Why?

Why do I let it get to me so much? Why does it crawl under my skin and itch? Why am I so unexplainably bothered and embarrassed by it, and reduced to the chubby 13 year old with glasses again? I hate the bile and spit that rises up in my throat, the enflamed cheeks that accompany the forced grin and fake laugh. Even now, as I type, my body is stiff with barely restrained anger. Anger not at the words, or the ones who uttered them and laughed (okay, maybe a little anger towards them), but mostly at myself. For I cannot explain this reaction, and the fact that I cannot even explain myself makes me furious.

And the merry-go-round does not stop for a minute, for here I am again, entangled and ensnared by the self that I want to be set free from. What is there in me that cannot simply laugh it off? Give a careless toss and shrug of the shoulders and flick the words away into the air? What is there in me that can't just 'relax' and 'chill' and not be so 'dramatic.' For those are the small rocks that I pick up and place ever so carefully in my coat pockets each morning, and take out each night, the rocks that say I am too dramatic, I exaggerate, I over-react, and ultimately, how I feel is not based in reality and therefore I am simply.......hysterical.

Female hysteria; said to be caused by disturbances in the uterus. From the Greek word, hystera, meaning uterus.

Haven't we all heard some version of that? "Oh, stop being so hysterical, you're overreacting." " Here we go again, the emotional woman is crying, what a surprise"........as if this thing called 'uterus' is the origin of disease or dysfunction. As if our very womanhood is a liability in this world dominated and purported to be structured according to male 'rationality' and 'logic.' Haha. A joke.

And what a tangent I have veered off onto.