I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World by Eve Ensler Page A

override her emotional nature.
    The ten years I spent listening to girls, charting their development, going with them to beaches and museums, writing and doing theater work with them, had the cast of revelation. Passages from my journal recording pleasures unearthed and losses covered over bring back the visceral sensations of that time:
    This morning in the shower, I remember what it was like on Monday, that intense experience of pleasure, seeing the girls at the beach—their bodies, their freedom. Minnow-like bodies darting in and out of the water. Running on the sand. Dancing, turning. I began to remember an eleven-year-old body—I began to remember my eleven-year-old body and to enter that body. Without thinking I began running, unencumbered, fast like the wind.
    •  •  •
    Covering loss with words. Embroidering beauty over the ragged hole of loss. An inner sadness and a sign: Do not touch. I am touched so directly, so immediately by these girls…. I begin to move directly in their presence, to speak without hesitation, to find a freedom and pleasure that I relish…. To leave this is to face the sadness of its loss….
    The research with girls was taking me back into what had been a lost time, a moment of freedom before womanhood set in. The sound of girls’ voices, at once familiar and surprising, brought home the extent to which I and other women have rewritten our histories to conform to a story I now recognized as untrue. Like Anne Frank rewriting her diary, I had muted my pleasure with my mother. Like thirteen-year-old Tracy, I had come to hear an honest voice as “stupid.” Like sixteen-year-old Iris, I feared that “if I were to say what I was feeling and thinking, no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud.” Like Iris, I knew that “you have to have relationships,” while at the same time I knew that relationships maintained by silencing myself were not relationships in any meaningful sense.
    I Am an Emotional Creature
was written for girls. As Eve says, it is “a call to question rather than to please.” It is also a call to all of us to join girls’ resistance to turning their backs on one another and themselves. The opposite of patriarchy is democracy, rooted in voice rather than in violence and honed through relationship. Whether read in silence or performed on a stage, these monologues carry the hope of recalling us to our better selves. They remind us of a store of energy in our midst that doesn’t cost anything and does not pollute, a source of power waiting to be set free. To understand the forces marshaled against its release is to recognize the extent to which we are held captive to a false story about ourselves, a story about manhood and womanhood that belies the fact that, as humans, we are all emotional creatures.

INTRODUCTION
    Dear Emotional Creature,
    You know who you are. I wrote this book because I believe in you. I believe in your authenticity, your uniqueness, your intensity, your wildness. I love the way you dye your hair purple, or hike up your short skirt, or blare your music while you lip-sync every single memorized lyric. I love your restlessness and your hunger. You are one of our greatest natural resources. You possess a necessary agency and energy that if unleashed could transform, inspire, and heal the world.
    I know we make you feel stupid, as if being a teenager meant you were temporarily deranged. We have become accustomed to muting you, judging you, discounting you, asking you—sometimes even forcing you—to betray what you see and know and feel.
    You scare us. You remind us of what we have been forced to shut down or abandon in ourselves in order to fit in. You ask us by your being to question, to wake up, to reperceive. Sometimes I think we tell you we are protecting you when really we are protecting ourselves from our own feelings of self-betrayal and loss.
    Everyone seems to have a certain way they want you to be—your mother, father,