Too Much

by Rachel Vorona Cote

  To my mind, Lovato’s candor on such a swollen topic indicates genuine bravery. “Sober” is a devastating wallop of a confession, one that is honest without being totally overblown or platitudinous. But what might have been cathartic and, frankly, lucrative for Lovato would likely be for another public figure an insurmountable ask, a demand for emotional labor when they simply aren’t interested in nurturing, or drawing support from their relationships with fans and admirers. A famous woman like Lovato or Lohan must recognize that while she can ask for and strive for total privacy, she cannot ensure it. She is also not required to care about the feedback she receives about aspects of her life unconnected to content production. But public opinion is a maw as exacting as it is ravenous. When women stumble on that great, hot-lit stage, their recovery is endlessly, and searingly scrutinized.

  Lovato has been received relatively gently. Still, responses to “Sober” and to her overdose have laid bare how stringently we assess women’s vulnerability, how the search for the Good Victim, a fundamentally bad-faith effort, is in fact a blanket demand prescribing the way women perform their weaknesses. The lyrics to “Sober,” after all, fulfill expectations of penitence: Lovato apologizes to her parents, intimately referred to as “Momma” and “Daddy,” insinuating the self-expectation that she fulfill the domestic role of an obliging and successful daughter. She even addresses “my future love,” with an apology “for the man that left my bed / For making love the way I saved for you inside my head”—a nod to heteronormative expectations of propriety, the illusion that we must “save ourselves” for one particular person, as if our identities are wholly absorbed by our sexual decisions. And, perhaps most crucially, she mourns her inability to be an example to her fans: “I wanna be a role model,” she sings, “but I’m only human.” In these verses Lovato implies the impossibility of role models—that the demand for pristine example is wholly at odds with the tumult of being a person in the world. Still, she expresses a yearning to be this fantastical creature, indicating that she has, to some extent, internalized the behavioral standards for public women. “I don’t know…why / I do it every time / It’s only when I’m lonely,” she pleads, suggesting that at the base of her addiction is depression, that she hadn’t necessarily been having a good time. And so, in a meager way, Lovato has been rewarded with a relatively unsullied reputation. There is perhaps nothing Western culture laps up more readily than a woman who seems ashamed of herself.

  Neither Lovato nor anyone else should be maligned for their struggles with addiction. And my views on Lohan, influenced though they may be by some of her behaviors, are not tainted by judgment regarding her own bundle of personal struggles. I suspect, however, that if she had narrated the trials of her substance abuse in a way more similar to Lovato, with regret and self-castigation—and, of course, if she had not revealed a penchant for driving under the influence and thereby putting others’ lives in danger—she might not be regarded as a punch line, as a tawdry cautionary tale for our amusement.

  * * *

  Although women’s mental illness has been vilified and diminished and banished to moldering attics, we are, gradually, slouching to the right side of things. The glacial shift toward more heterogeneous cultural representation breeds more finespun, empathetic portrayals of too muchness in all of its forms, particularly in the arena of mental illness. The series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which premiered in 2015, is one of the most recent compelling depictions of a woman’s borderline personality disorder, and the 2019 animated series Tuca and Bertie illuminates the quiet horror of generalized anxiety. In the former, Rachel Bloom’s character, Rebecca Bunch, digs her heels into behavior that’s often mortifying in its resonance: she is self-destructive, selfish, exasperating, and she is tangled in a thicket of pain. Tuca and Bertie’s creator, Lisa Hanawalt, allows her lead duo, voiced by Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong, respectively, to be both ribald and utterly gross within a textured narrative of compassionate female friendship. Marvel’s Jessica Jones introduced us to a traumatized alcoholic who is also, despite some of her worst inclinations, a deep-hearted hero. Gradually, mentally ill characters emerge who are fleshy and difficult and extraordinary. They rely on antidepressants, like One Day at a Time’s Penelope (Justina Machado). It’s a herculean task, leaving the Victorians behind: to take a wrecking ball to the dank, panoptic asylums and to rip apart the yellow wallpaper. We struggle, still, to perceive Bertha Mason and Lady Audley with clarity, to unsnarl the conceptual knot that distorts mental illness as monstrosity. These muddled pathologies have long suffused our thinking, urging us to regard our pain and our instincts with the most uncharitable suspicion. Mainstream Victorian culture would have women villainize ourselves at every turn: It would recklessly conflate too muchness with mental illness, rather than understanding them as interlaced and staunchly tethered to the way one lives in the world. It would diminish our too muchness—all that’s glorious and the parts that trouble us—as the squall of crazy bitches. We do not choose the brains that spark inside our heads, lifting us into bliss, bearing us across a placid sea, and then, without warning, casting us into hell. My mind, sometimes fevered, addled, other times perfectly unextraordinary: I must take it as it is and grapple with it however I can. Sometimes it’s too much. I would not choose otherwise.

  Chapter Seven

  Cut

  I have neither a voice nor hands, nor any friend nor a foe;

  I am I—just a Pulse of Pain—I am I, that is all I know.

  For Life, and the sickness of Life, and Death and desire to die; —

  They have passed away like the smoke, here is nothing but Pain and I.

  —Amy Levy, “Felo de Se”

  Bodies that can beget new life are cursed to be ravaged. Puberty startles us in late childhood, when our abdomens throb with the tremors of menstruation. Those who bear children stretch and vomit and tear, bodies gyrating into vicious agents of vitality. Some pain chooses us more than we choose it.

  And then sometimes those boundaries are too fickle to discern with confidence. Sometimes, by way of compulsion, an urge murmuring beneath the skin, we demand and negotiate our own physical afflictions. We tug at shirt hems to conceal the slender path yielded by a razor’s slice. Our thighs blister with the hissing kisses of cigarette butts. Underneath long sleeves, red blossoms unfurl from a scissor’s decisive twist. To inflict self-harm is not necessarily a means of courting death—it never was for me—but it’s a glutting of vicious impulse that, however paradoxical it seems, brings a ghoulish sort of quietude. Pain shocks us into pause, and sometimes we yearn to be still.

  When I was twelve, I might have told you that I cut myself because I was ugly (I believed that I was, anyway, and that is all that matters). Or, maybe I cut myself because I had earned a B-plus on an algebra test: imperfect results that demanded a different, more visceral, kind of lesson than whatever the quadratic formula had failed to illuminate. But these episodes, however clear the trajectory seemed from mishap to masochism, grew from a recalcitrant, gut-level sense of my own essential superfluity. By pre-adolescence, I learned that my too muchness extended beyond a social and familial inconvenience. I had absorbed biting feedback, both from people who loved me and those who didn’t, and it swelled from within my chest, flush and acidic. I wanted to be perfect—comely, charming, and beloved—but it seemed that others found me excessive. And all at once, I decided that they were right, and for more reasons than they knew. This matter of being so distended with feeling, of flinching against the gravelly scrape of criticism, even when it was light and well-meaning—it had become unbearable. Something gelatinous seemed to consume me from the inside, harboring in its mass every crime for which I had indicted myself: being too sensitive, too gawky, too inclined to tears. It was too much—being like this, feeling this way. I felt myself tumbling against the world, knocking against it at every turn, the jelly mass that burgeoned from my chest ballooning, quivering urgently, inexorably. It seemed ever-ready to pop, and yet refused,
choking me instead with its precarious, taut bulk.

  Given these intense conditions, and the extremity of my makeshift solution to them, you would be reasonable to assume that I remember my inaugural cutting episode. But I don’t. From the first time—it was seventh grade, this much I recall—they conjoined as moments of ritual, one hardly discernible from the other because the effect was much the same: a thickening in my brain, a demented serenity as I meticulously scratched parallel lines along my torso. My tool of choice was a pair of purple scissors that commingled innocently among pens, clips, and other small tchotchkes, all stuffed into a hand-painted clay pot my mother had bought for me when I was little.

  The scissors hid in plain sight, whimsical tools for my amateurish craft projects—cutting out celebrities from teeny-bopper magazines, mostly—until they were repurposed for more macabre aims. Sometimes, after looking at my face in the mirror, I would unravel into gasping fury and apply the blades with less care, impatiently enclosing them on a pinch of skin, then pressing and twisting. Once, after a fight with a friend, I carved the word “FUCK” into my forearm. I always took care to conceal my work, but in that particular case, a classmate spied the angry red scrawl and, unbeknownst to me, called my mother from school. When I slipped into the passenger seat during carpool, she turned to me, exasperated and accusing: “Let me see it. I know it’s there.”

  My parents already knew about this habit of mine; I told them after an especially miserable weekend during which I had foraged for bottles of Tylenol and Advil and Motrin, lined them up on my bedroom floor, and contemplated them, little pharmacological pawns at the ready and willing to provide. (Years later, I would learn that this particular poison, while thankfully allowing me time to think better of my actions and seek help, resulted in being force-fed a bowl of liquid charcoal which is, to say the least, fucking disgusting.) After a bout with the purple scissors, I swallowed six Tylenol, not because I thought it would have any effect, but as a bizarre practice round for the main event that, every now and then, penciled itself between the lines of my school planner. Then I clambered to my feet. This was an awfully lousy pastime, cutting myself and dwelling on a slew of fatalistic musings, primarily among them: “If I kill myself, the boys can’t laugh at me when I pass them in the hall.” During seventh and eighth grade the tormenting and behind-the-back whispers could send anyone home in tears, but I feared—often believed—that what my schoolmates had to say about me was true, and I loathed myself for it. I loathed myself, but I didn’t want to, and I didn’t want to die, not really. I wanted to believe there were other possibilities, that the tunnel cowering over me concealed, somewhere, a small, but traversable, passage of light.

  Timidly, I padded downstairs. My father’s parents were staying with my sisters and me while our parents traveled, and I found my grandfather in quiet repose on the couch, watching television. I sat next to him and promptly began to sob. His face folded into worry, and he put his arm around me as he summoned my grandmother. They listened, gently prodding here and there, as I confided everything: how I had been cutting myself for months, how sometimes death presented itself as a seductive option, how, despite my desire to be otherwise, I was colossally, achingly sad. That night, when my parents returned, my grandmother organized a family meeting and asked me to tell them what I had expressed earlier that afternoon.

  My parents were, unsurprisingly, troubled. They were also, I think, frustrated, and a little angry. I can’t imagine anyone would like being ambushed with such news after a weekend away: Surprise! Your twelve-year-old daughter, whom you love and have given every advantage, is super bummed and has taken a fancy to self-injury! They interpreted my circumstances as a result of narcissism: I spent so much time wallowing—what if I considered those who didn’t enjoy my same privileges? It made sense: I was, after all, thinking about myself a great deal. But those thoughts were not deliberate mental pathways; rather, they were compulsive, unproductive circuits of self-abuse. When I began volunteering at a food bank, my mind was no less inclined to declare war on itself. Any moment of pleasure would be swiftly harpooned by dark, boring, but insistent vocabulary: ugly, undesirable, unwanted. And then, the old refrain sounded out: Cut, cut, cut.

  I couldn’t tell my mother or father because I didn’t know how to apply words to this new habit that had become so corporally tempting. I knew it was a punishment of sorts, although I’m not sure I ever articulated that to anyone besides my therapist, the one found for me soon after I confessed my self-harm. As with most experiences, it registers more clearly in the rearview mirror: cutting became my means of self-regulation and conditioning, a way to snip away at my superfluity and trim my edges. I was learning, obliquely, that too muchness could be as dangerous as it was integral to my disposition. I was cellophane, punctured and ripped by a world that could not accommodate my need for softness. It seemed to me pathetic, this inability to countenance my bratty classmates, my reflection, or a perplexing algebra problem, without regarding life as a catastrophe. I didn’t understand why I was always spilling everywhere, my emotions too mammoth to remain packaged and kempt: instead, my insides sloshed out like an intestinal flood, disgusting everyone with their red vulnerability, and rendering me ashamed and bent with self-loathing.

  The conundrum, of course, was that my solution only exacerbated the symptoms I was so desperate to conceal. I undertook cutting with the same precision that guided my schoolwork and my writing, and when the exercise held me in its thrall, I didn’t cry; I was silent and stony-faced—the way I most desired to be. Self-harm was a pressure valve as much as it was a form of discipline, and in its screwy way, it worked until I disclosed the activity to my parents and until, sometime later, my classmates learned my secret through the junior high gossip grist mill. Cutting contained a lucid kind of logic to me—emotionally, it kept me in line—but to others, it was wild, a certain mark of insanity. I became a punch line; one fair-weather friend referred to me in a tirade as “Suicidal Rachel,” which is not especially creative but conveyed the sentiment. Cutting, the very thing that I had resorted to in order to curb my too muchness, became its principal evidence. What reasonable girl would do such a thing, after all? My parents suspected that I was overly dramatic and obsessed with myself; my classmates considered me—when they considered me at all—a flagrantly unbalanced nerd. In the meantime, I had handed myself over to the regimen of addiction. I didn’t consider the whys or what-fors: I only knew I wanted to keep cutting, and so I did.

  * * *

  Every woman- and girl-identified person who self-harms experiences pain and its associated rituals with fundamental specificity. It’s a practice, often an addiction, as it was in my case, undertaken for a myriad of purposes and in response to all manner of impulses. But what we do share is the restive, tapestried history of female self-inflicted pain. In an attempt to make sense of my own inclinations toward masochism, I’ve muddled through the sandy borderland between socially sanctioned mutilation and stigmatized mental illness. And I’ve learned, as most girls do in their youth, one of the guiding lessons of femininity: that the world does not want our anguish. It would sooner smother it—us—and for centuries has done just that.

  Our suppression of female self-harm manifests itself across Western culture, where mutilation emerges primarily, and most prominently, as a masculine mode of self-purification. We often see it occur in fiction: a man, often a blatant misogynist, resorts to self-harm in an attempt to cleanse himself from unholy erotic desires. In The Scarlet Letter (1850), certain adaptations of the Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Brave New World (1931), and in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1973), women are figured as corrupting forces, engendering lust that must be extinguished. Arthur Dimmesdale, the craven minister who abandons his lover and their daughter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, self-flagellates as a ritual of penance and spiritual cleansing. Meanwhile, he allows his lover, protagonist Hester Prynne, to be shunned by their claustrophobic Puritan community, forced
to wear a crimson “A” on her dress to signal her sin of adultery. Hester, through this public shaming, is divested of autonomy and reduced to a hieroglyph, becoming a mere signifier of the temptations for which Dimmesdale self-indulgently performs penance.

  The elderly Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd similarly mistakes righteous self-pity for repentance. After making a habit of spying on his ward, Johanna, his voyeurism leaves him undone by desire and contemptuous of the girl’s alleged “mockery” and “temptation.” Like Dimmesdale, he whips himself to expel his fleshly yearnings, all the while dwelling in an egomaniacal enactment of self-loathing. For these men, shame is sexualized, and intertwined with the misogynistic blame they direct at the objects of their sordid passion. What they most seek is neither humility nor forgiveness, but rather to reassert patriarchal power—over their desires and over women—through the brutality of their masochism.