Agency: my entire life has been predicated on achieving this.

I have sought it more than love, more than enlightenment, more than self-awareness. I did not think I could have those things until I achieved Agency.

From where does this most basic human desire arise? The need to be in complete and total control of one’s own life, one’s body, one’s choices? To have no one, not a parent, not a spouse, not a friend, be able to control what you do with your life?

And why does it make men like Trump crazy when women achieve it?

In my little child mind, I intuited that the acquisition of money was the one and only true path to agency.

If you could pay for yourself, then you owed no one.

This became my singular goal, one I pursued with zeal.

Funny thing, I pursued it in a counterintuitive manner. I obeyed all the rules. I became the quiet, behind-the-scenes little worker bee that everybody could rely on.

I got squashed along the way, but I never took money from anyone that I did not immediately pay back. I worked for every cent. For every apartment. For every car. For every insurance premium. For every vacation. For every notebook, every pen, every computer.

Virginia Woolf taught me that I must have A Room Of My Own if I wanted to be creative. I took her to heart.

It would require millions of words to recount all the obstacles along the way. The men who took credit for my work. The men who got the bonuses for my sweat. The men who insisted they owned me because I worked for them. The men who tried to insult me for my feminism, my fashion-ignorant attire, my weight. The women who agreed with them, who saw me as an aberration of nature.

But that’s not what I want to remember. What I want to remember is this:

I am the sole agent of my destiny.

Girls. Seek the route to your agency. But only if that’s what you truly want.

 

I am lying naked, emaciated, on a concrete floor.

I am thinking. It is all I have left.

I am thinking about Michelle Obama’s speech, the one she gave 27 days before she and her husband were executed.

The beauty of that speech. The dignity. The hope it gave me as a woman. As a human.

They managed to repeal the 19th Amendment, and he won.

He immediately set upon imprisoning everyone who didn’t back him.

He started with women, then Mexicans, then gays.

I am all three. I was top of the list.

I memorized her speech. The last tears from my eyes came from those words.

My body is no longer writhing, only waiting for the sweet release of death.

I can still see her eyes, the tremor in her voice, the passion oozing from her heart.

Now I hear a sweet song. Star, my cockatiel, is singing good morning to me.

“Wake up,” he says.

I do. I look at my iPhone. It’s November 8.

The now infamous “Grab her by the p***y” tape triggered a long forgotten memory in me.

I was 21, fresh out of Yale. I had returned to the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. As an English major, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. Home seemed like a safe way station.

I got a job as a “paralegal” in an established law firm run by a father and his sons. At the Christmas party, the patriarch, now retired but still ruling with a firm hand, drew me into his ostentatious office. Before I knew it, the door was closed and his withered aged face was slobbering on mine. I exited quickly, but did not make a fuss.

I was furious. But not at him. I was furious with my female colleagues who had not warned me to avoid him. When I asked one of the women I trusted why she had not said anything, she implied that it was a rite of passage that every woman in the office had to endure. They felt that it was in my best interest to experience what each one of them had.

It never once occurred to me to report the incident. I knew it was a battle I would not win, and I did not want to be fired from my first job after college.

Soon thereafter I quit and moved to Boston. I donned 20 pounds and fatigues as my daily wear.

I never made the connection between that incident and the anti-beauty campaign that I embarked on in the Boston years. I never wore makeup, I was faithful to the fatigues and the sensible shoes, and added men’s ties and vests if the occasion warranted.

Somewhere in my female-trained mind, I associated beauty with danger. Beauty invited unwanted advances, unwanted pregnancies, even rape. When I arrived at Yale in 1975, a freshwoman was raped twice by the same man. We were forced to take a self-defense class  in which we learned to yell NO and kick a man in the crotch. Although I was extremely grateful for the class, I regretted having to give up three hours a week which I sorely needed for my studies.

In those Boston years, I wanted nothing to do with beauty. Makeup and clothes cost money which I did not have. The ritual of daily beauty devoured time that I’d rather use in advancement of my career.

Early on in life I bought into the false dichotomy: you were either on Team Beauty or Team Smart.

Donald Trump and Billy Bush, in a moment of unguarded Sexual Assault Banter, reminded me why.