The Feminine Urge to Destroy Your Life

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Every month, I fantasize about making my big exit.

Two weeks notice. Books donated. Job secured at a Costa Rican hostel. 

Some weeks the Costa Rican hostel is the shadow beneath an old weeping willow tree down south. I’m an MFA student writing fiction, corporate cacophony silenced by buzzing cicadas, the sizzle of a nearby grill, voices of characters coming to life. Usually girls with Juul-smoked voices and men who talk like John Mayer before he lost his innocence. Sure, I’m at the mercy of academia. I have the visceral sense that I’m playing a losing game. But I am writing, finally in an exclusive relationship with this apathetic ass, no-birthday-gift-giving ass, asks-for-a-blowjob-and-doesn’t-eat-pussy ass craft. 

Other weeks the weeping willow tree is an Italian villa in one of those little towns in Puglia where they’ll pay you to move. I stammer on the phone with my American friends, forgetting the English word for “sunset.” We make coffee on the stove. Walk Mousse off leash through an olive grove because every version of my blown up life depends on trees. Something about stability and reaching for the sky. 

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Consider a tupperware of week-old spaghetti, hiding in the back of your fridge. Are you always going to make the rational choice of scraping the pasta brick into the garbage can, washing the container? 

Or do you trash the whole red-stained nuisance and get on with your life? 

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Last year I was diagnosed with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) which is somehow worse than it sounds. PMDD is a severe form of PMS characterized by extreme sadness, rage, suicidal ideation, and other psychological hellscapes that typically break upon menstruation, but are nonetheless detrimental to one’s life and relationships. 

For me, PMDD feels like being locked in a dank closet, endless obsidian, with nothing but a butcher knife and “Lithium” by Nirvana on loop. So it’s no surprise that even I, a proud protester of the TikTok School of Medicine, found comfort in a viral video on PMDD. 

I was scrolling my For You page one day when someone with “holistic health coach” in their bio flashed before me, a beach-waved head bouncing around an infographic comparing PMS symptoms to those of PMDD:

If you feel like an absolute crazy person right before your period… if you always get the urge to quit your job and move away, but not in a good way, in a like, I hate my life and I can’t believe everything is happening to me this way and I’m just gonna quit. I started experiencing that about eight years ago when I went off hormonal birth control. And it was only three years ago when someone finally diagnosed me with PMDD.

I’d already been diagnosed with PMDD at this point. But somehow amid the breakdowns, I’d failed to make the connection between my cycle and the gnawing feeling that I should quit everything. I thought that was just part of being a writer: reducing one’s life to a series of distractions, hurdles to clear on the path to success. Every month I’d look at my job, my social life, my running schedule, my Italian lessons and berate myself for not nixing it all to write my ass off.

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I’d told my therapist in our first session that I had PMDD and thus, how I show up on Mondays at 10 AM depends on the time of the month, i.e., when I’m ovulating, I can confidently recognize grief as central to my crises, but exactly 10 days before my period, I start Googling “how to disappear.”

(Some people think I’m too open about my menstrual cycle. I think they’re a lower form of consciousness.)

A couple Mondays ago, I was really in the throes of it. It didn’t help that I’d been missing my nephews extra hard. So the fantasy du jour was something like buying a house in my hometown where I otherwise have little interest in living to be close to them. And of course, because Danville is rural and isolated, I would be churning out those short works of fiction that I keep starting and can’t seem to finish. Maybe working as a waitress at Perkins like my mom did all those years.

My therapist asked me, “What other scenarios come to mind when you imagine blowing up your life?” I told him about the Costa Rican hostel. The weeping willow tree. The Italian villa. 

He smiled, “Is any of that actually blowing things up?”

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Every good girl—even the bad girls who are really good girls subcutaneously—knows that to deviate from what’s expected of you even the slightest feels like detonating a tiny bomb.

I can’t tell you how many hard partying nights I’ve come home, told myself “I’m going the fuck to sleep with my makeup on,” and found myself pouring micellar water on a cotton round, scraping off the night with surgical precision. Days when I’ve promised myself boxed mac and cheese and endless TV but instead, found myself on a treadmill for an hour, eating salmon and broccoli for dinner. You see, I avoid little offenses in fear of a domino effect; I couldn’t “blow things up” if I tried.

It is precisely that self-denial, though—that by-the-booksness—that keeps the fantasy alive. If I woke up to a breakout after sleeping in my makeup, I probably wouldn’t assign some weird rave valor to forgoing my routine. If I knew the emptiness of running off alone, of having no one but my parents to call when I’m miles away and the walls close in, I probably wouldn’t be tempted to dip out of the country whenever I’m not invited to some bachelorette party.

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Why do the girls who have it all always search for an out?

Bitterness asks all the right questions.

I play “Heroin” by Lana Del Rey and I start to wonder.

I play “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground and I start to wonder.

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Susan Sontag wrote, “The great culture heroes of our time have shared two qualities: they have all been ascetics in some exemplary way, and also great destroyers.” Destruction and discipline are not mutually exclusive proclivities. Arson may require little planning, but you have to be committed to the cause. You have to be willing to watch shit burn. 

Enter a room of beautiful women with curtain bangs and Wellbutrin prescriptions and mention “Amy Elliot-Dunne” or “Lux Lisbon” and watch the pink return to their porcelain cheeks. Manic depressive incandescence. These fictional characters represent a certain aspirational unraveling. The feminine urge to destroy your life. 

What’s always appealed to me about fucked up heroines is that their path of destruction is usually regenerative, the way artists create something new and interesting from trashing the canon. The average woman can do that in her own way. All she needs is a bottle of good bourbon and someone else’s credit card.

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My favorite literary pyromaniacs are those who’ve had the guts to bare their own stories. The ones whose fires are exquisitely mundane and within reach, helping us feel their warmth. They remind us of that pack of matches in the junk drawer in the kitchen in the apartment with all the bad memories caked on the walls. 

Sometimes their tales are cautionary. Sometimes, encouraging. Depends how much you hate your life.

Exhibit A: What happens when you lose your mom, get hooked on heroin, fuck up your marriage, and snap? Cheryl Strayed found herself backpacking the Pacific Crest Trail alone, buckling under the ultimate novice’s too-heavy pack, the unpredictable and untamed around every corner. 

When I attended her writing workshop last fall, she talked about having been young and dumb, hoping to write the Great American Novel. But what she wrote, Wild—the story of blowing up her life—became the Great American Memoir. Because even when she’s dangerously dehydrated with $20 to her name beneath the arid Western sun, living the consequences of a semi-irrevocable choice, resilience pushes her onward. 

It makes quitting everything sound a lot more heroic. A lot sexier.

For some people, there isn’t one singular, neatly packaged story of flying off the rails. Rather, they regard themselves as chronically disastrous, often in the quiet alcoves of their lives, obscured by professional success or beauty or charm or in Stephanie Danler’s case, all of the above. 

She calls them “The Unravelers.”

In her 2015 essay in The Paris Review, Danler divides women into two opposing forces: knitters and unravelers. She puts a name to a face we all know. Her own face. Aquamarine-eyed and ocean-hearted, she sees a loose thread (“credit cards,” “married men,” and “perfectly cut lines of cocaine,” for example) and doesn’t just let it all unravel, but fucking drowns it in a tsunami of Cab Franc. 

You don’t feel that? The titillation of trouble? You must, even as a knitter. You wouldn’t investigate. When you see a loose thread, you tie it off, or weave it back into the larger narrative so it’s unnoticeable. The loose thread shows us a flaw in what should be a perfectly plotted structure. They remind us of our own flaws—damage calls out to damage. A knitter is humbled by the reminder, but taps their needles together and forges ahead, straightly.

I am a knitter dressed as an unraveler. A bad girl who is really a good girl subcutaneously. I have endured such monstrous heartbreaks that people stop me on the streets of my hometown with sad eyes, telling me they “always pray for me.” No matter the depths of despair that I sink to, though, my needles click on. Because knitting means staying in control, if only in pursuit of a blanket to hide under.

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Somewhere along the meandering construction of this essay, I Googled the idiom “grasping at straws.” That’s something I do often: Google a word or phrase, regardless of how confident I am in my understanding of its meaning, because god forbid I should use it wrong. If I’m going to look stupid, then I want it to be on my terms. And if I’m going to end my relationship with a man or a job or a city, then I want that to be on my terms, too. 

To grasp at straws is to desperately reach for useless, unlikely means to save yourself. A last-ditch effort at control.

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Control feels fake 99% of the time. I mean, how can the thing that keeps me from destroying my life be the same thing I’m craving when I dream of destruction?

Grief and control are a flammable pair. Whether the people we love will live to see 30 is mostly out of our hands. But we can control how much of our sadness we let on when they die. I bury my grief all the time because in America, to be palatable is to never let them see you cry. Even the ones who talk a big game about “vulnerability” and “compassion” and “authenticity.” They’ll rub your shoulder gingerly with a frigid hand, afraid your humanity might just rub off on them.

Anyway, the burying thing… that’s me taking control. And the thing about grief is it requires you to surrender control and face its wilderness to actually “make strides.” I’m just so used to contorting myself into something lighter to avoid those “you’ve changed” conversations. (For the record, it would be sociopathic to be unchanged by four of the most important people in your life dying within four years. Just saying.) 

When you wear a mask all the time, you start to forget what’s underneath it. And when you’re digging and scraping and coming up short, you might just find rage instead. You might just want to shave your head and change your name.

…until you remember you have nice hair and a pretty name. That’s me grasping at straws.

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I’m in my kitchen watching leftovers circle the microwave, and I unconsciously start twirling. In a big, thrifted Godsmack tshirt and no pants, I keep spinning and spinning until I get dizzy. Certain feelings keep me from snapping, like rollercoaster stomach drop, kitchen twirl dizzy. I want to live in this moment forever, staring over the edge, always pulled back by the effortless joy in my heart that fights for its life, against all odds.

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