Yes, Writing Is Essential To Me. It's

There Questions Of Wanting To Be An Artist, And What Does That Mean, What Makes You An Artist? Are You An Artist If You're In A Gallery In New York And Not An Artist If You're Doing It At Home? Do You Need Legitimation To Count? If You've Been Acculturated To Believe That You Have Certain Obligations - Familial, Social, Human - If Multitasking Has Been Your Forte And That's What's Been Praised And Rewarded, Where Do You Find The Single-mindedness, The Selfishness To Do Something Like Art? I Think Those Are Questions That Arise Differently For Women And For Men.

It's The Strangest Thing About Being Human: To Know So Much, To Communicate So Much, And Yet Always To Fall So Drastically Short Of Clarity, To Be, In The End, So Isolate And Inadequate. Even When People Try To Say Things, They Say Them Poorly Or Obliquely, Or They Outright Lie, Sometimes Because They're Lying To You, But As Often Because They're Lying To Themselves.

I Always Thought I'd Get Farther. I'd Like To Blame The World For What I've Failed To Do, But The Failure - The Failure That Sometimes Washes Over Me As Anger, Makes Me So Angry I Could Spit - Is All Mine, In The End. What Made My Obstacles Insurmountable, What Consigned Me To Mediocrity, Is Me, Just Me. I Thought For So Long, Forever, That I Was Strong Enough -- Or I Misunderstood What Strength Was.

We Live In A Culture That Wants To Put A Redemptive Face On Everything, So Anger Doesn't Sit Well With Any Of Us. But I Think Women's Anger Sits Less Well Than Anything Else. Women's Anger Is Very Scary To People, And To No One More Than Other Women Who Think: Oh, Goodness, Well, If I Let The Lid Off, Where Would We Be?

We Live In A Funny Time, A Funny Era, When Desire, To Be Adult Desire, Has To Be Conceived As Sexual. And That Didn't Used To Be The Case. Sexuality Is A Social Construction As Much As Anything Else And I Think The Realities Of Sexuality Don't Always Fit Into The Social Constructions That We Have, And We Live In A Goal-oriented Time - On All Fronts.