Born to be Nice

I’m not a nice girl, I’m an angry woman.

The good girl I was raised to be was never real. She was a myth I carried simply because it was given to me. It was handed over by generations of other nice girls.

Expressing myself required freedom. Freedom from the expectation to always be nice.

Only being the sanitized version of myself, threatened to starve me of that freedom. I know, because I saw when those nice girls, the ones who passed those expectations down, benefited from being strong women. Stories of their realness sometimes spilled over the walls of their reputations, revealing the kaleidoscope of their realities. Their stories formed constellations of hope, fear, joy, despair, pain, serenity, loss, perseverance, love, risk, friendship, contentment, connection, and loneliness. Niceness concealed an awful lot, both good and bad.

How strong a woman must be to only be nice, I thought.

My maternal grandmother was a strong women. It saved her from abuse as much as it condemned her to it. She was both controlled and controlling.

Her drunkard of a first husband often came home late to wake her in bed and force himself upon her. Marital rape wasn’t rape then. Nice girls didn’t speak of such things. They endured them.

The night she found her strength, she stayed awake nervously waiting for him to come home, concealing under the covers that she held one of his belts in her fist — one with a large metal buckle. When he came home looking for access to the nice girl he felt he owned, too drunk to defend himself, she whipped him with his own belt until he crawled back out of their bedroom in defeat.

My grandmother never told me this story. My mother did. My grandmother would never breathe life into something powerful enough to define her against her will. She could avoid further pain by not talking about it.

The strong men who wrong us, like my grandmother’s abusive first husband, become so weak in the face of any accusation. Nothing they can do to us is ever worse than us telling others about it.

And others will agree. They will help the strong man morph into the victim of a woman’s feelings.

Whereas, we are often asked to erase bits of ourselves, or our story, to appease others — don't speak about it. If you share your stories, you’ll go from victim to perpetrator, instigator, agitator, or traitor. Don’t tell anyone how you were wronged, it’s embarrassing for the person who wronged you.

And there is no greater sin than embarrassing someone with the truth.

Doesn’t matter how old you are, not being nice will be used against you in the court of public opinion. Nice girls swallow tension, we don’t sit with it. Sitting with it makes people uncomfortable. We gulp it down hard, so no one else has to.

Ladies don’t make people uncomfortable. Ladies contort their bodies to look pleasant, or so I learned at an etiquette school when I was five. A school that same grandmother enrolled me in, hoping I would grow be a nice girl.

A vivid memory of the time I spent standing against a wall, as an older matriarchal figure pushed my shoulders back, still haunts the mass inside my skull. I wore voluminous dresses and folded over white socks with a frilly lace edge — it was the required uniform. It’s not a motion picture, it’s solid, only one frame. But it is in full technicolor.

I was destined to be a lady. To not allow reality to define me.

I was taught to sit with my ankles crossed, and how to properly dine. American style, not Continental, we weren’t from Europe. Pretending to be was gauche.

Pretending to be something you were not, wasn’t nice. Pointing out someone was pretending, was worse.

Swallow it. Don’t let it dissolve slowly, swallow it whole, before you can chew.

It was not nice to say what everyone else was afraid to. It was nice to pretend an entire group of people didn’t want what they wanted.

It was not nice to stand up for yourself, but it if you must do it, do it quietly— no one wants to hear the truth and people don’t like being made to feel bad.

The world wasn’t told to be nice. Little girls were. Little girls were to mask themselves in it, to carry it around as we struggled with it’s weight. Be nice.

While I was being taught to be nice, I saw that grandmother be fierce. I saw her push back against the weight of other people and their bullshit. I heard her say things aloud everyone else whispered behind closed doors. I heard her be loving and harsh, even to me, and it didn’t make me hate her for it. She might have disappointed some with her words, but I’m glad to have had her bravery in my life. Nothing she ever said to me, broke me.

What breaks people are the things left unsaid.

There is this threat, also unspoken, that if you spit it out, you’ll have to clean up the mess by yourself. And that if you don’t get out the mop immediately, someone will slip and fall on your words.

You give no one a chance to help you when you’re silent. You’ll forever be cleaning up inside yourself. Sometimes, you have to point the mess out to the people involved in making it, so they know it’s their responsibility too. If they don’t help you, that would’ve been true whether or not you said anything.

You can be nice, and angry, and nice and angry. You’re born to feel everything. Being just nice won’t save you.

I am an angry woman, but that’s not all I am.