From Eve Ensler's "I Am An Emotional Creature"

GIRL FACT: Your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart.


Author’s Note: These monologues are not interviews. Each monologue is a literary text inspired by traveling the world, by witnessing events, by listening to real and imagined conversations. On occasion a monologue was inspired by an article, an experience, a memory, a dream, a wish, an image, or a moment of grief of rage.

Introduction:

Dear Emotional Creature,

You know who you are. I wrote this book because I believe in you. I believe in your authenticity, your uniqueness, your intensity, your wildness. I love the way you dye your hair purple, or hike up your short skirt, or blare your music while you lip-sync every single memorized lyric. I love your restlessness and your hunger. You are one of our greatest natural resources. You possess a necessary agency and energy that if unleashed could transform, inspire, and heal the world.

I know we make you feel stupid, as if being a teenager meant you were temporarily deranged. We have become accustomed to muting you, judging you, discounting you, asking you—sometimes even forcing you—to betray what you see and know and feel.

You scare us. You remind us of what we have been forced to shut down or abandon in ourselves in order to fit in. You ask us by your being to question, to wake up, to reperceive. Sometimes I think we tell you we are protecting you when really we are protecting ourselves from our own feelings of self-betrayal and loss.

Everyone seems to have a certain way they want you to be—your mother, father, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, boyfriends, fashion gurus, celebrities, girlfriends. In researching this book I came upon a very disturbing statistic: 74 percent of you say you are under pressure to please everyone.

I have done a lot of thinking about what it means to please. To please, to embody the wish or will of somebody other than yourself. To please the fashion setters, we starve ourselves. To please boys, we push ourselves when we aren’t ready. To please the popular girls, we end up acting mean to our best friends. To please our parents, we become insane overachievers. If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? What do you have to cut off in yourself in order to please others? I think the act of pleasing makes everything murky. We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We wait to be rescued. We forget what we know. We make everything okay rather than real.

I have had the good fortune to travel around the world. Everywhere I meet teenage girls, circles of girls, packs of girls walking the country roads home from school, hanging out on city street corners, arm in arm, laughing, giggling, screaming. Electric girls. I see how your lives get hijacked, how your opinions and desires get denied and undone. I see too how this later comes to determine so much of our lives as adults. So many of the women I have met through The Vagina Monologues and The Good Body and V-Day are still trying to overcome what was muted or undone in them when they were young. They are struggling late into their lives to know their desires, to find their power and their way.

This book is a call to question rather than to please. To provoke, to challenge, to dare, to satisfy your own imagination and appetite. To know yourself truly. To take responsibility for who you are, to engage. This book is a call to listen to the voice inside you that might want something different, that hears, that knows, the way only you can hear and know. It’s a call to your original girl self, to your emotional creature self, to move at your speed, to walk with your step, to wear your color. It is an invitation to heed your instinct to resist war, or draw snakes, or to speak to the starts.

I hope you will see this book as something living, that you will use it to help you to identify and overcome the obstacles or pressures that prevent you from being an emotional creature. Maybe after you read these stories and monologues you will be inspired to write and share your own, or paint your bedroom wall or fight for polar bears or speak up in class or learn about sexuality or demand your rights.

When I was your age, I didn’t know how to live as an emotional creature. I felt like an alien. I still do a lot of the time. I don’t think it has much to do with the country I grew up in or the language I speak. In this book you will meet girls from everywhere. Some live in remote villages, others in huge cities or posh suburbs. Some worrying about whether they will be able to afford the latest purple UGGs, some worrying if they’ll ever get home after two years of being held as a sex slave. Some deciding whether they are able to kill a supposed enemy, some on the brink of killing themselves, some desperate for the next meal, some unable to stop starving themselves. Girls from Cairo, Kwai Yong, Sofia, Ramallah, Bukavu, Narok, Westchester, Jerusalem, Manhattan, Paris. All of them, all of you, live on the planet right now. I think whatever country or town or village you physically live in, you inhabit a similar emotional landscape. You all come from girl land. There you get born with this awakeness, this open-hearted have to eat it, taste it, know it, defy it. Then the “grown-ups” come with their rules, their directions. They teach you how to make yourselves less so everyone feels more comfortable. They teach you not to stand out. They get you to behave.

I am older now. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, with being this alive, this intense. I just don’t want you to have to wait that long.

Love,
Eve

What Should We Teach?

I am becoming obsessed with all that is Eve Ensler. Working with and through her words, in The Vagina Monologues, was a powerful and opening experience. She slams readers and audiences with a dose of reality, one that we so often overlook or forget: the reality of women. I love her bravery and brazenness. I love her humor and her humanity. I love that she continues to create works and do work that defies ignorance or apathy.

This is the kind of plugged-in I want to be.

I've begun introducing my drama class to her newest work, I Am An Emotional Creature, which brings to life the wide variety but also the unity present in girls' experiences across the globe. I started with confidence, but now it is beginning to waver. Can I really work with girls in a public high school on a piece that talks openly about sex, about abuse, about teen pregnancy, about sex slavery, about about about??? Can I get away with this? Will a parent complain? Will I make one of the girls uncomfortable? Wouldn't it be easier to use material that doesn't hit this close to home? Shouldn't I stop now, before it's too late?

But how could I stop? Now that I've heard one girl call the work "empowering." An another girl came in yesterday saying, "Ms. G! I saw a boy crying today and thought of this class. We are emotional creatures, and you don't normally see that!" Others have openly said that some of the words and ideas are "awkward" and "surprising," but they also say that it's "deep" and "they will really remember these lessons and experiences."

I've been as clear about my position as possible: I want to open a discussion about real and current issues affecting girls all over the world; I want to do this so that each of us can become more in-tune with our selves, our bodies, our decisions; I want to give them the opportunity, in a safe space, to define and strengthen who they are, something that has taken me a long time to do. I want to give them fair warning, a heads-up--you will have some difficult decisions and experiences ahead of you, but you are beautiful and unique and it is you, ONLY YOU, who can do what is right for your self.

I want them to know that if they are uncomfortable in any way, they can come talk to me. If we, as a group, decide there are some pieces we do not want to address, that is OKAY. I'm trying to give everyone the option of participating as much or as little as they need, so they can receive as much or as little of this message as they need or can handle at this time.

Is this wrong? Should we avoid sensitive material because it is too difficult, because it is too scary? And if so, what good are we doing?

Who are we?

Behind closed doors, deals are made. Bargains are struck. Hearts are broken.

Behind closed doors, we protect ourselves from the public eye, the humiliation and exposure therein.

Behind closed doors, we can take the easy way out.

But we can also take a stand for what's right. We can dig our heels in, set our jaw, take a deep breath, and get ready to fight the good fight--the fight for justice, for fairness, for respect; the fight for the good parts of history to inform the future.

Behind closed doors, a person's true quality is forged.