by Wrath of Persephone
"Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naivete, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble."
-Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
The golden thread that connects my identities is Madness. Madness as in, "I feel too much." Madness as in "I can’t come out tonight, I’m on too many pills,” except I forgot to send the text message and my friends all think I blew them off (because I did, I guess). Madness that has my creativity in a chokehold. Madness is a drunk whore. I can’t find a vein. All I am is Yves Saint Laurent Black Opium and $250 lace panties. My Madness tiptoes along a steep liminal edge, where time isn't linear, where my body is present, but my mind is…well I’m not always sure I have a mind that matters. Loved ones catch me staring into deep space, losing track of conversation. Sometimes I can hear my neighbor scream at her husband. The tension of argument and volatility ripples through me. I have always navigated the world through feeling and intuition, though for a long time, I had not defined it that way. I feel things and then I do what I need to do to not feel. And so, the cycle continues.
When I was little, my heart broke constantly. I would go decades before redefining this experience for myself as something much more mosaic than pathology. I was an unstable child. I hurt a lot. After a particularly disastrous year of my adolescence, I experienced my first psychiatric hospitalization. I entered the unit with a belly still aching from a recent terminated pregnancy. The rest of my body was emaciated, malnourished, bruised. The hospital gown hung off me. The doctors were preoccupied with my physical body at the expense of everything else. I was used to strangers touching me, checking for cuts, track marks, fingerprints. I was a crime scene. They searched for evidence of self-destruction and found it.
This body did not belong to me. First it belonged to my mother whose obsession with shape and weight was imprinted into my DNA long before I took my first breath. I escaped her grip and fell directly into the arms of an older man with a preoccupation for my youthful innocence. I mistook his perversion for love. The fallout of the pregnancy led me straight to a psychiatrist who immediately categorized me as sick and broken. After hospitalization, I went to live with my father whose focus on me vacillated between the closed fist of tough love and the embodiment of a precious gemstone – to be possessed and guarded. As the eldest child and daughter, I felt sacrificial.
"Help." They were meant to "help" me. "By any means necessary." A therapist told my father I was a habitual liar. She was right. I would say anything to protect the people around me from what I was feeling and thinking. I did not care if it was true or not. Sometimes Madness is a labyrinth of secrets. No one talks about how deception can be protective and safe. I have always clung to that.
Cixous, though she uses language and metaphor I find to be problematic as it relates to race and culture, does find a way to tease apart the problems with sexual essentialism and provides a space for people outside the gender binary to explore our magic, a form of magic that is often framed as monstrosity. I find that her work calls everyone to write themselves into existence, the way we see fit. And though she is writing as a cisgender white woman firmly and comfortably planted within the ivory tower, her perspective feels radical for second-wave feminism.
"As a militant, she is an integral part of all liberations. She must be farsighted, not limited to a blow-by-blow interaction. She foresees that her liberation will do more than modify power relations or toss the ball over to the other camp; she will bring about a mutation in human relations, in thought, in all praxis." (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa)
These days, and since the beginning of the Disaster, my Madness has become militant. Part of the way this manifests is through bursts of creativity, sometimes seeing the world through a kaleidoscope of color and sound and deep excruciating feeling. It inspires fertile collaboration with other Mad people. Madness appears through my strength as a care worker, my ability to sit with people in their despair, hold space for their anguish, anger, rage, hopelessness; it acknowledges others' desire to die or disappear as an understandable and valid response to constant trauma with no time or space to grieve or heal. Madness is the impulse to run into the discomfort instead of away from it. It informs my identity as an abolitionist; my worst fear is being confined, contained, and controlled. I call in my Mad ancestors who fought and died to fight against coercive systems attempting to fix the chaos. My Madness sustains my militancy.
When the catastrophe of existing hits a zenith, occasionally my involuntary response is dissociation. In an act of self-preservation, I can psychically disappear, removed from consensus reality, removed from embodiment and linear time. Dissociation can be dreamy and warm and safe. It can also be disorienting, a magical consequence of enduring years of violence, that in the ultimate act of survival and resistance, I disconnect allowing a brief reprieve from stress and hurt. I can suspend peacefully, floating outside of myself in a liminal calm connected to a gentle tether that always, eventually pulls me back into myself. When I was little my angry father would yell at me and when I did not respond, he’d grab a limb and twist to force a reconnection. These days the response from concerned others' is a simple "where did you go?
If she is a whole, it's a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble, a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros, an immense astral space not organized around any one sun that's any more of a star than the others. (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa)
My instability can sometimes manifest as paranoia. Paranoia is a voice I carry with me, a warning to reassess my environment, my safety, my exit strategy. She is mindful, tactical. ‘Watch your back,' she whispers. She encourages my suspiciousness. Sometimes she screams for me to run like hell. I'm grateful for her. She is a protector. She never lets her guard down. She never lets me forget where I've come from. We are all capable of terrible and monstrous things, even the people we love the most. Especially the ones we trust with our lives. If I choose to ignore her, she gets louder, unrelenting, and consuming. She interrupts thoughts and conversations. She forces my focus at the expense of others’ comfort. She is demanding and needy out of her impulse to protect. She dares me to match her energy. There are always consequences for ignoring her. I carry those scars.
“And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?” - Edgar Allen Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart
All emotion cascades a sharpness through my nervous system. I am an agonized nerve. Horror, fury, vulnerability, hope, delight, fascination, curiosity, jealousy, tenderness, intimacy – it does not matter the emotion, every cell in my body trembles. No amount of morphine or Ativan or scar tissue will soften the sting.
The other end of this spectrum is emptiness, which is an objectively worse sensation. To vacillate from extreme exposure to the absolute zero of emotional vacancy is tormenting. It feels like being in an empty room with no way out or in, Baker-Miller pink – the color of amoxicillin. Just bright enough to drive a person insane. In my solitude, I grow murderous, vengeful, conspiratorial. I plot against myself. It is not peaceful. It is suffocating. Madness can be claustrophobic.
Each day, I wake up and prepare to manage little volcanic eruptions inside my head. Anything can set them off. The smell of lavender dish soap, a text message, the sound my dog makes when she needs help getting up on the bed, the posture of a stranger on the train. Nothing is too mundane. Everything hurts. And oftentimes, the only way to move myself through is by force of razors edge. A clean, shallow incision to distract and cut through the emotional intensity. When self-injury eludes me, I will destroy whatever is closest. Sometimes it is a thing, sometimes it is a person. Sure, instability can be a romantic cataclysm, but often it’s just me screaming at myself. Sometimes I don’t even have to open my mouth.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," explores a first-person account of a woman descending into Madness. Our main character and narrator is likely experiencing post-partum depression and psychosis, though the diagnosis, as with most diagnoses, is irrelevant. What matters is her experience. She is forced into isolation and bed rest by her husband who is also her doctor. She is kept in a room where she is tormented by her environment and details her perpetual and ceaseless negotiation with the yellow wallpaper. The color, patterns and imperfections haunt her with gross familiarity. Every waking moment is a nauseating investigation of the wallpaper. She begins to see a creeping woman in it. One could assume the creeping woman is a symbol for the prison of womanhood and the resistance to this imprisonment. The story ends with our narrator and the creeping woman tearing the wallpaper apart as if to excise herself from the trap of isolation and infantilization.
"I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper. It dwells in my mind so!" - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
The Disaster forced a disconnect for many of us. It's not over. Those of us whose bodies resist demands of capital are often alone in our homes. We have creative ways of coping with the sadness that accompanies structural and familial abandonment, but it is never really enough. My little bubble of support feels like a revolving door of mental health crises. We quietly maneuver the tipping scales of psychiatric hospitalizations, tours through the DSM, and pills. Lots and lots of pills. Because these doctors cannot fix our circumstances, they rely on the medications. Not all of us want medications. SSRI’s and antipsychotics never worked for me. Often, they would create new, unwelcome experiences for my bodymind. I choose to stick to the devils with which I am most familiar.
Over the years, therapists have instructed me to confront my feelings, as though these feelings do not demand my undivided attention every waking moment of every day. We coexist, my big feelings and me. I find moments of reprieve when I can connect with other sick women, hysterical, psychotic, hostile, and when I am able to create. Connection will always be the magic pill. So, when paranoia whispers to me, I know now that this she is asking me to assess my environment, to check in with my people, and to ground myself in safety. What is left is the wallpaper. It is made up of all the things I love and all the things I hate, and the great expansive chaos in between. No psychiatric diagnosis will ever be able to fully and accurately represent the prismatic depth of my ability to feel. There is no pill or therapeutic tool effective enough to make my experience any less severe. I am Mad. I will always be Mad.
about the author
wrath of persephone is a writer and digital nomad. Their work has been published by Minor Literatures, CLOAK, Expat Press, and Hobart Pulp. Read more of their musings at wrathofpersephone.com or @hacksawplaydate