I thought she’d be there holding daisies // she always waits for me.
I had a long phone call with a friend yesterday while I was organizing my apartment.
He had been going through a lot of trouble recently, grappling with the fact that he doesn’t know what to do with his life.
I mean, we all go through it, wondering what the fuck we are doing here.
Everyone tells me that the point of your early twenties isn’t to have your life figured out; it’s just to get to know yourself. It doesn’t stop it from being difficult, though; it doesn’t help that you can feel the clock ticking, that you can see others gracefully glide into a beautiful future when you still feel stuck in the Stone Age. Hearing about people I went to high school with that have suddenly passed away sets a fire underneath me– I have to do something now! This life can be taken away at any time!
Things are slowly falling into place, growing pains, muscle tendons tearing and resetting stronger than before, bones breaking and healing calcified and stiff.
I don’t feel lost right now, just exhausted.
The road is longer than it is hard, with no one to guide you
The other night while driving home from The Odyssey, I had some revelations about what I am wanting out of this season of my life. (Reading The Myth of Sisyphus has been helping, too.)
Thinking smaller and turning my problems into little bite-sized pieces has helped me gather my bearings. I can see my present pretty clearly, but my future is a big fat question mark. Sometimes I freak out about it.
I need a purpose to my life; I need a calling
But what if I am out of range of the call?
What if the call is there but I just have to go find it?
I got the whole wide world just to find her.
For the past year, after a fateful conversation with Sarah, I have been grappling with whether I am able to liken myself to Penelope in The Odyssey. I feel like it would be natural for a woman like me to do so– Penelope is a great female character in The Odyssey… She is virtuous, faithful, clever, loving. Penelope plays her role flawlessly, and she is loved for it!
This, however, feels to me like a master praising their dog when they finally perform the trick correctly.
Sarah told me about how there is a notion of thought that there could not be a female Odysseus, that a woman could not have possibly been successful should she have been in his position.
I insisted upon the contrary; of course there could be a female Odysseus! Perhaps not in a literal way, but in a way where if a woman was given an equitable chance, her strengths can be highlighted and praised just as men are.
In the new Odyssey movie, I loved the scene where Penelope seethes to her son how Odysseus’s throne is seen as empty, despite the fact that she had been sitting on it for 20 years. The only way the throne is seen to be secure is if her inexperienced son takes the throne or she marries a suitor.
Penelope brings up something I want to dwell on for a second: that the reality of a situation is often completely dependent on how it is received.
A few nights ago I watched a Coen Brothers film titled The Man Who Wasn’t There. The main character, Ed, played by Billy Bob Thornton, is the classic stoic who I find always plays the lead in noirs. It reminded me a lot of The Stranger in that the main character seldom ever impacted the plot through direct action. The only thing Ed ever did directly on his own accord was the inciting incident to the conflict of the film: financing an aspiring dry cleaner. Ed is like a jellyfish, floating down the current of the plot… and I loved how he was deeply flawed and made innumerable mistakes, but I digress.
There is a part in the movie where a lawyer is yapping about how the more you know about something, the less you do, because the perspective you give it changes it. He says that you never can really know something for sure, and the more you know about it, the less you do.
I believe this statement more so in the same sense Penelope speaks of how the throne of Ithaca has not been empty, for she had been sitting in it this whole time, managing all of Odysseus’s responsibilities as well as the hall of suitors vying for the throne. I love how she speaks of her great love for Odysseus, which explains her fidelity towards him and refusal to accept him as dead, yet she also clearly explains the political reasoning behind her decision. I adore how her character is written.
It brought back to mind my conversation with Sarah… of course there could be a female Odysseus! After our initial conversation, it made me watch more closely the media I consumed, trying to find female characters that resemble Odysseus and the general Hero’s Journey storytelling device. I found two of my favorite movies already had characters like this– Chihiro from Spirited Away and Sarah from Labyrinth. I love how directly similar Chihiro is to Odysseus, especially with the direct reference to The Odyssey regarding her parents being turned into pigs. I love Sarah as a character because she is such a relatable girl, and she learns to reject the immature mentalities that ultimately limit her as the story progresses. Her story pushes her outside her domestic cave, the only home she had ever known, so she could have a frame of reference for the life she could live. Both are coming-of-age films, which is fun, but I wish there was more Hero’s Journey variety for female leads.
I brought these movies up to Sarah, and she recommended Poor Things to me. She said something that has stayed with me for a long time about it, which is:
“Emma Stone’s character Bella goes through a lot of difficult situations and is allowed to be in danger, but the writer was never incessantly cruel to her character.”
Holy shit, this movie is so good, and Sarah was so right.
This comment in context to this movie has impacted the way I live my life in a monumental way. I can be in danger, but being in danger does not always mean that a bad thing will happen.
After looking into it more, I found The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock, a book I have mentioned a few previous times on my page.
In it, Maureen talks about being the student of Joseph Campbell, the professor who popularized the system of The Hero’s Journey in the modern zeitgeist. After class one day, she approaches him and asks him about something that had been bothering her.
She points out that the hero’s journey feels incomplete in regard to the type of journey women go on through their lives.
He replies to her, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”
This put so much into perspective for me: The Dead Wife montage troupe, Eurydice, the princess in a tower, getting the girl, Inception, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Edge of Tomorrow (movie), even Silverstream from Warrior Cats!
I started seeing it everywhere: how women are narratively framed as this effervescent, ethereal, mysterious force to motivate the male characters instead of being fleshed out and with authentic grittiness that men are allowed in the media. She is there; she is the place the man is trying to get to, she is the home, she is the motivation! Which is nice and all, but I feel like there is a disproportionate amount of stories that have this trope reversed. What example does this set for women: that our purpose is to be a man’s finish line?
I think a big reason The Hunger Games got so big is because of how real Katniss is a successful subversion of this trope. Peta is the damsel in distress, and Katniss loves deeply for many but seldom ever is her love romantic. The fact that Prim is Katniss’s sister instead of her romantic interest brings a fresh tenderness to the story that is unprecedented in popular YA fiction of the time, such as Twilight.
I think of how Katniss shoots the apple in the pig’s mouth while being ranked by the game makers, just like how Odysseus shot the Cyclops unnecessarily on an impulse. They both were rash and made risky decisions that held weight.
It’s not like I want every female character to be an unromantic girlboss; it’s just that I want her to have intrinsic value to the story besides being a motivating factor for a man.
This is why I am not Penelope. I relate to and aspire to be more like Odysseus.
I can now confidently say that I am a person suited for adventure. I want to get out there in the world and see what it has to give me; I want to take the long way home; I want to learn lessons and grow. Cleverness, strength, valor, patience, justice, and security in himself are all qualities Odysseus possesses which I would rather nurture in myself than those seen as “inherently feminine,” which Penelope is celebrated for.
Penelope is a fabulous character, and I don’t think I’d mind being seen as a Penelope in someone else’s story, but I am not one to hold still in one spot like Joseph Campbell seems to think women should. If someone wants to make their journey to get to me, they better be ready to follow me wherever I decide to go.
On my drive home from The Odyssey, I considered how next month is August, and I turn 26.
When I turned 20, I had been living with my parents during Covid. My sister, her husband, and my boyfriend at the time came over for a small celebration at my parents’ house. We went to Dairy Queen and got blizzards, and my sister got me a vinyl of Lady Gaga’s Chromatica. That December I finished my Associate’s Degree, in February my boyfriend proposed, and by April I was married.
Now that I live across the country, I feel like I can actually process the last five years of my life and figure out what I want to do next.
I just wanna be me, man.
I have done some difficult things, and when I started seeing myself as an Odysseus instead of a Penelope, life got a lot more fun. It helps to see myself as a clever, crafty warrior on an adventure rather than a queen dragged out of my castle to fight a cyclops.
It’s not that I’m “not like other girls;” I’m not a tomboy; I’m not trying to be a guy. I am very secure in my femininity, yet I reject the notion that the most I could be is a Penelope. I am not a destination, a finish line for someone else… It’s my journey; it is my life, and I’m going to live it for me.
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