yea i ate from the tree

A woman must stay alone for a long while until the hate men have for women has left her, and even longer until the jealousy women have for other women has left her, and longer still until the anger her children have for her has left her—until she is no longer a woman altered by the resentment of men, women, and children, no longer what others have forced her to be, but empty as a skull or a shell, filled only by whatever she pleases, forest air perhaps.

When my son was about to turn two, strangers would offer condolences. There’s a collective cultural dread of toddlers, who get described more like animals than people. Kids in their "terrible twos," I was warned, are illogical, unregulated, and feral. "Good luck," people would say. "He'll grow out of it."

"As the Centre Pompidou expands in Seoul and Saudi Arabia, the museum becomes a global perpetuation of the human fascination with an anesthetized image of itself. This is likely because, as the art theorist Peter Osborne has demonstrated in Anywhere or Not At All, the European museum is escaping its architectural confines to become synonymous with the world. As Jean Baudrillard once remarked, “The museum, instead of being circumscribed in a geometrical location, is now everywhere, like a dimension of life itself.” ... As Bataille wrote in the short essay ‘Musée,’ “The origin of the modern museum would be linked to the development of the guillotine,” adding, “The museum is the colossal mirror in which man finally contemplates himself from all angles, finds himself literally admirable, and surrenders to the ecstasy expressed in all art magazines.”

“When a woman loses her resolve to speak up and stand firmly behind her position, she may be vulnerable to depression, anxiety, headaches, chronic anger, and bitterness. Sometimes these symptoms reflect an unconscious search for truth, forcing a more honest self-appraisal, including the degree to which she is voicing her authentic values and desires and living in accord with them. As writer Kat Duff puts it, “Sometimes I think we would lose ourselves altogether if it were not for our stubborn, irrepressible symptoms, calling us, requiring us, to recollect ourselves, to reorient ourselves to life.” We need to listen carefully to the wisdom of our symptoms and to try to decode their meaning, because some of us have learned to settle, to fall silent, to deny that unfair circumstances exist or matter, and then to call our compromises “life.” But our bodies, our deeper unconscious selves, remain harder to fool.”