Am I doing my best to kill her?

When I find myself searching for the purpose in my writing, I return to Virginia Woolf's speech "Professions for Women." In this speech, which you've probably read or quoted at some point, she details her murder of the Angel of the House, a metaphor for the stifling, deferential, sweet-natured people-pleaser a woman was supposed to be in Victorian times. Woolf is merciless in her slaughter; she has time she needs to claim in that room of her own, a trance to fall under.   “I turned upon her and caught her by the throat," Woolf said. "I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me.”  A simple yet thrilling scene. "The Angel was dead; what then remained?" But aren't you already anticipating the jump scare? Only a fool believes an Angel like that, a horror in whatever form she takes, stays dead.   “Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against,” Woolf continues.  I am not fighting the same Angel as Woolf, thanks in part to her work and the work of other feminists who pushed obstacles out of our way and modeled a life with more options. But that doesn't mean I'm not locked in a constant struggle of deference to and retaliatory violence against some other phantom that needs to be slain in order for my writing to take its proper shape.   I realized this week that for the book I'm writing, my phantom is also the girl I'm bringing to life on the page. My phantom is charming and selfish; she followed her own path and sacrificed parts of herself in exchange. I have to catch her by the throat in order to write her, and me alongside her. My story is about the fight I've been locked in my entire life with a girl who both did and did not exist. She's wily. I am protective of her and I envy her and I want very much to know her. I have to reconcile those impulses with what must ultimately be done: to know any phantom intimately is also to destroy them, or at least to disarm the ideas that animate them.  How do you fight a phantom? With taped knuckles, with a monastic study of her habits.   I'm playing all of Yoko's songs from Double Fantasy to focus.   Are you in your own fight with a phantom? What's your walk-on song?