All my nightmares

Listen: Welcome Home - Radical Face (the Nikon song!)

I have no life but this,

To lead it here;

Nor any death, but lest

Dispelled from there;

Nor tie to earths to come,

Nor action new,

Except through this extent,

The realm of you.

- Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson's mostly known for being depressing - look at this poem we had to read in secondary school for English Lit, "There's been a death in the opposite house" - and her sad sad face. But that poem above is something different, isn't it. And she didn't get married, unusual for women during her time. There was something Byatt said in Possession about Dickinson, I think, about how she chose to be a recluse and kept her own independence so she could continue her writing, rather than "be normal" and get married, and probably not have time and be expected not to write.

Reading about how strong the women are in Game of Thrones aka GoT on the Internets, and how women are inspired by the characters, I wonder whether these women would have gone that far if they weren't in the situations that Martin placed them in the first place. (Except for Cersei. Cersei's a bitch, not the mega dictator type kind that makes people really hate her - she's the kind that enjoys making people's lives miserable being petty and vengeful for the smallest of things. I had no sympathy for her.) And while fans tend to focus on Dany and her dragons, it's probably Arya who'll make or break a kingdom. Hopefully she won't be murdered before the end though.

It's the little things, isn't it? But I keep hearing people telling me to "look at the big picture", until I feel like telling whoever it is to shove it where the sun doesn't shine. If I wanted to "look at the big picture", I wouldn't be having the conversation where you tell me to "look at the big picture". And I might be wrong here - but when people who like to "look at the big picture" start spouting meaningless phrases like that, it's usually because their "big picture" involves a lot of "them" and not enough of "other people". Treating people like pieces in a game to achieve your "big picture" will probably get you success (I'm not denying it), but whatever goodwill you might have had would be gone. 

It doesn't apply to all situations, but I can't write about specific ones, so I'll just write what I want.

Coming back to Dickinson's poem - that last line: The realm of you - both magnificent and depressing at the same time. When I read it, I first thought how selfless and grand it sounded - to think that you could love someone so much, and owe almost your entire self to the unnamed you - that to understand what it is to be here, now, feeling what you do - is because this person made it possible for you to feel it. But on the other hand, it's depressing because you can only understand being in the here and now because you have someone you love to share it with - which would mean you could achieve anything you want, do what you want, feel what you want - but it'll all be meaningless unless you could have it with someone else, through someone else. 

I wonder if it's mostly girls who tend to think this way (maybe I'm just a raging closet feminist). But if it was, I wonder if girls are more likely to have this uneasy feeling I sometimes have - to do what I want, I'll have to do it with someone, or get someone's approval to do it; to go where I want, I must have a reason to leave (a better reason than because I want to, that's why); to achieve something, I have to think about whether it will hurt me or others around me. Always that doubt.

Maybe it's an Asian thing. Maybe it's because it's still OK to make jokes like "girls don't understand programming" to my face when deciding something important, and then laugh it off when I get annoyed about it. Maybe it's because girls are still seen as soft and likely to be histrionic when things get bad, and they will continue to be soft and histrionic despite all they've been through. 

Or to use Shu Yuan's favourite phrase: "Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe you can go fuck yourself."