I was first introduced to Roxane Gay when my friend gave me her annotated copy of Bad Feminist.  On every page, I felt seen.  How could this woman, so wholly different from myself in every way measurable, write so intimately about MY fears, MY history, MY experiences, MY innermost secrets?  That is, however, what makes great writers great — the universal appeal, the ability to talk to each one of us personally, to capture with words what we ourselves are unable to express.  But the truth is, her essays are NOT my story — they are hers and hers alone, but it makes me feel good to know that Roxane Gay exists in the world and is writing her way to making a better one.  Read her.  Read everything you can by her.  Be a better woman, a better friend, employee, HUMAN BEING.  She’s witty, irreverent, honest.  BRAVE. (and, total fangirling statement here, she has the cutest smile).

She says at the end of her book that “I wrote myself back together.”   I think this was the part that made me a disciple — I admired her courage, and suddenly believed that I, too, could be more than I felt.  And so it began.  I have been writing myself back together.  It is taking me a while — a long while — as I try to unravel who I am as a daughter and a sister and a mother and a wife and a #metoo survivor and a teacher and a volunteer and a friend and a neighbor and an alumnus and. . . a bad feminist.

Something else that Roxane Gay has done for me is to shatter the snowglobe I lived in.  She has encouraged me to use my privilege (yes, I grew up in a very white, very protestant, very GOP, very vanilla suburb) to help those without that privilege.  I didn’t know any people of color, and I had no understanding of what it was like for them to live and move through a society that criminalized them for having beautiful skin.  I know better now.  I didn’t know any LGTBQ+ people (that’s actually not true, I didn’t know that I did, but I did), but now I am an ally, an advocate, a disruptor. She taught me that when you know better you do better and she is teaching me to know better.

But the reason for this post is another reason I love her:  the Nemesis.  Roxane often talks on social media about encounters (real and imagined) with her Nemeses — at last count, I think there are 10.  Here she writes about the pleasure of having a Nemesis and once again she has articulated perfectly my experience.  Call it schadenfreude or cattiness or jealousy or pettiness or whatever, but there is something so delicious about having a place to park your misplaced/misguided sour grapes.  As Gay says, “it’s motivational”.  A Nemesis makes the perfect outlet for those pent up frustrations and feelings of inadequacy and insecurity.

I have often joked on social media about casting a hex on my Nemeses, and I love to imagine in all the ways those hexes have landed.  My personal favorite involves sores and boils and a lady garden that smells like a decaying warthog from 10 feet away.  I can admit that my Nemeses are talented and deserving women who have achieved or earned something I covet, yet despite my hard work and best efforts and earnest desires, I continue to fall short.  The ugly stepsister.  Always the bridesmaid.  It isn’t enough that I have a basket overflowing with my own success and happiness, I want the thing I can’t have.  But I can see it:  it’s the candy bar that falls 1/2 way in the vending machine.  I want to be loved and admired like they are — and tangible proof that I am.  I want the endorsement.  It’s silly, I know.

I think social media has created a little of this imagined jealousy because we only see snippets of a person’s real life and often those photos or statues are contrived — scripted and shared to elicit envy.  I know my nemeses are a direct result of this:  I perceive them in a way that isn’t entirely true.  I have one who is an artist and is publically admired for her work in a way I want to be.  She also shares an easy intimacy with a friend — the kind of close friendship that eludes me in my awkwardness and failure to understand how such things work.  As Roxane would say, “she exists to spite me”.  Another holds a position of high esteem in her professional life — she has earned endorsements that I have yet to achieve.  Her work is exemplary and she is deserving of the accolades, but I am jealous because it is something else that I want but cannot have.  My 3rd nemesis does not know I exist, but because she is the very worst kind of woman:  vapid and tedious and obvious and cruel.  Baseless and Benign.  I once clapped back at her on social media and was giddy when she went into hiding.  My final nemesis is only because she forced me to accept a truth I did not want to see — I should be grateful, and I imagine in time that I will be.

So who’s YOUR Lex Luther?