Glass Goddess

When your wine glass is

Too heavy;

Full of things

You shouldn’t say

And moments you’re already sorry for.

Stumbling through life

With stars on cheeks

And half-closed eyes,

You sip to the future.

You drink to the past.

You gulp to the present.

Your glass makes you 

A goddess and all it’s weight

Can’t keep you grounded.

Stained Crimson

We all suffer

But everybody bleeds at a different pace;

Some have cauterized their wounds

And some are bleeding out.

The difference between you and I is

You have opened your veins

With the hope of ending the suffering

As I’ve been cleanching my wrists for years

Dying to get better.

And we are both in so much pain

But you glorify your misfortune and pray for  life to hurt you

So that you can have more reasons

To suffer, so you can justify cutting deeper.

And while some of us want to be whole,

Some of us want to be alright again,

You get off from the pain

Because suffering is your only companion.

It is people like you who never really bleed out,

Only bleed on

And stain the rest of us crimson.

Hubris Has Nothing to Do With It

I think we need to stop blaming women for holding their bodies to standards our society and culture actively glorify. I read an article in high school, “Too ‘Close to the Bone’: The Historical Context for Women’s Obsession with Slenderness” by Roberta Seid and at the time, it spoke to me and riled me up as a fellow feminist and active believer that I was allowed to be any weight that I wanted. She said “If avoiding fatness and possible disease is the main preoccupation of our lives, then what are we living for?” And this made so much sense to me then.

Now I have a different perspective on this article. While I know Seid was fighting for the woman against the shaming of fat, she was also shaming the woman for her desire to be thin. I don’t believe this is fair. She said, “Surely this is the worst form of hubris- to despise our bodies because they are not perfect.” But she’s so wrong. Despising our bodies has nothing to do with our pride, but our self-worth. Our bodies are temples and women worship in different ways.

I think after struggling with disordered thoughts for so long I was willing to believe I was to blame for wanting to lose weight and look different. It was my fault that I looked the way I looked, it was my fault that I didn’t like what I saw. But this is also wrong. The mind works in flashes and we flutter to keep up; those plagued with body image issues know all too well the hell of what goes on in the mind when these things are happening to the body. If this is more than a physical battle, why are we going to war with society instead of addressing the mental health of our women first?
Continue reading “Hubris Has Nothing to Do With It” →

An Ongoing Journey With a Romanticized Addiction

“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.”

-Mark Twain

I miss waking up early, as the sun was shaking the world from it’s cold sleep; sneaking out to the garage with my pack of smokes and a notebook. The solitude, the absolute beauty of sitting alone with my thoughts and a cigarette. The smoke filling me up and reminding me I was allowed to be hurt enough to consume it. It is hard to remember smoking any other way; it sits on my heart waving it’s unbridled romanticism of depression. It told me all the time I was broken but it made me feel beautiful for it. And maybe this is why I have relapsed over and over again despite the multitude of rewards of quitting- because the depression has never left but smoking made me more comfortable with it.

I think I had my first cigarette when I was sixteen; I heard smoking them could make you lose weight. At the time I was in my first serious relationship and I was with a man who would literally tell me he did not like the way I looked or the clothes I wore- embarrassing, of course, but I had long struggled with my self-image beforehand and this only further perpetuated my hatred of the way I looked. I thought a lot of my problems, maybe even all of them, could be solved by being thinner. I desperately wanted to be skinny because in my eyes, this was the key to being worthy and being beautiful. I had to have an older friend buy them for me of course and in the beginning I did not like them; I could tell they interfered with my anti-depressants, often making me nauseous and sometimes sick to my stomach. Not to mention I had to keep it a secret from my whole family, who were quite conservative and surely disapproving of that habit, and all of my teachers at school. Smoking was a physical thing I could do to change my identity when I was unable to reconcile the way my body looked with who I thought I was.

Needless to say, the relationship didn’t work out. But smoking did. In the years following I began to hang out with an older crowd and discovered how likable and funny people found me when I drank. So I drank a lot. The drinking was of course accompanied by many cigarettes and it became hard to distinguish between what was bad for me and what would make me feel better- turns out the two aren’t mutually exclusive. By eighteen I was smoking close to a pack a day and my depression was completely out of control. I remember being gone from home for several days, drinking and then being late to school and then working until eleven and then repeating it all over again, until I would completely crash and come home and climb into my mother’s bed and cry and tell her I wanted to drop out of high school. I was a mess and my self-medication was also abuse. But the cigarettes leveled me out. Difficult day? Better have a cigarette. Need to skip a meal? Better have a cigarette. They were an immediate fix to a problem with no solution. They kept me alive just long enough to keep hurting myself. Their existence in my life was a paradox.

I quit many times, sometimes with several months under my belt before relapsing. I would get so fed up with the smell, the tick of cravings, the disdain from the people I loved who knew it wasn’t good for me. But I always went back, because I was always still sick. And smoking offered me some solace, some affirmation that I was bad enough to warrant needing something so harmful- and that was important; it wasn’t scars on my arms but it gave me the same release. It was self-harm but under a guise that didn’t warrant questioning and didn’t demand an explanation.

I would have lots of relapse dreams; some of the most realistic dreams I’ve ever had. There was always guilt there, even (maybe especially) after I’d woken up, because it was a desire I still had and a fight I was still fighting. I think that was part of relapsing too, knowing it was inevitable and not wanting or being able to fight it anymore. Quitting was rewriting my identity and through these dreams I glimpsed a different version of myself, someone I longed to be. But relapsing rewrites your identity too.

It wasn’t until my current partner showed great disdain for it that my smoking became a serious wedge in a relationship. I had many friends and family who strongly disapproved and tried multiple times to help me quit but no one had ever made me feel like I had to choose them over smoking. At the time I can tell you it frustrated me to my core- like I said, it was part of my identity and I was furious someone wanted me to change who I was for them. Smoking was a source of great tension for us and we had many arguments for several months. I even successfully quit for a time but it felt forced and made relapsing easy; it wasn’t what I’d wanted.

Then a miraculous thing happened; I got pregnant. I was overjoyed and so was my partner. I quit that day and found it was much easier to refrain from smoking when I knew that disguised self-harm would also harm my child. Pregnancy was difficult because being healthy was difficult but not smoking came naturally. At one point I found an old purse and rummaging through the pockets, found an empty pack of cigarettes. I was horrified; I had actually forgotten I had ever been that person! It was easy to feel as if my addiction was years behind me; buried far beneath the surface. I even developed a disdain for the habit as well as the people who practiced it, forgetting just months separated me from the same thing.

But postpartum everything changed again; that intense longing for a cold morning spent wrapped in a blanket with a cigarette resurfaced. I ached to be that person again- someone with the ability to hurt themselves that way. It was a beautiful picture in my mind and I felt strongly it would help me cope with the intense feelings of loneliness and helplessness I was experiencing. Some battles never end.

Writing Prompt: What Scares You The Most

I can recall a specific day working at Starbucks- my father appeared, out of the blue, and when I saw his face it was like my stomach dropped all the way to my feet. I could feel my face flush, could see my coworkers eyeing me, but I didn’t know how to swallow the knot in my throat. My father and I had even been talking recently and things seemed like they were progressing in our relationship but it was still there, under all of the hard work and forgiveness: the conditioned fear.

I have these misguided feelings (perpetuated my entire childhood by the reinforced idea that things were okay; things were normal; we could manage) that what I went through growing up was not justifiably traumatic. I have known others who had it much worse and in a very awful sense, that phrase has become a mantra in my life. But here is the truth: a tiny voice inside of me, trembling but sure, has always told me a fact I have no scientific evidence of- It’s wrong and you know it. So many times in my life, especially my youth, I heard something or saw something that someone older or more qualified than me could explain, could justify. I have outgrown the need to listen to these voices above the fire in my gut.

You see, I saw my father do terrible things. Sometimes I wish I had never seen them and yet I am softer and harder for it. I like to think (and maybe I have to, as a defense mechanism) that it made me stronger.

I have so many fragmented memories, like pieces of glass. All I ever want is to look into them at myself but they require the sacrifice of cutting open old scars. Some of the things my sisters tell me I simply cannot remember; other things I can recall in grossly vivid detail. I wish I could watch it like a movie; see myself and see things play out but with the knowledge we wouldn’t be with him forever.

When my sisters, mother, and I lived at the shelter we each had to attend weekly therapy sessions with a woman named Ellen. I really liked her; she was round and jolly but had this way of making you feel like you had been through something worthy of talking about. She really listened. I remember during one of our sessions I had started describing the disparity between how my father treated Amy, the oldest, and Emily, the second oldest. It was something that even now, a decade later, I desperately want to understand. It was like he pitted them against each other for his own entertainment; like he was keeping them forever against each other so that they could never be completely and truly against him. As I was describing this to Ellen, she got a funny look on her face that even then I could read as wisdom. She asked me where did Melissa (the youngest) fit into all of this? I was quick to answer, Melissa was the baby. She could do no wrong in anyone’s eyes; my father probably loved her most of all. And then she did that thing that doctors and psychiatrists and therapists probably long to do their entire careers: she opened up my fucking eyes. “And what about you, Mary?” she said. “Where does that leave you?” And it was in that moment I realized I had been an outsider, watching these things happen to my family without ever really feeling like I was part of it, like maybe I shouldn’t be upset because I wasn’t necessarily loved or hated by my father. And I remember looking at her face, that face that was trying to help me get to the right conclusions, and I started to cry. I knew it then; my place in the abuse that happened to my family was the exterior of a shell; I was the watcher, never the direct victim.

It was easy to feel like you had the power to stand up to him when he was not in your face. We would all rally together and hype each other up; fantasize about all the things we would say to him. But God, the moment he was in front of you, it was like your throat closed up and you couldn’t breathe, and the room got too warm and you were vulnerable, so completely vulnerable. Amy was really the only one who could stand up to him, and I think this is part of the reason all of my sisters and even my mother have this quiet, devoted respect for her.

I don’t remember Spot. I have heard though that Amy was supposed to be watching me outside (I was four or younger at the time) and Spot bit my heels so I got upset and my father took Amy and held her over the fence with his hands on her neck because there was a large dog in the neighbor’s yard that she was terrified of. I was told he died of worms but only just recently found out my dad clipped his nails to the quick and he bled out in a box in the garage; howling all night, scratching the sides of his prison- quickening his death.

I do remember my father bringing home Joey, a German Sheppard puppy and he was so cute and warm and I loved him and he peed on newspapers in the house for a while. I remember my father putting Joey in a barred cage, sticking sharp sticks in on all the sides, preventing Joey from moving unless he wanted to be stabbed. I remember watching it, on the top of the deck, my mother pleading with him, and I feel her protection inside the memory (she may have told me to close my eyes or go back inside the house). I remember seeing my father punch Joey square in the face, I can still hear his cry. I can still feel the horror of my heart shattering with the realization that not only could people be this evil, but my father, my daddy, was this man. My mother had shouted for him to stop, ran to him, and he had pushed her. I remember so clearly he had looked at my sisters and I crying and said “It’s just an animal.” I remember when things got bad my mother took him away to my uncle’s house so he didn’t have to be abused. But she brought him back when things temporarily got better; and then Joey just started running away. He ran away all of the time. None of us could blame him. And then one day, he ran away and my father threatened to beat the living daylights out of him when we found him and I stayed up all night that night praying that Joey would get far enough away that my father would never find him. And he must have, because he never came home.

Then there was Lucy Mae and my father said she “slid off” the deck in the backyard and fell off and broke her neck. She was already buried when Melissa and I got off the school bus that day and my mother had to explain there was an “accident.” I wonder how many facts about my childhood were not the truth and I wonder if I could handle knowing.

So much of this I have struggled to get out, not only emotionally because of the trauma, but also mentally, trying to figure out what to tell people and how to say it. The hardest part is, I forgave him for all of these things because he is a sick, sad, lonely man but I have to say, I am still afraid of him. He still scares me more than anything else.

Past

Postcard I never sent
Because of words I never meant
To write, for eyes to see;
No one to know but me.

Long nights I never spent
Better for what you thought you'd meant
To say, but couldn't do,
No one to know but you.

Now herein lies my discontent,
The best hours of our lives are spent
On a love we couldn't keep or last;
The best of us is in the past.

Looking for Perforation

Lines like lacquered bridges binding
Page to edge; the courage it takes
To break from our form.

When we are all pieces 
With a place where we crack
The pawn and queen become equally worn.

To ask for self-definition
But weep when we're broken
Is the ultimate lie that we tell-

For if what we really wanted
Was to learn of ourselves,
We'd loosen our limbs at the fell.