Favourite character? There are so many. I’m not kidding: SO MANY. However, for the purposes of this piece, I must choose one. So, here goes:

by Rhea Sugwekar.

My favourite character would be Sister Jude (or Judy Martin) from American Horror Story: Asylum. It’s played the ever-talented Jessica Lange, who I absolutely adore and idolize. The reason I love Sister Jude is because she’s the ideal of imperfection: she has a ton of insecurities and mistakes done in the past, and she well and truly tries to make herself a better person from them, which is why she becomes a nun in the first place. She runs the Briarcliff Mental Institution in Massachusetts, and the entire series is set in 1964.

Sister Jude is a person who has made dire mistakes in the past, and managed, somehow,  to slip past the consequences. However, her conscience catches up to her, teaching her a lot of crucial lessons.  She submits herself to the Church and runs the institution in a questionable (and I’m using that term loosely here) but committed manner, which–due to an epic turn of events–she finds herself a patient of, later on in the show.

One of my favourite quotes by her is, “Don’t you ever let a man tell you who you are, or make you feel like you are less than he is.” She is a character with flaws, but she is honest about it. She may seem robust and up-front-and-personal at first, but inside she’s a swirling tornado of emotions, one even her God cannot calm. She is the epitome of someone who is trying their level best to get their life together, irrespective of the million pieces it has broken into. Her gradual but mesmerising transition from the lady running the damn thing to a frail, emotionally dead woman is the best example of just how things turn out to be exactly the way they were supposed to be, no matter what you do.

She believes in her God most utterly, undoubtedly, and surrenders herself wholly to him. She has a spine of steel but a heart of gold. I look up to her in that she will never submit unless given absolute reason to, she is loyal till the end and highly grateful for everything her life has doled out for her, even the terrible times. She is a real inspiration to me.