love and pain

Albert Oehlen, Sohn Von Hundescheisse, 1999

As I finish the project I’ve been working on for the past two years, I’ve been reading and rereading The Pain Gap by Rayne Fisher-Quann, and Combat in the Erogenous Zone by Ingrid Bergen. I’ve been thinking about how I’ve needed people and resented that need, how they’ve hurt me and I’ve hurt them just by being. de Beauvoir was the one who taught me that for women love is all-consuming, and I heeded the lesson: I grew up anxious, obsessive, limerent. I have had, in many ways, the luckiest of dating histories, but I’ve still been in a lot of pain. I think pain is the female birthright. It’s certainly the literary female birthright, lol.