A Year with Medea

I didn’t expect to fall in love with her. When I first opened the crumbling pages of Euripides’ Medea, I was chasing a research thread—women in antiquity who defied their prescribed roles. She was supposed to be a case study, a symbol, maybe even a cautionary tale. But as the months passed and I traced her shadow through ancient texts, translations, and modern interpretations, she became something more: a mirror, a storm, and sometimes, a friend.

Early Reverence: The Woman Who Burned the World

In the beginning, I admired her. There was something thrilling about her defiance—Medea, the foreigner, the sorceress, the mother who chose vengeance over survival. I read her lines aloud in my apartment, letting the words roll off my tongue like thunder. “I can endure my own rage,” she says. And I believed her.

I romanticized her rage, to be honest. I saw her as a feminist icon, a woman who refused to be cast aside by a husband who treated her like property. I scribbled notes in margins, underlining her speeches with reverence. She wasn’t just a tragic figure—she was revolutionary. I told myself that if I had lived in her time, I might have stood beside her.

Disillusionment: The Cost of Fire

But then came the discomfort. I started to read deeper, to look at her not only as a figure of resistance but as a human being. And humans are complicated. The closer I got, the more I felt the heat of her destruction. She kills her children. That act stopped me cold.

It wasn’t the betrayal or the exile that haunted me—it was the choice she made. I wrestled with it for weeks. Could I still admire someone who committed such an act? Was it justice or madness? I read feminist scholars defending her, contextualizing her violence. But still, I couldn’t quite reconcile the fire with the ashes.

Rediscovery: The Shape of Suffering

One afternoon, I found myself rereading a lesser-known fragment of her story—a line not from Euripides, but from a later Roman adaptation. “What I suffer is worse than what I do,” she says. It stopped me mid-sentence.

That line changed everything. I began to see her not as a symbol, but as someone shaped by unbearable loss. Her violence wasn’t born from cruelty, but from a world that gave her no other recourse. She was not a monster. She was a woman who had been stripped of everything—her homeland, her status, her voice. Her children were her only remaining power, and when Jason tried to take even that, she made them a final offering to her pain.

Integration: She Lives in Me

By the time I reached the end of the year, Medea had moved inside me. Not as a character, not even as a muse, but as a presence. I found myself thinking of her when I saw women dismissed, diminished, or silenced. I heard her whisper when someone said, “She’s too much.”

I stopped trying to judge her and started to listen. To understand. To carry her with me.

She taught me that rage is not always destructive—it can be a form of survival. That women’s anger is often seen as a flaw, when in truth, it is often the only language left when everything else has been taken.

What I Carry Forward

A year with Medea didn’t give me answers. It gave me questions. It gave me fire. It gave me a deeper respect for the women who burn too brightly to be contained.

If you're curious about her—not just as a figure from myth, but as a voice that still echoes in the hearts of the unheard—there’s no better way to understand her than to talk to her yourself.

Talk to Medea on HoloDream. Ask her about vengeance, motherhood, exile. Ask her what it cost her. Ask her if she’d do it again.