I was led to such a glorious video on this fine 75° night in Boston (I can assure you the temperature in my third-floor room has at least a 15 added to that) and I immediately felt two things: an urgency to share this quirky magnificence with others, and a deep, calming sense of enormous wellbeing. Without further ado, “Glas” by Bert Haanstra:
See, now wasn’t that just spectacular?
Dear Patriarchy,
I Am A Woman…
And I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want with my body.
This may include:
1. Eating what I want.
2. Fucking who I want, when I want to.
3. Shaving OR not shaving. Wearing makeup OR not wearing makeup. Dying my hair. Cutting my hair. Growing my hair. Getting tattoos.
4. Wearing whatever the fuck I want.
5. Saying no.
6. Taking up space. Being sad and letting it show. Being angry and letting it show. Being loud, being vocal.
7. Not getting married.
8. Terminating an unwanted pregnancy.
9. Forgetting to shower for a day or two because I’m busy doing stuff I care about.
10. Taking care of myself, as I see fit, because I come first. I have no caretaker obligation— if I offer to help someone or comfort someone it is because I have deemed them worthy of my time, energy, and respect.
Reposted from How to Own a Body
“I can’t believe we’ve got to a point where it’s basically costing us money to have a vagina. They’re making us pay for maintenance and upkeep of our lulus, like they’re a communal garden. It’s a stealth tax. Muff excised. This is money we should be spending on THE ELECTRICITY BILL and CHEESE and BERETS. Instead, we’re wasting it on making our Chihuahuas look like a skanky chicken breast. God DAMN you, mores of pornography that have made it into my undies. GOD DAMN YOU.” – Caitlin Moran, How to Be A Woman
**This is the third or fourth (I lost count) revision of Lipstick. I’ve change the title, and pared down the description. This was considered a final piece, and was used in my final portfolio collection for my short short fiction workshop class this last semester.**
The girl sitting in the cafe orders banana and cream cheese crepes and a small glass of orange juice. Her face is absent of any makeup. The orange juice comes first, pulpy froth at the top. It leaves a wet ring on the table as she lifts the glass to her mouth and savors the sweet and sour taste with eyes closed. The acidity stings the cracks in her lips, the rawness between her teeth, the sensitive roof of her mouth. She puts the glass back into the ring on the table, aligning it perfectly inside the glistening trace of its former self. Breakfast always was her favorite meal.
The crepes are placed before her with a smile. The waitress asks if she needs anything else. She starts to say no, but a dash of red distracts her from the friendly, made up face. A small bowl of sliced strawberries is pushed to the edge of the table behind the waitress, and she asks for her own bowl. The waitress says it’ll be an extra $1.25. She’s alright with that. She remembers strawberries: a buck and some change is a small price to pay this early in the game.
A growl comes from her stomach as she looks down at the plate of crepes, waiting for her perfect strawberries. They come soon enough, though she’s waited longer for food. She takes her fork and presses it into the soft roll of the first crepe. Cream cheese puffs from the nearest end, a banana slips out onto the white plate. Making sure to get an even amount of crepe, cream cheese, and banana, she lifts the fork. She sinks her teeth in slowly, chewing until everything is mush until finally, she swallows.
She forks a strawberry and brings it to her mouth, feeling each textured little seed. She dances her tongue along the fleshy fruit, pressing hard to feel the spongy give of it. All four foods come together in a delightful mixture: rich, slightly salted cream cheese, the light taste of the banana under the more intense sweet of the strawberry, the doughy blandness of the crepe. She passes the mulched food from one side of her mouth to the other. Swallows.
After consuming about a third of the crepes, she sets the fork down and presses her napkin to her mouth. Her tongue roams over her molars, picking out bits of food here and there that she nibbles with her front teeth.
Dropping the napkin and pushing her chair away from the table, she abandons the plate and heads to the bathroom. A tall woman with red hair and a red sweater is at the sink washing her hands; she smiles at the girl as she comes in. The girl doesn’t smile back. She goes into the farthest stall and closes the door, leaning her back against the cool metal. She waits until the woman leaves. The tile floor is filthy, so she bends at the waist instead of getting down on her knees. As she slides her finger down her throat, bile and food rises, it burns the roof of her mouth, presses through her teeth, dehydrates her lips. She distracts herself by searching the acid in her mouth and throat for reminders of how much better it tastes going down than coming up. Spitting watery blood into the toilet, she thinks about the last sip of orange juice she left aligned in its ring to rinse the taste of vomit out. She can handle one gulp of orange juice, after all this.
She leaves the stall and stands in front of the mirror, listening to the water in the toilet run. She looks at herself. Her cheekbones swell out from under her eyes. The line of her neck muscles sweep down to meet her sharpened collarbones that stretch to thin, bulbous shoulders. She pats at brown curly hair, smoothing the side part. She combs her fingers through the bangs that hide her too-large forehead. Reaching in her purse, she withdraws a tube of lipstick. She pouts and begins smearing thick red lines onto her lips. When she’s done painting her mouth, she leans back to make a few puckering kisses and wink at herself. She feels good today. She looks good today. The thin girl kisses the center of the mirror, the glass cold on her lips.
Then they were in an elevator bound skyward.
“What floor, please?” said the elevator man.
“Any floor,” said Mr. In.
“Top floor,” said Mr. Out.
“This is the top floor,” said the elevator man.
“Have another floor put on,” said Mr. Out.
“Higher,” said Mr. In.
“Heaven,” said Mr. Out.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, May Day
I know I have a meager number of followers, and for that I am both thankful and humbled, as well as extremely proud of myself. I want you guys to know that I am very grateful to have the support of a readership, even if it is small. Every person counts when all you want is your words to be read. But here’s something different. I thought I might share some other cool blogs I’ve found over the past few days that are not just entertaining reads, but educational and highly involved in social issues I find affecting my life every day as a woman who suffers through a bad body image, low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and a life of depression. And… something else on that.
How to Own A Body — My friend, Emily Rudofsky (If you’re an experienced reader here, you know I pimp her out all the time, because she’s, well, utterly fantastic) has started a new blog recently that’s taking on the noble and neat task of educating people on what I’ll generalize as “body issues”. These incredibly poignant articles come from the voice of a woman who feels othered by the beauty and advertising industry alongside the general demands of society, and she’s got some emotionally and intellectually pressing things to say about that. She’s also working to address what it’s like to have mental illness and mood disorders in this “perky-ass world” (which is something I suffer from, as well) and she works to raise awareness that depression is a real thing (like diabetes or cancer, and not just something that the afflicted need to just “work harder” to get past) which is something that lingers so very close to my heart. Be a part of something awesome, read her stuff.
Ladybud — News and Editorials, Culture, Health and Beauty, Science, and reactionary journalism to just about everything else you can think of. (My personal favorite so far is Fuck Diets) She’s got quite a mouth on her, and an avid support for Marijuana law reform, so it’s generally NSFW, but she’s a smart lady writing some smart things. So I totally promise it’s worth it.
Guerrilla Graffiti Magazine — My friend Brice Maiurro (find his equally amazing poetry blog at Flashlight City Blues) invited me and some others to contribute to this online magazine he started featuring poetry, alt lit, fiction, art, movies, music, reviews, and even a few regular columns like Take It Or Leave It (an advice column) or The Listmaker by Kessa Montez. Check it out! Updates often! Full of Exquisite!
And last but not least, I recently read this article from DIY Couturier, 21 Tips to Keep Your Shit Together When You’re Depressed which was a response to someone else writing a list entitled “21 habits of happy people”. Her response is an amazing list that helped me, and countless others I’m sure, realize that it’s not their fault their depression won’t simply vanish if they try hard enough to think positively.
Now for a touch of the personal. Over the last ten to twelve years, I’ve been chronically depressed. I was legitimately diagnosed, and I spent years in and out of different therapists’ offices. The therapists I’ve had were sympathetic shoulders, and they listened well as I talked a lot. Depression medications were suggested, and for a very small amount of time I was prescribed Welbutrin (that I was terrible at taking because I was fourteen years old and I had to take three doses a day at the same time). Shortly thereafter, I began to develop severe anxiety problems, at first over seemingly nothing. I would have crippling panic attacks that left me sobbing and terrified at random times and for random reasons. I can’t honestly say whether this was a development of my shaky attempts to treat my depression with Welbutrin. It changes the chemistry in your brain, and I never did it quite right by taking them when I was supposed to or quitting them the way I was supposed to (weaning off, so to speak). I know now that anxiety tends to come hand in hand with depression often and since I’ll never know the answer, I try not to think about it. But the fact remained, I was depressed still, and now I had anxiety problems to boot.
Over time, I saw myself “quitting” therapist after therapist. They never helped me, and I was constantly lost when it came to this idea of “depression”. Titles and concepts like “mood disorder”, “depressive rumination” and “ruminative cycle”, “cognitive behavior therapy”, “group therapy”, they’ve been foreign to me for most of my whole life. I would get this idea from society around me, my family, and my friends, that depression was something you had to “think yourself out of it”. I’ve resisted drugs for a long time because I prescribed to this notion instead. I wanted to be strong enough to think differently. After eight or more years of this thought process, I am still depressed. I am downright woeful. My moods make my life almost impossible. So many things bring me so far down. Hopeless is a constant backdrop for my life. I punish myself constantly because I’m not good enough. I’m isolated, and deep down inside, I think I know this is because I’m unfriendly, I’m not smart, or I never do anything right: people don’t want to be around me because I’m not good enough to be around. I take everything personally, I feel like everything is my fault. But I desperately want to be loved and accepted. I desperately want to be a part of things, too. So, I’ve been reading stuff about me. The above blogs are a part of that. I also found this article from the New York Times (while I didn’t walk away from this with any confidence at all that my depression had upsides, it helped reinforce the idea that people take this seriously as a disease somewhere). I’ve been talking to someone who’s gone through my struggle, who’s learned recovery is an option, and has sought out the tools to get her there. And I’ve decided I need to get help. I need real help, not someone to just listen. I can talk forever, but it doesn’t solve anything. I wake up the next day with all the rumination and pity and self-loathing still intact, and my outside problems are still functional and very real. My reactions to things that occur around me are broken, and I need to fix them. Talking to someone about how much life sucks doesn’t help. Talking to someone about how hard things are doesn’t help. I don’t need confirmation, I don’t need sympathy. Trust me, I’m already very good at knowing how much things suck, and I’m very good at feeling sorry for myself.
I face a weird process, I guess. I need to find a different therapist than the ones I’ve been seeing, and I need to do research myself to figure out what options are out there. It upsets me though, that despite my long-term involvement in the psychology system, I still slipped through the cracks. I never really found real help, I was never even offered any other options. And now it has to be up to me do work hard to figure out where I can ever start. Through my reading, I’m coming to realize that people don’t think depression is serious, and these realizations are putting words to my own experience. Being told that it’s only a mood that you can “shake yourself out of” and if you’re sad it’s because you’re not doing something right in your day-to-day living habits, these are things I’ve been told by so many well-meaning people. I can’t stress enough that this is the wrong approach to depression. I already feel like I’m not doing anything right, so all this concept does is worsen my frustration with myself. I definitely already feel like there’s something wrong with me because I can’t just be happy like you do, so if I try to do the things you do to be happy and they fail, it makes me feel so much worse. But also, through my reading, I’ve found that there are people who feel like me. And it’s basically us against everyone else, because so many people address depression with same well-meaning misinformation. Well, it could be argued that when you have diabetes, you should try harder to process sugar. Oh, wait. Is that not right?
Last night I had a conversation with the person I loved who struggles every day with my low self-esteem and reactionary sadness, and I admitted I needed help. But admitting to him that I was sick, that I had a disorder that I couldn’t control, and that I had learned that simply thinking differently or acting differently wasn’t going to help felt like an excuse even to me. It immediately showed me just how deep this goes, this stigma against depression, and how much harder it makes getting help. The truth is, we have to stop thinking about depression as something that people can control by themselves. Those people tend to die before they figure it out. Often by their own hands. Society has to stop stigmatizing. We have to stop putting forward that it’s a personal accountability issue and not something that that person struggles with every minute of their whole life. We have to make it so that it doesn’t feel like a personal failing to admit that we’re hurt, we’re sad, and we need help getting past it. There has to be a better way to make options known and easy to access, so people don’t feel like they have to either learn to choose to be happy (which doesn’t work, I’m sorry) or stay unhappy and isolated forever.
Society is mean, though, so for now, I’ll just figure this out as best I can. Here goes. The first conversation I get to look forward to is with my mom. She’s watched me give up on every therapist, and I can only imagine that her interpretation of this is that I don’t take therapy seriously, or that I can quit once my latest phase in sadness ends, and that I’m turning to therapy as an easy way out of each sad phase. It’s going to be hard to be honest about this, but I can only hope she’ll believe me once I am. Because it’ll only be that much harder if she doesn’t, and not only because she handles my insurance, if you know what I mean.
I’m sorry. I know I’ve never posted anything like this before, but Emily suggested that I try my hand at my own blogging. Based on… what happens next, we’ll see if it ever happens again. I can’t take being ignored or completely denied any notice at all, I’d definitely rather keep it to myself. So if you have things to say about this, please, do. I welcome any and all feedback, as always.
I worked hard enough to get smears
on my glasses, accented by
the polka dots of differing sizes
from dried saline spots
splashed on the glass from wet eyelashes
as I think loneliness about
a fearful, empty future
I cannot determine
these blur marks from the steam
of hot tea in tiny metal cups
that burn my fingers because I forget
to test their temperature
for long enough before
committing to the weight in my hand.
I’m sure my line breaks are nonsense, I’m sure it’s abstract, cluttered by language, or pointless, I’m sure it’s not good, but this poem is how I feel right now, an observation of a moment in my own skin. In four, short weeks, I will graduate with my BA from Emerson College. I am an anxious mess because I feel like I have very little to show for it, and even less coming next.
“Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” – Goodbye To All That
From Joan Didion’s book of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
A good friend of mine, Emily Rudofsky, is writing a poem a day for thirty days for Tupelo Press, alongside other poets for the 30/30 Project. She’s a great writer, and this is one of my favorites from her for this project. Please check out the 30/30 Project, and please donate to a great cause. It’s a better marathon concept than the real typical marathon concept, and far more worth your money. Also, check out Emily’s blog, because she’s got great poetry.
He Worships The Academic / by Emily Rudofsky
(from a prompt by Ian Thal)
He worships the academic;
Clears her empty plate from her desk.
After breakfast he builds bookshelves,
Fills them with what he can’t understand.
Waits, passive, on the quilt,
And begs her to read,
Carved in fragrant pine,
The note: For my heroine,
I am addicted to you.
She gives him a dictionary,
Flags the word goodbye.
**This is a list story. That is, a list that also tells a story. My main aim was characterization, and I do hope you find a character amongst these people and places.**
My own hand. Fingers at the bus stop. In the stall at St. Rosemary’s. With my mouth at Shirley’s party. In a twin bed in my parents’ basement. Against a car parked on the shoulder of the Scenic Highway at night. On the seat of an overweight dad’s easy chair. On the hood of a ’77 Trans Am. While tripping on acid. In the backyard. With my parents in the room beside mine. In a convenience store bathroom. My dentist. With people watching. A doctor. The best man at my sister’s wedding. In a queen-size bed in my own apartment. In the shower. A lawyer.
Two months after we met. Before the party. The landscaper. At the aquarium. In his apartment. Every day for six weeks straight. Before cooking dinner. After fighting. In front of the big, sliding glass door. With the cat watching. My fiancé before the wedding. My true love.
After our wedding. Up against the raw-wood railing that guarded the hole cut for basement stairs that hadn’t been built yet. On the unfinished counter in our kitchen. In a Cancun snorkeling cave. The first time without birth control. In the hot tub. Standing up in the hot tub. Under the stars. Under the sun. Under the Christmas tree. On the floor next to the crib. At the Christmas party. In the kitchen. Pushed against the fridge. On our oldest daughter’s bed. In Uncle Taylor’s second floor bathroom. In the garage during Thanksgiving dinner. With some sex toys. Only after he takes Viagra. Before calling an ambulance. At the hospital. While the nurses looked away. A man with cancer. My soul mate. In my dreams. My own hand.
Nicolable 