Can anyone deny that we are haunted?
What is it that crouches under the myths we have made?

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries 

Sunrise, cold sweat, chemical haze. Bare branches caress a chrome-smooth underside of sky. I am restless, trembling, iridescent, obscure: I am dreaming in the morning light. Has this garden been rendered obsolete or desirous, violent or sublime? How long has it been since I left it untended? Ivy garnishes crystal-shards of feigned remorse, found, shared, scattered, lost: hidden scores of half-gnawed bone that underpin what has been sought and then forsaken. I forget what you have done to me, how very much I still hate you. My mind is tangled in holy catastrophe, whatever lingers of your skin. And of course it is not real, but it does not matter, it does not matter—I am down in your arms again.

So I wake up, I draw back, raw sensation limps away again. It is the only way for me. Because I am dead tired, you know, of mourning these mistakes. It is terrible to be the one who remembers, who grieves. It is mortifying to admit that this still matters, to know that I still linger here even though all the rest has gone. Rinse, repeat, I scrawl. If they act like they care, they’re humoring you. If they ignore you, they’re being honest. Close your eyes and pretend it isn’t real.

One last evening breathing this in, especially that one that I might have loved—though he was never one to understand, to recognize the implacable desire that snarled beneath my topography of skin. I said goodnight and stumbled to bed, my tongue still swollen with words I have long forgotten how to say. My final night was lovely, sanguine, but there was something unsettling, even disturbing, in my farewell. I was laboring on the cusp of that deep, lost tenderness when I realized how long it has been since I have properly felt anything at all.

We, all of us, live within a glance. People look, and see themselves, see what they want or fear or expect to, see only a relation to themselves. But a self in a mirror is organic, pure: the only unadulterated gaze. When I try it myself, I see an almost-girl, all ruined makeup and exhausted, myopic eyes: she glances back, almost smiles, and it is plain that she will never be right again. I look at myself and every time, as if for the first time, I see the damage that was done to me: first in my childhood, and then again in this past year. I see the shell of the self that I could never truly be—not if I want to survive in this world. I understand that the reality of my past is that I can endure it, perhaps, but I will not recover from it. Not ever. Not really.

These weeks have been brief, drunken, avid, beautiful. I regret that they are over, and I regret that people in a distant past have left me so damaged, so deadened, that I mistrusted so many clandestine moments of now. But the truth is that I did not believe that I would make it this far. And now I have to find out what to do with myself, this improbable body, this could-have-been corpse. The wounds open with arbitrary impulse, the ichor drains, but I am not empty. I am never empty. I am alive and alight with confused sensation.

If I flooded my past with kerosene, took a match to the manuscript, would I be able to feel again? And if so, could I survive it? I cannot be sure. Before, I only wanted this, the oblivion of immolation, a somnambulist’s darkness tinged by tongues of crimson, a fire by which to erase my own name. And, after all, I had a talent for the craft. Now, I want the opposite. I want to remember everything, I want to be known. My skin is spidery with scar tissue, the rhythm beneath it is strong, but the sensation is lacking. What could possibly have changed since, but that apathy replaced my self-appointed amnesia? Is it worse to feel everything, or nothing at all?

Sometimes I think that faith is a symptom of those who are weak in their minds or hearts—but other times, I wonder if maybe everything that has happened to me was leading me here. Because at least I know now that the most authentic, effective form of survival is remembering that what you love will always eventually leave. Because I would rather be sardonic, impervious, then suffer again as I have. Because I am not much, but at least I am alive. I am more and less than a miracle: I am a result.

And already, the new recollection dawns. All I can do is rise to meet it.

I am spacious, singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I, more or less human, but alive because of transformation.

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Trigger warnings for mentions of ableism, suicidality, self harm, abuse

Your disbelief cures nothing. 

Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

Nowadays, we are all more or less familiar with the trope of the crazy woman. I have written about it before, and will undoubtedly do so again. “Crazy” is a cultural phenomenon that linguistically fuses the erasure of abuse narratives, the infantilization of women, the latent anxieties and misconceptions surrounding mental illness, and a whole host of similarly unpleasant tenets of Western thought. “Crazy” is a word that exonerates its user. Call a woman crazy, and you do not have to explain your treatment of her. You do not have to give a reason for why a once-meaningful relationship fell apart. You do not even have to acknowledge her account of the hundreds of ways in which you treated her like shit.

But the communities with the largest penchant for formulating trenchant (if occasionally slightly self-righteous) critiques of the ableism and misogyny inherent within the use of the word “crazy” are also, more often than not, precipitating their own form of this rhetoric. We tend to perceive ourselves as subversive, radical, and painstakingly careful in our applications of language, but in my communities–feminist communities, queer communities, trans communities, disabled communities, academic communities, and so forth–when we do not say that a person is “crazy,” we say instead that he, she, they are “toxic.” And that really is not much better.

I will try to make this unmistakably plain: I am not arguing, would never argue, that toxicity does not exist, or that anyone is under any obligation to accommodate toxic or abusive people. Toxicity is everywhere, all of the time. This is something that I understand far better than I would like to–believe me. I knew someone who routinely left unmistakable evidence of their self harm on my bedding and on the floor of my room. I had a girlfriend who routinely threatened suicide. I had a childhood that I still cannot fully remember or talk about. I know how bad toxicity can get. I know how agonizing–indeed, traumatizing–it is to lay down boundaries and enact separation from people you love because their behavior has gone so far beyond what you are capable of coping with. Time and again, I have been there. I know how important it is to be able to get out, to save yourself. I am not criticizing that. How could I?

What I am criticizing, though, is the strategic and contrived use of “toxic” as a modern analogy for “crazy”; that is, as a short-hand term used for deflecting awkward questions. Colloquially, “toxic” almost always implies a kind of mutual trauma, which makes people less likely to criticize your actions. This can be extraordinarily helpful if the person(s) in question really is/are toxic, and their actions really have resulted in traumatic experience. But if you use accuse someone of being toxic as an easier way of saying,  “I had been worried about us for a while, but was too afraid to confront him about it”; or, “I was unable to cope with her mental illness in addition to my own and thought we could both benefit from distance”; or, “They asked for support and I didn’t feel willing or capable of giving that to them”–then things start to become difficult.

First, and perhaps most obviously, this casual application of the word “toxic” makes it nearly impossible for survivors of abusive or mutually destructive relationships to adequately describe their experiences or identify their abusers without becoming lost in translation. And when you bring questions of preceding traumas and (dis)abilities into the picture, the term can become violent. Because if you slap the label of “toxic” on a human being, and fail to properly address their status as disabled, traumatized, or a survivor of abuse, then you become complicit in the incredibly harmful social practice of construing certain trauma or disability based behaviors as ‘choices’ or indicators of our failing health, when they are in fact permanent symptoms of conditions or traumas, and need to be recognized as such. 

It is absolutely possible to reproduce patterns of oppression even as we seek to eschew them—oftentimes we share the very facets of identity that we reject or marginalize in others.  A persons’ pre-existing disabilities must never be subsumed by a projection/displacement narrative in which trauma and disability related behaviors are only considered in their cultural reframing as ‘trigger points’ for other people (yes, even if said other people are themselves coping with traumas or disabilities).

For instance: if dissociative or spectrum-based behaviors make you inherently uncomfortable—so uncomfortable that you endorse, defend, or participate in acts of alienation and aggression towards an individual on the basis of their having demonstrated dissociative behaviors–then even if you suffer from similar issues, and even if these behaviors upset you, you still need to critically consider your own attitude towards people on the autistic spectrum, people with post traumatic stress disorder, people with dissociative identity disorder, and so forth. You need to hold yourself accountable. You need to take a long, hard look at the impact you are having, and the priorities you hold.

If you have ever considered, even for an instant, using someone’s own disability or mental illness against them in order to make your treatment of them seem more credible, then you are a part of the problem.

The thing about radical, empathetic communities is that they do not work properly without humility, mutual respect, and basic compassion. Having your own history or trauma or disability does not give anyone a free pass to weaponize ableist structures for the purpose of treating other disabled people like shit when it seems more convenient. That goes double for anyone who claims the label of ‘ally’ in a marginalized community. Because whatever effect someone’s disability may have on the people around them, the one who suffers the most from being disabled is always the person experiencing it.

To pretend as though certain conditions associated with trauma and (dis)ability are somehow innately toxic is reductive, violent, and inhumane. That kind of thinking prioritizes certain forms of trauma over others, and comes dangerously close to suggesting that certain kinds of people (or people with certain disabilities) are inherently unhealthy, and our marginalization justified.

If you ever find yourself in a community where exclusionary, abusive or ableist practices are considered defensible because your disabilities are visible, or the effects of your own conditions are somehow only significant insofar as they affect someone other than yourself, then the best thing you can do is recognize this for exactly what it is: vicious, toxic thinking that you do not need to put up with. Cut it out of your life. Protect the people you love from it. Do whatever you can to avoid replicating it yourself.

I have had the immense privilege, over the past two terms, of finding myself in communities where I am surrounded every day by extraordinary people who work their asses off to fight internalized forms of discrimination, and do everything in their power to protect me from the people who have attempted to use my disabilities against me in the past. But not everyone is so lucky: it honestly makes me sick, and sad, to consider what it must feel like to have to face this world, or this culture, or this university, alone as a disabled or traumatized person.

At the end of the day, there are a million and one appropriate ways to use the word “toxic,” and one decidedly inappropriate way of using it. So the next time you find yourself excusing your treatment (or someone else’s treatment) of a disabled person by labelling the latter as ‘toxic,’ just take a moment to check with yourself that you really do mean toxic. Double check that you are not just using toxic as a broad, deflective, misleading buzzword, to avoid saying “he/she/they are living with a disability and/or mental illness, which I don’t want to properly acknowledge in this conversation because that’s more effort than I am willing to expend: so instead I’ll rely upon known evidence of his/her/their disabilities, and the internalized cultural view of disabled people as sub-human, and leave the rest unacknowledged, because my own convenience takes priority.”

If the answer is ‘no,’ and you really mean toxic, then by all means speak on. If the answer is ‘yes,’ or ‘maybe,’ or ‘a little,’ or ‘I’m not sure,’ then pick a new goddamn word.

Things Our Bodies Used to Know

people go
but how
they left
always stays

Rupi Kaur, milk and honey 

I will never learn to love that way again, so reckless, so irrepressible that I lost all demarcation, found sinews of my soul enmeshed in the form of another. Caressing that calamity of famished flesh, of tongue to skin, sketching half-shadows in the syntax of her gaze: what remained of our gutted life trickled from between her teeth, dripped down my chin, until my chest was all soaked with her screaming, salt-crest genesis. I removed my sodden shirt, unpeeled her fawning hands. I left her alone on the wine-drenched mattress: her frailty repelled me, made me wonder, made me doubt.

It stopped mattering that she left me. It stopped mattering that she was my best thing, then my nothing. For six months, I suffered and dreamed. But then I bled her, like ink, from the bedsheets. I burned every letter. I pawned borrowed clothing. I tore pages from books. I withdrew into my rage, my words, my inexpressible solitude: I emerged victorious and alive. So our long strange history died, unrealized. Will she ever find liberation from this sin? Or must she always live with this, the knowledge that she tore into another’s life unbidden, wasted my time and then destroyed it all for nothing?

I am still this, I am still me. But the wound that I was has been cauterized now, and the new skin spreads unrepentant, beguiling. Stained shades of corrosive liquor and glass-panelled bones, strains of battery acid and the battered neck of my guitar, every new, nebulous bruise where the knuckles wound their way around my throat: I seek comfort where I still can. Crouching, like an animal astride the four-wall shoreline, still seeing dimly that seraphic face beneath the waters, feeling the whiskey-tinged howl of the currents, clawing up across the muddy banks into knife-shards of moonlight: I salvage solace where it has not yet died out.

You can still see her impact in the edges of my eyes, but only rarely, in the half-light we used to share. I was so much younger then, enraptured by the ocher dusk, as poems and promises met like bodies, and every note of Calvary seemed sweet. She was an orator, an oracle, an evening in early summer. She was jasmine and hyacinth, sweet wines and badly rolled cigarettes–those heady, rose-damp offerings for false idols or docile gods. But I was the real thing. I required blood.

Did she think that, because I loved her, she was safe? That I would not tear her apart with my pen: that I needed her tongue between my teeth? Perhaps I will always be abhorred and estranged, when the glamor fades or the passion wanes. But at least I am an experience. At least they will remember me. At least they will talk about me after I have gone. I will not fade away like some sycophant, prostituting my own inadequacy. I know now, with certainty, that what she called my madness was only the slew of her own sensations, the life she was too frightened to face.

Whatever else I may be, at least I never asked another to climb the cross in my stead.

Dispossession, hunger, alienation, hurled abuses–I have learned to see and feel my way through the dark waters of a world that is so much more dangerous than my own mind could be. And there are others like me, others who have managed to survive and yet still feel keenly, feel utterly, feel indiscriminately. The strength we practice, we who face the world unflinchingly, is enthralling, anointed, instantly recognizable. We are a fragment worth exalting, a contrapuntal clashing of flesh and fractured light. We have no use for weakness or denial. We know no patience for the faint of heart.

Without warning, she was gone from my arms, a broken-winged dagger in desperate flight. But she left me with some sanity, and the promise of the springtime. I know the earth again and I recall the language of the mind that is half-mine. I am messy and monstrous and I am myself: I do not exist for your pleasure. Every night that I endure, I grow stronger. My self-sustenance is all the more formidable because it is denoted by a joy that predates those lost days.

I stand apart from my own grief, burning like something still lost: reckless and restless, insubordinate, sublime. Twisted well beyond near-recognition, I am history, trauma, possibility enfleshed. I am every oppurtunity that you were too afraid take.

And so, I am satisfied. Can you blame me? My survival is prodigious, improbable, stunning. Covered in scars, I am still on my feet.