Wound #9
Listen to this dream:
The room was small, but it held all the women you could think of and all the men you were ever scared of in your whole life, passing on the street or just imagining, and all the men you loved the most … There were knives and girls skinned alive and kept alive, and one woman screaming but trying to laugh it off to another, “Look what they did to my face!”—and there were amputations performed right there, the limbs cut off … and all the things that can be done to a person including the pulling and ripping of everything that we didn’t even know we love about a person.
Here’s how the dream ends: eventually the girls are skinned to the point of interchangeability—“just bloodiness, like animals turned inside out,” like Carson’s nude—and tossed from the building while onlookers throw paint onto their falling bodies. They turn all the colors of the rainbow. They turn into art.
They turn, specifically, into a book called How Should a Person Be? Its narrator, Sheila, is one of the onlookers and also one of the girls. (She also shares her name with the author, Sheila Heti.) She is in pain but also making fun of how we distort every pain into the worst pain—the very worst possible pain—the worst circle of hell. Superlatives are just another way of proving hurt—an abstraction instead of a cut line on the skin. The dream offers a woman who is aware of how girls try to turn pain into a joke. She makes a joke of this tendency. She is standing in front of you—all shivering and bloody, like a freak on a stage—and cranking up the volume on the pain stereo, pushing on your eyeballs with the force of her mind. Raw bodies turn into painted artifacts. The superlative vocabulary of suffering keeps extending its wingspan.
In college, I took a self-defense class with a bunch of other girls. We had to go around in a circle and tell the group our worst fear. These instructions created a weird incentive structure. When you’ve got a lot of Harvard girls in a circle, everyone wants to say something better than the girl before her. So the first girl said: “Getting raped, I guess,” which is what we were all thinking. The next one upped the ante: “Getting raped—and then killed.” The third paused to think, then said: “Maybe getting gang-raped?” The fourth had had time to think, had already anticipated the third one’s answer. She said, “Getting gang-raped and mutilated.”
I can’t remember what the rest of us managed to come up with (white slavery? snuff films?) but I remember thinking how odd it was—how we were all sitting there trying to be the best kid in class, the worst rape fantasizer, in this all-girl impersonation of a misogynistic hate-crime brainstorming session. We were giggling. Our giggling—of course—was also about our fear: One woman screaming and trying to laugh it off to another.
Whenever I tell that story as an anecdote, I think about the other girls in that circle. I wonder if anything terrible ever happened to any of them. We left that shitty gym to start the rest of our lives, to go forth into the world and meet all the men we were ever going to be scared of, passing on the street or just imagining.
Wound #10
I grew up under the spell of damaged sirens: Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, Björk, Kate Bush, Mazzy Star. They sang about all the ways a woman could hurt: I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl. When they’re out for blood I always give. We are made to bleed and scab and heal and bleed again and turn every scar into a joke. Boy you best pray that I bleed real soon. Bluffing your way into my mouth, behind my teeth, reaching for my scars. Did I ever tell you how I stopped eating, when you stopped calling? You’re only popular with anorexia. Sometimes you’re nothing but meat, girl. I’ve come home. I’m so cold.
I called my favorites by their first names: Tori and Ani. Tori sang “blood roses” over and over again, and I had no idea what this phrase meant except that pain and beauty were somehow connected. Every once in a while her songs posed questions: Why did she crawl down in the deep ravine? Why do we crucify ourselves? The songs themselves were answers. She crawled into the deep ravine so we’d wonder why she crawled into the deep ravine. We crucify ourselves so we can sing about it.
Kate Bush’s “Experiment IV” describes a secret military plan to design “a sound that could kill someone.” From the painful cries of mothers to the terrifying screams we recorded it and put it into our machine. The song would be lethal, but also a lullaby: It could feel like falling in love / It could feel so bad / But it could feel so good / It could put you to sleep. Of course the song played just like the song it described. Listening felt so bad and so good. It felt like falling in love. I’d never fallen in love. I was a voyeur and a vandal—flexing the hurt muscles in my heart by imagining myself into aches I’d never felt.
I invented terrible daydreams to saddle those songs with the gravity of melodrama: someone I loved died; I was summoned to a car accident deathbed; I had a famous boyfriend and he cheated on me and I had to raise our child—better yet, our many children—on my own. Those songs gave me scars to try on like costumes. I wanted to be sung to sleep by them; I wanted to be killed and resurrected.
More than anything, I wanted to be killed by Ani’s “Swan Dive”: I’m gonna do my best swan dive / in the shark-infested waters / I’m gonna pull out my tampon / and start splashing around. If being a woman is all about bleeding, then she’ll bleed. She’ll get hurt. Carrie knew how it was done; she never plugged it up. She splashed around. I don’t care if they eat me alive, Ani sings, I’ve got better things to do than survive. Better things like: martyrdom, having the last laugh, choosing the end, singing a song about blood.
I was listening to “Swan Dive” years before I got my period, but I was already ready to jump. I was ready to weaponize my menarche. I was waiting for the day when I could throw my womanhood to the sharks because I finally had some womanhood to call my own. I couldn’t wait to be inducted into the ranks of this female frustration—the period as albatross, lunar burden, exit ticket from Eden, keys to the authenticity kingdom. Bleeding among the sharks meant being eligible for men, which meant being eligible for hope, loss, degradation, objectification, desire and being desired—a whole world of ways to get broken.
Years later I worked at a bakery where my boss liked putting on a play list she called our “Wounded Mix.” We hummed along with Sade and Phil Collins. We mixed red velvet batter the color of cartoon hearts. My boss said that when she listened to these songs, she imagined being abandoned by some cruel lover on the shoulder of a dusty highway—“with just my backpack and my sunglasses,” she told me, “and my big hair.”
I started hunting for more ladies singing about wounds. I asked my boyfriend for suggestions. He texted instructions: Google “you cut me open and I keep bleeding.” Best bathos on the air. I found Leona Lewis: You cut me open and I / Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love / I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love / Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. Each chorus returns, at its close, to the main gist: “You cut me open.” The lyrics could be lamenting love or affirming it; trusting the possibility of falling for someone in the aftermath of hurt, or else suggesting that love dwells in the hurting itself—that sentiment clots and coagulates in bled blood, another version of the cutter’s logic: I bleed to feel. Bleeding is the proof and home of passion, its residence and protectorate. This kind of bloody heartbreak isn’t feeling gone wrong, it’s feeling gone right—emotion distilled to its purest, most magnificent form. Best bathos on the air. Well, yes, it is. Turn every scar into a joke. We already did.
But what if some of us want to take our scars seriously? Maybe some of us haven’t gotten the memo—haven’t gotten the text message from our boyfriends—about what counts as bathos. One man’s joke is another girl’s diary entry. One woman’s heartbreak is another woman’s essay. Maybe this bleeding ad nauseam is mass produced and sounds ridiculous—Plug it up! Plug it up!—but maybe its business isn’t done. Woman is a pain that never goes away. Keep cutting me open; I’ll keep bleeding it out. Saving Leona Lewis means insisting that we never have the right to dismiss the trite or
poorly worded or plainly ridiculous, the overused or overstated or strategically performed.
In the reader’s group guide to my first novel, I confessed: “I often felt like a DJ mixing various lyrics of female teenage angst.” I got so sick of synopsizing the plot, whenever people asked what it was about, I started saying simply: women and their feelings. When I called myself a DJ mixing angst, it was a preemptive strike. I felt like I had to defend myself against some hypothetical accusation that would be lobbed against my book by the world at large. I was trying to agree with Ani: We shouldn’t have to turn every scar into a joke. We shouldn’t have to be witty or backtrack or second-guess ourselves when we say, this shit hurt. We shouldn’t have to disclaim—I know, I know, pain is old, other girls hurt—in order to defend ourselves from the old litany of charges: performative, pitiful, self-pitying, pity hoarding, pity mongering. The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.
Wound #11
Once I wrote a story from that open wound Yeats calls “the rag and bone shop of the heart.” In this particular case, my rag and bone shop had been looted by a poet. He and I had a few glorious autumn months in Iowa—there were cold beers on an old bridge, wine in a graveyard, poems left on pillows—and I thought I was in love with him, and maybe would marry him, and then suddenly we were done. He was done. I knew this wasn’t an unusual occurrence in the world, but it hadn’t ever happened to me. I kept trying to figure it out. A few nights before the end, feeling him pull away, I’d talked with him for a long time about the eating disorder I’d had when I was younger. I honestly can’t remember why I did this—whether I wanted to feel close to him, wanted him to demonstrate his care by sympathizing, whether I just wanted to will myself into trusting him by saying something that seemed to imply that I already did.
After he was gone, I decided maybe this conversation had something to do with why he’d left. Perhaps he’d been repulsed—not necessarily by the eating disorder itself but by my naked attempt to secure his attention by narrating it. I was desperate for a why—at first, because I wanted to understand our breakup, and eventually because I realized any story I wrote about us would feel flimsy if our breakup had no motivating catalyst. Pain without a cause is pain we can’t trust. We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.
I was afraid to write a story about us because heartbreak seemed like a story that had already been told too many times, and my version of heartbreak felt horribly banal: getting blackout drunk and sharing my feelings in fleeting pockets of lucidity, sleeping with guys and crying in their bathrooms afterward. Falling on Sixth Avenue in the middle of the night and then showing my scarred knee to anyone who’d look. I made people tell me I was more attractive than my ex. I made people tell me he was an asshole, even though he wasn’t.
This kind of thing, I told myself, wasn’t what I’d come to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to write about. Maybe sadness could be “interesting” but not when it looked like this. The female narrator I’d be depicting in my story—a woman consumed by self-pity, drowning her sorrows in drink, engaged in reckless sexual self-destruction, obsessed with the man who’d left her—didn’t seem like a particularly appealing or empowered sort of woman to think about or be. And yet, she was me.
Maybe drunken heartbreak was the lamest thing I could possibly write about, but this was precisely why I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write against my own feelings of shame at my premise—its banality and waft of self-pity, the way in which its very structure suggested a protagonist defined almost exclusively in terms of her harmful relationships to men. The story wouldn’t just seem to be about letting men usurp a woman’s identity, it would in fact be about this. My own squeamishness goaded me forward: perhaps self-destruction in the aftermath of heartbreak was a trite pain, but it was my trite pain, and I wanted to find a language for it. I wanted to write a story so good that my hypothetical future readers would acknowledge as profound a kind of female sadness they’d otherwise dismiss as performative, overplayed, or self-indulgent. There were also practical concerns. I had a deadline for workshop. Seeing as how the breakup was all I thought about, I didn’t see how I could write a story about anything else.
I wrote the ending first. It was an assertion: I had a heart. It remained. I liked it because it felt true and optimistic (my heart’s still here!) but also sad (my still-here heart hurts constantly!). I put the eating disorder conversation into the story so that readers could point to it—if they needed to point to something—and say, Oh, maybe that’s why he got out. I also meant the eating disorder to clarify that my protagonist’s impulse toward self-destruction wasn’t caused so much as activated by the breakup, which had resurrected the corpse of an older pain: an abiding sense of inadequacy that could attach itself to the body, or a man, an impulse that—like a heat-seeking missile—always sniffed out ways it could hurt even more.
I realized that this causeless pain—inexplicable and seemingly intractable—was my true subject. It was frustrating. It couldn’t be pinned to any trauma; no one could be blamed for it. Because this nebulous sadness seemed to attach to female anxieties (anorexia and cutting and obsession with male attention), I began to understand it as inherently feminine, and because it was so unjustified by circumstance, it began to feel inherently shameful. Each of its self-destructive manifestations felt half-chosen, half-cursed.
In this sense, I was aware that the breakup was giving me a hook upon which I could hang a disquiet much more amoebic—and not so easily parsed. Part of me knew my story had imposed a causal logic on the breakup that hadn’t been there. My ex had been pulling away before I’d ever confessed anything to him. But I recognized a certain tendency in myself—a desire to compel men by describing things that had been hard for me—and wanted to punish this tendency. Punishment involved imagining the ways my confessions might repulse the men they were supposed to beckon closer. When I punished myself with this causality, I also restored the comforting framework of emotional order—because I did this, this happened; because this happened, I hurt.
In the meantime, I was nervous about workshop. Would I be lauded as a genius? Quietly understood as pathetic? I chose my outfit carefully. I still remember one of the first comments. “Does this character have a job?” one guy asked, sounding annoyed, and said she might have been a little easier to sympathize with if she did.
Interlude: Outward
As it happened, that story was the first one I ever published. Sometimes I get notes about it from strangers. One woman in Arizona even got part of it tattooed on her back. Men say it helps them sympathize more with certain female tendencies. These men write to me about their relationships: women who once seemed like reckless bitches, they say, start to seem like something else. A frat guy wrote to say that now he “got” girls better. I trusted he meant: understood. Another guy said: I have always been curious of the psychology of women who tend toward a want to be dominated.
A Hawaiian real estate agent wrote about his little sister. He’d never been compassionate about her painful relationships with men. I’m sure that your goal was not to educate men on the psychological nuances of women, he said, but he felt he could relate to his sister’s self-destructive tendencies better after reading the story—a little wisp of understanding, he said. I was thrilled. My pain had flown beyond the confines of its bone shop. Now it had a summer home in the Pacific.
I wouldn’t say writing that story helped me get over my breakup any faster; it probably did just the opposite. I ended up consigning that ex into the realm of legend—a sort of mythic prop around which I’d constructed this suffering version of myself. But the story helped me weave the breakup into my sense of self in a way that ultimately felt outward, directed toward the lives and pain of others.
And yet—do I still wonder if my ex ever read that story? Of course I do.
Wound #12
The summer after m
y freshman year of college, my mouth was wired shut for two months while my jaw healed from an operation. The joint hinge had been damaged in an accident—I’d fallen off a vine in Costa Rica, twenty feet to cloud forest floor—and certain bones had been drilled into new shapes and then screwed back together again. The wires held everything in place. I couldn’t talk or eat. I squirted geriatric energy drinks into the small opening between my teeth and the back of my mouth. I wrote notes on little yellow pads. I read a lot. Already, then, I thought of documenting my experience for posterity. And I already had the title of my memoir in mind: Autobiography of a Face.
That’s how I discovered Lucy Grealy. Her memoir, Autobiography of a Face, is the story of her childhood cancer and enduring facial disfigurement. I read it in an afternoon and then I read it all over again. Its central drama, for me, wasn’t Grealy’s recovery from illness; it was the story of her attempt to forge an identity that wasn’t entirely defined by the wound of her face. At first she couldn’t see her face as anything but a locus of damage to which everything else referred:
This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also … became the launching pad from which to lift off … Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point.
These are the dangers of a wound: that the self will be subsumed by it (“personal vanishing point”) or unable to see outside its gravity (“everything led to it”). The wound can sculpt selfhood in a way that limits identity rather than expanding it—that obstructs vision (of other people’s suffering, say) rather than sharpening empathic acuity. Carrie doesn’t do anyone any favors. Rosa Dartle is all edge.
The Empathy Exams: Essays Page 22
