'surprise'

I was surprised, when my body no longer made sense to me, and it seemed foreign, somehow, ungainly, full of complicated wrongness. 

I was surprised when I cheated on myself with other girls, telling myself they were so much better than me, so much prettier in every way. 

I was surprised when I had to be smart because I wasn’t anything else anymore, instead of being smart because of everything I was. 

I was surprised when I felt relieved to be called pretty by even the least interesting guys. 

I was surprised when I sometimes dated them. 

I was surprised when I found myself having sex I didn’t want to have. 

I was surprised that I’d been doing it for a long time by then. 

I was surprised by the reshaping of my desire, which became contorted so that I sometimes couldn’t locate it, and sometimes I seemed to be coming at it through a confusing loop, a rift in a the space-time continuum, so that I could only feel lust as a pretend man, because it was only men who seemed to actively lust, and women were always just moaning along, splayed, obliging. 

I was surprised that this was supposed to be liberation. That being a free woman meant being a woman who didn’t flinch, didn’t blink, didn’t bother to be hurt by anything. Being a free woman meant, somehow, doing the things to guys that guys already wanted you to do, but doing them because you thought this was fun anyway, because you just felt like it. It was all in the nonchalance, the unaffectedness, the laughing-it-off. 

I was surprised to look at myself, finally, and find that I could no longer see myself through my own eyes. Instead, my image had been filtered through all of the other eyes in the world. Through the eyes of every man. 

 I was surprised by my surprise, which after a while seemed misplaced. Why be surprised at all? This is just life. It just goes like this. 

The truly surprising thing, really, I began to think, was that I’d learned somehow to be surprised in the first place. 

- "Eat the Damn Cake"