read the book as a class, a community. That is what I think is missing now, community education. A lack of community education is why we are all so wayward now. Why we experience metamorphosis so violently. If I had a great mentor back in my teenage years, I probably wouldn’t of made half of the bad decisions I made in high school. But that English teacher, the young student that was fresh out of collage ready to teach, sewed the seeds in me that are present now.

Today has been one of my death becomes her days. And when I write, they are almost always on days like this.

Written on August 4th, 2024

There’s no sunshine without rain.