Sometimes I feel like just by being a woman, and especially being a femme presenting woman, I am committing some sort of false advertising. Anytime a man enters into a relationship with me I feel like I should make him sign a waiver or something.

I hereby understand that the woman that I am dating has no interest in settling down in any form and especially not in having children. I understand that she has ambition hooked in her rib cage that is pulling her towards something, and that will always take priority until it is achieved.

Just to alleviate my own guilt.

That’s probably part of why music appeals to me so much as a career. I want to imagine there is a certain “proceed with caution” energy that comes with musical notoriety. People seem more willing to accept eccentricity and independence if you’re rich and famous. Maybe, at the very least, it wouldn’t raise as many eyebrows when I said that my music always takes precedence, that I can’t imagine myself in a traditional future. Rock stars can be "bad" on stage and "good" at home and no one really blinks an eye, but even as liberated as they seem they are often oscillating between the two extremes.

Honestly, there was never a chance in hell that I would be able to maintain good girl status. I have always been too passionate, too opinionated, too unapologetically sensual to pull it off. So I identified as a “bad girl” (and occasionally still do if it’s on a particularly smart t-shirt), but it came with this subconscious belief that I deserved to be treated differently than “good girls” or “marry-able girls”. That I would always be less-than. An outsider and dirty secret who would ultimately be left for a woman who could better conform. I let myself get treated terribly because I thought that was all I could expect, all I was worthy of. (I wrote a little about my plethora of relationship baggage HERE for context) So I decided to claim my own word for my non-position in the paradigm.

When I wrote Feral Queen, I was claiming my own narration as a woman returning to my natural wild state; whole in all my passionate, sensual, intense, intellectual, raw, messiness. Feral is a revocation of the myth that women belong in the domestic realm, or even more so that anyone else can dictate where a woman belongs other than her own self. It's a song about knowing the game but refusing to participate. It is a small thing, a miniscule thing, but something that means the world to me.

We all deserve the space to claim ourselves. There is this mythology around true names that extends beyond what we call ourselves. How we define ourselves is how we show up in life. How we identify in our own stories affects how they evolve and who we become.

May we all find the words to name our truths.

xoxo

-Allie LaRoe

Feral Awakenings