women, truth and being sensible

Dear Kate,

I don't believe I've ever edited anything I have ever written as much as this. I think this goes to show I have never truly tried to write something? Or is this just the curse of personal essays directed at a specific group of people? It is nearly done and I am feeling anxious yet exultant because I feel like I have actually written an essay that shows something of who I am and actually says why I want to be a doctor. I even have answers ready if they ask why not just be a psychologist? Do you think you can handle the science? etc. I am ready, fists up, smile on.

That being said, I've also been doing a lot of thinking about women and who we are. Mostly inspired by reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I love the way Nietzsche writes, but I find it difficult to grasp who this overman is, because it seems to be mainly that-- and overman, not and over(wo)man. He is full of dance, poetry, laughter, despair, hope and all those things that cause us to rise up and fall down and discover our being, but what does all of this mean for women? I then started reading The Second Sex, which I would like to find in French and read over there. I only got through the intro, but I like her style and I like the way she addresses all the questions. I don't think we can reduce men and women to being just humans. We are, of course, all humans, right? But, even science agrees, there's a difference--a difference in how we think, what a specific balance of hormones does to us, and how we develop. But, with Nietzsche, that's not what's bothering me, I find myself wondering if I can understand fully what he's saying. I've just spent the past four years of my life reading a bunch of dead men, so I hope I can...but his seems particularly attached to him, to his illness, to his lack of physical strength, and who knows what's going on with his ideas about women.

I think I like what Rilke has said about women better: "The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being."

I love him because you can't say those things anywhere else...that men are light and easygoing, they do not have the same heaviness that women have. There is truth in that. It speaks to me and makes me gasp. I see that in everything, in the art men create, and the lives women lead. Perhaps it is a subject best left to conversation and poetry, forget quantification. Gotta take a break more later...going to make chili. Fulfilling my womanly duties in the kitchen. Just kidding. I'm sure you have plenty o thoughts on the subject. mwah.