Click here to read the first instalment:
When abandoned by traditional modes of pleasure and work and company which all amount to – in some form or another – distraction, one is forced to sit with what exists within. To isolate from all external accessories has been terrifying. You cannot stand still for hundreds and hundreds of days and consistently avoid introspection.
My family has become gossipy, suspicious, anti-social. We have a chart to record our temperatures with and a bag hanging by the door with blue plastic gloves in it. We think we are tactical and militant and that our lives need not be too affected. We maintain we are desperate to be exactly the same when it all begins to move again. Am I? This is the question I am asked: ‘What do I look forward to when this is over?’, ‘What am I excited for?’
I am aware of the opportunity that this lockdown provides. I did not think that, two years after moving away from home, and, at twenty, I would be coming back. This is an opportunity to question what it is that you want. Pressed, I can say: ‘I would like to get a first’ or ‘I would like to perfect my French,’ but these are floating statements, ones that do not bite me or embrace me. It is not that I don’t respect these things, but that I do not long for them. I do not turn to them, in a daydream-haze, to soothe me or inspire me or to make me feel whole. When I feel sad, or cold, or stressed, I hold close the image of that fish-bone woman. I warm the idea that if that was me, someone would come. They would bundle me into their arms and hold up my head in the palm of their hand and feed me liquid ambrosia with a soft plastic spoon. I think it is a dream of love and of serenity.
I have been ill, amenorrheic. I feel an irritating need to state this – this sort of narrative is fiercely gate-kept. But I suppose that I am not really talking about that side of this illness. I’m talking about long-standing obsession, pervasive images that I think are archetypal of our world. I don’t know where they come from. Mental illnesses are viewed so heavily through an aesthetic lens but this seems to contradict their nature.To treat the physical is not to treat the mental.
I am an example of this. I arrived at Trinity at my highest ever weight. I am not skinny anymore but I still think in the same way. I am in an in-between space. I’m still in love with this woman, preoccupied by her. Indeed, whatever state my body has been in, I have always chased the same woman and I have never caught her.
I am still obsessed with food. I still dream of the skeletal. It is a hard thing to explain – the presence of this woman and these thoughts – when you yourself are not emaciated. Our world trades on an aesthetic currency and sadness is seldom recognised unless translated to the world through the physical.
There is an image problem with the way in which we deal with mental illness. Not everyone with an eating disorder becomes emaciated. Not everyone with an eating disorder is white and female. However, if you are, you are much, much more likely to be seen – both in a medical sense and in a societal one. It is a toxic, damaging aesthetic. I consider, now, the privilege in my adolescent experience. The support that was available to me, the colour and aesthetic that facilitated it, the money that paid for it.
I was recently sitting next to a man at a dinner party who told me how attractive Nicole Kidman was in Big Little Lies – how silently suffering, bruises under soft silk blouses, limp hair and taut torso and pursed lips. I knew that what I was listening to was a sick sexualisation of female oppression, of feminine unhappiness. I was disgusted by his admission. I also understood it.
I have, buried within me, this language, this archetype. I do not support it. This is something that I need to make clear -these images, the images of this woman, are not beautiful. It is profoundly destructive and problematic to fetishise illness in this way. I don’t know why my mind works like that. I am horrified by them – as a woman, as a person. I am conflicted by what I rationally and internally support. I know the world loves women to be submissive, thin, vulnerable and this very fact makes me angry. I think bodies are beautiful, in all and any forms. I do. I know that illness, in its reality, is horrible and cold and isolating. The woman that I am in love with makes no sense, does not fit with the political and rational beliefs that I would and do fight for. What I believe in is so horrifically undermined by my internal, instinctive feeling and image. This is that admission. If the cure hasn’t been in my feminist education or my wider reading or my knowledge of the horror of illness, then I wonder where it is. Perhaps it is in admitting to this, in publishing this essay.
When writing this, I wondered how I would render what seems such a personal, private fantasy comprehensible. I know my woman so well that it is hard to look her in the eye and tell you what she is like.
In truth, you already know her.
We are hypnotized by photographs of Princess Diana and Sylvia Plath and Lucia Joyce. We wonder what Woolf was thinking when she put the stones in her pockets and if she felt them, round and smooth and final in her fingers. We wonder if she clutched them and how tight, whether she called for Leonard or her mother or her non-existent children. We think that perhaps she considered these children, their possibility, in her last seconds of straining lungs. We invent a Her that was most likely never her to feed our morbid minds.
We romanticize the idea that female brilliance is married to unhappiness. We fetishize female resilience if it presents itself in these specific, aesthetic terms. There is something sold to us of the vulnerable-feminine. We like obvious but silent female pain. We want to f*ck it or film it or emulate it. We have all invented this woman. We feed her and keep her alive. We are awful. We are all at fault and we are all conditioned.
Marianne walks through Trinity College Dublin on an empty stomach and we all think that her tortured thoughts are poetic and brilliant because she is beautiful and white and thin. We are in awe of her. Rooney has been criticized for this. I was amongst these critics. I thought: why write into the narrative instead of challenging it? Why create another starving woman to be read and canonized ? However, if Rooney wrote the world as she had experienced it, can one blame her? Perhaps to write a woman who is unaffected by these images would be to write a non-realist text. In some senses, this is what we need to demand. We need to aim to stop talking about the body, to stop caring so much about it. We should aim to see people and not ‘fat’ or ‘thin’ or ‘tall’ or ‘short. ‘
I think of the nuns that stopped eating in the middle ages: the fasting girls. I think of their desperate efforts to sanctify themselves. I think of the corrupt notions of female ‘purity.’ I think of the twisted, patriarchal world that I exist in and contribute to. One that only idolizes a self-harming female body, one that worships the self-destructing woman. I think of the many friends I had when I was very thin. I wonder where they are. I think of how people received me, then and now. It makes me sad.
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My woman is forever fictional. I could never be her or meet her in the street or at a cafe. For her to be a possibility, she would cease to be a dream. She has never been the same age as me. When I was at school, she was in her twenties. She had money and a flat and she got her eyebrows threaded. Now, when I glimpse her in mirrors or around corners, she is a child. She is always the thing that I want to be but that I am not: then, adult; now, naive. Maybe this is the point of her. Maybe this is the point of dreaming. A dream self does not exist and cannot be destroyed. Dreams are safe and you may retreat into them.
I wonder if this is what religion feels like: ‘When I die I will go to heaven.’ ‘When I grow up I’ll have blonde highlights and slim-fit jeans and wear all of the vertebrae that trickle down my spine.’
It is the safest secret-dream. Perhaps I don’t want to be this woman, just to dream of her.
I think we are all dreaming, now, that we can sanitize our way back to normalcy. It calms us and gets us out of bed. Dreaming can be a magical action but it should be expansive, fluttering – not sinking and leaden. Not like mine. My dream is an enduring obsession and it warps my vision.
I turned twenty in June. Twenty is terrifying. I feel young and unsure and insane. The time I have dedicated to what is, truthfully, not dream but disorder has made me so tired and tunneled my vision. I am at a loss. I have never understood a recovery mantra that encourages one to think of ‘the person they were before.’ A self does not shed its skin, daily, to be hung in a wardrobe and walked back into at whim. I cannot go back. I cannot simply fall out of love and I wonder if I want to. I wonder, constantly as I wrap my hands around my wrists in a nervous tick, if she will ever love me as I love her. She has made me so hopeful and yet so lonely.
I mourn my sixteen-year-old-friends, all bug-eyed and sweet. I want to freeze them at that moment. They have not died, just got older. Their neuroses faded into interests and passions. They read so much and made so much and they care about the world. They are all Big Fishes. They have forgotten me. I do not know them anymore. They leave me behind and do not turn back. As I sit in my lockdown-kitchen for months on end and obsess and obsess and obsess, I understand why, and I cannot blame them. I am stuck on this woman and she makes me boring. I do not know why I cannot give her up, shut the door on her and find something else to love.
