Long Live Aggressive Women

I am an aggressive woman.

Not too long ago this label would have mortified me. Being aggressive and direct are masculine identified traits, and I was taught from a young age to be softer; yielding. Women are taught to take what others offer with poise. To internalize every judgment, slight, or act of violence and transform it, within the crucible of our bodies, into love and forgiveness. As I’ve grown older, and more aware of the inequities within our society, it has become clear to me how convenient this docile perception of femininity is to the current power structure. I have also gained the ability to articulate how painful this expectation is. Not only to me, but to all women and people of minority experience who have been told that their success and personhood is tied to their ability to perform, and to provide for those who fail to recognize their intrinsic value.

I have never been aggressive in a physical sense. I’m barely 5’5” and I dare you to find a hard angle on my soft, wide, body. Besides, as someone who spent their childhood on the receiving end of physical violence, I can speak definitively when I say that, as far as tools go, it’s ineffective at best. I don’t raise my voice in anger and have never felt the need to assert dominance over another person in order to win an argument. Nonetheless, I’ve always been exceedingly verbal. Due to a combination of environmental factors, as well as a seemingly natural inclination to chatter, I grew up using over-communication as a tool to help mitigate my anxiety. I was certain that if I was able to find the right words then I would be understood, and by extension loved. If I could only explain myself everyone would know that I was smart, and good.

Prior to my recent rebranding as an aggressive woman, my acquaintances would be more likely to describe me as sweet and friendly… as well as at least a touch neurotic. I was so eager to be this perfect girl, to gain respect and admiration based on my ability to receive and reflect, that I completely sublimated my own needs and ambitions. It has taken me twenty-five years to learn that ambition is a gift, and that having needs doesn’t make me selfish or weak. I now know the value of my experience and my intellect. Consequently, I have become a woman who will be heard.

I spent the majority of my teens and early twenties believing and behaving as if my feelings and desires were worth less than the feelings and desires of everyone else in the room. This meant that, throughout the majority of my interactions, I spent most of my time trying to figure out what the other person wanted me to say, or who they wanted me to be. I had my values, but for the most part I spent my time trying to give people what I thought they wanted. My life was a performance piece, and I was my harshest critic. I deconstructed every syllable that came out of my mouth, and everyone else’s. I scrutinized every action and felt constant, almost physical, agony over every misunderstanding or awkward moment. If an interaction didn’t end in a complement or a round of applause, it constituted a failure. I would torment myself for weeks and months thinking about all the things I should have done differently.

The stress of this was exhausting; I slept all the time because that was the only way to quiet my hyper-critical inner monologue. Icing on the cake: I was so tightly wound and insecure, that I developed a severe stutter. Which, as a person who used language as a security blanket, was the definitive end of any self-confidence that I might’ve managed to cling onto. I found the solution to my spiraling sense of self through constant distractions and self-medication. I spent the following two years drinking excessively, to sooth my nerves. Then began my love affair with Adderall, which I felt transformed me into the confident and productive person I believed everyone wanted me to be… at least temporarily. Last but not least, I partied. I surrounded myself with friends from work who just wanted to have fun; and I had fun. I danced, and drank, and had sex with people that bored me to death with their clothes on. I stayed out all night, went to work at 6am, and did the same thing the next evening. I always had something to do, or someplace to be. I was having so much fun, but I was miserable.

I felt my sadness in the quiet moments. Right after the heavy thunk of the deadlock falling into place in my front door. Or while opening the restaurant I worked at, on my own, just before sunrise. Or when I went out at night and I’d find myself floating just beyond the fog of laughter and tequila shots. Just long enough to wonder what the hell I was doing standing there in the middle of it all. In these moments I felt as if I was being haunted by the ghost of the woman I’d chose to leave behind.

Alcohol had stopped making me feel that warm glow of ease. Binge drinking left me feeling numb, and lonely. Everything left me lonely except Adderall, which I always needed more than I had. I’d ration half and quarter pieces for the days that I absolutely had to get out of bed. A friend once asked for a pill during her double shift and I couldn’t help the tears that leaked from my eyes as I pulled one of my last three out of my purse for her. Despite crying, I don’t remember feeling anything but acute annoyance; at my friend for her request, at myself — first, for my selfishness and second, for my inability to say no or to lie. I remember being furious that my stupid face was red and puffy, making it impossible to hide my nonsensical outburst from my co-workers.

Eventually nothing was exciting or beautiful on its own. Everything was just tedious. Honestly, I was barely even there. The closest I came to feeling like myself was during those miserable moments, and I didn’t want to feel like that. I wanted help, but I couldn’t tell my friends. They didn’t sign up for this disaster case. I had sold them on “fun” me. So for a while I kept going out. Laughing and dancing. After a while, I found myself realizing that most of the relationships I had were the culmination of my great performance. I was a walking reflection, a mirrored doll. By placing everyone else’s needs above my own, I had effectively buried myself. I’d pushed myself so far away that the ghost of a feeling was all I had left.

That realization built slowly. I’d feel the truth like the first fat raindrops of a storm. Splashing shockingly down, across my nose or cheeks. Momentarily breaking my reverie only to be wiped away by an unflinching hand. Soon these drops of truth would fall faster and land heavier over the life I had built. I grew drenched in the knowledge that I had been sleepwalking through my life. And that all of this was wrong. The truth washed away all artifice. I began to panic, first frequently and then constantly, that this obvious lie was going to be my whole life. This terrifying reemergence into wakefulness made my options pretty clear. I could keep floating through my life, pursuing outside validation at the cost of my own humanity. Or, I could choose to believe that I was a person of value; and that my needs and desires are as valid as anyone else’s. That’s when I got loud.

When I allowed other people to define my worth based solely by my ability to shrink, bend, or break, it meant that I’d begun inviting people into my life who, from the onset, had no interest in getting to know my authentic self. In the process of attempting to excavate fragments of the woman I used to be, I was forced to acknowledge that there were not enough pieces left to create a whole. I realized I could never step back into the woman I was. So I grieved, and still grieve, for the time I’ve spent attempting to erase myself. And for the ways in which I succeeded. Through that grief I emerged, with tooth and claw, into the woman I am. I hold all the pieces of that shattered girl within me, protected; but I have become a woman strong in the knowledge of her truth. Who refuses to become small for the comfort of others.

My god, that is worth so much.

Although I often wish for more tact, I never regret speaking the truth and defending my well-earned right to live honestly and take up space. It’s not shocking that fewer people like me now. Sometimes being aggressive simply means being bold enough to ask for what you deserve, or confident enough to be the unpopular opinion. Insecure people are easily threatened by someone with the audacity to stand against power and take risks. I’m learning to tell the difference between people who are responding to my words and people who are reacting to what I represent. There’s been a shift in my thinking about my relationships overall. I had to perform in order to be liked, but I have to be brave in order to be loved.

I have had to take a hard look at myself, and see how the things that I fear keep me from the relationships that I crave. I have to be honest about what I need, and if I’m not receiving it then I have to be strong enough to leave. Because I have learned that love — the deep, true, enduring stuff — is hard. It requires authenticity, which is sometimes ugly. When I spent all my time trying to be what everyone wanted me to be, I was keeping myself from the possibility of being known. You can’t love someone you don’t know. Now I tell the world who I am, and when love finds me I cherish the gift. My love is fierce. It doesn’t lie, mince words, or waste time. I can say now that I am better able to give and receive love from other people. That is the result of the grace I have learned to give myself.

It’s harder. Definitely. To practice radical honesty and allow yourself to need things from people. To have people thrown by your forthrightness, and to be labeled reactively. But if passion is aggression, if honesty is aggression, if being vulnerable even when it makes others uncomfortable is aggression. Then sign me up. I am done hiding.