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. By this single, blistering essay, I was left inspired and silenced; compelled to speak, yet 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 left 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 strange and singular way. Even in the throngs of my own mind, with all of its involuntary cynicism, I saw beauty quite plainly in this.

From one woman’s act of tremendous courage, her full 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 responsive 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 this piece around myself, to detract from its shattering impact in any way, would be despicable. 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 simply am not equipped to equal. As such, what I hope to communicate now is not self-serving recalibration, but deferential gratitude: I hope to contribute something modest of my own to the ethos of this wonderful piece by echoing, however inaptly, its model of honesty and strength. I am trying to extend the parameters of my own mind beyond my basic understandings of gender, sexuality and human love, in order to interrogate the individual and collective implications of an article such as this one.

I want to know 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, has exemplified the concept and the triumph of women loving, protecting, and uplifting other women in the modern world. I want to understand how it matters, what it means, for women to nurture and inspire and adore one another, openly and uninhibitedly, at this moment in time. And then 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, sensual, and sacred all at once. I am a woman, of sorts. After all, I was called a girl when I was born, and named a woman when men assessed and affirmed my erotic 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 like rosewater and raw honey upon 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; diaphanous 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 as it broke like a wave-crest along my tongue. 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 all sought to hide from one another, from ourselves, even as something wonderful was unfurling inside of us. In downcast eyes, glancing skin, and gently stretching limbs, we all were afraid. Sometimes, I still am.

Five years almost to the day of that first, clandestine kiss, forty-nine queer people, largely of color, were executed in a nightclub in Orlando. And although I certainly did not share every experience or identity of those targeted in the carnage, I felt this loss directly: I 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 notion alone of this reckless hate in such a space was enough to physically sicken me.

So I shared the blinding horror and uncertain misery of that afternoon with just one woman: a figure still sometimes shrouded in allegory, for reasons that even now, as they lay forgotten across the vast Atlantic, wrench the raw nerves and 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 bitter 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 both 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, writhing intimacy of the 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 they can, because they 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 now with soft, confused tenderness the young man with the sad, shadowed eyes like pale winter morning, 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. And of course, it is not an exclusively romantic or physical act; nor it constrained to any single “female” identity. I know and cherish multitudes of women who are neither lovers nor figures of 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 can 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 their 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, shattered or blank-faced, with hearts like gaping mouths, with memories that bite like pale tongues of fire, with entire universes of cautious hope contained in the depths of their eyes. I want to protect them. I want to be their mother, their sister, their brother, their lover, their friend. Not their father, of course, for I have had enough of fathers–but I long to show them some better, more blameless life. 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 made my 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 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 soft-edged annotations in the margins of lent books, let me wear their borrowed clothes, made me laugh, made me feel, asked me questions, told me stories in the night. These women took the shattered parts of me, and soldered my skin together with 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 new 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 as, 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

I stumbled outside in a blinding thrall of whiskey and rainwater, defenseless, indefensible, and blistering to the core. The howling world all but deafened me, the wonderful wetness pooling in garlands on my lips, my hair streaming out in tides of burnished red, like the dust that shrouds these mountains at dawn. I lived fleetingly in the bliss of an autumnal tempest, face upturned towards an arcane moon, my bare skin drenched and dripping as the rain soaked through my clothes. It still hurts, it always hurts, but this was not the savage scorch of summer, when the sunlight sinks talons into my chest. My body was shivering wet, and when I let the memories come, they felt different. I was not suffering, but mourning. It was not like missing a real thing–a thing with a pulse that might return to me. It was like missing something already dead. I knew then, really knew, that there was no coming back from this.

I wonder what it feels like to be loved irrevocably, without ultimatum. I know that he has been cared for in this way, for it was I who sought to do so. I am not ashamed of that. Not anymore. I am allowed to feel this. A longstanding subject of trauma and abuse, I am allowed to be angry with such inhumanity: such willingness to mimic the horrors of my history. I am allowed to write. To recall. To seek meaning. To stay breathing. To hold such people accountable. Because I am tired of blaming myself. I am tired of hurting myself. This is not some barbed romanticized lament; this is simply an acknowledgment of the damage inflicted upon me by one careless, pulse-bearing occupant of this earth. I would still give anything, anything at all, to chalk it up to some misunderstanding. To move on with the memories unmarred. But to do so now would be to degrade myself so thoroughly that even I, presumptive masochist, could never attempt the act. Plath wrote once that every woman adores a fascist; but I will not deify my own deserter twice. The fact that I could survive him does not mean that I should have had to.

You know who you are. You’ve known for a long time yet. So know now that while I loved you, and often have, I do not forgive you. What you have wrought upon my flesh is not forgivable. You knew who I was, what I was anticipating, how this would ruin me. You did it anyways. You watched me face the gallows and senselessly, knowingly, you added misery to the act. You are not clean. And hell, if I could not love what mutilated me, then how could I ever endure my own self? So you are spared, once more, the filth and consequence of your own actions. But nineteen scars along my body now belong to the arbitrary silence of your still-living soul; and those nineteen jagged marks are more than you are worth.

I know that I lost nothing useful in the end. Nothing real. Just a fiction that took whatever I had to give, and offered precious little in return. All I ever gained from your positionality within my life was that which I, myself, projected upon the presence. The health that I would have sworn you had inspired in me was, I know now, mine all along. Yes, it was me–it was always me. The brilliance of sensation, the way my body sprang to life like a miracle: I am it, for Christ’s sake, I am everything. You could have been anyone, for I alone made my revival possible.

But there was a time when this did not hurt at all. Oh, how I remember you: this body recalls what it once loved. Whatever else has happened since, you did care for me. And why should two souls share a half-year of such affections, only to squander it all with clinical apathy? But that was your choice: it would never have been mine. I’ve seen enough already of such beautiful, barbaric acts. I knew that I was ready for an ending, but I could never have prepared myself for this. Twice now, in one lifetime, I have loved something that would just as soon have allowed me to die. Heaven knows how I waste my own time like this, when I have so little of it to spare. But I relent. I will not seek answers that aren’t worth their own telling, will not endeavor to make sense of this any longer. You have rendered yourself well beyond what I am capable of comprehending or caring for.

May whatever satisfaction eluded you in our time together be yours now. But know this: as surely as I once cared for you, and as surely as I have bled for that mistake, I know that you will one day read this, and feel things I don’t understand. Don’t want to understand. Don’t care to understand. And even if you don’t–it will not matter in the slightest. Because someday, when your luck runs out, you will remember everything. 

That first night in the bathroom dim with cigarette smoke, when you drank in every half-formed phrase I offered. Later, my body wrenching with the tremors of a terror long deferred, until you took my face in your hands and moved with consecrated patience as from above you I glanced down. The mornings of our first connection, sensuous and calm. Kubrick films on a dormitory floor. Haunting strains of melody in an imprecise, minor key. My blood upon the bedsheets. How you always held my left hand in your sleep. The hours of affection, lying beneath you, both of us laughing and so alive. When you ran your fingers through my hair as I played your piano in the evenings. How I wrote, well into the dawn, with your sleeping form pressed against my bare heart, and tried not to wake you when I climbed through the window to smoke and watch the sunrise. The first night of spring, when I began, at last, to succumb to the specter of my illness, and you held me in silence, amidst a growing stillness, and I was safe, and simply cared for. The reckless nights that followed, chasing shadows upon the moonlit canals. The days when your absence made me wonder and wait. The time you were uncertain, even afraid, and allowed your head to fall against my chest like you had never been held before. How I wept with joy when, at last, my muscles did not spasm in pain any longer. The last time you saw me, my form all starved and burned and beautiful, and you had already undone me once, but we tried anyways, tried to say goodbye, tried with champagne and empty promises to amend the history we had forged and tarnished as one. The last steps I took down that narrow, winding staircase, towards home and solitude and blank hospital walls, as you watched from the threshold of the door. The empathy and uncertainty; the lovely and meaningless words that you wrought. 

Remember yet? Remember now? Remember me? And on it goes. I scarred and killed and cried for nothing. This all returns to what it was, as though it always wasn’t. Too many people have been forced to watch as I compromised my own efforts towards recovery, worsened my already precarious health, sacrificed the energy that I needed so desperately in some brutal, senseless struggle to come to terms with what you never even bothered to explain. Now, it is time to stop trying. Nothing can alter what a body remembers; and no one, I swear, knows this better than me. So I am wrenching out every trace of you: I refuse to suffer the consequences of your cowardice any longer. I will abandon this, still contemptuous and completely alive, while you share the past with our formless, foreign horror. I expel you like an affliction: your name will fall no longer from my pen or from my lips. Your value is utterly spent.

No flesh, no heart can stay open forever: and my wounds, once gaping, have closed off like an iris. I am sure that your bruises, those gorgeous impressions I once wrought with my teeth, have faded away as well. So go on living, for as long as you can, some life like a viper; low and imbibed with the venom of what you cannot face. But you are no serpent, you are mere flesh. You cannot shed your own history so easily.

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.

Or: When Health is Nothing Like Riding a Bike

He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.

W.B. Yeats, The Rose of the World

Around the time I turned sixteen years old, despite having ridden a bicycle since I was about seven, I suddenly stopped being able to mount one at all. I could not (still cannot) figure out how brakes work. I had entirely forgotten how to steer. It was (and, context aside, continues to be) the very amusing converse of that famous old expression: “It’s like riding a bike: you never forget!”

But I forgot. And a week ago, we finally determined why. Following my father’s departure, my mind misfired: it arbitrarily repressed a number of seemingly innocuous memories. Birthday parties, basketball games, and school lessons all became hazy at best; at worst, they were entirely obliterated. I never know when they’re missing until I try to recall them. Apparently, this includes the time my dad taught me to ride a bike.

It might not seem like a big deal. It certainly wouldn’t be for any normal person. But that is exactly the point–things like this are why I don’t get to be a normal person. Never mind living on my own. Never mind holding down a job. Never mind stable relationships. Never mind having children. I don’t even get to cycle down the street with the rest of my university friends.

When my peers were traveling to foreign cities, learning new languages or new things about themselves, I was checking in and out of hospitals, testing out new medical procedures, and trying to determine the likelihood of being able to continue an academic career at all. When people tried to help, I closed off from them. When people made me feel terrible about myself, I let them. When the person I had been seeing for half of a year decided suddenly, without explanation, to sever me from his life entirely, I thought I deserved it. Because whenever someone chooses to leave me, I have to reckon with that possibility.

Please do not think that I feel sorry for myself. I honestly never have. There’s very little to pity. I don’t even know any other way of living. There is nothing to mourn, because I never really lost anything: I can only ever remember being like this. But sometimes that frustrates me, and sometimes it makes me sad. Because I am defending myself, all of the time. And against what? I really couldn’t say.

I would like to be less of a burden for my family and the people who love me. I don’t believe that I am dead weight, or unworthy of their care, but I know that I cause worry and grief to many of the people that I wish to hurt least of all. The person I am lives often in the shadow of the illnesses she carries. And that’s lonely. That’s frightening. That’s hard.

But I have made, so far, a kind of life for myself. I still go to work every day, and sometimes try to do some art, or learn a piece of music. I always show up to therapy. I usually remember to put gas in my car. I try to keep in touch with people. I don’t hurt myself the way I used to. I really hope that I can go back to England and achieve something more than half-hearted survival. Sometimes, I think a lot of people don’t like me; but I also know a handful who (probably) do. And that doesn’t always feel like much; but honestly, it’s something. Maybe everything. In any case, it’s better than nothing at all.

So, it’s okay. It’s always okay. I’m working on it.

Eventually, I’ll get there. I’ll find my way back to health–that elusive, half-hallowed word that imbues every image of life I conceive–and back to the people who love me. I’ll want to be awake and alive again. I’ll learn to enjoy, or at least endure, solitude. I’ll laugh a bit more than I have of late, and write just as much, and drink a bit less. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even learn to ride a bike again.

Because I don’t quite recall what it felt like to be that child, elated beyond language, knuckles wrapped around the handlebars, the wind in my hair and upon my face, my dad perhaps running and laughing–did he laugh back then?–a few paces behind me, as I kept the two wheels upright on my own for the first time.

That image is a fiction. I don’t remember it anymore.

But I wish I could. I wish I could. I wish I could.

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