Sometimes I think about this book I didn’t read for a class that I hated. It was Victorian Literature, I took it to complete my English major during COVID, and everyone in the class was a girl, which maybe spoke to the popular perception of Victorian Literature, to the fact that there weren’t many guy-English majors overall, and maybe to coincidence, and maybe to the overall “femininity” of the literature we were reading? Most of the authors we read were women–even though they were often penned under male names, like this book I’m describing that I didn’t read, by George Elliot. Books by women, for women. Unlike the books for men by men that we typically read in historical English classes, classes which were still filled with a majority of women.

I didn’t like the class–not because of the literature or its makeup–but because I didn’t like the professor all that much, the books, or the pretentiousness of some of the things students would say. Also, it was online.

Even though I didn’t read it, something about whatever that book was about stuck with me. And seemed relatable. 

In the book, there was a passage talking about Mother Theresa. And how there are probably many potential mother theresas in the world but they just failed at that because they got into a relationship or died or life or whatever. And that’s what happened to the character in that Victorian novel. She had a ton of potential and then just fucked it all up, by getting hitched.

I think about Sor Juana Ines de La Cruz, who forwent the opportunity to be a rich wife and instead became a nun because that meant she could read and never had to look after kids or a husband or do any of that dumb shit. 

And what if I’m wasting my potential? What if I got a good hand and I didn’t play my cards right? That’s what, historically, what being a woman was about, anyway. Rushed poems on folded napkins and wanting “a room of one’s own.”

Is there a way to escape that without being a nun? Without 4Bing and forgoing? 

There’s that statistic. Men without a wife in old age are significantly less happy while women are about the same–if not happier–without a man. 

But still the same, I’m happier when I’m not alone. I’m happier with human touch, I think. I’m happier when someone brings me breakfast. When I can cook for myself but also someone else.

When you try to figure out how something works–a piece of writing, and you examine the gears and the ticking and all that, it’s the same with a person. Actually, not really. People are incomprehensible, as incomprehensible as we find our own beings.

On a side note, I was looking up the Genius lyrics for the Yebba song I took this title from, and in the “about” section of the song, Yebba describes how she felt after her mom committed suicide, and all these labels were trying to sign her, and how she told them to fuck off because she wasn’t ready. She doesn’t even own a Louis bag.