My Feminism as an Organ Within me

I like to think of my feminism as an organ within my body. She is central to my whole biological structure: every rush of blood, every hormone, every shit, piss and fart that traverses through me goes through my feminism. She is very specific to me: naturally, I was born with her, because I am female. But I have raised and nurtured her, deciding to let her form as an important part of my internal system. We are one and the same, yet also individual entities. At her conception she was small; I think nestled into my back, just under my rib cage, vulnerable, but present. She was immediately conscious of her creation, and everything that this life might mean by being a part of a woman. She was round, a perfect sphere, but over time her appearance changed from our shared experiences; she’s now tough and leathery, like a determined and old fruit. She is the physical manifestation of all of my trauma and joy. The organ is part brain, part heart, part stomach and part clitoris. Each of them fights over my internal console - I’d love to say that it's the brain part that often wins that battle, but it's usually my clit.

She's grown inside of me as I’ve gotten older, changing every year. She was sick and confused when I was sick and confused: every time I put another girl down to bring myself up, every time I did something reckless, something contrary, to impress some boy at a party. She’s moulded by my constant need for approval from my brothers and father, by every boring conversation I’ve had with men in the hopes they’ll kiss me afterwards, by my intelligent male friends who still don’t know who Malala is, by the older man in the pub taking photos of me when I was just having a drink with my mum. She’s sitting with me every single time I eat: considering the implications of my diet, and then the implications of thinking about my diet. She was cut into by the death of my best friend, who died by suicide, but was really killed by the men who verbally and sexually abused her. And now she doesn’t know how to act, because she is so, so fucking angry. But then she stops: the heart has taken control of the console again, and she’s flushed with love and strength. She laughs thinking of one of my friends drunkenly helping me insert a canesten pessary, or the other hiding a used tampon in her bag when there was no bin at the party. She smiles when she remembers another friend eating a tear off of my cheek, in the hopes that the bizarreness of the gesture would cheer me up. We women are absurd, but every absurd act is charged with warmth, as though we are all conspiring together against each awkward and challenging moment.

Our feelings for one another, my feminism and me,  often change; right now we are proud of each other, because we’ve taken every fuck up and chosen to learn from it. We’re approaching life with more privacy, realising that we’ve grown up sharing every detail of our experiences with others. Was that a natural response to life, to be intimate, or a subconscious attempt to appear care-free and charming? How much of who I am is built on my essential qualities, and how much has been modelled by some outstanding force that has more control of me than I realise? It’s okay that we aren't sure yet. But is it? Maybe the confessional part of me is my feminism refusing to be quiet and docile. It's impulsive, so it must be a reaction to something deeper within me, some refusal to be placed within a box that I don't belong to. She’ll keep growing with me as I do, and something also tells me she won’t die with me when I do. I like to think of this organ, this determined and old fruit, bursting seeds from its centre, spreading parts of itself out to others, and hopefully affecting change in some men along the way. We’ll see.