Listen to: The Best Pessimist – I Just Want To Be Your Everything

If art is equal to self divided by self, and the self needs only itself to be, why is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs right? If we need not others to fulfil ourselves, why is it so hard to be alone? Why does society urge us to search for that missing other — if there is a missing void to begin with. I may not know much. Then again, I am only an Arab almost-to-be 20-something girl who’s only been as far as one continent in her life. But I, too, get to question a society that always deemed me at fault for not wanting what it constantly demands. 

by alicia eggert

I am not against finding that mystic “one” and settling. I am against society when it tells me, that I, as a Middle Eastern woman, am not enough, that I need a man to support me, that I need to have kids and stay home and raise them, that I only have ‘three’ places to go to, as the colloquial sayings go; “from my parents’ house to my husband’s then to my grave.” I want a family. I want to be in love. But I don’t want society to force me into it. I want to wake up one day and decide by my own, without keeping age as a factor or the fading knocks of perspective grooms on the door in mind, and feel ready. 

From Sartre’s “Being And Nothingness.” (p. 171)

So yes, society and I are in a bit of a pickle. Wops.