It never occurred to me to keep my abortions a secret from anyone nor was I ever compelled to apologise for them. Part of that confidence came from growing up in a family where the notion of women’s reproductive rights and control over their own bodies was sacrosanct. Part of it came from living in a state where no amount of public opposition or patriarchal bullshit had the power to suddenly render my choices illegal. This defiant stance about my own body means I’m often accused of being an unfeeling, evil, selfish murderess who, bizarrely, doesn’t deserve to have children. I’m told, as so many women are, that I am a ‘whore’ who shouldn’t have ‘opened my legs’ if I wasn’t prepared to deal with the consequences of it. There’s no shortage of irony in the fact that women are held responsible for whatever we allow into our bodies but denied any say over what we take out of them.
What I know is this: in a few weeks’ time, if things go according to plan, I’ll be meeting a baby I already love and whose future I can already see stretching out in glorious technicolour before me. This child and their future would not exist if I’d been forced to make a different decision when I was twenty-five. Fuck all those people with their placards and their judgment, their pathetic ideas of what we women should and shouldn’t do with our bodies. As far as I’m concerned, I’m pro-life.
My life.
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7 –
THE BELLE JAR
There is a mantra I repeat when things begin to seem too immense to process:
This too shall pass. And we will all be okay.
I began to say it sometime towards the end of 2012, when I went a little mad.
Frightening and disorienting as this madness was, it was familiar in that I had met it twice before. The first time was when I was twelve years old and struggling with the emotional disruption and change that comes from moving to an entirely different country. Madness introduced itself to me in my living room one afternoon and lingered by my side for a number of months. As no one else seemed to notice the stale weight of its presence or smell the metallic odour that seeped from the corners of its mouth, I tried my best to ignore it. But still it remained, whispering its threats into my ears and draping me in the cold, clammy sweat of the terrified. The world around me began to tilt and shift. I have been abandoned in a boat, I thought, and I don’t know how to navigate my way back to shore.
The madness brought with it paranoia. I’ve always lived with the contradiction of being a calm and measured person who has a layer of irrational anxiety bubbling beneath the surface. I don’t worry about locking doors or leaving ovens on (if anything, I’m too lax when it comes to real-life responsibilities), but since childhood, I’ve grappled with a particular form of catastrophic hypochondria. I say catastrophic, because I’ve never been scared of everyday illnesses. I rarely go to the doctor, choosing to deal with colds and sniffles the way everybody else does – by lying in bed moaning loudly about how miserable I am and insisting that eating Manuka honey out of the jar ‘really does work’. With the exception of Nurofen Plus (one of the few things we can thank menstruation for providing access to) I barely take over-the-counter medication, let alone prescription drugs. In mid-2015, I broke my ankle while playing roller derby and refused to go to the sports clinic for twenty-four hours because I was sure it was just a sprain.
Catastrophic hypochondria is different. Someone with the kind of anxiety I have doesn’t worry about being felled by a cold. Those things are small fry. Instead, we’re convinced that life has something worse in store for us. By the age of six, I already felt this keenly. Every bruise was the harbinger of leukaemia, every sore elbow evidence of osteosarcoma. I’d run to my father, explaining each condition with comprehensive medical notes like, ‘It hurts when I press here,’ or ‘I think this scrape might be getting gangrenous.’
‘Well, don’t press there then,’ he’d sometimes reply. At other times, he’d make a show of looking carefully at whatever limb was concerning me then declare ominously, ‘We’ll have to cut it off then.’
His replies did little to address my anxiety, but knowing that he found them silly enough to make fun of (in a loving way) did bring momentary relief. Still, my fear that an imminent, debilitating death and/or condition await me have never really eased. In my life, I’ve diagnosed myself with having HIV, multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease, brain cancer, possible blood clots and potential macular degeneration, to name just a few. I am currently concerned that the little squiggles and floaters brought out by light sensitivity are signs I might be going blind. Despite these things being completely normal, I’m still gripped by bouts of anxiety about what I’ll do when I can no longer see. I sometimes catch myself in the act of testing my peripheral vision, checking the progress of two fingers as I move them slowly and deliberately from my ears to my nose. I’ll bring a hand in close and assess the ridges that hide beneath its wispy blonde hair. So far, they’ve always appeared clearly and cleanly.
Still, I wait for the day they don’t. This is one of my anxieties – waiting for my body to break down so it catches up to where I assume my mind already is.
At twelve, the madness came shortly after the ringing. One night, as I was getting ready for bed, a single note sounded in my left ear. It ran on a high frequency, piercing the silence with a steady, unrelenting drone. I assumed it would disappear soon enough, but it was instead joined by other notes. One by one they appeared, until an orchestra of ringing played inside my head. Days turned into weeks, but the noise just grew louder. Bedtimes were the worst. A quiet house cloaked in darkness only amplified the cacophony. I took to sleeping with a Discman beneath my pillow and deliberately grinding my teeth, both futile attempts to muffle the noise that was slowly pulling me further and further inside my head.
Around the same time, I developed an absurd and frankly disturbing fixation on religion. There’s no way to write about this without sounding completely unhinged, so I’ll just put it out there: I became convinced that the devil was trying to tempt me into handing over my soul, and that all I needed to do was give in to it. So profound was my paranoia about this that I had a panic attack one afternoon as it occurred to me the boy I had a crush on at school might actually be Satan in disguise. I began visiting the Catholic church near our house, and entered into discussions with a nun I met there about how I might convert to the faith. Harmless things filled me with terror – the sound of the creek running beyond the hedge outside our house, an accidental glimpse of something that looked like an upside-down cross, and what seemed to me to be the steady dismantling of an already jumbled mind.
My anxieties started to manifest in extreme expressions of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I favoured the classics: repetitive and specific numerical flicking of light switches, persistent hand washing done in a strict order (rub the soap on the palms then scrub each finger on my right hand four times, moving from thumb to pinkie and then moving across to repeat the method on my left hand before doing it three more times fully but in a forward-reverse-reverse-forward pattern), and repeated mantras. In my case, these mantras were prayers. I’d start with an Our Father and then do two iterations of a Hail Mary before cycling back to finish with another Our Father. It was the hand-washing equivalent of cleansing my soul, and I’d do it in the same pattern applied to my fingers. Forward-reverse-reverse-forward. The ritual had to follow this formation or else it became invalid, so even if I repeated it endlessly (which I sometimes did), it still needed to be done in basic fours. Anyone who suffers from OCD will be familiar with the power of counting, and I counted everything.
But all of this was happening deep, deep inside. If anyone around me noticed anything untoward, they kept it to themselves. This was also around the same time I developed anorexia and bulimia, two things that should be extremely difficult to hide but which end up being remarkably easy when cultivated in an environment that praises thinness and self-control in young women. Girls are trained to keep everything neatly tucked away and tidy, so much so that even ou
r desperate cries for help become the whimpers of the politely inaudible. As a young woman sharing confessionals with other survivors of a girlish youth, I considered my experiences rare and unique, incorrectly assuming they made me the group’s outlier. I was an anorexic, I’d offer solemnly. I have bulimia.
I viewed and spoke about eating disorders through the lens of a performatively horrified society that likes to pretend these maladies are an exception to the tapestry of girlhood and not one of the primary materials used in its creation. I thought it would shock people to hear I had spent years keeping intricate lists of my calorie consumption, that they’d be astonished by the fact I’d become so practised at purging that not only could I vomit with only the aid of my stomach muscles and not the stimulation of my gag reflex but that it was something I proudly considered a ‘skill’. Now, when almost twenty-five years have passed since I first bent over a toilet and emptied myself of all I thought made me disgusting, I have a different reaction to hearing stories like these. You too?
A 2015 survey conducted by Girlguiding UK found that 58 percent of girls aged thirteen to twenty-one believed mental health in young women was a serious concern, 75 percent of respondents believed self-harming was a major health issue for people their age and 62 percent had known a girl who’d experienced a problem with her mental health.
And yet, the problem of poor mental health in girls is often overlooked or downplayed, dismissed as girls simply being dramatic or overwrought. The Girlguiding survey found that 82 percent of girls believed the adults around them ‘didn’t recognise the pressure they were under’, a finding that seems to be supported by the lack of substantial discussion around the mental health challenges of women in general but particularly young women. It’s strange that society can be fully aware of the ways in which girls can be hurt – after all, sexual violence, eating disorders, self-harm and poor self-esteem are hardly unheard of – and yet seemingly fail to understand how these various traumas are likely to chip away at the mental health of the girls harmed by them.
In terms of mental health, public conversations are still very much focused on how it transpires in young men. A friend of mine once confessed to me that she was secretly relieved to give birth to a boy because she was scared of the violence that might have greeted a girl. Her relief turned to anguish when someone else told her that the world holds damage for both girls and boys. With a girl, a parent worries that their daughter might be raped. With a boy, they worry he might kill himself. (To be fair, the person raising these dual concerns is enmeshed in trauma; they have worked for years in rape crisis centres and currently work with the survivors of gang-related sexual violence.)
But this isn’t an entirely fair depiction either. Make no mistake: I think it’s absolutely right and vital that we address the circumstances of suicide in young men because far too many boys are responding to feelings of anxiety and isolation by choosing to end their own lives. Of course this is devastating – how could anyone think otherwise?
What isn’t often considered, though, are the rates at which suicide is attempted. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, while men (and white men in particular) are four times more likely than women to die by suicide, women are three times more likely to attempt it. There’s some conjecture that this is because women choose less violent and immediate methods (in the US in particular, the suicide rate is boosted by having easy access to firearms – more than 60 percent of fatal gunshot wounds in America are deliberately self-inflicted, and that accounts for more than half of all deaths by suicide in that country).
We don’t have to stop focusing on the high rates of suicide in men to also acknowledge that the urge to end one’s life is something profoundly felt by and acted upon in women. Additionally, the ways in which suicide is conceived need to be broadened. An attempt on one’s life isn’t necessarily something undertaken in a single moment and with a single mode of choice. The girls and women who starve themselves and/or engage in endless cycles of binging and purging are practising a form of ongoing self-harm, and much of this is motivated by the desire to simply cease existing. So too are the girls and women who track their overwhelming feelings of pain and hopelessness by the cuts they notch into their arms, legs and torsos. These might not be suicide attempts in the way we typically understand them, but a good proportion of these people will profess to wrestling with the constant and terrifying feeling of either wanting to die or just wanting to go to sleep and never wake up.
I know what that feels like, because I’ve been there too. The mental distress and paranoia I felt at twelve didn’t disappear, but I found a way to channel it into other forms of self-abuse. I practised the aforementioned cycle of starvation and purging. I wrote endless reams of text in my diaries about how useless and disgusting I was. I spent a solid decade from the age of thirteen feeling that I wasn’t entitled to things like love, affection or even identification as a girl. Sadder still is that my belief in these things was characterised less by a sense of how deeply unfair that was and more by an inherent acceptance of it. Who was I to think I had the right to be treated like anything other than a repulsive freak? When my friends chattered about boyfriends or flirting, I listened with all the wonder of a person who’s being given a rare and undeserved glimpse into the inner workings of a secret society. You can look at these things, I told myself, but you can never have them.
This acceptance of my own inadequacy was so profound that when I finally landed my first boyfriend at eighteen, I took to referring to him as ‘my friend’ when speaking with strangers or workmates who’d never met him. It wasn’t to shield his privacy or to protect the fragility of our courtship from prying eyes. It was because I assumed people would think I was lying about it, and I believed this assumption to be fair and natural. Girls like me didn’t have boyfriends or love or feminine identities, and it was embarrassing to act as if we did. So I lied about it to spare anyone from having to look at me with pity.
And still, no one seemed to know that anything was wrong – least of all me.
I knew that not everyone vomited up their food or chain-smoked cigarettes because it was a good way to remember to keep breathing, but I still thought it was normal that I did these things. This is one of the (many) terrible by-products of self-harm: the belief that it’s not really all that damaging, because you only harm yourself enough either to leave no marks or make sure they’re in places where only you can see them. You keep smiling for other people, laughing at their jokes, saying the right things and expressing the appropriate amount of excitement about life – and you do all of that because sometimes putting on a show is the only way to stop yourself from tumbling headfirst into the emptiness that seems to live inside you.
When I was twenty-one, I fell again.
I remember the moment clearly. I was lying in bed one night, trying to drift off to sleep, when a wave of adrenaline suddenly rushed through me. I sat bolt upright in the darkness and tried to focus on something – anything that would anchor me back to that point in space and time – but it was like trying to stem the flow of a river using nothing but your hands. I was overcome by a feeling of dread and terror so intense that all I could think of doing was fleeing: physically running out the front door and trying to escape it on foot. At the same time, I knew this would be pointless. The terror came from within me, and that meant it would be impossible to escape. I lay there in the dark and watched as it seeped from my pores. It grew in the room like a dark stain before snapping back and encasing me in a bubble of its own stench. I could bend its walls, but I couldn’t break through them.
I stayed this way for months and months, bound by an invisible barrier that no one else could see but through which everything for me became muffled. It had the disconcerting effect of making it seem as if objects were both too close and yet also too far away, as if voices and sounds were fighting to be heard over persistent radio static, as if I was touching everything through gloves and tasting everything through pla
stic.
Fearing I would never get better, I went to see the university doctor. He was a nice chap and he was easy to talk to. I tried to explain to him how I was feeling, and he appeared sympathetic. It was as if reality only existed in a painting, I told him – or as if I did.
He asked me if I’d been experiencing anything unusual. Had the television or radio been talking to me, for example?
No, I replied. The television and radio hadn’t been talking to me (but the thought they might soon start doing so began to plague me; even now, on anxious days, I might turn either or both on just to reassure myself that they’re both working as normal).
Was I feeling suicidal? he asked.
I wasn’t, I replied – although that wasn’t strictly true. I didn’t want to kill myself, but I was also sad and anxious and tired of being alive. I didn’t want to die, but I was scared that I might spend the rest of my life tumbling around in an endless cycle of panic and fear. If you’ve never experienced anxiety, you might find it difficult to understand what that feels like. I can throw any number of clichés and similes at you: it’s like trying to find your way out of a dark and dense forest, only to keep circling back to the same point you started from; it feels like being caught in a washing machine, disorientating and dizzy-making and like you’re always on the precipice of drowning; it’s like a carnival tent full of distorting mirrors, and you’re too terrified to look into any of them because you’re afraid your own reflection might assume a life of its own and start to mock you. It’s like all of these things at once and that’s an easy way to visualise it. But the simple and most universal truth is that anxiety just makes you feel incredibly, desperately alone.
Fight Like A Girl Page 12