This weekend I dyed my hair pink, painted my nails green, and started thinking about tattoos. I would like, eventually, something that covers my whole back, but I don’t have many images with such resonance to me that I would put them on my body. So, I’m thinking of going with words instead, which have far more resonance with me anyway. Turn my back into a book.
There is a quote from the Bhagavad-Gita I have always liked:
Impartial to joy and suffering,
gain and loss, victory and defeat,
arm yourself for the battle,
lest you fall into evil.
I had decided on wanting that tattooed on me a long time ago, but Mr. Flint and I got into this horrible fight about it. He thought it was wrong, just plain wrong and also stupid to get a tattoo from a book I hadn’t finished reading yet. I told him, well, I still want it, so I’m going to get it, and I don’t really care what you think about it because it’s not for you. Well, that was a helluva thing to say, I guess, we fought for hours, until I was broken down crying, and telling him, it’s my body, I don’t see why you get a say in what I do with it, and he sneered, well, why did we get married then. I usually don’t tell stories like this, especially on a semi-public forum, but I’ll explain better why I decided to do this later.
While googling tattoo stuff to try and get some further ideas, I read a bit of the history of tattooing, including the Roman use of tattoos to punish and designate certain kinds of slaves. Often they would tattoo runaway slaves, so everybody would know they ought to be watched. I really like the idea of getting a tattoo that essentially means “I am a slave who has run away from my master.” Unfortunately the traditional marking for that was “FUG,” which today is slang for “fugly” or “fuckin’ ugly,” which sounds like an explanatory conversation I don’t want to be having the rest of my life. I thought about getting “I am a slave who has run away from my master” verbatim, but it seems too wordy. Maybe I should just get the non-abbreviated form of “FUG,” that is, “fugitivus.”
I’ve been in a real funk. It happened slowly and stealthily, which makes it sound like depression is this separate entity that crawls up on you in the night. Really, I have been hiding it, slowly and stealthily, until getting up in the morning and going to bed at night and all the quiet moments in between make me feel like a pitcher being poured out. I look for the source and there is none. I look for me, and there’s nothing, just the wet residue of liquid inside a jar. Maybe there was something here once, maybe not, maybe my fingers are fooling me.
I have a novel I tend to read when I’m feeling fucked-up, swirling in this little black pit that I can’t describe well enough to communicate. It’s your classic novel about girl goes crazy, girl goes to psyche ward, girl gets her shit together, except by “classic” I mean really “classic,” written before everybody got romantic about crazy girls in literature. The novel really emphasizes how this girl goes through everything girls go through, but has to see it through her illness, so that normal everyday interactions become distorted beyond comprehension, and her constant inability to really feel normal as well as she is able to act normal reinforces the illness, makes it more grandiose, more relevant, a deeper and further world that has more color and dimension than the far more chaotic real one. At the same time, her illness acts as a protective layer. It’s what puts a necessary distance between her and a painful reality with which she has no experience and no coping skills. At the very end of the book, she has succeeded in putting herself together enough to admit the world she’s been inhabiting isn’t real, and that she would rather live in a world with physics and cause and effect, as difficult as it is. But she can’t give up her imaginary world completely; she’s got no friends, her family is distant and afraid of her, she’s lonely and no matter how hard she tries and how hard she wants, there’s nothing in the real world with a responding call, that wants to connect with her as much as she wants to connect with it. She has managed to work and live outside the psyche ward, though she returns fairly often. And she manages, after several months of hard studying, to get her GED so she doesn’t have to go back to high school, as broken as she is. When she calls her parents to give them the good news, they are so meekly and sadly proud that it emphasizes how pathetic her achievement is, even though she worked hard for it, even though it took everything she had. When she hangs up the phone she watches normal teenagers outside, playing football, walking hand in hand, and thinks to herself, I will never have that, as hard as I try. Everything that comes easy to them takes everything I have, and it’s pathetic. And all her self-hate starts welling up spectacularly, and in the midst of a red haze she manages to find her way back to the psyche ward, where they put her in a straitjacket and let her fight it out of her system. When she comes to again, she realizes she unconsciously flipped her shit so she could come back to the hospital, and be in a safe place to make a decision. She realizes she has to give up the imaginary world entirely, forever, for good. As long as she keeps it in some small corner of herself, it’s where she’ll return immediately every time the slightest disappointment comes over her, and never learn to truly be a part of the world.
That scene never resonated with me, I never understood it. How could that be her realization? I couldn’t follow the logic, though it seems so easy. So she gives up her imaginary world; but what has she got to replace it with? There are still normal people playing football and walking hand in hand and her accomplishments are still meager and sad — how does being hit with the full force of all that make her realize she has to give up what small comfort she has? I would cling far more tightly to it.
Yeah, well.
Over the last few weeks there has been this building terror, like someone turning the white noise up. It comes with this building depression, and I can’t tell if one causes the other, if they’re a matched set, or if it matters. I search and I search, where is this coming from, what is it, what is wrong with me. Even if I can talk about what started it, something I am overreacting to, something perfectly reasonable, nothing at all, the feeling doesn’t go away, and I don’t know why. And then it builds, because there is clearly something wrong with me, because my life is happy and I’m depressed, because I’m unable to recover from tiny things, from normal things, because I have a bear who loves me so much and still think, reflexively, when I see happy couples, “I will never have that.”
The bear and I were talking the other night, and I was telling him about a fight I had had with Mr. Flint once, after the failed and rotten intervention I had tried to initiate for a friend. I could go on for a while about the things I could have said or done better to make this thing happen, but it was the right thing to do, and the fact that I couldn’t force others to do the right thing reflects a failure on my part for trying to force, and a failure on theirs for needing to be. But how could any of us confront a drug addict when nobody was willing to quit smoking pot, even for a day, even for an hour? When nobody was able to admit that they were in debt because of drugs, that they were flunking out of school because of drugs, that they had jobs 17 year olds would piss on because of drugs, that their only friends were drug addicts? Start staging interventions for addicts and see if your dealer ever talks to you again. The guy even flipped his shit and beat up Mr. Flint, and all anybody did was avoid speaking to us again until the guy left the country, and then we all pretended it had never happened. The night the intervention was supposed to happen, and everybody had dropped us like cats on fire, I was upset and Mr. Flint was horrified that I was upset, and we fought. I’d “quit” smoking, meaning I quit for several weeks, something I was proud of at the time, pathetically, but it was better than anybody else could do, managing to stay sober on 4/20. I think Mr. Flint thought the more horrified I became with our friends, with our life, the more pressure he would be under to quit as well, to get better friends, to pass his classes, to stop stealing my money. He was probably right, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about our friend who was digging himself a shallow grave, and all of us standing around handing him shovels. I was angry, I was upset, and Mr. Flint kept yelling at me, stop it, there’s nothing you can do, are we going to stop talking to all of them, are we going to stop smoking, you can’t save everybody, Harriet. I told him that at least I could fucking try, and that’s more than anybody we called a friend. I grabbed my keys and walked out, went down to the pier on the lake. As soon as I left, I immediately felt better, felt happy even, couldn’t remember what was so horrible, what was so bad. I got down to the pier and watched the lake and couldn’t remember ever feeling so right with myself, right with the world. I was wrapped up in that little bubble of pure joy and watching my hands go into my pockets, pull out my Swiss Army knife, and start cutting. The two things didn’t synch up, there were no alarm bells going off, not even for the briefest moment did I feel like something was wrong. I was still on a cloud of joy. This is mine, I thought. I can do what I want with it. It’s my own, and Mr. Flint would hate what I’m doing, everybody would be disappointed in me, but it makes me happy and it’s mine and I’m keeping it.
In some ways, everything changed that night. In some ways, nothing did, nothing at all. I’d been “clean” before that, since I’d run away from home. Yeah, well. It was surface work. Cutting was bad, so I stopped cutting. Starving was bad, so I stopped starving. Being depressed was bad, so I laughed, all the time, louder and happier than anyone. Having no friends was bad, so I took care of everybody I met, buying them gifts, cooking them food, giving them therapy. Having no job, no education was bad, so I took double loads of both. Having no lover was bad, so I stayed with somebody who made me feel afraid and lonely more than I ever felt loved. And though on the surface I did everything right, underneath I was just getting more cagey, more inventive. Biting my tongue until it bled to keep from speaking up. Digging my fingernails into my palm to keep from crying. Working out until I couldn’t walk to keep from thrashing about in bed all night. Pinching, poking, stretching poorly, holding absurd positions, so that everything ached, but it wasn’t cutting, it wasn’t bad. Every day, with every blow from the world, every humiliation, every defeat, I went through the same retinue, the same self-talk, the same evil voice piped up to tell me exactly who and what I was, how ugly, how fat, how stupid, how worthless and apart. It was the same speech I gave myself when I would cut myself, but there was no knife, so there was no danger.
After that night, I quit the surface work. I cut, I burned, I stuck my hand in ice and then boiling water. I had never really understood that being happy meant not doing these things. With the resources I had, all that ever came through clearly was that the point of looking happy was never getting caught doing these things. And that was all anybody around me wanted, was for me to keep smiling the way I did, keep flirting the way I did, keep cooking and cleaning and not asking too many wrong questions, the way I did. They wanted me to look happy, and I wanted to brutalize myself. It was an implicit agreement I thought everybody understood, and it would always work so long as nobody said anything to change the carefully cultivated symbiotic balance of all the right lies at all the right times.
It came to the point where that part of me didn’t even seem real, wasn’t a part of this world. It was real when it came, and then it was gone and didn’t exist. I couldn’t ever tell anybody about it. Who would I tell? My husband who said things like, “Nobody else could ever put up with this,” whenever I cried? My pothead friends? Everybody who knew-me-when, who would think I had gone crazy again? Besides, I thought, besides, everybody has to do something to get through their lives. This is just who I am. This is just what I am. This is how I motivate myself, this is how I get through college with two majors and two minors and a full time job, this is how I get up in the morning, by telling myself how worthless I’ll be if I don’t.
One night about a year ago, when I was still with Mr. Flint, my bear came to visit me and we spent a lovely day together. When it came time for me to go home that night, I started sobbing hysterically, because I knew what was waiting for me there. It had never been hard to go home before, but I had never been so happy before, with somebody who gave me more than the bare minimum of affection, respect, and human decency. Worse than going home to Mr. Flint, worse than the things he would say and do to me because I had been with the bear, the worst thing was the way I would make myself accept them, the things I would say and do to myself to convince myself this was life, this was me, this was happiness. I’d begun taking massive doses of pain medication and Nyquil so I could sleep through the night, without him waking me up at 3 am and demand that we talk RIGHT NOW, without having to wake up to see him at the foot of my bed, staring at me, telling me how he was thinking of strangling me, without having to really be there if he wanted to get off in me. I broke down and told my sweet bear all of this, I told him I had been lying to everybody for years, that I hadn’t stopped hurting myself at all, I’d just started being smarter about it. I cried, we talked, and then I called Mr. Flint and told him it wasn’t working, I couldn’t do it anymore. He wouldn’t let me get off the phone, kept asking me, where are you, come home, until I finally had to hang up and turn the phone off. I spent the night with a sad bear on a friend’s porch, feeling like puking, wondering if I would go away with the bear the next morning, or go home. I went home. I shouldn’t have, I should have gone with the bear, but I didn’t. Hardly a day goes by I don’t wish I had.
That was the first time I had put some of that pain out on the table, shared it with another human being. I remember crying uncontrollably while my bear held me, as I spouted out things I had never been able to say to anybody, evil horrible things I thought about myself, what I wanted to do to myself. At the time I thought I was crying about my marriage ending, about losing the man I loved. None of that was true. If I ever cried about that, it was years ago, before we were married, any one of the thousands of times he hurt me and I laughed while digging my nails into my palm. That night, I was crying for myself, for what I had done to myself, for those awful things I believed that felt like my blood, intrinsic and inescapable and necessary for life. Afterwards I remember laughing and saying, “I didn’t think saying all that out loud would actually make me feel better.”
It did and it didn’t. It did because I realized I could say those things out loud and the world didn’t explode, and someone still loved me. It didn’t because I went home and continued living with Mr. Flint “trying to make it work” and taking sleeping pills and burning the soles of my feet after sex I didn’t want and asked not to have. That time is forever lost to me, time that I could have been happy, time that I could have been alive. Every minute damaged me more than I knew, wounded me in ways I fear I will never be able to heal, took things from me that I need to be whole. Now that I’ve left him and left most of that life, those friends, that place behind me, life is better in almost every way. I started out this past year feeling very fragile, shaky, uncertain. The ground had shaken beneath me, and I didn’t yet know if it was safe to walk, crawl, even. But I felt happy, overall, I felt alive and okay and healthy even where I was weak or frightened. I guess I thought, I hoped it would be that easy. Change the scenery and it all goes. But it was a surface modification, like it was the first time I ran away from my master. Beneath it all, I kept alive that dark corner where I could huddle and play monster. It didn’t matter if I didn’t cut or burn or do anything technically “wrong.” The illness was still there, even if the moments I didn’t feel it acutely were more numerous and held more joy than I had ever imagined possible.
That place still doesn’t seem real, not real enough to discuss, not sane enough to exist. But I went there so much less often, because life was less demanding, I didn’t need it to survive anymore, and I thought, this is okay. It happens rarely, these sessions of concentrated self-hatred that I can hardly stand under, where I cannot even look at myself in the mirror. They will happen less and less often and then go away entirely and if not, if not, that’s okay, too, because everything else is so much better.
I feel sometimes like the automated house in “There Will Come Soft Rains,” that continues cooking and cleaning and rocking the beds after nuclear war has come and gone, and all the inhabitants of all the homes are dead and gone, burned-out shadows on the wall. These things I believe about myself, deep down, that I build around me like an Iron Maiden to keep me in line when I do wrong, even the littlest of wrongs, they are brooms in an empty house. Once I used them to survive. Once this was an illness that frightened and separated and crippled me. Once it was an illness that protected me, that gave me something of my own to cherish when I had nothing. I have many nice things now, but they all feel flat and two-dimensional. I dye my hair pink and look at punk girls thinking, “I wish I looked that cool.” I draw pictures and write stories and then read a book and think, “I wish I could create something.” I have my lover’s arms around me telling me how beautiful I am and I think, “I wish I was pretty.” These are the callings of the real world, and I have no place to answer them, because I am still a shadow living in an empty house. If these good things I do and have don’t feel like me, it’s because for my entire life the only thing that has been steady, the only thing I was never once willing to give up, not for anybody, not for anything, the only thing that has been a strong and stable core of me has been this illness, this self-hatred, this belief that I am at heart worthless, no matter what else I have, no matter what else I do. I have never entertained the idea that anything else could be me, that creativity could be me, that compassion or friendship or need or vulnerability could be me. Only this thing, this secret monsterhood that I can never reveal to the real world, because it doesn’t belong there. It belongs apart, and as long as it does, so do I.
When I told my bear about the night Mr. Flint and I fought about the intervention, he asked me if I had hurt myself after I left Mr. Flint. I said no. He asked if I had hurt myself since he had been living with me. I couldn’t answer honestly. I said, half-true, that if I had, in those moments I feel so out-of-touch, so drunk, that I can hardly remember what I felt the next day. But I found I could not tell him that yes, sometimes, when he is in the next room, when he is right next to me, I am not there, I am in a shallow grave, telling myself what I am, what I’m worth, and that I can never let anybody know. Even when I can bring myself to say what’s upsetting me, all I can tell him is the trigger. I cannot tell him where it’s led me, where I am now. Until I can do that, I cannot truly count myself as alive among the inhabitants of the world. I don’t need this anymore, it gets in my way, it stops feelings short, the bad ones, and the good ones. I made it this way, because there was a time in my life when good and bad were the same thing, the one only building upon the other until it all came crashing down.
I have to start opening up this part of me that I have kept hidden from everything, from everybody. I have to be able to admit to the things that have been done to me, that I have done to myself, which shame me so deeply all I can feel is the need to do them again, that endless cycle of deserving it because it happened, and it happened because I deserved it. It’s simply not true that there are parts of me that are fit for consumption, and parts that are not. They all come from the same material, and have to live, have to co-exist, or the whole thing withers and dies. All my effort, energy, creativity, body and soul, have gone into creating and protecting this hidden fortress within me, this world that only I can inhabit, these things that only I can know, these laws of physics that apply only to me and the things I touch. I am ashamed and horrified that this is the largest project of my life, the biggest contribution I have made. But there may be some worth in it. If there is no worth in it, there is probably worth in sharing. I’ve made a concerted effort to never complain, to never tell sob stories, to shrug whenever others say, “That must have been so hard for you.” I always thought it was for the benefit of others, nobody wants to hear me whine, but I see now that it was for me, because of the flood that would come if I ever told how hard it was, the things I have done to survive, the things I have done to keep from living, from being really human. I have been afraid of that flood because I might drown in it, and because others might watch and do nothing, and then I will know that I deserved it, because it happened, and it happened because I deserve it. I am terrified that to begin to speak about the things I have considered unspeakable I will become as alone as I have always felt. But it is a choice I have to make, because every day I am confronted with happiness so thick you could touch it. You could, but I can’t. I can’t, unless I let it touch every part of me. Unless every part of me becomes a part of the world. I’ve got to hang by my thumbs, full weight.
