what goes around goes around (or: what to write when you want to dip your toe into writing again after 3 months of block.)
On screen there is a small boy, huffing in and out, in and out. He is ‘small’ in the sense that he is young, but not ‘small’ in terms of his mass: ungainly body rising and falling underneath a size of t-shirt that should be far too large for a child of 7.
The camera zooms in to this boy’s face, flushed with red. Off-screen, a voice:
“Do it.”
The boy tries again, adapting a pose for a standard push-up, but his arms begin to shake.
“Fucking do it,” the voice repeats. “You can’t even get 10. Useless.”
The boy’s face cracks and he begins to sob, now, tears and snot streaming down his rotund face. He’s given up all pretence of strength, curling into the fetal position as he does.
“Get up,” the voice repeats. “Get up.”
Then: “You’re fat. You’re disgusting.”
-
I have returned to this after a couple years, though I’m not sure why.
Or, that’s a lie. I do know why: I had an experience I’m trying to unpack, and apparently this is how I like to unpack. Welcome.
I am standing on the dance floor, some hours into an acid-trip that started off as fun and exciting and then became pretty horrible as colours melt and swirl and darkness descends around me. My body is spasming to the music without reason, keeping up appearances relatively effectively, but inside I’ve gone deep. Bouncing around my head, lit up in neon, is a message that Co-Star delivered to me through a push notification the day before:
IT’S HARD TO MOVE PAST FOUNDATIONAL TRAUMA, BUT YOU’VE GOT TO DO THE WORK REGARDLESS.
Hanging onto this message are all of these events that shaped me, apparently, all of this shit that happened ten, twenty, twenty-five years ago that continues to effect the ways I relate to people and the way I relate to myself. One by one, I open each event and inspect it, pulling apart what parts I can remember and trying not to fabricate anything for myself. One by one I relive each event and with it, the pain I felt, the pain I still feel, the pain I keep using against myself. The big message that follows this is:
NONE OF THIS MATTERS, DUH.
Except that it really seems like it does.
-
In Season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy gets a sister: Dawn.
The season starts off with Dawn already there. She’s not introduced, she’s not given much (any) of a back-story, and the audience is left to figure out this mystery. As the season progresses, we discover that Dawn is actually a mystical being placed under Buffy’s care, and that everyone’s memories – including Dawn’s own – have been altered so that they believe she’s always been there.
This is a fear that grows within me as I dance. I’ve been here forever, I think, trapped in some techno purgatory. Everything I think I remember is a fiction, everything I think I am good at is fiction: but then so too is everything I hate about myself. It’s all just fiction.
-
When I was 12, I sold my soul to Satan for the chance to be skinny.
This was, of course, when I still had a distinct and fearful belief in the devil (and in god Himself). As such, this act spoke tomes about my level of self-loathing and desire for, if not a sexy body, at least a normal one. I didn’t really know much about Satanism as a concept or actuality, and this was both before our house had an internet connection and before I was old enough to bike down to the local library (the Glen Eira library, that held a bi-monthly Torah reading and probably had no concerns (or books) about my fantasy devil: a six foot tall Lothario with red skin, firey eyes, a six pack, horns and goat legs.) All of this meant that, whilst I knew conceptually that one could offer one’s soul to Satan in exchange for goods and/or services, I didn’t really know how one would go about making this transaction. I only knew what I’d seen on TV: predominantly Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess and a couple of rambunctious children’s shows.
One afternoon, left home alone during school holidays, I sneak outside. Heart racing, I pull the old bonfire drum out from the shed. My father had, about a year earlier, found the inside of a washing machine by the side of the road and, sensing it might be useful for something, had returned with a trailer to pick it up and later mount it on top of a metal base. I drag this sacrificial fire drum to a small brick altar in front of my family’s rotting basketball headboard and leave it dead centre like a rusty bullseye. Then, I rip up a collection of Mum’s old magazines and Dad’s newspapers, rolling them up as we learnt to in Scouts so that they’d burn longer and hold more oxygen. I head inside to retrieve the matches and a sharpie. I pause, my hands electric and hovering, felt tip to paper. I write in thick black ink, my heart spasming from the excitement and terror of it all:
“SOUL.”
I head outside, hands still trembling and clutching the piece of paper warily, placing it on the ripped up newspaper. I wait for perhaps five minutes, silently daring myself to do the deed. Then – my brain suddenly bored with this game, somehow knowing that either way I’m going to go ahead with it so I may as well Just Do It – in one smooth movement I strike a match and drop it, lit, into the centre of the paper. I watch as the paper curls and blackens, its edges quickly disappearing with neon orange and blood red vibrancy. I accidentally inhale a ream of black smoke, and back off, coughing and spluttering. I am quietly disappointed that Satan himself hadn’t appeared in a puff of colour and smoke like the guest star demon of the week on Charmed.
The next morning I am less quietly displeased that I still remain overweight. Like a butterball Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, I stand naked in front of the mirror and pull, heaving, at my fat.
GO AWAY, I think, my eyes narrowing to hateful squints. YOU AREN’T WELCOME HERE. The thought of diet and exercise, at this point, doesn’t seem like a viable option (or else otherwise seems like way too much work).
Later that day we’re on a family trip to Southland Shopping Centre, and I am even more infuriated that the automatic doors unseal as I step before them, sliding quietly and coolly open. When Bart on The Simpsons sold his soul, the doors didn’t recognise that he was there. So it mustn’t have worked.
That’s it, I think. It mustn’t have worked. I must still be ensouled.
Or, maybe it did work, but the souls of fat people are worth less.
-
All of these things happened, and countless more, and in a sense I carry them with me but in another I don’t: I’m not actively traumatised by them, every moment of every day, but they have taught me to expect the worst out of situations (and maybe myself). What’s the point in relating them, then? I suppose I hope that by recounting them in my memory, my self, I’ll come to terms with them. And largely, I think this is true: I exorcise these things by running over them, somehow mythologizing them.
In Trauma and Recovery, author Judith Herman outlines a form of post-traumatic action whereby the victim obsessively repeats the inciting traumatic incident in order to discover more information, anything that might let them comprehend what has happened to them. First coined by Freud, this action is called the “repetition compulsion.” This compulsion may involve the victim of the trauma play-acting the inciting circumstances, recognising supposed patterns in the world that lead them to believe the incident is about to occur again, or obsessively writing out the facts of the incident as they attempt to bring some kind of sense back to their life. It is an almost unavoidable fact of trauma, Freud writes: it “[defies] any conscious intent, and [resists] change so adamantly” that it is regarded to be a type of death drive; a “death instinct” (Herman 1992, p. 30).
In Cruising Utopia, meanwhile, José Esteban Muñoz writes: "the eventual disappointment of hope is not a reason to forsake it as a critical thought process […] it is nonetheless essential”: for creativity, for connection, and for the future (2009, p. 10). So, is it enough to hope I’ll gain sudden confidence in myself, my body? I know that part of me – a big part of me – doesn’t rate bodies that much, anyway. Instead I rate empathy, intelligence, kindness – most of all, kindness. Abs don’t convince me to care – unless they’re my own abs (or lack thereof).
-
When Jeremy and I first started dating, his beauty hurt me: in the sense where my self-esteem was so cooked that I couldn’t imagine myself in the same world as him. We’d go on dates together, hang out, whatever, and a part of me would whisper: he’s going to leave you. He’s going to see you how you see you, how you really are, and then, he’s going to leave you. But he doesn’t.
The sex is good, but we have it with the lights off, at my insistence. He never questioned, but I’d imagine he found it odd. It became a ritual: our bodies against each other, enjoying the other, but only in the darkness of night where I can’t see my body, see his body, my imagined flaws and comparisons. His metabolism is far better than mine is, and so he eats whatever he wants, while I chug down diet shakes instead of meals and obsess over my weight and the topography of my body. While he never leaves me, he also never shakes me, tells me to eat a proper meal, and only occasionally tells me I’m beautiful. I should just know it, he thinks.
A few weeks of this and then, one day, he stays my hand: gently, pushing it away from the light switch.
“I want to see you properly,” he smiles, lifting my shirt over my head. There’s a moment of tension: my shirt half on, half off, my heart in my mouth, flesh exposed, waiting for his inevitable rejection.
Instead he stops and smiles, eyes scanning my body, hands snaking around my midriff, and lips kissing me.
Oh.
-
I can rationalise a lot of this with theory, or therapy, or with past experiences, but this all ignores the central fact: I’ve got work to do, and I need to do it. So what, is this a declaration, then? I solemnly swear to love myself more? (Honestly, sometimes I feel like Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls: “I could hear people getting bored with me, but I just couldn’t stop.”)
Muñoz says that hope is “the rejection of the here and now, and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility” (2009 p. 2). I, on a drug or in a particularly good mood, have previously been wholly in my own corner. I’ve looked at myself and gone: “fuck yeah, I look great today.”
It’s happened once, twice, many times before: so I know it can happen again. More than this, I know that, no matter how much validation I think I need, it doesn’t matter unless it comes from myself. But then, self-validation is often impossible. Is that a Catch-22? Maybe it’s a ‘fake it ‘till you make it’ thing. All I know is, it’s 2020, I don’t have the time for these feelings anymore.
All I know is, it’s 2020: I should just know.