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I am exposed in that novel, my dying marriage and consequent attraction to the distraction of chaos.

But I realized, as I wrote it, that the story was coming from a deep place. I emerged from periods of dream-state feeling raw, vulnerable. Which is also when I knew, after two drafts and lots of struggle, that the book was getting good.

There is a thrill to taking yourself on the edge like that.

Good Girl wants to be — needs to be — is desperate to be — liked.

She lives and dies by the approval of others.

If you can’t say anything nice…

The truth tends not to be nice.

The constant need for approval chokes off the good girl’s inner, intuitive voice, her truth-telling voice. In order to be nice and get along and not risk conflict she has to deny it over and over again, until self-doubt becomes her natural, reflexive state.

Creative paralysis sets in. How can you tell the truth when you no longer know what it is?

When you can no longer separate your true, inner voice from the voices around you?

By relying on the esteem of others, good girls sacrifice an essential truth about themselves. It keeps them tamed and compliant and smiling, unwilling or unable to penetrate the superficial. It puts them at the mercy of someone else’s agenda; sweeps them along in directions not their own.

Bad girls, on the other hand, don’t give a damn.

They prize their inner voice. They listen hard. They know it is their most important guide through the wild, uncharted territory of an unconventional life. Then again, a bad girl’s life wasn’t particularly safe or sweet to begin with. She doesn’t have those illusions to lose.

“When a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized.”*

A bad girl knows that it’s better to stay dirty.

“I became my own rebellion.”

I would turn this phrase over in my mind, thinking that it sounded good, but what did it mean, exactly? Why did it appeal to me so much, and seem necessary to anyone who wanted to be an artist (or entrepreneur or hacker or any other thing that demands stepping off the beaten path)?

Probably because of this: the statement is rooted in such spirit and defiance. It’s not just a challenge to the conventional ways of living, the accepted wisdom, the status quo, the established Establishment, etcetera…but a challenge to the self.

We are all born into ways of thinking that we take for granted. We are raised within certain belief systems. We take the dominating voices of the adults around us and internalize them until those perceptions of us become what we are to ourselves.

But when you become your own rebellion you say a healthy Fuck You to all of that.

And if you’ve been raised to be the good daughter (or the good son), you maybe start to think that what is ‘bad’ is in many ways ‘good’ and what is ‘good’…might be killing you slowly.

And if she doesn’t have anything nice to say, she won’t say much at all.

This could be a problem if you want to be a writer.