Artwork: Fountain Tarot
To Anderson
In my more silently grandiose moments and/or when I take a somber look on the way I have been sinking deeper and deeper into the tar of my illness, I entertain the thought that someone will say, “She was the blood of the dragon, but now her fire has gone out,” after I’m gone. But who would bother, right?
There are certain spells that are made not from words but from refusal. I cast mine every day.
I live—I am a living contradiction myself. I am someone who was meant to die by medical prognosis over thirty years ago. And yet, here I am, talking. Existing. Moving through a world that cannot make sense of me, not really, because I am the person you see—the one you do not want to be your enemy. That alone is enough. I’ve learned to live among people whose tolerance for ambiguity is very, very low. But I am not like them. I was never like them. And ambiguity—its texture, its taste—has become the very medium of my breath.
I learned to recognize ambiguity, not only as truth, but as a condition of life. It’s where the real things live–the things we must shirk away from if we hope to endure. It’s where the unbearable things live. I’ve known this for as long as I can remember. Some people acquire or–forced to acquire–knowledge they never asked for. And they suffer for it. They suffer because they see what others ignore, what others call exaggeration, or bitterness, or delusion. There is a passage in a book of clinical psychology that tries to describe this.
“One of the most striking aspects of many high-functioning individuals with schizoid dynamics is their lack of common defenses. They tend to be in touch with many emotional reactions at a level that awes and even intimidates their acquaintances. It is common for the schizoid person to wonder how everybody else can be lying to themselves so effortlessly when the harsh facts of reality are so patent. Part of the alienation from which schizoid people suffer derives from their experiences of not having their own emotional, intuitive, and sensory capacities validated because others simply do not see what they do. The ability of a schizoid person to perceive what others disown or ignore is so natural and effortless that he or she may lack empathy for the less lucid, less ambivalent, less harrowing world of non-schizoid peers.” That is as close as I’ve ever come to seeing myself in a diagnosis. It’s not obtuseness. It’s the opposite—too much clarity. Too much sensation. Too much pain.
I turned to philosophy because I needed something to hold on to, something rigorous and luminous that might match the sheer scope of what I was living through. I was drawn to the pure, crystalline vestiges of abstract thinking—so far removed from the turmoil of my body, my days, my world. The mountains of the mind were calling to me, and to my own surprise, I could climb them. I was good at mapping out difficult terrain, good at connecting the dots others didn’t even see, good at weaving and reweaving fragile but precise conceptual webs that came to form my signature—my philosophical signature. And let’s not even begin to speak of the absence of critical thinking today. For me, philosophy was not a ladder to some higher truth—it was a structure of survival, however unstable. But philosophy offers very little when it comes to surviving in the more immediate sense. As Adi Ophir asserts, the person in pain does not want an interpretation—what the sufferer wants is relief. And there is no philosophy written from and out of pain.
I lived in a world where the idea of my loving, or being loved, was considered laughable. A foregone conclusion. Not only was I not supposed to get married—I wasn’t supposed to live long enough to make it to adulthood. The idea of me having sex was non-existent. Even the people closest to me—those who loved me most—hoped to believe otherwise but didn’t. I could see it in their eyes. It was inconceivable that I would find someone to choose me in all my strangeness, in my bent and broken form, my contorted hands, my inescapable pain.
For a while, in my early twenties, I imagined myself in a relationship like that between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. How a striking, vital woman humiliated herself in a sense, for a man who did not see like magic. Who betrayed her. Because maybe she felt herself to be lacking. Because maybe she believed the cultural story that women like us should be grateful for crumbs. That we are lucky to be tolerated, let alone wanted.
I hardly ever use the word “loneliness” anymore, not like when I was much younger and romanticized the hell of things. I use the word “ostracism.” Thankfully, I didn’t just see myself as fundamentally deficient. I was also stubborn, defiant, impatient for life. I’ve come to hate the ideas of destiny or fate as one might expect. Fuck fate.
“The traumatized are unpredictable because we know how to survive.”
So this is what happened instead.
My husband and I have been through hell and back together. And he does not love me despite my disability. He does not touch me in spite of my illness. He loves all of me. He has held me in hospital beds and while I collapsed after visits to dismissive pain specialists. He has helped me with things most people couldn’t imagine needing help with. He helps me with archery. He listens to my rants about Game of Thrones, the finale and the books, for hours on end. We make up words together. We speak in our own language. We play make-believe. We joke that if anyone heard us talking, they would assume we were insane. One of our first dates was one of the happiest days of my life. We went to the Contemporary Museum of Art. There was a special installation—an entire mirrored room filled with silver birthday-balloon-like pillows, floating everywhere. I played until my body couldn’t take it anymore. And he watched me laugh under silver light. That was joy. Real joy. The kind that becomes memory not because it ends, but because it expands.
It has become clear to me that if the world were to know how deeply, how quietly, how fiercely I am sustained by this—by him—it would destroy it. So I cast a quieting spell, to keep it hidden, to keep it safe. As rational as conviction can be, I believe this to my core. I will not risk it. Not this. All of my dreams have been wounded by the world. But this one—this dream-become-reality—will not be. I will burn cities to the ground before I let them reach it.
Nietzsche wrote that a person’s unhappiness is revealed by how they respond to happiness. Well. I respond with utter disbelief. Even after all these years. In fact—because of all these years. Because this keeps happening every minute. The longer we are together, the more unbelievable it feels. The very idea that anyone would choose to stand by me for so long, to love me, with a love that radiates from every gesture, every whisper, every caress. Even the slightest touch. My reaction is not to grow jaded. My reaction is to see him as my miracle. Not a black miracle—not something that ought not to be—but a miracle. And I am not the person who talks about miracles, or believes in them, and certainly not the person who expects them to happen to me, of all people.
People forget that in ancient Greece, the gods were not there to save you. People feared attracting their attention. Divine interest often spelled catastrophe. Hubris wasn’t punished because it was false—it was punished because it was true.
The world sees my fury.
It sees the fire that scorches and the kind of fury that comes from someone generally soft-spoken and non-histrionic, someone who would sooner direct her pain inward, quietly, methodically—the way many women do—rather than ever risk appearing overly dramatic. This is the kind of fury that takes years to build. Years of being beaten down. Years of being left behind. Years of social abandonment, which is no less than social death.
In the shared mythology of our time, everyone understands the fatal weight of a single command—Dracarys.
And then there is another kind of fire. A candle, gentle and fragile and yet enduring—the way the elements endure: tide, salt, breath, bone.
The inside sees—
crimson and clover.
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