“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
–John Green, Looking for Alaska
*
I am the hurricane.
If you’re not sure whether you are one, then you probably aren’t. Hurricane Women know. We don’t try to be this way. We were born into it. Emotional weather systems with tempers, intuition, sensitivity, and something wild in our blood. Once we were little baby thunderstorms. Emotional outbursts. Quick to cry and just as fast to collapse into laughter. We were told to “calm down,” to “take it easy,” to “stop being so sensitive.” And we tried. God, we tried. I used to apologize for it. Tried to quiet it. I was told, more than once by a man I was dating, to “just be easy and breezy.” Certain women were born to be easy and breezy, and it comes naturally to them. I think for a long time I tried to water down the parts of myself to be more like that, but it made my chest feel hot and claustrophobic.
