Blog 2

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write. – Virginia Woolf

I have to say, I am not much a fan, per se, of the writings of Virginia Woolf, but I am very much in love with the idea of Virginia Woolf. I saw the film “The Hours” while I was in Iraq and cried my eyes out over the plight of the three manifestations of Mrs. Dalloway, including Virginia Woolf herself, and what that all meant for women. You see, I love Virginia Woolf so much because she was a woman who was truly herself, as best as she could be in the time she lived in and I believe even in today’s times. She was sexual, she was intellectual, and she refused to marry simply for conventions sake and was not afraid to be a little crazy and a lot stubborn. She did not have children simply for conventions sake, and cultivated a room of her own and took charge of her life even unto the end, when she committed suicide. I find the quote I chose as the opening here very fitting for the essence of Virginia Woolf.

I have always been a writer, scribbling mad journals for my own secret pleasure for as long as I can remember, as well as reading books in class when I should have been paying attention to other things and pointedly writing poetry in the margins of my arithmetic. Lately I have come to realize that as I writer I had been lacking a major affect – egotism, or at least an element of conceit. As a woman, writing, trying to sound fair and balanced, I had often and nearly always not assumed an opinion of my words, my own opinions and ideas and sentences and desires and dreams, as inherently mine and not expressed them with the appropriate level of conceit. I was recently in light of this course thinking about many of the writers I truly loved, particularly male writers, and realized what I love in many of their works is their opinion. These writers actually write on their own idea on how things are and how things ought to be and the sheer sense of self that they project in their writings. I feel like I have reached a personal epiphany point in understanding that I too deserve myself and my opinions in my writings, and I am no less talented or no less a writer because of it, but rather more of a writer for being allowed to pour more of myself into it.