UNSOLICITED ADVICE

I am the eruption my ancestors were dead afraid to whisper.

A guide to setting the ancestral dollhouse on fire while everyone else is busy worrying about the upholstery.

Photo by Srimathi Jayaprakash on Unsplash

The domestic history of womanhood is a long and suffocating corridor of muted footsteps and carefully swallowed pieces of glass.

We are raised on the delicate architectural footsteps of our grandmothers, women who mastered the art of becoming corner furniture so they would not be broken by the men and people walking through the room.

They wore their silence like a heavy wool coat in mid-June, sweating under the weight of unsaid things while smiling at the neighbours through windows polished to a deceptive shine.

I look at the faded photographs of these women and see the shadows of a thousand wildfires trapped behind their eyes, banked fires that were never permitted to smoke because smoke alerts the authorities to a heart in transit.

Today, I am the byproduct of that generational drought, the tectonic consequence of a century of forced politeness and the exquisite performance of being happy.

I am the eruption they were dead afraid to whisper about over their laundry lines and their cold cups of tea. While they were taught to be the calm surface of a well, reflecting the clouds and the needs of others without ever rippling, I have decided to be the deep, dark pressure at the bottom that eventually erupts even the underground.

Society has a fascinating obsession with the gracefully dedicated to the family woman, a creature who apparently lacks a central nervous system capable of registering insults, taunts, and even violence.

We are expected to navigate the world as if we are made of satin, floating through corridors of casual entitlement without ever snagging our sleeves on the thorns of reality.

When a woman finally decides to stop being a decorative flower and starts being a wild venus flytrap, the world reacts with a mixture of petty horror and genuine confusion. Social media calls it unhinged or hysterical, like our anger is a sudden, inexplicable weather event rather than a predictable result of being treated like a side character in our own biographies.

I find a heck of a sort of sarcasm in the way the world fears a girl who has stopped caring about being perceived as sweet, even when kept surrounded by rotten fruits. Sweetness is a preservative used to keep things from rotting, but it also implies a lack of substance, a sugary facade that melts under the slightest heat.

My ancestors were sweet because they had to be preserved to survive the winters of their own discontent, but I am living in a season of permanent summer where the ice has long since vanished. My rage is not a tantrum. My anger is a long-overdue audit of the emotional labour I never consented to perform. (Well, who am I kidding, as if they understand consent)

It is the personification of every no that was strangled in the throats of my aunts and the realisation that I do not owe the world a pleasant expression just because I happen to be occupying space within it.

There is a satisfying beauty in the realisation that you no longer fit into the dollhouse. You begin to notice the way the walls are made of cardboard and the way the tea in the tiny cups was never actually meant to satisfy your thirst.

The girlhood rage that contemporary culture tries to package as an aesthetic, complete with smudged kohl and moody lippaints, is actually a primal reclamation of the self. It is the moment the glass finally realises it has the power to cut the hand that tries to shatter it.

I am currently busy decorating my life with the shards of every expectation I have managed to break, and the view is significantly better now that the walls are down.

The men in my lineage likely never imagined a daughter who would speak in the cadence of a landslide, nor did the women imagine a girl who would refuse to stitch her own mouth shut for the sake of a quiet dinner table.

They were terrified of the whisper of rebellion, fearing it would bring the house down around them, but they failed to realise that the house was already haunted by their own resentment. I am simply the one who decided to stop ignoring the ashes and start setting the curtains on fire.

The eruption is finally here, and it is loud, and it is absolutely unapologetic. It is the sound of a thousand years of I’m sorry being retracted in a single, deafening breath.

I am the terrifying proof that you can only bury a fire for so long before the earth itself decides it has had enough of keeping your secrets.

If the world finds my volume inconvenient or my anger unbecoming, it should perhaps consider why it spent so long trying to build a civilisation on top of a volcano and expecting it to never wake up.

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this guided tour, drop 50 claps. Leave your own stories of ancestral arson in the comments, and follow for more dispatches from the eruption; I promise to keep the volume high.

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