The little match girl -the feminist version-
By: Life Is Easy
Tags: Empowerment, Feminist, Women, Bildungsroman, Reflections

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

In my newly-found single status, I’ve moved in with two gay boys and I am surprised by how much emotional baggage do I share with them. Maybe because I’ve suffered discrimination, maybe because I’m too sensitive myself or maybe because we all heart-warm good people.

However, since I’m single and after a long time trying to be a good girlfriend, I’ve decided that I don’t want to be good anymore. Nobody likes good. Good is not fun. Good is predictable and you know what they say:

Good girls go to heaven (of the cheated on girlfriends) and bad girls go everywhere.

So fed up with the first outcome, way too many times, I’ve decided to join the Bad Girls gang. I want to be the Mean one. The Materialistic One. And the one that just to have Fun. So, a girl on a mission, to win the world. I thought I wouldn’t want a relationship and therefore, I wanted someone who could spice up my life so money can always help to do that but it’s so much better when it’s someone’s else’s, right? You can see, I was on a catapult to become a gold-digger so I started to say I wanted some rich guy to take me out to fancy dinners, summers in Saint Tropez, winter in the Swiss Alps and so on, and so forth.

Every time, I imagined something crazy, I couldn’t afford, there was a match that I was switching on in my head just like the little match girl shivering with cold. I imagined a life that I thought it could be the easiest way out of my plan until I got asked by one of my flatmates:

Do you really want to depend on a man’s money?

And then, I remembered all the times I had done that in the past and how that affected my self-esteem as I was selling myself away to sleep in warmer bed when the house I lived in had no heating. Or when I ordered an extra pizza at a restaurant and I got told off as he was meant to pay. Or when I was not entirely myself because I decided to be at the mercy of someone’s money.

It was then, when I saw that I was holding a match stick when I didn’t need it, just as we, women don’t need the matches that all the movies tell us we need, we don’t need the guy to come and save us. We don’t need anyone. Just ourselves.

It was at that moment when I realized that I could provide all for myself. That I could work hard and provide those once a year type of holidays. That I didn’t need to step on my dignity to get a man buying me drinks or trips. I realized that I could be the main provider and that I didn’t need to change because some a**hole thought Good was boring and decided to sleep around with some other woman.

I realized that I could be just me and have fun in my own way and on my own terms. I remember what I had dreamed to be when I was young and the independence that my mother fought to instill in me with her advice. I dreamed of being a kick-ass woman who would confidently enter a room like she owns the building.

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

That I would gain over the people sitting at a round table with some cosmopolitan city in the background. I remember that I wanted to be strong and independent and I would win my way to the top with my know-how, and skills. I remembered that I wanted to become the Jon Draper of my industry. Or better said, the Peggy Olson, the Mad Woman, who makes it happen against all odds.