I Want to be a Villian

On the girl I am too careful to become

There are moments—small but pulsing with heat—when I imagine releasing the raging atoms of my body into the nearest object and watching it become destroyed. I picture the pieces coming back together like nothing ever happened.

Not for drama. Not for spectacle but to just feel the echo of my own rage… for once.

To see proof that I, too, can project my feelings when they’re ugly—just like everyone else has permission to do.

There is a darkness within me, just like everyone else, but I dress mine up as patience.

I do her hair with a well-kept ribbon. I place a soft blush on her lips. I belittle her with the silence I surround her in.

Some days, I want to let her speak.

I want to stop choosing the quiet dignity of being well-groomed

and instead see the evidence of what I’ve buried with a beating heart.

But before I can act, I weigh the consequences.

And it’s never worth it.

The villain in me has since forgotten how to speak. She never really had the space to begin with in the first place.

She’s a dead language now, and it kills me differently.

I want to be understood, but not if it makes me ugly.

So I let those parts of me die. I let them break away, one by one, like pieces of a wagon loosening with every mile of the bumpy road.

Until I no longer notice what I’ve lost.

Until I confuse this hollow fog for peace.

Until I realize that peace was a vapor too—because I never even had it.

I dwell in forfeiture and numbness and the inability to be angry, even about that.

I’ve been told I’m mature for my lack of reaction in the moment. But really, I’ve just conditioned myself.

Conditioned to feel the earth shatter inside me the moment something goes wrong.

Conditioned to play the hero.

Conditioned to surrender my side of the story and rescue theirs.

I shrink what I feel because theirs must be so big, so consuming, that I have to help carry it.

I detach from myself.

I tell myself I have to calm them down, that arguing or showing emotion will only escalate things.

And the actual issue is that the issue stops mattering the moment I think it might cost me their love.

Suddenly, they’re upset with me, suddenly, it’s all my fault.

It must be—because if it weren’t, I wouldn’t feel this hollow.

I wouldn’t feel this guilty, this desperate to fix what I didn’t even break.

I’ve been told I’m mature for my lack of reaction.

But really I’ve just broken myself in private so nobody else has to ‘break me in’.

Growing up, I learned that the worst thing a girl could be was crazy.

Too emotional. Too reactive. Too loud. Too much.

I watched her on TV. I read about her in books. I learned she was the punchline. The cautionary tale in a way.

I studied her like a manual of what not to become.

I told myself I would never be her, not if I wanted to be taken seriously. Not if I wanted to be smart, composed, loved.

So I became a very disciplined child. I did everything I possibly could right.

I became an origami:

Folding myself into the smallest, most graceful shape I can manage.

So tightly I forgot I can become anything I want to.

And in doing so, I forgot that paper has to unfold before it becomes something new.

Before you can improve your shape. Before you can even remember you had one.

The Sticky Situation

I don’t want to be the villain forever. I just want to stop pretending I never was. I want to know I can be messy, loud, wrong—and still be loved. I want to shatter and not have to sweep it up before anyone sees. I want to unfold what I’ve pressed down, to let the girl I buried speak again, even if her voice is cracked from the silence. Maybe she was never a villain. Maybe she was just the part of me that didn’t know how to wear patience like perfume. The part that knew rage and tenderness could live in the same body. I don’t want to destroy myself to be good. I want to be good and whole. I want to be the swan, yes—but also the paper. Capable of becoming, again and again.