To keep warm through the night

What a language it is, the laughter of women,
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

- Lisel Mueller

I can't tell you what it meant to be breathless with laughter with my princess-haired friend without telling you that twenty minutes before she was speaking of her dear friend whose boyfriend is regularly beating her up, and how she suspects they are going to get engaged soon.

I can't tell you about joy, about one of the songs we sang along to, in between cracking up at how the bass made my parents' minivan rattle — far from home, all alone/but we're so happy — without saying also that I wore my throat raw sobbing to the empty space of the car on my way home. (What can/could I do? What is there to do?...)

No, the weight of the laughter that I share with my friends is some function of this litany of pain. The assaults, the abuse, the depression and eating disorders, the scars literal and figurative, all these grievances that I find so uniformly distributed among the women I love. It's not incongruous that we laugh. And it's this honesty that allows it. It is possible to really laugh because we trust each other, and that includes not having to pretend we do not know all these reasons not to laugh.

Despite all this, all these things that so often come with being a woman in this society, we still have laughter. We do. And it is not escape, denial, or forgetting, but the taste of the bitter with the sweet, sweeter for its being so dearly bought. It is the insolence of being joyful with open eyes — and it is our honor, to speak so bold a language. Our fire that we are burning through the night.

Consciousness

The waters of my brain are too murky lately to write easily to anyone but myself.

I'm still very young, but the world seems to have darkened significantly over the past several years as my understanding of it has grown.

I still believe that to see truly is the heart of all mercies. That seeing is where hope and possibility begin. First comes the clarity of sight — then hope. But there's pain between, in the space of gaining clarity.

And my body is so heavy from the pain of this work lately. I do not want to see any more  —  this society is terrible, I get it, and now there is so little left for me to stand on. I trust that with greater understanding, though, hope will return. Like second simplicity. Second hope.

So I am saying every day to myself, Do not run. Wider. Open your eyes.

Guest post: Some words I wish you heard more often

Thank you for struggling.

Thank you. Thank you for crying so hard that your tears and snot and drool all pool into the tissue. Thank you for the objects you have thrown at the wall. Thank you for the days that you have gotten out of bed, and the days you’ve slept through to stay safe. Thank you for the shallow breath that sustains you when you’re absolutely numb. Thank you for the crap food you eat because it takes so little effort to prepare. Thank you for surfing the Internet, when it’s less “surfing” and more “dead man’s float.” Thank you for the times you spend on autopilot. For the times when you check in. Thank you for screaming — and sobbing — so hard that the words you are screaming and sobbing out do not make an ounce of sense. Thank you for going to sleep when waking up is not something you are sure of. Thank you for your cries for attention. For your vague, unsettling status updates. For the e-mails you send when you don’t trust your voice to function. For your mistakes. For your unsettling drawings and your emo poetry, for your journal and the music blaring from your headphones. For how hard you try when no one — yourself included — thinks you are trying.

Thank you for still being alive.

_____

This post comes to us from Mary Maxfield Brave, a blogger whose insights, logic, and passion I deeply respect. It was originally published on her blog Miss Mary Max. Some other pieces of hers I recommend: "Enough with the Good Enough," "Note on Recovery," "Logic Worn Thin: On Obesity as an Eating Disorder," and "Not Offended, Oppressed."

Heartache

I went to the doctor today about a minor concern, just a little inflammation in my heel.

I was sitting next to a tweenish boy and his mother in the waiting room. My ears are a little too sharp, maybe, or too curious.

I heard her say something like, "So you feel like you have to do these exercises?" and thought, Eating disorder. But not very seriously, just my brain skipping around.

But they kept talking and it turned out I was right. These little tidbits: You made yourself throw up. Grandma told me about how you were running around the parking lot and not eating very much. She sent me a picture, I could see your face was different. Push-ups in particular? Were you surprised to find out you'd lost weight? Dr. So-and-So the head of the eating disorders unit. You're thirteen now, what about down the road, if you were giving a concert, you would pass out on stage.

Thirteen. Murmuring, long legs, young face, big feet in Converse. Going to be admitted to an eating disorders unit. When I heard that, a little part of me was running away and sitting down somewhere small and hiding my face and crying hard hard.

I still have to assemble something called "Lake part three" because that's how I am, but today I only want to say, I am sad. Not about my life, but about other things in the world. I know there are glimmers of redemption everywhere, but I am sad that our world has to be so broken. I am sad that a thirteen-year-old person has be in so much pain.

I'm not Catholic, but I'm lighting a St. Jude candle lately when I pray. Patron saint of the helpless and alone, of hopeless cases, of things almost despaired of. Ore por mi, pues estoy solo y sin ayuda...

I light it for who I sometimes am, for the kid in the waiting room, and I light it for you. I do not know who you are, but you know who you are.

Interviewed

I completely forgot that this interview was going up today, until I saw it come across my reader and went, "Oh, hey, that's me. Ack."

Sarah Von interviewed me for her True Story series. It was a bit scary for me to let someone else steer a conversation about something this personal and achey (I must have emailed her four or five times with small edits to my answers) and I REALLY didn't want to write the typical eating disorder confessional.

But judging by the comments so far, it was a good idea, and it was a good exercise for me to try to tell the thing from beginning to end. Or middle, or wherever this is.

It's not everything, but it's a lot of it.

Pretend you can see the ocean because the wind is blowing I can smell it

From one of my favorite Mary Chapin Carpenter songs.

If you ever need some proof that time can heal your wounds, 
Just step inside my heart and walk around these rooms, where the shadows used to be,
You can feel as well as see how peace can hover

Time's been here to fix what's broken with its power 
And the love that smashed us both to bits spent its last few hours calling out your name,
And I thought, this is the kind of pain from which we don't recover

But I'm standing here now with my heart held out to you
You would have thought a miracle was all that got us through
Well baby, all I know, all I know is I'm still standing

***

Sometimes that's the best thing dear friends can do for you, tell you their story so you can see that they've been somewhere bad too, but they're not there anymore, not at all. Sometimes we need friends to be our proof that people do get better, they leave bad things behind and become who they want to be and make their lives what they want them to be. It makes it easier to hope the same for ourselves. One reason why we tell our stories.

I have a couple friends who have told me those kinds of stories when I needed them, and if they're reading this, you know who you are, you're irreplaceable in my life and I love you MUCH.

I'll say it, too, in case you need to hear it: I was so unhappy I couldn't imagine life being okay again, but it is, and I am. More than okay. We leave bad things far behind us, we get better, we change.

yours,
cuileann

"It smells like snow," I will say.

For today's Poetry Friday, I present an excerpt from a longer Franz Wright poem. The poem is called "East Boston, 1996."

You already know I'm a Franz Wright junkie, so I don't have to tell you that I love these words. The last five lines of this section in particular linger in my mind in the most powerful way — I find myself thinking, Unendurable, unendurable at strange times.

The smell of snow is a bit of a motif throughout the book of poems that this one is from, God's Silence. I take my cue from this poem, the first in the book, and interpret it as a sign of hope — hope that one can change and begin over again.


Night Walk


The all-night convenience store's empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing the bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday's newspaper—
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home, for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.

– Franz Wright

Poetry Friday round-up at Check It Out