On: Restrictions

Restrictions

It has been ages since I felt this way. A throbbing lust, a stark stiffness in my arms, hands, thighs.
It’s has been ages since I felt allured, drawn to and interested in someone like her. The muscles. The strength. Her fringe, her smiles.

It was ages ago since I thought I could tame someone like her. Ages upon ages since I saw someone that strong bow their head for me. I am so used to other things now. Smooth and carrying, warm scoldings, soothing strokes against blushing cheeks.

It has also been ages since I felt so scared. Scared of what I might be able to offer. Scared to be perceived as a freak. Scared to be incompatible with someone else. Scared to be declined, brushed off, put out. Scared to be invalid, undesirable.

- Why would you pursue her? she ask.
- Oh, it’s because I think I could break her. Tame her. Otherwise I wouldn’t try.

I am surprised at my own answer. Sometimes I don’t believe the power I subscribe myself. Sometimes I don’t see it myself. Even if I know it.

I think about that other one. The same muscles. Cameo-pants and sweet smiles. Stubbornness. How we weren’t compatible. How the worst thing she could be was dependent.
How she leaned in one day and said: You know, you could decide for me if you wanted…

How I see her in this new person. There is something. A bashfulness and sweetness, something that contradicts butch-aesthetics and swelling triceps.

What you didn’t think you knew about yourself, I shall find it.

That which you think others don’t see. I will see it.

I am writing this to muster up courage. I am writing this to call up on guardian angels of strong crippled, poor, marginalized femmes.

Angie. Mother of a whole house. Sister in deficiency. Hold my hand. Help me walk the Dating ball.
Grandma, voice unheard, you who’s bobby pins I have inherited. They have been places where you would never have gone. Help me gather strength passed down by hard work and sisterhood. How one is dressed one is perceived, how one speaks one is heard. Help me dress the part.

I look back at old writing. I guess I knew something then I have now come to doubt. Or at least I played the part of knowing it. Nonetheless, then I wrote some things that I cant even think now. That I was entitled. I knew of bloodlines of resistance and power. I knew of a strength and confidence that equaled calm desire. I knew I could do it.

My hands at the back of her neck. I long to lock her arms behind her back. I long to tell her to and see her comply without the use of force.

Another club, another town. I speak of how voice and intent is the only thing that matters. That with good communication and strong will anything can be achieved.

Why is it then that I cannot speak now? That I am so convinced I have nothing to offer her. When I know I have everything to offer others.

That club in the other town. She blushes as she asks me. I don’t understand why anyone would blush in relation to me. The promoter of the club, the purple godmother of an empire tells me:

- You know, if you wanted to you could have anyone here now….

It’s as alien as anything. I am so programed to be the one pining and sighing. Not the one acting.

Her smooth skin. How I want to run my nails across it.

The sex-positive nature of things. The shame in admitting one doesn’t think anyone would want you. The lack of power that it gives.

Don’t pity me, obey me.

I have a feeling this is now or never.

That it has little to do with her, even though it has everything to do with her, and more to do with unlocking the notion of myself as an agent subject. Learning by doing.

I must overcome this hump.

We shall dare the leap, mother Angie and I. If I can take on a system of discrimination I can take on the ideas they have created in me.

The shame, the doubt, the anger.

What you think others wont see in you. I will see it

On: The Price of the Struggle

I wake up still ill. I have had this mad infection for weeks, I worried it might be tonsillitis, but it’s not. It never is, it’s stress and a gaping PA schedule. One shift here and one shift there.
My parents come to see me. Have you been living like this, my mother shouts. I explain, when I only have one shift a day or can’t be in the house for my shift cleaning is not a priority. My mother understands but is furious. She cleans and cleans and cleans. And we talk of class and matriarchy and love, a little new born baby. My cousin’s little son keeps me up.
I play her a new song I managed to find on Spotify:

“Hiya, here is Sally a wrench, an urchin from the street
Don’t come talk to me about misery
If you knew what I knew, if you had seen what I had seen
My goodness you would weep”

Structure hogties me. My father returns with a new kettle. The old one broke ages ago. I had a crying fit from it, the smallest thing, the cheapest thing. But so much of a hustle, I can’t both cook, clean and by a kettle.
He is calm and assertive, like me. Angry internally and not in the feisty way of my mother, and he says: They profit from you!
Profit, they earn money on me and then they don’t do their job. I think of Oslo, such struggles, such sorrow. I see myself weeping in her strong arms in the hotel room.

I get back on my feet. I compensate, I make a schedule for my PA’s I shouldn’t have to make. My sweet and funny and very gay friend calls me, we talk about taking good care of each other. I send him my draft for the Queer Mass prayer. Later that evening I have to txt him, saying I can’t go.
I try to be okay with that but I am not, I feel sad and worried, both let down by my body and the stress of malfunctioning structures (not bodies mind you) and like I am letting them down. I post about it on Facebook, and get the sweetest replies.

Yesterday morning I wake up still ill. Still, even though I felt better the other day. It’s a trope. I should stop but I push it. I tend to my impersonal hygiene. Someone helps me get dressed. I get going in a pricey cab, since taxi service just isn’t to trust.

We get there sickly early. I ask my PA to get me a coffee from the place next door, the caffeine rushes through my veins, ticks my heart into speed. Enhances twitching nerves and vocal chords.

We are supposed to be at the venue now, I try to take the lift upstairs. But it doesn’t work. Finally we meet a janitor who explains to us that the lifts don’t open on that floor until my talk is scheduled to start. I laugh at it then but inside something turns a switch.

And then I talk and talk and talk. Medical model. Bodies. My body. Other bodies. Her body. Power. Powerless. Cripplets. Sex. Desire. And it comes closer and closer and closer and in the end I am so tired of it. So infuriated and ill, my throat is heated and my skin is buzzing.
But you can’t tell, she swears. No one but her can tell.

The anger in my last talk is visible though, I fairly scream at the audience. I won’t put up with this. I won’t put up with inaccessible venues, crip-phobic attitudes, the feeling of being undesired.
We wrap up and I tell her as we leave: Yes I am going to go to that club now, but I will pay a price tomorrow.
And then we leave.

I feel okay when we go there, we speak of nail polish, how our brains are wired, what we do and don’t. And then we talk about going out for food first and I hear the tire in my own voice as I say, I don’t feel like walking those stairs more than twice.
It’s so inaccessible I weep inside, all the time. And I swore, in that talk with those crips I swore I wouldn’t put up with it. And look at me now. My mantra all the way down and in to the office backstage is it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. I feel tired and ill but food helps. I get changed, or undressed, but I can’t help but think of my crooked legs. My tensed arms as they hold my weight up on my walker. And to be fair my tits aren’t that fabulous anyway.

We walk out of the office, I spot her almost immediately.
She spots my tits, and then my smile.
We hug, firmly.
I move on.

It gets crowded. I get in the way, my wheels take up space. People trip and don’t say sorry. I am too short; they don’t see me as they walk by. Legs like pillars, high heels, no crooked feet.

And then I spot it. The rush, the clattering of heels and boots. They run. They put one foot ahead of the other quickly and they run. The hunt, the escape, the catch and the wrestle. Able. Able to run. I look at my hands around my walker handles. My feet. Invisibly marked - no running. And the switch turns squeeking inside my chest. I walk around even more restless, I get tired, unfocused, even sadder for “no reason”.

I spot her again. She spots me as well, and not only my chest, and not only my walker.
How are you doing?
Not so well. I am tired, I need closeness.
We cuddle. And even more. She takes me backstage to a crazy concrete stair. It’s cool and silent, just us. I get to sit with her and be just the way I am. But it sticks with me. Able. Disabled.

When we get out of there it is even more crowded, she has to go work. I find them, the runners. They have stopped running now and they are sweet and kind. I try to engage in conversation but the dam the switch has broken keeps flooding it all out.

I walk backstage when she is done. The other runner has gone home now and we sit opposite each other. I weep. People come and go into the office and I don’t care. I speak of all, but the image of them running. It’s not okay, I can’t be this trigged by other peoples physical abilities. It’s weird, I am mad.

She asks me if I want go, and I say no. Throughout that night I lie. No it’s okay, I can stay. I am alright yeah, sure.
I say I am tired and it’s been a rough day, that’s true. No I don’t feel up to do what I normally do. Yes I desperately want power and authority and strength, that’s all I want right now but I can’t bring myself to do it. I am too tired. Please don’t assume it’s because I want the opposite. I would say if I did.

We finally go home. I curse the stairs on the way up. Yeah, they say. It’s not okay, it isn’t.
And then we walk and walk and every step is a knife in my chest. I can talk because it is too hard to even breath. I am too rough and I am too jealous. I am jealous of you running, chasing, escaping.
If I could I would ask, what’s it like, running?

I have to take several stops on the way to the cab rank just to breath. I don’t say anything. She says little. We find a cab, I get in and stutter my address to the driver. I cry as silently as I can, clasp her hand in the dark. I am mad, I am mad, this is dirty, this is too rough, I can’t be jealous. I can’t desire normality; it’s not good for the fight. I have said. I weep at the fact that I feel like such a fake, here have been telling people we shouldn’t compensate. Then what do I do? We shouldn’t expose ourselves to emotional pain, what do I do?

I am inconsolable when I finally get into the apartment. I lose it already in the corridor, big tears roll. I shiver. She says I am tired, she says I have had a lot of work put onto. I think of the fact that tomorrow consists of two uncovered shifts in my PA schedule. Isolation, inability and loneliness. And you can choose I think, you make choices all the time. And right now I can make none.
At the cusp of morning I tell, she urges me firmly and I do. I focus my gaze on my feet and I say. I felt so disabled. I felt so in the way and stuck in that space. And then I saw you run, you ran and she ran after you and I can never give you that. I am not that good.

It’s all full of the medical model bullshit I have slaughtered all that day and that is what sickens me the most, even I don’t get away.

She says it’s normal, I weep, she comforts me, she leaves.
When she’s gone I can’t sleep. I still haven’t slept, thirty-five hours later. Oh, so many thoughts, why didn’t I tell? Why is there so much shame? Why is there still that assumption between ability and power and why does it affect me even with people who know me the best? Why do I make such bad choices?

We talk of choice during mid-day: No but you have to understand I say, in situations like this I don’t have any choice, and perhaps I chose to do less productive things because at least that is a choice I have. And I think she gets it.
But is it this harsh not having PA-care because you are extra rough now? She asks.
No, I say. It is always this rough. But I cover it up, I can push through a day of isolation and no independence every now and then. I shut my mouth and plough through. But now I can’t.

But why? She asks me. Why!?
I don’t want to be a bother, I say.

We hang up and I call my mother. A mother of a daughter stuck between a rock and hard place. A mother of a minority member. A mother of one of those discriminated against. We talk about our common worry of becoming bitter. Sometimes people don’t understand she says, and I don’t want to tell them all, and all, and all of the time. And I agree.

Her understanding is comfort. After a while we move on to talking about patriarchy and capitalism. The price of the struggle.

On: Honestly…

I realized I haven't blogged in here in more than six months. I guess life has been intense, relationships crashing, being picked up, deepening. Me learning a lot of my own mechanisms trying new things, getting lovely offers, learning, despairing, crying and then all over again.

I have been pretty shook about recently – structural discrimination tripped me and let me fall face down into the dirty. I have struggled hard for my basic needs, and I haven't felt rough like this for years. Anxiety has still to wear off but I won, I fell, got up and won in no less than a week. But in between I revisited some very dark places, and I cried like I have never cried before.
But I do think I rode on something bigger than myself too, a wave built up by a true sense of community, family. Now I am trying my best, knowing everything is safe, to get back to what used to be mundane and usual. I am having a hard time feeling motivated about my studies and spring always make me want to leave. Just run, no looking back.
I think that has been one of the hardest things in these last weeks, I have had to e brutally honest, humiliatingly so, about my physically limitations, my feelings and my worries. I felt have like an open book. Transparent. As if my throbbing blood would show under my thin skin. Like there was nothing left that was personal and just me. Like there was nothing that was just mine, that wasn't public. Anxiety makes me feel that way too. Unworthy, a fake and a fraud, someone who anyone could find out. Bust. Like there has been no one there, I have just been faking it. But never making it. And it makes me want to run. Just run, no looking back.
Of course I know logically that is not true, I know a lot of things logically because I am smart, they say. And I know what I am. Of course I know what I am. But in these testing times I lose the map.

I lay, a mess, crying in my bed. I am not wearing any skirt, just panties and a top and she lies next to me on top of the covers. We quarreled because I didn't want to eat. She said I had to, I said fuck you, then I ate. We laughed about it – but still. I cry and cry and cry; I close my eyes and turn my head from her. She is too close and I have never felt so humiliated and scared, scared to the bone, terrified. This process is too much. The rug is pulled away from under my feet; it is not just an expression.

I am no good for you, I say. Yes you are she says, and she is not lying, I know that. Still I turn my head.
I get my head up in days to come. I do believe her when she says I am still what I used to be, I get angry more often than sad at all the mess and I find I have good friends.

Then it comes, like a strong punch, a fist to the face. My welfare officer, the man who raped my mind, and forced me to feel like a soggy lump of meat, that they could measure and pass around as they liked and decline the most basic help, he calls me. I see his number on the screen and I don't pick up. His voice on my voice mail sends my anxiety level through the roof. I know I have the upper hand on all this now; we have come that far in just a few days. My army, my generals in fitted skirts and all done up blouses and me, still I fall.

I send her a txt, it's short and précis – Hi, can you get me food. Something easy like soup, am in the pit…
She brings me tomato soup, bread and candy. I tear the bread up and dip in like a starving person in the silky red liquid. I feel hollow, carved out by sharp claws. I have fits of despair, I cry and cry and cry and the bread swells in my mouth.

You must leave, I say. I need to be alone.
She goes, without a word of fuss she leaves me. When she comes back she tells me she knew I had to make a decision. And I did.
I wail when she has left. I wail and hold myself up physically, I wrap my arms around myself and I hold myself tight. The way I used to when I was a kid and nothing helped, nothing but…
I look at the steal, it's slender and sharp and I stare at it mesmerized. But then I pull it back in and put it down. I didn't need to, I made the choice not to cut but now I am angry again. Furious at how far this has made me go, how anxious and terrified they have made me. To push me so close to the edge. I haven't cut in almost ten years and before then not since I was just a girl.
She comes back and we talk, I tell her and she says I was strong; I am strong, for doing what I just did. I didn't believe her then but I do now. I do know what I am. We write up the most horrendous medical model list of what my body cannot do. Humiliations lick the cavities inside my chest and she types and types and types. Seven whole pages.
That night I cannot rest. I dream he is in my apartment, that has been let in and no one has told me. In my dream I scream at those who have let them in, I tell them off like there is no tomorrow. And I wake up at 4.30 am and can't go back to sleep.
Before my reassessment with him I dress up, pencil skirt, stockings, short sleeveed bowtie blouse, sharp blue jacket, all my classy jewelry. I dress to find a power that has crawled back into the back of my bone, forced into hiding. Just moments before seeing him again I feel nauseous but breathe in and out firmly. Convincing myself he has seen nothing yet.
I reach my hand out before his when we greet, a sign of power I have been told. I use his name and I say, hello again S. He shivers, he really does and he looks at me, my representatives from the PA agency, and her, my general in a fitted skirt. And he says as he looks down, oh how many you are.

I sit opposite to him by the table but he doesn't meet my gaze once. I concentrate on sitting up as straight as I can, using my stage voice, calm and assertive. I own all the things he thought would humiliate me. I tell him point blank about all the fucked up quirks of cripfemme life, about periods, so called personal hygiene, sex and the changing of sheets. He stutters, and blushes. I breathe in and sit even straighter.
When we get out of there I feel like I have jumped from the highest cliff ever, adrenaline throbbing through my veins and I smile wide at her.
It was wonderful, purely wonderful, she says.

I was a mean mean cripfemme machine, and he was nothing but the little boy he is. I won. I did.

It's true I won. But I still think of him, it's only been a little over a week and it is like he haunts me. I worry I will see him at the tube stop, out an about. I conjure up his face in my mind and I feel anxiety rising. I have never been so terrified and wrung inside out in my life, and I quiver still.

I needed to get this out; I must travel the path of honesty so that other people know we can fight back. This will happen again, even for me. But I must bear witness that it can be conquered. I must change this, and don't worry he is not getting away. You can run Mr. Voldermort, but you can't hide.

On community

It is a meta experience of life, to read about myself and my living conditions as part of theories in outdated literature. To read that the disabled feels this and this ,will say so and, lives here and there. It seems silly, hard, enraging, and sad, all in one go. To be subject to such ethnographic perspectives on myself and others, on a community I cherish and know are filled with heroes.

Even more so when the structures these theories diminishes into something that rarely happens, when the laws that they so joyful tell me will help me receive autonomy and freedom are the ones that hinder me the most in everyday life right now. It's a foggy life I look into, sometimes too foggy, sometimes a brick wall of discrimination right in front of my eyes. One that I reach out and touch with vainly polished nails. Fearing I will not have courage enough to scratch at it.

And it tells me I am invalid, confined, isolated and lonely. That my struggles will be in vain because it won't matter what I do. What I say, write and create, what kind of community I build for myself. We are bigger than you it says, we who built this, we see you but we don't care.

Recently I have been thinking a lot about small things, the ones that build up to the big one. How I could never just jump on a bus, how I haven't been to the grocery store in weeks since it's too far from my apartment and I would rather just send my PA's instead. How my new apartment will be better than the one I am in now, but how the ludicrous ideas of accessible housing, the way the makers of the brick walls sees it, means that it is okay to just make a huge bathroom and a badly planned out room. But after all the bathroom is where the disabled spent most of its time, isn't it?

I worry I will feel confined there again. That I will curl up and wail until the wallpaper curls on the walls.

I exist under such a matrix of discrimination, I suppose it is true there aren't very many rural-blue collar-Pentecostal-cripfemme-pansexual-kinksters, but that doesn't mean that this isn't the unprivileged reality that I live each and every day.
Recently it worries me, that solidarity has become such a bad word. That the political winds that are blowing here, and not only from the far far right as one would assume, are building an ignorant and frightened society that fears the other – an other such as me.

 

In between all this I struggle with assumptions of myself. I should work better, harder, my work should be effecting more change, I should be asked to do more stuff, I am not versatile enough, I am not strong enough.

I guess that's why I sob when she asks how I am feeling. I do feel isolated, I have gotten so used to being inside, so used to having to consider my energy, so used to pouring over books filled with words of those who have seen others such as me -but still none like me.

 

I have already lived a nightmare. I have already been what I was brought up to believe I would never be, a disabled young woman with limited access and self-determination over my own life, a loner. It's true I came out of it, and it was somewhat quicker than I would have thought. But that doesn't mean those feelings don't resonate within me now. I remember what it was like to not be able to choose, I do.

And I still can't choose like I would like to.

 

Don't think I have got it. Don't think that just because I read, write and perform critically about all that shape and strengthen me that I am somehow above it all now. The truth is I am not, the truth is I am pretty much as deep in the shit as I have always be. The truth is my sense of home is still being invaded by the constant help I can't be without. I cannot choose to be alone for that would be choosing a slow death. Don't think that just because I can formulate articulate academic reasoning on how that affects myself and others I don't live it as much as anyone that can't.

 

However, it is my duty to formulate this reasoning. It is my duty to speak in spaces where others can't, to infiltrate as much as possible a white-urban-atheist-able bodied-academic culture and tell about loss, sadness, confinement, rage and the restrictions placed upon the impaired body.

Do not tell me about freedom, for I have longed for that. Do not tell me about choice, for I very seldom have it. Do not tell me there is no class, when I exist as a lower class person within a lower class.

Do not speak to me about goodwill or charity. Tell me about responsibility and support. Do not try to tell me about equality, for I will show you what is truly unfair.

 

Recently as I have stumbled on this new path I have found great support. I know we share different experiences of illness, disability, and embodiment but I know we often pay a high price and we live to support others and the change we feel is necessary. I am deeply thankful for a shared understanding of complex femininity, sexuality, beauty, weakness, freedom, and force.

Thank you for supporting me, reading what I write and engaging in my work. You are my inspirations, my resorts, my beacons. You show me possibilities when I think there is none. And if this is the way this life is going to be then I am very thankful I will at least get to share it with you.

On dealing with despair

The first dead person I ever saw was my grandmother. She was 89 years old, and she died one month after her birthday. I remember the odd chilliness of her hand as I stroked it one last time. My mother had told me about it.
"It's a strange sensation", she had said. "A living person never gets that cold. I felt it lingering..."

My grandmother had been a widow for more than 40 years when she died. The last years of her life she was madly senile but happy where she was, I was convinced she was with my grandfather who I had never met. My father's father, who had died of a cardiac arrest in the forest behind their house. She had gone out too look for him because he took so long coming back, and she had found him dead. My father was 25, his brother only ten, soon he has outlived his own father by 40 years.

Death has never been a secret where I grew up. In fact it has been talked about openly. My mother's grandmother fell over from another heart related cause of death, my grandmother on my mother's side had constant heart troubles after she retired, but, said my aunts, when she died she stretched her arms out – as if someone was coming to greet her.
My grandfather who's woolen knees would chafe against my bare thighs as I sat in his lap, who called me his little dove, and carried sweets in his pocket (on box each, in each pocket for me and my brother) died in his car. His heart stopped right outside his garage, although he was vainly alive when they found him.
I remember calling his landline right after my mother told me he had died to see if he wasn't home after all. I was seven years old, and I can't remember what number I dialed.
My brother and I got his striped woolen cap and his red scarf, for months it smelled like him, a dark peppery perfume.

 

I wore a black plaited skirt and shiny patent leather shoes to his funeral, my older cousin couldn't stop crying behind me. The golden lettering in an equally golden frame behind the coffin read JESUS, the only altar needed for Pentecostals.
I remember wanting to cry because it would show I was sad. And going home with a friend of the family after the ceremony with my brother and my younger cousin who was only six, to eat Basset's Allsorts and take our Sunday bests off. My aunt wrote the verse in the obituary, about the wind swaying in the trees. A deep green forest that would never end.
The men in my family have been woodsmen, the forest a refuge for heated thoughts.

 

I eat dinner with my father in a noisy urban restaurant and he leans in over his plate and tells me.
"Christine, I have found this spot. Where the forest meets a meadow and a hill, like a triangle... and when it's all done, I'll build a little cottage there, and I'll go lay down, and you know where to find me."
I am not sure my father will ever do this. But I am certain he longs to.

 

My father's mother, who outlived her own husband for longer than they had been married, resonates in me now. I see her in the structure of my cheekbones. My smiles. I see my father and my mother's mother in the shape of my face, and all of them in my curly hair.

 

Perhaps I indulge so much in death and its concepts sorrow, loss and anger, since it has never been hidden from me. And perhaps it is so since I have been brought up believing that death takes us where we are destined to be. That we are called home. That we are greeted and hence reach out to the one coming towards us.

I am a constant subtle reminder of death where ever I go. My body is a reminder that you all will decay, that human life is fragile, hurtful and full of failings.
I was brought up with a notion of having conquered death before I had means to speak about it. My brother made the V for Victory sign in the incubator, it is true, I am not telling lies. I am certain we knew we had survived, but were clueless when it came to living.

 

The reminder of death that my body is is hard to escape. It is a constant weight dragging on behind me, sometimes smaller sometimes larger, but constant. It is a shadow of life lived on the fringe that has nothing to do with what I do, who I love, where I live – only the fact that I am.

I cannot help but be fascinated by the way my body works. I look fairly normal, I am short that true's, but none of me is disfigured. Still I marvel sometimes, and often it takes proof in the form of photography to spark it, at my upper arms, the muscles around my neck, my boney fingers. They are each other's contrasts, the representations of force and stiffness. Movement and confinement.
I marvel at a lot of things when it comes to my physical form. Small stuff, like the dry patches on my hands that come from pressing them down onto the padded handles of my walker in infinity, the slightly more bent joint on my right little finger.

The fact that the tension in my inner thighs can give me full blown orgasms without any other stimulation. If I am really in the mood.

 

One could assume that such a culture that mine has been, with constant reminders of sorrow and death. With a religious context and conversations of life and death as sincere as open windows to the afterlife, would have made for a gloomy childhood. One full of dark clad somber old aunts who sang chorals with shivering voices. But it was one of mad dances in pouring lukewarm summer rains, in our knickers, my aunt me. One of sheep with little golden crowns on their heads for my brother's and mine's birthday. One of constant stories of ecstatic relatives and mad childhood mischief such as painting cows and riding pigs. But with a frankness about mental illness, disability, grief and starvation that taught us.
Memento mori

But most of all
Memento vivente

 

 

My brother's and my body are slowly decaying. As with the half life of nuclear waste, we are withering, you all are - we have just gotten a head start.
My physical composure has landed me a place in a social structure of discrimination that I couldn't choose, but see all so clearly now. I am frightened; I am terrified that it will cage me in.

It is a porcelain white panic, the notion that this is my state, for as long as I live my body will hinder me to live a life free from help. I can be independent perhaps, but never truly autonomous. It is a condition that I cannot fight but musr accept, a notion I bear with me wherever I go, and sometimes it hits me. Bluntly over the head.

 

It is unfair, but life is unfair. I was lucky to be brought up with the lessons of love and bravery, of force. I was lucky to live in a home where nothing was hidden. Where the truth would truly set us free.

 

I was lucky to meet a man, a Norwegian wonder of nature. A talent in the truest sense. A teacher who taught me what no school would ever, a lesson I too often forgot.
He said that I had an eye for detail, that it was good that I sought a career in this, so few women did.
I didn't think of him yesterday shivering between my sheets but I think of him now, when I have come through to the other side of despair.

"Be small he said, be small but never frightened."

So I accept my fragility, I accept decay and I accept death. I accept my smallness as well as my force but I won't accept how structures frighten and rattle me.

 

My father's mother, the only dead person I have touched knew the true meaning of loss. Although as I touched her body her chilly bones knew nothing, had no stories to tell, spoke no language. Showed only, as a map, the trails of life lived.
In my father's photo albums the young woman who I resonate wears a soft flowery cotton dress, she is strong and healthy but she looks shyly into the lens of the camera.

There is something that always draws me into that picture, her hips, underneath her dress they seem to glow, like iron. My father's mother had glowing hips, my mother's mother only one eye and I have shivering thighs that grant me pleasure without touch.

On fear

I live a life of constant intrusion. I lead an existence based on a facet of social facades. My existence here is fragile. I cannot help but feel, again and again, as if I am wasting my time in this town. This is not what I came here for, to lay curled up between sheets in a apartment where the air hurts to inhale and my chest cramps with the notion of isolation. Still. Despite.

Despite taxi cards and PA's, despite good courses at University and despite a growing crip revolution under my hands.

Fall is approaching, fall is here now and I remember just how it was. How I felt that I imposed myself. How it was being stuck in a deep dark hole that opened up under my feet, how I plunged in, head first. And I remember that very clearly now, the hogtying ropes of confinement chafing against my skin, and it makes my chest cramp. With fear.

 

Recently the organization that has been a strong and reliable force of further existence in this town, my PAs, have crumbled and dissolved. In a matter of just physical existence I am indeed fine, someone still buys my groceries and washes my dirty laundry, but they are new and unknown girls.
It's a very odd and hurtful paradox, the one that says that on the surface I meet people all of the time, we talk and all, but I don't know them. We talk of nothing I really would want to talk about. While I see them, I am still alone, 'cause it's not them I want to see.

 

In the midst of this I get truly terrifying reports from media and friends, of people who's physical conditions are worse than mine, who's PA hours have been declined totally or cut drastically. On September 20^th I meet my welfare contact, to speak about my PA services since my contract runs out on the last of September. I hope I have nothing to worry about but it's so much added stress and I am terrified.
There are so many feelings of anxiety in this, so much which hinders me and puts my mind in other places than I want it to be.

It's hard to explain, the lack of autonomy and spontaneity in my life. The feeling of constant intrusion and lack of privacy, my own struggle with being nice and happy and good boss for the PAs who come to work for me now. The feeling of constant assessment by an authoritarian external force.
Who wants to know how long I use the bathroom when I do, if I eat healthy and practice a safe sexual lifestyle…all highly relevant questions, they assume, to determine whether a person in need really needs help.

 

And the hardest part of this being that I can't get out if. I can't tell them to fuck off and go do my thing anyway. My entire existence is built on their assessment of my need of help, and their good will, granting me hours of that help.
Usually when I have these feelings of confinement and worry they are paired with a strong will of fighting back, or carrying on anyhow, proving that success is the greatest form of revenge.
It is true I am driven by passion, obsession and a stubborn drive for self assertion and representation but fear is a marvelous sniper, shootings its bullets in the core of all of that. Shattering my dreams of lime light, good writing, revolution and inspiring studies, making me a shivering victim of coincidences…

I don't speak openly about all this as much as I perhaps should. It's private and personal and hard to phrase right. And I do believe that I refrain from it in order to not get bitter. I don't want it having the upper hand in my life. But today it's been true, the pit has been dark, deep and narrow, and its walls have scraped the back of my shoulders as I have turned in it.

 

On: Catharsis

"I try to call you names… but every time it comes out the same…"

 

I guess I should be happy about the fact that I don't care if you care anymore.
But it annoys me, the revising of our history, the you and me in us, that you must have done somehow to be able to deal with pushing me away so gently.
What was it with you and me and what we did that you could never accept? Don't worry, I know, and I won't tell here… I don't want to embarrass you.

However, you are the only one I have lost, that I have never been able to reconcile with. The only one with whom I couldn't have a promise of betterment and a new commitment. I divorced you and you didn't even know, when I was miserable grieving what we once had you didn't even think of it as being lost. You only thought of how to get your hands on the texts, those that I used to write for you, but didn't anymore.
You said - Oh that's mine, let me do it!
And I thought what the fuck, my words are mine, write your own. And then I grieved you.

 

I still make up foolish hopes. Like how you would show up at my birthday party, all changed and willing and contrite. Bloody fool. Of course you don't, you have no impulse to be contrite, you were never willing unless I was.

What bugs me the most now is the idea that I have let you go, but I can let go of what you made me. There are things that only we did, music only we listened to, texts I only showed you. And you bore into me so deeply I can't let you go. And now and then I miss you, madly. The you I knew. Whoever that was.

 

Yes it is true I loved you, coveted you, and craved you. Perhaps you didn't crave me and that is alright somehow. But I know I meant more than this. And I hate your revisionist approach to the life we lived, the stories we wrote inside each other. It makes me feel fake. A make believe version of myself, with make believe memories and fake ideas of myself, and you. But it doesn't matter that much what my image of you is, I just hate that you terrorized my image of me.

 

I try desperately to regain what you have forced me to connect with you. Although, sometimes I can't.
It's that music, my first ever meeting with you was play backed by it… it was the soundtrack of whatever we did and the theme of me missing you when you were unobtainable. Vainly I put it on the playlist for my party…as a hex, a spell…foolishly hoping still.
And when those dark musky tones starts playing I can't help but feel run over by how hard it is to have lost you, you slipped through my fingers even though I tried everything I knew to keep you. And the hardest part is knowing it isn't something I did, you just didn't want me, did you?

 

We are pissed and giggly and have measured our complexes to the inch to see who had it worse, and that song starts playing again, and she (apart from you) notices the gloom in my eyes…
What is it?, she asks.
And I say it's you.
Do you want me to turn it off?
No! No, I say all of a sudden! Put it on, put the entire record on, I need to overcome this!
And she does…

It's then that I realize, you will never go away, I will never be able to reconcile because you will never be contrite. I will just have to accept that this will hurt for longer than I thought. My foolish softhearted constitution allowed you drill yourself into my bones and I smile wanly at her..

..for I know that constitution I detested so because it let you in and will never let you out, also let her in..and all the others who will never leave like you left.

And I guess I should be happy about that, and about the fact that I won't ever have the opportunity to be disappointed with you..ever..again.