Month: September 2016

Let them see that we were not heroines or heroes at all.
But we believed passionately in our goals and we pursued them.
We were sometimes strong and sometimes we were very weak.

Alexandra Kollontai, in Bolshevik Feminist

A girl I knew vaguely, half a lifetime ago, recently wrote a staggering piece on abusive relationships; in a wrenching turn of language, of honesty, of recollection, she chronicled the untimely horrors of adolescence, the toxins of mistreatment, the devastating fate of far too many women at the hands of far too many men. Her essat left me inspired and silenced; compelled to speak and unable to do so; burning to write, but lacking the language. The piece itself can be read here.

The aftermath of the article’s publication saw an outpouring of affected, astonished individuals, particularly girls and women, who expressed their gratitude, offered their shared strength, described their own experiences, and penned lingering clauses of admiration and empathy. Watching from my position behind a computer screen, I was struck by these events—both the piece and its reception—in a singular way. For all of my involuntary skepticism, I saw beauty quite plainly in this.

From one woman’s courage, her reckoning with and articulation of an agony-imbibed history, there had emerged an invaluable source of caution and solace for women anywhere and everywhere, which in turn engendered a flood of acknowledgement, gratitude, and love. I realized then how lucky I am to be surrounded, directly and indirectly, implicitly and explicitly, in precise and arbitrary fashion alike, by women who write and think and feel in such extraordinary, authentic ways.

I am writing carefully now. To reorient the brilliance and raw potency of another’s work around myself, to detract from its shattering impact in any way, would be unforgivable. I don’t want to do that, and in fact, I likely couldn’t; Alana’s text breathes diatribes of admission and power that I am not equipped to equal. What I hope to communicate now is not self-serving recalibration, but gratitude: I hope to contribute something modest of my own by echoing, however ineptly, its model of candor and integrity. I am trying to extend the parameters of my own mind beyond my rudimentary understandings of gender, sexuality and human love, to interrogate the individual and collective implications of an article such as this one.

I want to understand the beauty and force inherent not only in this single excursion of language, this gorgeous scattering of text upon a page, but also in the response that it has elicited: the selflessness and courage that reverberates now across the threads of a webbed nexus, some online community that, before my very eyes, emerged to exemplify the concept and the triumph of women loving, protecting, and uplifting other women in the modern world. I want to understand  what it means for women to nurture and inspire and adore one another, openly and uninhibitedly, at this moment in time. And I want to write about it.

I think that the deeply personal resonance of this event, and the manner by which I perceive it, is as physical as it is political. For me, the terms “woman” and “girl” are deeply conflicted: they are desirous, unfamiliar, constricting, erotic, and sacred all at once. I am a woman, of sorts. I was called a girl when I was born, and named a woman when men assessed my value. And I have been loving women for all of my life.

It all started around the eighth grade, hastily and half in jest, with one shared kiss in the late summer; a stolen moment of sweetness that lingered on my tongue, and altered eternally the cast of my desires. In the lifetime that followed, I learned a thousand forms of forbidden tenderness. A letter slipped between the panels of a locker. A hushed conversation in a bathroom stall. A smile or a glance in a middle school hallway. Shorn hair like cropped silk; pastel brushstrokes; soft fingers that ran, searching, along the notches of my spine. A disheveled apartment in New York’s East Village. A ringing peal of laughter, like rain, in the Oxford streets. Amidst these scattered, near-infinite moments, there emerged the first person I ever thought to love sincerely: and in one intrepid summer of insolence and affection, she seared herself onto my heart. We met in motion beneath the waters, while the fractured moonlight cast off its pallor and crystallized her skin. I lost myself to the salient curves along her waist, the parting of her lips, the taste of salt. And there have been others, since then.

But back in the beginning, it was all very different. I was a girl from a small, normal town, who did not feel a small, normal love. There were a few like me, then, but we sought to hide from one another, from ourselves, even as something wonderful was unfurling inside of us. We all were afraid. Sometimes, I still am.

Five years almost to the day of my first, clandestine kiss, forty-nine queer people, largely of color, were massacred in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. And although I certainly did not share every experience or identity of those caught in the carnage, I felt this loss directly: my mind buckled beneath the gore-smeared violation of a place where people who felt different, in ways both like and unlike the ways that I felt different, could come together and live and love and not feel quite so different anymore. The idea of such reckless hate in such a sacred space was enough to physically sicken me.

So I shared the blinding horror and uncertain misery of that afternoon with a woman: a figure still sometimes shrouded in allegory, for reasons that even now, as they lay forgotten across the Atlantic, wrench the raw nerves and the contours of my heart. We received the news in a blinking disarray of text alerts and slowly unfolding coverage. We waited in silence for the nationwide address. Alone together, in the confines of my room, we saw the president on our computer screen, confirming those forty-nine dead. We watched a national, cultural, and spiritual catastrophe unfold. We lit cigarettes. We held each other. We cried.

Three months later, I lay back on an artist’s table as another woman, dark-eyed and steady-handed, preformed for me a burning art. In the searing rise and fall of a needle against my skin, imbued with the scorching intimacy of carefully applied ink, she emblazoned upon my shoulder that old symbol of resistance: a small triangle in holocaust pink. Its impression still whispers with the potency and pain of those hours spent learning of the horror in Orlando: that wonderful girl and her gentle embrace, my tearstained countenance, our grief.

In this rough and uncertain reality, girls love girls because we can, because we must. Because this world can be beautiful; but too often, it is callous, unassuming, and cold. Of course, I have loved men too, in many different ways. I recall with soft, confused tenderness the young man with the sad eyes like winter mornings, and the cruelty of his chrome-tongued successor. I think fondly of my friends and my brothers. I grieve for my father.

But to love another woman is a hallowed art: a practice sanctified by generations of camaraderie, self-preservation, and quiet, transgressive desire. It is not an exclusively romantic or physical act; nor it constrained to any single identity. I know and cherish multitudes of women who are neither lovers nor figures of my desire: we are merely joined, all of us, in the terrible beauty of our difference. Womanhood, as I conceive it, is not a question of physical terminology; thus, the word, “girl,” as I employ it here, is not meant to be exclusive or binding. I hope it will be read as just one of many terms used to signify and celebrate those who have practiced, for centuries, the art of affection, of tenderness, of solidarity; who have been those certain kinds of children, those bent and branded things called girls: raised to be girls, afraid to love girls, or living in bodies that made parents and teachers call them the wrong names.

I still see them all now, down in the city streets, luckless or genderless, queer or unwell, ignored or abused, with hearts like gaping mouths, with memories that bite like tongues of fire, with entire universes of cautious hope contained in the depths of their hearts. I want to protect them. I want to be their mother, their sister, their brother, their lover, their friend. I want to love and live for them in all of the ways that so many women have loved and lived for me. This, alone, is my womanhood. It knows no definition by which it may be condemned or constrained.

Those who have known or cared for me, as a lover, or a pupil, or a classmate, or a patient, or a friend, or merely as a fellow woman, have me mind something closer to whole. A thousand names flood my tongue. The pages I turned in a childhood closet as I came to know that I was neither alone nor forsaken: Barnes, Lorde, Woolf, Bechdel, Sappho, Rich. Every girl who has shared my bed, or calmed my soul, or read my writing, or cut my hair, who has steadied my shaking hands or consoled me when men taught me all the worst parts of what I am and what can be done to me. The ones who wrapped my arms with bandages, played my guitar, wrote annotations in the margins of the books they lent me, let me wear their borrowed clothes, made me laugh, made me feel, asked me questions, told me stories in the night. These women soldered my skin with sinews of their own hearts. They kept me alive when the surgical knife could not.

And so I have come to be, fully, that which I always was: a girl who loves girls in this strange century. And we are not writing, or speaking, or loving, or fucking, or living, or dying, for you. We are for each other. We are for ourselves. In our shared and varied affections, we desire and astound. Our learned affections break the binds of known convention: we ring out through the silence with insurrectionary love. The blinding cast of our hearts subdues an expressionless stillness, and echoing, astonishing, aspiring, we express.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.

Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

Plath wrote once that every woman adores a fascist, but I will not deify a deserter twice. The fact that I could survive it does not mean that I should have had to.

I know that I lost nothing useful in the end. Nothing real. Just a fiction that took whatever I had to give, and offered little in return. All I ever gained was that which I projected on the presence. The health that I would have sworn it had inspired was, I know now, mine all along. I alone made it possible.

But there was a time when this did not hurt at all. I was ready for an ending, but not this one. I’ve seen enough already of beautiful, barbaric acts. Still, I relent. I don’t seek answers that aren’t worth their telling.

Just know this: as surely as I once cared for you, and as surely as I bled for that mistake, you will not return from this. Nothing can alter what the body recalls. No one, I swear, knows that better than me.

I am wrenching out every trace of you.  I am extracting your venom from my veins. You will not shed our history so easily. Someday, your luck will run out, and you will remember everything. 

Even now, kid, I am a part of your skin. And I do not envy you that.

Suicides are always judged as if they were admissions of defeat, but one can take the viewpoint that their having lived as long as they did is an accomplishment of a kind. Knowing herself suicidal as a very young girl, Virginia Woolf resisted—made heroic attempts to attach herself to the exterior world—as did Anne Sexton—as do we all. Why not concentrate on the successes, the small and large joys of these lives, the genuine artistic accomplishments? After all, anyone and everyone dies; the exact way can’t be very important. 

Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982  

Our culture does not speak openly of suicide, or of the presently suicidal. Such content is an unnamed notion in the periphery of our lives. The ever-present threat inherent within many an errant phrase or earnest intention, it is seldom articulated as an ongoing fact. The term “suicidal” itself is, in our collective consciousness, always temporally bound. One might commit suicide, or attempt suicide, or have once been at risk of doing so, but the chronology is diametric. Linguistically and culturally, the phenological application of the phrase “suicidal” to existence implicitly anticipates that word’s own ending—logically, one either recovers from their depressive state, and so ceases to be suicidal, or one commits suicide successfully, and so ceases to be any number of adjectives, “suicidal” among them.

So, to exist in our society while wanting to die (or having tried to), and while the quality of that urge is still latently or consciously present, is nothing short of extraordinary. In a culturally enforced narrative of health and redemption (where “recovery” is medically possible but entails a total expunging of the death impuls),  or in the artistic spectacle of failed annihilation (where the Plathian miracle-skin rises, like Lazarus from the ashes), or in the self-inflicted deaths and subsequent deification of figures like Hemingway, Wallace, or Cobain, there seems to be no place for those of us who are both and neither.

Yet we do exist. We are quite possibly everywhere. We are the margins and ruptures of everyday life. We are not immediately ‘at risk’ of dying; nor are we ‘threatening’ to die (though, to be clear, such terms are reductive, accusatory and pseudo-clinical and should serve solely as a comparative cultural function herein). On the contrary, we hold down jobs and places at universities. We have stable relationships and we sometimes start families. We are, or can be, suicidal the entire time. I know this as fact because I am one such person.

To write this terrifies me, because I am unyieldingly afraid of how it will be received. ‘Suicidal’ is not a term that I want ascribed to me. ‘Suicide’ is not a notion that I want to be associated with. I am not tragic or irreparable or incapable of a worthwhile existence. I do not wake up in the morning and hate being alive. As a matter of fact, I hardly hate anything, and my life least of all. I am filled with love. I love my family. I love my friends. I love writing. I love music. I have ambitions. I want to be around for a long time yet. But this does not change, and can never change, the biological circumstances that have rendered my unmedicated mind incapable of sustaining life on its own. Consciously, it wants to. But it cannot and never could. I am not always depressive in the clinical sense. But, like a diabetic needs insulin, I need serotonin to survive, and my neurochemistry does not produce adequate amounts on its own. I cannot live without it. Because without it, I will want, and possibly try, to die.

In a strange, depersonalized way, this can make me feel like I have become public property. To be medicated as I am medicated, and for the purposes that I am medicated, makes me not entirely my own. I carry the diagnostic hypotheses of others in my bloodstream. Their concerns and convictions, actualized as pharmaceutical reality, begin to slow my pulse, strain my libido, and alter my neurochemistry. Sometimes, they take my own consciousness away from me.

This is my relationship to therapists, doctors, and surgeons. I am the walking measure of their success. I am the body that they have been tasked with keeping alive.

They posit; I disprove.

They prescribe; I ingest.

They instruct; I live.

In this very physical sense, I am more alive than anyone, because I am living somebody else’s idea of health. It isn’t me, not entirely; but then again, it is, because it is what I have to do. And I can do it. I am happy to do it. It could be so much worse.

But it also accounts, perhaps, for the foolish stabs of pride I feel on the rare occasions when diazepam cannot calm me, or sertraline cannot elevate my mood, or lithium cannot balance my mind. In those moments, I remember that somewhere, beneath all of this medically sanctioned self-cannibalization, some small part of my body is still fighting to exist on its own terms: the terms of my birth. However begrudgingly, however unwisely, I sometimes catch myself cherishing that. Because one of my greatest fears is that my autopsy will be marred by some throwaway line about “recreational” use—when, in truth, there has rarely been anything at all recreational in my usage. Usually, I am just trying to do all of the things that most people take for granted, like quell the tremors, or calm the sobbing, or get some sleep. Yes, the medications scare me. They always have.

Oates surmises this better than I ever could. In the introductory quotation of this post, she describes the astonishing, herculean triumph of a woman like Virginia Woolf, who bound herself to the wonder and grief of existence for fifty-nine long years, suicidal the entire time. When she finally moved towards her own death, alone at the bottom of the sea, can it really have mattered whether such an action signified the tragic lack of timely access to contemporary chemicals, or the sheer relief of a body that, having labored under a single illness for its entire lifetime, finally managed to find some semblance of peace?

For me, this post, this extended meditation on suicide, is the farthest thing from a threat. It is not a warning sign. It is not a cry for help. It is a plain assessment of what I, and my doctors, have always known. The potential health risks that accompany any failure on my part to walk, as Plath once wrote, “carefully, precariously, like something rare.” Mine is the dream of a normal death. My goal is to maximize any model of health that allows me to find fulfillment until I meet, someday, with a bodily and spiritual ending that does not occur by these same hands that I use to write, and create, and make love.

In writing this, I hope not only to illustrate my own state of being (which is, by comparison, an exceedingly manageable one), but also to shed some light upon the reductive cultural views that frame the suicidal human condition as dichotomous and deeply flawed—a triumph if it results in a “natural” death, or a failure when it does not. It will never cease to astonish me how fundamentally incapable we are of reckoning with the notion of the suicidal body as anything other than a temporally restricted subject. Healing has never been, and never will be, as simple as that. Many of us will engage in long, full, promising lives without ever foregoing our medical status as chronically suicidal. This can be done. In fact, it is done more often than any onlooker might expect. But for us, such life is not a gift, but a hard-earned and double-edged victory.

So, it certainly seems, as Oates has written before me (and far more coherently), that to negotiate a lived suicidal existence, for any measure of time, should be considered a triumph. Such a life requires tremendous strength, endurance, and loyalty to the ones who love us: an irrevocable passion for our “attach[ments]…to the exterior world.” Regardless of the nature of one’s eventual ending, and in stark opposition to common belief, I am of the conviction that the possession and articulation of the suicidal condition is neither despondent nor self-serving. On the contrary, it is tremendously selfless—an honest, committed, and ongoing act of courage.

Perhaps even of love.