I didn’t want to kill myself. But I found myself frequently daydreaming about how nice it would be to lower myself into the ocean from the end of a jetty and just let the waves carry me out to sea. In my imagination, it would be less like dying and more like surrendering. I could give myself to the ocean, and everything would be okay. I could be salt and froth and calm and storm, but most of all I could finally be something that wasn’t me.
I didn’t tell the doctor any of this. All the advice and rhetoric around mental health tells us to reach out and ‘let people know’ how we’re feeling, but such a thing is easier said than done. A large part of my anxiety at twenty-one stemmed from the fear that I might actually be on a downward spiral into madness, and giving voice to this fear would only hasten the possibility rather than alleviate it. How do you tell someone that you can’t tell where your mind ends and your body begins, but you definitely know they’re moving in completely different hemispheres?
I didn’t know how to do that. And so, after reassuring him that I wasn’t a risk to myself, this kind and well-intentioned doctor told me that I seemed to be experiencing some ‘mild depression’. If I liked, he could prescribe me a half-dosage of Zoloft, but it was up to me. Did I want that?
I make careful mention of the compassionate nature of this doctor because I want to illustrate just how little understanding there is around mental health and the mental health of women in particular. At the age of twenty-one, it was possible for me to walk into a doctor’s office and within roughly fifteen minutes be prescribed a reasonably major form of medication that I almost certainly didn’t need. This isn’t because the doctor was ambivalent about my health or cavalier about prescriptions. I’m not really into conspiracy theories about all doctors being in the pockets of Big Pharma (even though I acknowledge pharmaceutical companies are in the business of getting people hooked on drugs), so I don’t think it was because this doctor saw me as a giant dollar sign. And above all, I don’t think it was because he didn’t care about my wellbeing.
I think it was easy to prescribe me drugs I didn’t need because ‘fixing’ mental health is more complicated than people want to admit. It’s a hard and often scary road. It has been hard and scary for me and I suspect that it will continue to take me down dark, forbidding paths for the rest of my life. I know this is true for a lot of girls and women – but again, we rarely talk about this because there’s a lack of understanding about and perhaps even interest in the particular mental disturbances that afflict us. The ways in which we cope (which so often includes the ways in which we hurt ourselves) are more hidden and less immediate than some of the other methods used to tolerate mental illness. Addictions, self-loathing, solitude, irrationalities – these are our tools. And after all, aren’t these the things women are supposed to be anyway? Quiet? Tremulous? Full of self-hatred? We have been imagined as irrational creatures from the very beginning, our pain and suffering dismissed as fanciful overreactions or desperate, pathetic grabs for attention we don’t deserve and have done nothing of substance to earn. We are hysterical she-demons, governed by the mystical movements of the moon and therefore unknowable and dangerous to others. If history bothered to document our stories, there wouldn’t be enough paper in the world to bear witness to all the women who’ve been imprisoned because our emotions proved too inconvenient for men to handle and too terrifying for them to ignore. Why should we expect anyone to care that we’re hurting when the message we’ve received our entire lives is that hurt for us is not only inevitable but also somehow our fault?
I didn’t take the Zoloft that day. My crutches have always been alcohol, Valium and cigarettes. These seem to me to be controllable substances in that the effects of them wear off reasonably quickly. I’ve had ecstasy twice in my life. The first time, I threw it up almost as soon as I swallowed it because I was suddenly gripped by fear of the unknown. The second, I began to panic almost as soon as the drug began to take effect. Anything that changes the chemistry of my body sparks my fight-or-flight response, which proves fairly incompatible with having an anxiety disorder.
With time and self-care, I eventually got better. That is to say, I didn’t get any worse. Somehow, I figured out how to live in the world again. I spent the rest of my twenties dealing with a more muted form of sporadic angst. But then, as if on schedule, there it was again at thirty-two. Sitting at my desk one afternoon, I had a sudden panic attack. As I gasped for breath, I felt the all-too-familiar urge to run – not from the situation, but from myself. I wanted to break free of my skin and disappear to a place where thoughts don’t exist, and any knowledge of the superficial self has been left far behind.
My particular battle with mental illness has always partially manifested itself in an existential crisis. When in its grip, I’m racked by an inability to understand how and why I am me. I experience jags of disconcerting disassociation, unable to connect with the world as it happens around me but still aware enough to pretend that everything is fine. I find myself staring at the lines of my body, wondering where the limits of containment are. Could I begin to seep out of myself, becoming a half-person living between two states of being? Has it happened already? Like the two times before, the panic that rose up that day settled in to consume my life once again. I’d sit in the living room and feel suddenly overcome by terror about my state of existence. My skin would prickle and I’d gasp for breath. My body was nothing more than television static, crackling in and out of a reality I was no longer a part of.
I took to walking in the late-summer afternoons. I embarked on long stretches of pavement pounding throughout Edinburgh Gardens, listening to podcasts and musicals – anything that would keep me from delving into the dusty nooks and crannies of my mind. I sat under trees and counted my breaths until the sky began to turn the ghostly purple of dusk, and slowly I crawled my way back to sanity. My recovery this time took longer, much longer, but it happened. I had put my fractured self back together again, and although there were more chips than before and a handful of tiny pieces missing, I became something that once again resembled me.
I seek help from a number of different sources now, the most enjoyable of which are the long walks I take around my neighbourhood. I’ll traipse for hours up and down the streets, admiring the flowers in people’s gardens or marvelling at the rich, dense clouds that spread like mottled bruises across the Brunswick sky. I listen to audio books – novels that I’ve read before and loved, and to which I can get away with directing only half of my attention. The Harry Potter collection narrated by Stephen Fry is a favourite, as is the work of David Sedaris. I walk myself into the good kind of exhaustion, and it reminds me that life is just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. It’s a kind of mindfulness, although my teacher for that would tell me that distraction isn’t the point. I’ve recently been meeting with her once a fortnight to discuss my impulse to run away from perfectly ordinary situations. She calls this my ‘threat-brain’. She means that I, like most anxiety sufferers, ascribe danger to situations that realistically will not harm me but from which I feel I must escape. Instead of succumbing to threat-brain, she tells me just to notice it. Notice the feelings as they pass in and out of my mind, but don’t give them any more weight than they need. Try to understand that they can’t hurt me, even if they make me uncomfortable. Sit with them and be still. Above all, be kind to myself.
Sometimes, remembering to be kind to yourself is the hardest thing. One of my greatest strengths is also one of my most debilitating weaknesses, and that is my ability to maintain control over my life and emotions. I emerged from a childhood defined by eating disorders, emotional instability, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and little to no physical self-esteem. The world I live in is one that seeks to control women’s physical and mental selves, to speak for us and to us as if we’re children, constantly reminding us at every opportunity that we are unreliable witnesses to our own lives. Is it any wonder that I, and the millions and millions of girls like me who are ma
de to feel so powerless, focus instead on asserting control every which way we can? Perhaps the most telling part of this tragedy is how adept we’ve become at doing these things in secret, viewing this secrecy as a necessary form of quiet resistance.
Three million Australians live with some form of anxiety and/or depression, and many of us are well practised in its concealment. Every time I speak openly about my own mental health issues, more friends come forward to reveal their ongoing struggles with crushing depression or anxiety. You’d think the knowledge that we’re all in this together would provide some kind of comfort and relief. But as anyone who struggles with mental illness can attest, there is a deep loneliness in being tethered to the erratic whims of one’s own mind.
I wonder sometimes if there’s a freedom in madness. It can feel like I’m balancing precariously on a tightrope dividing two states of being. On my left lies calm serenity. On my right, the thing I fear most – being sucked into a hole of rushing noise that makes no sense, the cacophony of a million thoughts crashing into each other at high speed. But if a decision could be made to at last surrender to it, to give up and allow myself to fall east to what sometimes seems the inevitable conclusion, might I find that it wouldn’t involve hurtling to the ground in a bloody mess but floating instead to a less frightening dreamscape? If there were a way to switch off, would I?
And yet, this is what I keep circling back to: that there is so much to live for. There is the man who lies next to me at night, who feels content enough in the secret world of intimacy we’ve created together to provide safety for me there too. There is the life we made together, our wondrous, impossibly beautiful baby, whose daily achievements manage to be both simple and magnificent. There are sunsets streaming through bedroom windows that look out over well-worn tram lines, the smell of jasmine on spring evenings, and the taste of real butter melted on fruit toast.
There is evidence that I have survived this before; that I will go on surviving.
There is love. There is love. There is love.
Maybe the Cheshire cat was right. Maybe we are all a little mad. And if we are all in this together, then none of us are truly alone. That means me. But it also means you.
Across these pages, I reach out to you, dear one whose heart feels so alone.
This too shall pass.
And we will all be okay.
–
8 –
WOMEN AGAINST FEMINISM
Sometime in early 2014, a movement began to spread across the internet in the form of a hashtag meme. Women, most of them young, white and conventionally pretty, started posting photographs of themselves holding up placards that began with the phrase I don’t need feminism because . . .
The posts were collated under the hashtag #womenagainstfeminism, with explanations ranging from the absurd (I don’t need feminism because I don’t want to politicise my gender) to the defensive (I don’t need feminism because I’m not a manipulative idiot playing victim), from the reassuring (I don’t need feminism because I respect men and refuse to demonise them and blame them for my problems) to the grossly offensive (I don’t need feminism because REAL feminism is about equal opportunities and respect for women. NOT abortions, free birth control and the ability to walk around like a shameless slut while damning the male population for being born!). I’d have thought advocating for respect for women included not referring to them as shameless sluts, but that’s just me.
I may be a screeching, self-styled victim with a severe case of the misandries, but I have to wonder where women like this get their information. Heavens, there are barely enough hours in the day for all the ritual demonising of men required to maintain membership of the Coven of Feminist Witches, let alone traipsing all over the place trying to score free birth control. As it is, feminists can only just about manage one or two abortions a week, which is a modern miracle when you think about it, considering it’s a well-known fact we’re all far too unattractive for any man to ever want to sleep with us. Isn’t that why we’re so angry all the time?
Personally, I like the contributions made by American blogger Rebecca Brink. Donning a series of wigs, Brink photographs herself in similar poses holding beautifully satirical interpretations of the various philosophies of the Women Against Feminism. Her statements reflect the confusing lack of awareness displayed by these women towards feminism as a whole and its various aims, not least of which is that the male problems seemingly being ignored by the radical separatist lesbian overlords are actually caused by the construction of patriarchy, not the dismantling of it.
Despite the endless evidence of its use and purpose to their lives, there are a multitude of reasons why women choose not to identify with the feminist movement. I’ll go into some of those reasons a little bit later, but I want to start with one of Brink’s examples, which I consider to be the most obvious, and the most pressing.
I don’t need feminism because I want boys to like me.
A lot of shade is thrown at girls and young women who don’t identify as feminists. Every time a celebrity says something silly about gender inequality, or claims to be Not A Feminist because ‘I love men!’, another think piece pops up to ponder with furrowed brow and admonishing tone all the reasons why young women might be letting the side down. I’ve probably written a few of them myself.
But the truth is our political identities are so intricately entwined with our emotional and physical identities that it’s impossible to look at feminist engagement without acknowledging the ways women are punished for it in an already punishing world. Women are told we’re meant to be beautiful, compliant, sexual but not slutty, thin, small, cutesy and, above all, willing to prop up the structures of power that keeps patriarchy firmly in place. Feminism is a challenge to all of this, and it’s perceived as a monumental threat by the people who benefit from and/or feel safe in an environment that relies on entrenched gender inequality.
But why would any woman invest in a system that requires her compliance to survive? Well, movements for social justice have always faced a backlash. For some, the backlash can be too intense. Feminism attacks patriarchy, which is a brave act against a system that has ensured it maintains access to the best tools, the most effective weapons and the privilege of being able to constantly shift its own goalposts. It requires a lot of emotional resilience to be able to stand up to the legacy of centuries of structural inequality, and I fully understand why some women are either too scared, too bruised or simply too exhausted to maintain the energy for it – particularly when intersectionality dictates that significant numbers of women are also battling oppression on a multitude of sides, whether its racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia or classism.
No one with any real understanding of the complexities of feminist activism and intersectional oppression could truly begrudge a single woman these feelings of identity ambivalence, because staying strong in the face of such overwhelming opposition can be a fucking hard slog. Unless you’re a cis, white, heterosexual man whose minimal expressions of solidarity with women always nets you the maximum number of pats on the head, maintaining faith in the feminist identity can feel like pushing shit uphill while having more giant buckets of shit fired at you from a cannon constructed entirely out of shit.
But how does this backlash manifest itself?
Its most basic and recognisable execution comes courtesy of the way feminists are de-feminised. Part of patriarchy’s modus operandi has always been to keep women tethered to a constructed idea of femininity and therefore distracted from fighting for their own political and social equality. Confusion is also a key component here, with the changing whims of fashion and how they tie into capitalist goals (in this case, the essentialist goals of keeping all members of a community dissatisfied and thus always striving to first keep up with the Joneses and then outstrip them) meaning that what is considered ‘feminine’ and attractive is subject to constant change.
At any given time in history, women have been told to be either fat
, thin, plump, short, tall, sexually adventurous, sexually prudish, brunette, blond, fecund, scrawny etc. etc. etc. (It’s imperative also to note that western colonialism and imperialism have also resulted in racist ideologies which have almost constantly enforced one other ‘must have’ item in a woman’s arsenal – white skin. To the white women like myself who are reading this book and who haven’t started doing this already, please make it a point to continuously examine and interrogate the ways you experience privilege despite being subjected to other forms of discrimination and oppressive ideologies.)
So it’s not just about creating a completely arbitrary set of ideals and convincing women we’re nothing unless we adhere to them – it’s also about being consistently misleading about the longevity of these ideals so that we’re kept in a perpetual state of self-loathing and gendered competition.
This is capitalism at its finest – telling women we’re rubbish so that we can keep working towards perfection. Conform to this system and everything from magazines, TV talk shows and the zeitgeist will call you ‘empowered’, which is just a fancy way of saying you’re a chill woman who’s happy to ‘embrace her femininity’ because it just makes you feel healthier/sexier/cleaner/ more womanly.
Feminists, on the other hand, have very rarely been referred to by the mainstream as positive examples of empowered womanhood. Calling yourself a feminist in 1972 inspired pretty much exactly the same public response as claiming that title in 1997, and neither were especially different from the disdain heaped on turn of the century suffragettes and modern day tidal wavers. For more than a century, women have led political campaigns which secured among other things the rights of women to vote, to run for political office, to not lose our jobs once we were married, to not be raped by our husbands in those same marriages and to (at least legislatively) be paid the same amount of money for the same work. Yet despite these extraordinary achievements, feminism is still dismissed by both men AND women as a hate-based movement run by fringe-dwelling lesbians who want to destroy everything that’s good and wholesome about the world. I entered the words ‘feminists are’ in Google, and the first three predictive responses that came up were ‘feminists are ugly’, ‘feminists are sexist’ and ‘feminists are stupid’.
Fight Like A Girl Page 13