Insecure Feminist Seeks Advice

When faced with posting to this blog, I’m forced to reconcile with the fact that I approach being a woman with the same pleased neutrality that I approach being a bipedal omnivore. And yet, even as I dedicate myself to honesty in this paragraph, I feel a small sense of uneasiness. Perhaps I ought to think harder about being a woman? Perhaps it’s my responsibility to develop an awareness of myself as a woman? Perhaps by not developing this awareness, I’m letting myself down, failing the cause, becoming a lead weight in forward progress. You can see how this might be intimidating. When it comes down to it, I feel that because I often choose to forego any feminist discourse, I don’t have the authority to talk about being a woman. Maybe there are rules about talking about women that I don’t know? Maybe I’ve already broken several of them. And yet I’m happy. I am a happy person. I make my own choices, I feel comfortable with those choices, I try to encourage others to make choices that make them comfortable. I’m also aware that these are luxuries afforded to me by the feminist movements, by my mother and father who raised me in an environment of equals and protected me from any oppression. And so I often feel spoiled and self-indulgent when I write a poem and think, “I don’t want this to be a poem written by a woman.” I want my work to be written by me, without any social cause shining undue light on my gender. Yes, I can see that this is a version of feminism, I want to be seen as a person not a gender, but still there is a sense of guilt and a question: is pointedly denying gender discourse an equally valid form of feminism?