We are Emotional Creatures

Simply put, Eve Ensler’s latest book yells: ‘TEENAGER GIRLS ARE PEOPLE, NOT THINGS.’ As she did with Vagina Monologues, Ensler interviewed women from various nations, documenting their sufferings, achievements and strengths as the inspiration and foundation of the fictionalized monologues, poems and vignettes of I am an Emotional Creature (Villard Books). However, unlike Monologues, Ensler turned her attention solely to teenage girls aged from 13 to 15 years old.

As Ensler writes in her introduction, “I see how your lives get hijacked, how your opinions and desires get denied and undone. I see too how this later comes to determine so much of our lives as adults… This book is a call to question rather than to please.”  I am an Emotional Creature responds to the call for a young adult book that does not trivialize teenage girls, their mistakes or their sufferings. It presents itself as a resource and a challenge for young women to be proud of their uniqueness, to take responsibility for embracing and celebrating their unique identity, and to resist the voices they hear that say that say women should not be who they wish to be.

Emotional Creature reminded me that the way teenage girls are portrayed does not give them respect or room to make mistakes. From the story of that girl in high school who sacrifices everything to fit in with the popular crowd, to the story of a teenage girl in an abusive relationship, to the sex slave in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ensler spreads her creative wings and lets these young women’s stories take flight. The diversity of Ensler’s entries only reinforces the fact that regardless of location and situation, teenage girls everywhere are struggling to survive.

Although I am technically still in my teen years, already I feel so distant from the stories that Ensler has told. Perhaps it is because I never felt the urge to ditch my friends and join the popular crowd, or perhaps it is because it has been several years since my last game of “Would you rather” that I thought that these stories were cliché, unrealistic. I fell into the very trap that Ensler warns its readers to avoid: the trap of believing that these stories are fake or invalid. I constantly needed to remind myself of the emotions that I felt as a 13 year old; although I wasn’t sporting Ugg Boots, I certainly was sporting pain from fighting alongside my brother as he battled and eventually defeated cancer. Just because my story did not show up in Ensler’s work does not make these other forms of emotion less valid.

Although this book is a stronger tool for its target age range, it is still an important piece for all readers because it reminds us that not everyone fills the teenage girl archetype, but we all had and have our emotions.  I too must respond to Ensler’s wake-up call: “I am an emotional creature / I am connected to everything and everyone / …Don’t you dare say all negative that it’s a / teenage thing / …I am an emotional, devotional, / incandotional creature. / And I love, hear me, / love love love / being a girl.” This call is for every woman, regardless of whether or not her story was put on print. The book is a conversation-starter, or a spark for thought. It is a challenge to think of all of the struggles young women have and to recognize that these feelings make us women and make us strong.