Where I’m Crawling From
It’s unsettling how easy it is to disappear. Engagement with social media is now a requisite for living—if you say nothing, you are nothing. And, honey? The peeps from me have been nary.
Which is not to say I am not a white woman. Were I to have actually, physically, vanished, one could assume the news would constantly run the most fertile picture of me publicly available for however many days it took to find my raped and eviscerated corpse at the bottom of a ravine.
Side Note: Whenever I see a raped and eviscerated corpse on a “Law and Order”-esque show, I can’t help but imagine the living girl within the dead body in the scene calling her parents at the farm back home to exuberantly proclaim, “Ma! Pa! I got the part!”
Side Note to the Side Note: I once watched my grandparents watch an episode of “CSI” wherein the camera digitally zoomed into a digital composite of the semen left in the vagina of a raped and eviscerated corpse and I thought to myself, “This is considered entertainment to the people I am obligated to love?”
But yes, it is easy to isolate, to withdraw. Months passed in the void—friends stopped reaching out and I judged them accordingly, not thinking of my part of the equation, only of their failings in my time of need. Meanwhile, when someone did text, I looked upon it and sighed, viewing it as a crushing obligation to mark myself “safe” like I was a Facebook user in a hurricane zone.
I withdrew because the anxiety was choking, oppressive, constant. When I felt trapped, which was often, I would wind a rubber band around my index finger until I could feel my pulse. I wore a necklace that was not visually appealing in the slightest because it contained a circle of leather in its locket I could pour drops of lavender oil onto for the purposes of huffing throughout the day. These measures provided temporary respite, but no cure—to fix myself seemed as pointless as it was impossible. Anthony asked why I didn’t feel like I deserved happiness. “I think it’ll take a long time to answer that question,” I told him.
Each day blended into the next, and on the next I would tell myself I would regain myself the next, but then the next next would come and I once again found myself not even napping, necessarily, just laying in bed with my eyes closed, listening to the sound of the fan or the kids outside playing soccer.
I am of the mindset that it has now become brave to state you believe there is no bravery in the admittance of one’s mental illness. At my lowest point, a point in which I found death to be the only escape and, in fact, experienced suicidal ideation while on the Minions ride at Universal Studios (How pervasive was this feeling? So much so, I could hardly walk back to the E.T. parking garage), there sat a billboard at the corner of Hollywood and Sunset advertising the mental health podcast of an influencer with fillers, the info page of which said was “born out of [the host’s] commitment to destigmatizing mental health concerns while reclaiming her own narrative.” Her web store sold tank tops that said “Depressed But Make it Hot!” and crop tops which read “Psych Princess.” While I refused to listen (and really, exercised an enormous amount of restraint not driving into the billboard advertising it), I have no reason to disbelieve this one-star review I found of it: “Very bad podcast from boring morally bankrupt narcissists.”
Side Note: The commercialization of the destigmatization of mental health feels comparable to when feminism was co-opted by the girlboss consortium, a trend which led to female slaves in third world countries sewing “Nasty Women” shirts.
I had bi-monthly video sessions with a Medi-Cal therapist, who was perfectly nice but had a habit of over-using the validator “Absolutely!” and very long, ostentatious nails that were filed into unsettling spikes which distracted me whenever she gesticulated. Her solution to the hell inside my head was that I should start journaling; her prescription was to send me lists of prompts from websites of questionable origin (one was from a woman who described herself as a “Virginia-born, happiness-obsessed mom” which, no matter what page you navigated to, gave you a pop up that screamed “SIGN UP NOW FOR FREE COACHING ON HOW TO INCREASE CONFIDENCE AND DECREASE DOUBT” with two clickable options: “GIVE ME ACCESS” and “NAH, I DON’T WANT TO GROW”).
Imprisoned by my own mind, out of complete desperation I bootlegged a digital copy of “The Body Keeps the Score.” When I looked for it at the library, it was listed alongside multiple condensed versions, “summarized for busy people” which were also unavailable for immediate checkout.
I initially scoffed at these summaries but, once I began reading it, I could have very well used a summary—there was far too much exposition about the author himself, his journey to discovery, et al. I was busy insofar as my mind was ceaselessly racing; I kept worrying that I would somehow forget how to breathe, that my body had stopped being able to maintain homeostasis without concerted effort. I didn’t give a fuck about the author’s petty grievances with the governing body of the DSM-5.
For some reason, however, I felt as though I had to read every word, as if learning the name of the college at which one of his myriad colleagues taught was imperative to my hero’s journey. Three hundred pages passed before anything that could remotely be construed as helpful was presented.
And the help was this: the idea of EMDR. Fuck it, I told myself, I’ll try EMDR, and fuck it, I’ll pay out of pocket for it. This was the basement below the basement of desperation I had found myself in—the sub-basement, if you will. How bad had things become? Bad enough that I, the cheapest woman in the TMZ, would pay a woman I found on Psychology Today $125 an hour to try and fix it. Because the alternative was untenable.
Sometimes (and by “sometimes,” I mean “all the time,” because, if you’re me, you’re programmed to minimize your own misery) you tell yourself the past that has led you to the present wasn’t that bad, that you’re being overdramatic, but then the woman in a peasant dress you’re now paying $125 an hour to listen reminds you that in the past that has led you to the present, you were a child and you realize you never took that into consideration—the malleability of your brain and it’s inability for logic, only feeling, it was capable of. And you resent this, the paying of the $125 an hour decades after the inciting incidents, but you resent it less than you resented said incidents when you were unable to process them. It’s possible you resent yourself most of all, for having done little to nothing to process said incidents until now, safe in the narrative that has led you to this desperate place.
And this leads you to ask why, if a straight line can be drawn so easily between the cause of the constant panic, that being an overwhelming feeling of being trapped, the same as you felt when you were a child stuck in your room while your parents screamed at one another out of frame, or in an orchard from which extrication required significant, impossible effort, did you not feel said panic when you were in your 20s? Because, she’ll tell you, you were drinking then.
Oh, of course. Oh, great. Oh, fuck.
It feels like witchcraft, how she can just lead me to a place in which I can merely tap the anxiety away, but I never became desperate enough to find sense in witchcraft, nor did I embrace astrology as an escape valve from trauma.
Side Note: Astrology is designed to make girls and gays to feel like they have a semblance of agency in a world designed to crush them—and I can’t help but notice that the more their civil rights are eroded, the more popular it becomes. Could it be the stars have dictated your fate, or your parents?
I don’t mean to continue to talk about Lisa Carver, who I referenced in my last newsletter over a year ago, but in the time that passed from there to now I bought more copies of her zine, Rollerderby, and I became fixated on her again, specifically her honesty in light of what could be construed as monsterism. Many of the stances she held in the ‘90s could now be considered proto-edgelord, contrarian for the sake thereof (give her a break, she married a Nazi sympathizer—if it’s any consolation, he also impregnated and beat her). An essay she wrote after Kurt Cobain offed himself, for example, was needlessly flippant and cruel.
Discovering she eventually did EMDR, too, both intrigued and terrified me. Specifically this quote: “EMDR really changed the way I wrote and actually really handicapped me for years. Before that, I'd been extremely dissociative and I could block out absolutely anything—I mean anything—and whip off fine articles every day, in a different tone depending on which magazine or newspaper or site it was for. After I integrated, I started questioning whether what I was saying was true or whether it mattered or would hurt someone for no good reason. Really hampered my output.”
Her admission terrified me because I, too, had made my name writing essays that were needlessly flippant and cruel about people whose lives I knew nothing about. EMDR made me more empathetic, more human—I feared what kind of kick my output would have without the knee jerk, and that made me continue to say nothing.
Because, for years, I had outsourced my validation to strangers, stirring the pot for the attention I never got from my blood kin. As a result, in the year in which I’ve been working on myself, I’ve felt as though no work has been done, because there is little validation in bettering oneself. There was nothing immediately visible someone could compliment me on.
I have not lost weight — in fact, I have gained it, a fact I fixate on even though the amount of weight is nominal and I know it means fuck all. Still, control. When I met my first grandmother-in-law, she looked me up and down and said, “Well, there’s not much of her, is there?” Correct, now-surely deceased Australian I no longer remember the name of. That was the point.
Journaling didn’t work because the idea of writing for something other than the public, the idea of writing for myself, I saw as bizarre, perverse.
Through EMDR, I now realize that I am programmed to need validation; I realize I am bereft of personhood without it, which makes me feel as empty as an influencer. I realize that I cannot live in the moment if the moment is mine and mine alone. This, and a litany of other untruths, is what I am currently working on.
Months ago, Anthony and I went out to watch a meteor shower for my friend Merrill’s birthday; her whole life, she had wanted to see at least one but had been deprived. I instantly saw multiple; she did not. I told her God was going to send out another meteor for her to see; she said he’s too busy killing people in the Ukraine, he’s too busy destroying the rest of Maui.
Earlier in the evening, I had given her a copy of the “S.C.U.M. Manifesto” as a birthday present—she walked around the restaurant holding it, putting it on the table, only moving it when her wine arrived but not before considering using it as a coaster. I thought about how freely people document their lives, more so visually than in written form because no one carries notebooks anymore and phones are for scrolling, not typing. I wanted to take a photograph of her sitting in front of the book, displayed in dim light at the “most romantic restaurant in LA,” but something stopped me, something always stops me—that desire to “live in the moment,” even though I never do, even though I have an atrocious memory. I see other people go through their camera rolls and it’s a cornucopia of remembrance. My camera roll primarily consists of images I’ve downloaded from the Craigslist free section. I’m documenting someone’s life, but not my own. It would appear I am almost contractually prohibited from “living in the moment,” like I signed an NDA with the present. But, y’know, I’m working on it. Wouldn’t be the first NDA I’ve broken.
For months, I have felt so close to it, the saying of something; it kept me up at night and in the day, where I’ve laid with the curtains drawn knowing I couldn’t sleep but not wanting to be conscious. God, it’s been over a year. God, do you still like me? Are there any grammatical errors in this? Is it OK if I’m nicer now?. Fuck it, here goes. If anything, the woman I pay will be pleased.