Inside the cocoon, there’s no record of time. Outside, months pass. My hair grows past my shoulders again and I dye it from a box in my tiny bathroom, staining the sink with auburn streaks.
Repair is brutal and boring. People rarely talk about how boring it is. I go on stupid little walks. I lie on the floor. I illegally stream entire seasons of 90 Day Fiancé. I cry in the rain, I cry in the street, I cry in my bed. I buy underwear I can’t afford, burgundy lace and black gossamer spun through with gold. I hang an advert torn from a magazine on the wall above my desk, cartoonish text reading: NEWS - IT WON’T BE LIKE THIS FOREVER.
And then, at last, I feel the fragments of myself knitting slowly back together, stitches stretching clumsily over flesh. Rough twine threads, tissue of fragile optimism. I grasp onto the strings and follow them down into the dark, all the way back to the beginning.
As someone with a flair for the dramatic, I always expected my dissolution would be a little more dazzling, or at least distinctly memorable. A woman as an exploding bomb, a wrecking ball, a tower block sinking into smashed glass and concrete and smoke. More screaming and wailing, more fists shaking ragged at the sky, more cliché expressions of selfhood destroyed. In reality, it was a quiet crumbling.
Even now it’s hard to tell if I truly disliked myself all along, or if I just didn’t know myself well enough to understand there was something worth liking. I was embarrassed by my existence, by failings and weaknesses both real and perceived. The gulf between how others experienced me and how I experienced myself stretched wider until it began to tear. The process was slow until it wasn’t; six months and a series of devastations later, whatever flimsy core I’d had to start with had been entirely wiped out. By the time I hit the ground, the problem was no longer that I couldn’t recognise myself in the mirror. It was that I never had.
It’s hard to unpick the knot when self-loathing manifests itself in so many endless, excruciating ways. Sometimes it’s drinking too much, or sleeping too little, or committing to a brutal exercise regime under the guise of wellness. Often it’s trying to be very thin, wanting to make your body smaller in the way you want to make everything about yourself smaller, afraid of taking up too much space in the world, revealing the grotesque nakedness of your needs. Sometimes you pursue people who can’t love you. Sometimes it’s the quiet, desperate attempt to accept a mediocre life, a mediocre relationship, a mediocre existence rather than risk the pursuit of something more. Sometimes, the pleasure of denying yourself something seems greater than the pleasure of having it at all.
It’s so much easier to write about pain than it is to write about peace. To write about the way I’d have weeks of calm and then the ache would arrive suddenly with an almost brutal violence that had me sobbing in the bath, fingers clawing at the tiled walls. The way I’d read through lists of self-destruction methods from the 1880s and try to identify what this feeling was most similar to - head through a pane of glass; head through an iron railing; explosion of a hand grenade; poisoned with Paris green.
Sometimes I think I romanticise the things that were bad because that way I get to keep them. I have to make the suffering into a noble thing, some tortured artist on a journey to self-actualisation. It’s much harder to accept that it didn’t need to be so hard at all. It’s so bittersweet to look back on your former selves with affection rather than embarrassment; to see that ragged self, that skinless girl scratching down the door, and understand what a colossal waste of time it was trying to be anyone else. The absolute tragedy of it, all the heartbreak flooding in, all those years of cruelty directed inwards. I did not think I would ever be able to find myself lovable unless there was some external proof of it; some barometer of taste I was excluded from, some jury coming to a grand and definitive decision. But how could I expect to be known when I did not know myself? How could I expect to be seen when I did not see myself?
All this time I was so desperate to be saved by something, by someone. I wanted a hand to pluck me out of my existence and drop me into another one, yet at the same time my greatest fear was that I would wake up one day in a life that didn’t fit. I was afraid I’d fall in love and lose my mind, because I didn’t know any other way to do it, and I’d end up somewhere downriver in a place I’d never wanted to be but it would be too late and too hard to get out. And so I would have to continue in that ill-fitting life, live with that constant, itching discomfort, and know that another existence had existed out there for me if I had been bold enough or brave enough or even naive enough to go looking for it.
I tried leaving. I tried coming back. I tried hiding myself in my work, until my work became a reminder of all the things I was running from. Eventually I ran out of options. All there was left to do was dig, and write, and dig, and write, and dig and dig and dig, all the way into the black hole.
After Theseus killed the minotaur, he followed the thread back out of the labyrinth and sailed away into a new life. Over time, every part of the ship was replaced, rotting planks pulled out for fresh timber, until nothing remained of the original structure but the idea itself. Ghost ship haunting the harbour, hidden inside the shell of something new. If you replace all the pieces, is it still the same ship?
If I burn to the ground and build a new self from the rubble, who do I become?
I wanted this to be one of those clever essays where I weave in an anecdote, or a story from my life, and that way the real message flows along just under the surface until, together, we reach a meaningful conclusion. I can’t give you that - there are whole portions of the last year I blocked out entirely. The first time I went back to London after October I don’t remember a single thing. For months all I have are fragments. Even my diary is just endless entries of numbness, punctuated with splashes of pain. Instead I’m just saying it all out loud.
I’m practicing being known, and being unashamed to be known. I text my friends that I’ve been walking around the outside of the Pantheon crying at night and we talk about the way old hurts come up in your body like crystals, and feeling like a raw egg, and being so afraid all the time of something you can’t quite grasp. I’m also happier than I’ve ever been. I still can’t quite reconcile the two. I don’t know if some people are just born with a kind of melancholy in them, a streak of yearning that turns the colours up to full brightness.
I come across a comment online and it rolls around in my skull like a pinball, bouncing off the walls, before dropping into my gut. I can’t stop thinking about it. It makes me ache.
you may have disappointed god, but I for one could not be prouder.
I was raised in the shadow of dour Scottish Presbyterianism, a sect so repressed it makes Martin Luther look positively sensual. My understanding of core tenants largely involved us being inherently, horribly sinful, and the absolute requirement to never get above yourself. There was a lot of darkness, too. I tried to exist between chaos and constraint, an impossible purgatory. I was so full of desire and need and naked want and so terrified of what might happen if I ever unleashed it. An arrow of pure longing, aimed directly at the universe.
you may have disappointed god, but I for one could not be prouder.
Who is god? What is god? Is it the person I was trying to be, the person I was supposed to be? I failed, I failed, i failed so many times and now I’m in another world on the other side of that failure. I just wanted a hand to hold in the dark. I used to think it was so tragic, this idea of holding my own hand while I fell asleep. Now I think it’s soft and tender and lovely. I hold my own hand, I come home to myself, I take care. I built myself a beautiful life. I still want someone to share it with, but I don’t mind if it’s all mine for a bit longer.
You never asked for forgiveness but I forgive you anyway. How can you blame the flame when the house was already so flimsy? Most of all I forgive myself. Even at my worst, I was always trying to be better. I never wanted to be a god. I just wanted to be myself. I just wanted to be down in the dirt with her, holding her hand. I’ll never be a holy man but I can be the alter, the water, and everything in between.
There was a time in my life when if you’d asked me for my idealised, impossible obituary, it would probably have read: her arms were very thin, and she never said the wrong thing. Now I want it to say: she lived explicitly. She hated lots of things, but she loved so many more. She always made space. She talked about death all the time but she was very, very alive.
I’m so glad I’m alive. I hope I get so many more turns around the sun.
For a while, I thought I’d put myself back together all wrong. I’m still finding my footing, steps tender and hesitant. I’m not brave enough yet to put my full weight down, to test the ground beneath me. I’m afraid of tempting fate. How can one person deserve this much love, this much luck? I’ve never known more peace than pain. I’m still not sure where to put it.
Life is a constant cycle of growing pains and shedding skins. I don’t know if it will ever get any easier, or if I will have to be born again every season, soft-shelled and blinking. But something about this spring reminds me of another long ago, the imprint of a memory I’ve run towards ever since. Recently the air’s turned soft as I walk home, and the sunlight winks on the river and the world whispers, how about another go? This time, I made you a universe you don’t have to leave. Again, again, again, please. The quiet murmuring of another monumental shift, that feeling in a car at night driving through the city, and it’s Paris or it’s London or it’s New York, and there’s something waiting for you across the bridge, lights glimmering in the distance. Another portal is opening, a door to another world. All I have to do is step through it.
soundtrack: true blue - boygenius