of late, charlotte bronte

Daily writing prompt

Who is your favorite historical figure?

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My favorite historical figure changes depending on the season of life I am experiencing–of late, I love Charlotte Bronte, mostly for the fact that she experienced a 19th-century iteration of having been outcast and wrote about it.

I read Jane Eyre for the first time when I was 11 years old. I doubt that I fully understood it, especially the bits where Mr. Rochester says, “I could bend you with my finger and my thumb, a mere reed you feel in my hands,” because I read that line again about a week ago and melted. Apparently, Jane was 18 or 19 when Mr. Rochester said the above to her and he must have been very ugly in the book–my reference for Mr. Rochester is Michael Fassbender (because that was the first Jane Eyre adaptation I saw) and anyone with eyes knows that Michael Fassbender is the type of white-guy-handsome that is just that–handsome (i.e., if I were Jane, I would have folded). Not quirky, nerdy, or corny in any regard–just brooding, handsome, handsome, and handsome. Fassbender is among the many male-equivalents of Blake Lively, Anok Yai, Jung Hoyeon, and Gong Li, of which include Lin Gengxin, Wi Ha-joon, Michael B. Jordan–humans so blindingly beautiful in a way that adheres to godly-standards of attractiveness that I really don’t have to say more than I have, even though I have already said a lot.

But I digress.

Regardless, I love Charlotte Bronte for having had the resolve to write about her experiences in schools as harsh as the one she, Emily, and Anne attended, that led to the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth Bronte. I’ve found that victims of abuse often struggle to feel the pain that comes with having been violated, in its entirety (I’m speaking slightly from personal experience here). Speaking up about your pain is often a figurative death sentence in many parts of the world, to say nothing of the restrictions placed on women writ large in the 19th century.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how people function as mirrors, and your ability to handle what other people are mirroring back to you about yourself is the ultimate cheat code to life.

X, y, and z relating to an incredibly turbulent and nonexistent childhood made it impossible for me to focus my energies on makeup, fashion, all things beauty and wellness when I was in high school. When I saw beautiful women on Instagram, I got jealous. It took some time but some number of years ago I realized I was just as beautiful as these women–all I had to do was learn how to take care of myself/beautify myself.

X, y, and z relating to having grown up in a home characterized by financial instability made it impossible for me to do all the things I wanted to do as a child. When I saw peers who had much more of the world available to them by virtue of having benefited from their parents’ labors, I got jealous. It took a while but I eventually did attain the financial stability that allowed me to pursue all the things so out of reach to me in my childhood years.

X, y, and z relating to having grown up in an incredibly toxic family system made it impossible for me to live the life I truly desired. When I saw peers who had homes to return to during times of strife in their lives, parents to rely on when they were down on their luck, I got jealous. It took a while, but I cut off the toxic family system and invested my energies in developing a robust spiritual practice, which has given me more security then I had known to be possible.

The irony in all of this is that I had to struggle in these ways, to understand extreme manifestations of universal truths, in order to learn how to become human again. The code, in all of this madness, is that I had to believe it was possible for me to transcend the hand that I was dealt.

Irony pt. 2 involves having had to experience the reactions of people who had only ever known me in my iteration of being as an outcast, by way of having had pain so severe that it was impossible for me to hide it all. Irony pt. 2.5 involves having had to realize that people blessed with more material comforts than I had could get green with envy in my company, even though the material comforts they had taken for granted so easily could have changed my life overnight.

Irony pt. 3 involves having had to experience the people who had known me for years, who had seen me through the darkest days of my childhood, who could not reconcile my current state of being with the childhood they knew I had, and had decided to write me off as someone who “didn’t have it that bad” and “was sheltered like everyone else.”

Crabs in a bucket, misery loves company, these are all stories that I imagine shall never see the light of day.

Anyway, I love Jane Eyre, happy Wednesday, I need to finish Wide Sargasso Sea soon.