Comments on: why you need to write like a bad girl, part two: selfish

By: Kate

Kate — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:36:33 +0000

Oh, this is really good. I needed to hear this (about ten years ago). Thanks!

By: Handle it like Hester Prynne: What it means to embrace your inner bad girl | Undefinable You

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 04:35:16 +0000

[...] thing is we are torn apart for it. (Men in the same position usually aren’t.) A bad girl is selfish in the best way. Because she knows in the [...]

By: Keshia

Keshia — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:59:33 +0000

This is the first post that I read on your site and I am officially a fan.

And a bad girl. (Go female writers woot!)

By: Justine Musk

Justine Musk — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:22:06 +0000

One thing I’ve learned in the past couple of years — and at some point I’ll write a post on this — is how important it is to listen to your instincts, intuition, whatever you want to call it…So many of us get trained out of doing that for one reason or another (usually because it conflicts with the agenda of whomever we’re trying to please) and have to relearn how to tune back into that voice, and trust it…

It sounds like the guy is a jerk and working there would be a miserable experience. And your intuition is flashing DO NOT TAKE THIS JOB in brilliant neon. I’m really glad you’re paying attention. You deserve better.

And by the way, my sister went through a similar experience — leaving her job to go back to grad school to pursue what she really loves, fighting off the belief that she was being “selfish”. Luckily her instincts also won out.

Thanks for sharing — I’m very glad you dropped by.

By: Cora

Cora — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 03:17:39 +0000

Thanks for this post. I’ll add my voice to the chorus that this was exactly what I needed to hear.

I had a job interview last week. The pay wouldn’t that great, but the job would give me more security than my current freelancing gigs. And yet I have been terrified of actually getting that job, because not only did the guy who interviewed me not respect me as a person (he couldn’t even be bothered to look up my name) but he also made it very clear that he disapproved of any of my extracurricular activities, even if they would not affect the job. Part of my wonders whether he would have been as disapproving if my extracurricular activities had been tending to children and a husband rather than being selfish enough to write and work on a PhD in my spare time.

By the time the interview was over, I knew that I didn’t want the job. But I feared that turning it down would be selfish, particularly in the current economic climate. Even though I get by pretty well with my freelancing.

But even if I am offered the job (which I don’t expect to be honest), I’ll be a bad and selfish girl and turn it down.

By: Liz

Liz — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:56:17 +0000

boosting this signal in my itty bitty blog and in my FB (though I don’t like FB it is one place to reach certain young people of my acquaintance I would like to see this.)

Thank you, and it’s past time I put MY bad on, as well. *wicked grin*

By: Athena Andreadis

Athena Andreadis — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:55:34 +0000

Before Eve, there was Lilith, the first and mightiest bad girl: Adam’s first wife, created in her own right, from her own clod of earth, not from his rib. She would not “lie beneath him” as commanded, as was deemed proper for the “helpmate” of Yahweh’s crowning creation.

So Adam whined to Yahweh, who cast Lilith into the abyss, where she became the mother of demons. Yahweh commanded his angels to kill her offspring every day, to which she replied with renewed defiance. It was her, rather than Lucifer, who first said, “I’d rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

Lilith’s story was suppressed, as many of this kind have been. But they simmer underneath the surface, in every act of defiance that women perform: “Remember. Try to remember. But failing that, invent.” (Monique Wittig, Les Guerillères)

By: Lisa B.

Lisa B. — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:38:48 +0000

I’m speechless. That was exactly what I needed to get me going today. Thanks for that. Now I’m off to be so bad I’m hoping to be arrested. :-)

By: David Gillaspie

David Gillaspie — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:32:37 +0000

Maybe it’s like magnetism when bad girls find good boys and bad boys find good girls. How many models find the craggy rock star? From the 80′s Paulina Porizkova and the guy from The Cars. More recent Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston? He was way too bad for her to be bad by herself.

Why do I keep hearing George Thorogood riffs…ba ba ba baaaad.

By: Natania

Natania — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:07:36 +0000

This was precisely the sort of thing I needed to read today. I’ve been contemplating a great deal about the writing process, the time I put into it, and the conflicts it sometimes makes with my own domestic life. Thank you, Justine! Glad to be bad. To quote another bad-girl writer, Edna St. Vincent Millay: “I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I: “But if I can’t be sorry, why, I might as well be glad!”