Conformity is a performance art

dispatch #5

Sep 08, 2021

Hey all,

How are you doing out there? It’s been rough and I just want to state the obvious and say that every fucking person deserves access to convenient, affordable, competent, and compassionate reproductive healthcare (and you know, general healthcare). Having access to abortion and reproductive healthcare, even though my experience was complicated, saved my life. That’s an essay for another day but for now, I love you so much. Send the support, make the calls, talk to your friends, keep listening, keep going.

On the home front, the job search continues and let me tell you, there is nothing further from a balm for the ol’ ego than job hunting. I spent much of last week drowning in feelings of not-enoughness, fear, and scarcity. On the third day, when I was up in the middle of the night again, chest compressed with worry, I got really fed up. There is feeling your feelings and then there is wallowing. I really love wallowing. I’m GOOD at wallowing. But apparently that doesn’t make it *healthy.* So, I took this weekend to engage in some rituals around letting go, clearing space, taking gentle care of my body. It feels like tentative forward movement and a little bit of precious hope.

My next bonus essay for paid subscribers will be zooming to your inboxes next Wednesday. Be sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss it!

[Image Description: A close up of an angled branch covered in clusters of moss purple/pink flowers. Behind the tree and out of focus is a church with stained glass windows and the bluest sky.]

Just a little crush.

Once in a used bookshop, among the boxes of unsorted books, I came across a copy of Madame Bovary with a flower pressed between its pages. The flower, perhaps used as a bookmark, was a kind of morbid surprise given the subject matter. We love to press beautiful things until they become flat. As long as they’re still beautiful, we can forget they are dead. No longer a flower but a sacrifice to the memory of loveliness. Delicate, existing in a kind of stasis, four pages before Emma Bovary consumes arsenic. We know how this ends. The idea of something will always be more dazzling than the reality, except when you are in love.

People are usually the proudest of us when we are hurting ourselves the most. When we are working the longest hours, in the shiniest relationship, the smallest body, the biggest house. When we put ourselves together in such a way that all of the life is pressed out, but we still manage to approximate good behavior. We do so much for the fleeting approval of people who are trying just as hard as we are. We do it because everyone else does, as if at some point we made a sort of collective pact that we would pretend that life is effortless. We do it because it feels like there is no way out. You don’t want to be breathing hard before the gun has even gone off, do you? So we pretend. And the more we pretend, the more everyone else does, the harder we are to see.

I wish I had known, being bullied in grade school, that my tormentors were just as insecure as I was. It wouldn’t have changed things maybe, but I wonder what would have happened if we could have seen each other’s suffering. That we were all unruly, shifting, stinking bodies, terrified of a change we couldn’t control. Children, but not in the way we used to be. But there was no mirror of commonality that we could find back then and so we stayed on script.

I have been trying to flatten myself for decades. An experience more common, I think, than unique, I have sought control of my body, my words, my thoughts, the perception of me like it was my raison d'être. I am sure that at some point being in a body didn't feel like such a struggle. I am sure at some point a kind of peace existed, but I don’t remember what it felt like. When I tell the stories of my body, I say the big things. Line them up like volumes on a shelf. Assault. Addiction. Healing. Sick. Starving. Recovery. Strength. Shame. But life isn’t clear like that, it winds and intertwines in ways I don’t yet understand. I have spent so long fighting my body that to trust it seems an impossibility. I am so busy thinking of the ways that it has failed me that I forget the times it has saved me. But the body has wisdom. It cares for us even when we try to desert it.

Becoming one-dimensional, a paper doll of ourselves, takes a lot of effort. Sometimes all of our focus goes into making it convincing. We cut along the edges as close as we can, skimming a blade along the outline of an idea. Something we’re all supposed to be but no one is. Not really. It’s putting on mascara when you want to die.

I have spent what probably amounts to months of my life doing the following: sucking my stomach in, sitting on dank beds in dirty rooms that smelled like body odor and Hot Pockets, watching boys play video games, drink, play guitar, talk about football, watch football, watch shows about football in which no one is actually playing football. I have sat in tight circles at bridal showers cooing over someone else’s toaster. Bought clothes too small and named them motivation. Held a dinner party in the middle of a hangover, one of the bad ones, the sun shining through the window like a knife to the brain, a weight so heavy it crushed. That’s the thing about flattening, it’s just letting yourself be crushed, consenting in a way to the crushing.

I don’t know the shape of what is crushing you, but I know that it is heavy. I know that not a single one of us is alone.

I am mostly three dimensional now, but I sometimes feel the urge to flatten creep up where I least expect it. Where I take up space now, I see people who knew me before hold questions in the black of their eyes, some acknowledged disapproval of me breaking the pact I used to excel in upholding. Asking how I dare choose myself when I could and should choose them. Their comfort, their expectations, their ideas of what I should be. A container. Empty and beautiful, pressed between the pages of someone else’s story. Always them. Never myself.

Never again.

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