So yeah, I saved those kids from a landslide. That's what I do, I save people, I have all this power, what am I going to do?
Sure, I have some time. I always mean to, I have nothing against answering some questions, try and set the story straight. It's just you're the only one who's asked.
Right, like in the Bible. I don't know, maybe I'm related to him, maybe I was abducted by aliens, I don't know. I just know the longer my hair is the stronger I am. It's pretty - it's very fiddly with how it works. I can't style it too much, can't put too much product in it, can't tuck it away - I guess I'm the only person in the world who'd be justified to wear a hair-met, it'd keep the hair safe, but then also I lose most of my power. I lose some power just if I lather and rinse, I still -
You know, on reflection, I'm really mostly going to be talking about my hair here, I don't know if your readers are into that.
Well, I spend thirty minutes a day washing my hair. Just hot water and cheap shampoo, rinse off the grease, comb out the tangles with my fingers. If it's too tangled I also lose some power, it's a fine line to walk, but really I just have to keep it clean so I feel human. If I know I have to go to full power sometime I go two days without a rinse, and also I untie this little braid.
I do handicap myself, you'd have to call it. I hold back. It's good for my enemies to know, at least up until now, twenty years in the public eye, up until now I have always gone easy on them, if one of them ever gets to me, shit, I don't even know what would happen if I lost my temper. Let's not find out.
And also it's a way to ground myself, remind myself I have limits like anyone else. There's, okay, I want to tell you something about power, as I understand it, but there's a bit of a story.
When I was younger I used to cut my hair real short. I told myself, I was very convinced I had two good reasons - I wanted to defy the standards of beauty that said, as a girl, I'm supposed to have long hair. And I wanted not to be defined by this power I didn't earn and didn't ask for. On some level I may even have thought I needed to be powerless to understand, empathize with powerless people.
What I didn't admit to myself, and this is very important to understand and pretty difficult to, I don't know, I may not even have the words to make sense of it. But there's a certain joy - I say "joy", it's not a positive sensation in and of itself, if it's just mindless self indulgence, but there is - joy in powerlessness. It's the part of us that says, hey, I'm one-sixteenth black, I understand your suffering now, and I don't have to worry about being fifteen-sixteenths white and having all sorts of possibilities and responsibilities given to me and freedoms that I could use to free other people.
It's, it would be uncharitable to ascribe anything malevolent to it, or even victim complex. I think it's just basic human laziness. Fear of responsibility, fear of sticking out of the crowd.
I think we as a society need to talk about power much more openly. It's my opinion that you need to be comfortable talking about your power, where that power comes from, what you're using it for, because if you're not then I think you're not using it correctly. And you know you're using it - you know that you are doing wrong. And you're shaming yourself.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. A very wise, very bold woman told me, as I was disappearing up my immaculately waxed and plucked nether regions, inaction may in itself be action. She showed me that I had to use my power, that squandering it for nothing was just another way of abusing it.
Yeah I basically had to be told I was supposed to be a responsible adult. More than adult, I guess, because I have more responsibilities - I can't get away from them, I didn't choose them, but then, almost no one does. And you know the adage, the ones who actually want power are the ones to watch out for. It's, to have power, it's not really something we evolved to be able to handle, as carbon based lifeforms, and that's just why I think we need to talk about it more openly, because we're not comfortable with it.
Right. It's worth repeating. I'm really racking my brain here to think of anything else I could tell your readers that's as important as this or should we just end?
Haha, sure, use a condom.
And punch nazis.
Question how you know what you know. Don't eat the yellow snow. No means no. Eat the rich. And use power in ways that leave you comfortable talking about power. That - there you are. That's all I've got.
My pleasure.
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