They spend too much time online, while their future happens elsewhere or never arrives. Instead, they stagnate in place, act out, overthink, seek spiritual ascension through drugs, or give up entirely. She’s also every character in my book, Bad Thoughts, a satirical story collection about modern women, mostly artists or aspiring artists who are unwilling or afraid to advance to the next stage of life. She’s the goddess Artemis roaming the forest with her squad of nymphs. ![]() She’s an Eve Babitz in a world of Joan Didions. She feels disconnected from her body and especially fears being reduced to her earthbound, corporeal form through childbirth and motherhood: the ultimate puella death. She performs confidence to compensate for an inner emptiness and lives in a fantasy of her own making, believing that her real life is always just about to begin. She prefers to remain elusive, desiring to be seen but not to be known intimately. She is a paradox, unknowable even to herself. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĪ true puella refuses such categorization, believing herself to be too special for that. It me! I had spent so many years psychoanalyzing Peter Pans/ex-boyfriends who referred to yearlong relationships as “hanging out” that I had failed to recognize my own puella nature. The book only briefly mentions his female counterpart, the puella aeterna, but upon reading about her, I felt a small pang of recognition. Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz identifies this resistance in her book called Puer Aeternus, Latin for “eternal boy,” better known as Peter Pan Syndrome, the pathological arrested development that plagues some men well into old age. ![]() I was standing (okay, lying down) on the precipice of what Jungian psychology refers to as “threshold experiences”: the archetype of new beginnings, an initiation into a new phase of existence where the old self must die to be reborn. Instead of feeling the alleged joy that comes from good things happening to you, I was feeling a constant low-level dread and spending a lot of time looking up things like “Victoria Beckham kids how many” and watching Marianne Williamson YouTube clips on how to become a spiritual beacon. Girlfriends write books that they will definitely, one day, let other people read … when they’re ready! Girlfriends get presents on their actual birthdays. Girlfriends have their whole lives ahead of them. ![]() Wives die-as in “My wife passed away five years ago” or “My wife, she fell down the stairs! Hurry!” I preferred being a girlfriend. At the same time, I was weeks away from getting married, a famous marker of adulthood that would catapult me out of the paradise of perpetual becoming into a fixed state of being: wifedom! It wasn’t marriage that scared me it was being a wife. These drafts were teeming with potential and could maybe even be perfect, so long as I could work on them forever (which I, contractually, could not). Last summer, I was completing edits on my first book-a thing that had, for years, existed as only a loose collection of drafts scattered across my desktop.
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