Healing is — as a friend once told me during a particularly acute wave of grief — not linear. One day you’re fine, the next you’re muffling your sobs with your sleeve in the bathroom of the Thai restaurant closest to the subway stop because it was either there or openly on the street and you thought you should at least have a mirror when you try to recompose yourself. And as you’re muffling your sobs with your sleeve in the bathroom of a Thai restaurant off Canal Street, you (by which I obviously mean I) must remember that this is part of the healing. The overwhelming, blindsiding moments of emotion do not mean that you (I) have somehow failed.
At the risk of sounding like a cheap TED Talk, let me clarify something. I was (am) able to accept this truism almost instantly for grief over things like loss, death, even climate change. But recovering from more cerulean pain — the nagging, vague sense of a life gone somehow amiss — requires a different healing entirely. First you must pinpoint the harm.
I am by no means an expert in this. Instead of locating harm, I tend to run. Every few months, the impulse to burn — bridges, weed, connections, history — comes strong and then I’m fucking up relationships I actually care about by going too deep too fast, by trying to get the other person to burn up, too. I’m staring into a friend’s eyes and blacking out, waking up naked in their bed. I’m sending unhinged paragraph-long texts for attention. I’m asking the man in the park if he actually has the tumor he always tells me he does. (He just winks at me and asks for more money.) I walk on ledges like a tightrope, both literally and metaphorically. And never once do I ask, “Why am I running like this? What am I revolting against?”
Shit.
There’s a line in “Sabrina” when Humphrey Bogart tells Audrey Hepburn that she should “never resist an impulse, especially if it’s terrible.” The line has stayed with me for ages — probably because I’ve never had an impulse that wasn’t terrible. Whims are my compass. I follow them, half-thinking at best. And, sure, it can make life fun but it can make writing a bitch.
I could kick myself for how abstract I get when I follow these thought breezes, how unable to tell a coherent anecdote I seem. It’s never just one thought, it’s a flooding and a ramble of words. Let me collect myself, back up, try to get this story straight.
Sigh.
It wasn’t supposed to come from this. The vague, nagging cerulean pain was supposed to be over something serious and important, like existential malaise or the trappings of a mind. But in light of recent news out of America, I’ve been wondering if there’s some slight chance this feeling is rooted in an ever-changing relationship to feminism. Some days I’m re-posting information about how to access abortion pills, other days I’m muffling my sobs and half-hoping that someone will tell me I’m a pretty crier when I emerge. (I’m absolutely not, by the way.)
Since I began bleeding every month, I have retaliated against the idea of female pain. It seemed trite. I refused to cry over anything a man said to me at a club or on the street. If I did tear up over an interaction, I would tell myself that it was just hormones. Or maybe cramps. In my mind, the pain of a female experience became unworthy of mention simply because it was so mundane.
It went on like that, unquestioning, until I woke up in a friend’s bed after a rowdy night out in October 2017. We turned on our phones and saw the beginning fires of #MeToo blazing across the internet. We laid in bed all afternoon, staring at our screens and reading Facebook posts out loud to each other, not quite believing what we were seeing. The unspoken rule of female pain was that the pain itself always went unspoken.
Hopefully obviously, I am glad that we’re now openly talking about what used to be shameful. I’m glad that discussions around the social limits of female (+ genderqueer) autonomy are finally being held in the public sphere. And yet after years of hearing about the millions of pains across the world, I find a gulf growing between reality and my ability to care.
As a noted skank, I am personally invested in the Roe v. Wade reversal. The decision — which I have the immense privilege of thinking about theoretically because I live in New York — came through a gauzy curtain. There was something otherworldly about it. I couldn’t work up the motivation to talk about it, post memes about it…much less attend a rally about it.
Over the past weeks, posts from people practicing activism by sharing anecdotes of their abortions have begun to feel like the confessional posts about mental health struggles that rang through the internet a few years back. I’m not saying that these messages aren’t important to share in the name of destigmatization, but I am questioning their impact. The #MeToo style of activism created space for vocalizing pain. But when activism becomes limited to public howls of pain, the reaction can quickly become apathy. For many of us, turning off is how we cope with the un-cope-able.
I googled “apathy” the other day, trying to find a justification for my own questionable indifference, and came across a college student saying that “apathy is self-care.” The line is pithy enough to almost feel like wisdom. Tuning out of the news when you just can’t handle it anymore is an act of prioritizing mental health. But I know that this is not sustainable. If we all went around touting apathy as 21st-century activism, it would create a disconnected and disinformed populace — fertile ground for fascist movements, as history has repeatedly confirmed.
Instead of apathy, I’ve seen other people turn to fury. People have tried to rally against forces that, as they see them, are responsible for their suffering. But this fury grows quickly problematic, the logic always seems to eventually fail.
In a New York Times column this week, Pamela Paul wrote about the attack on women “from the far left and the far right.” In her column, Paul attempts to argue that it is not just conservative aggression but slippery liberal semantics causing the dehumanification of women. She condemns inclusivity efforts, saying that they fall in line with a long history of women serving others: “If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it’s assumed women will be the ones to serve other people’s agendas rather than promote their own,” she writes.
The misogynistic attacks in question are “unwieldy terms like ‘pregnant people,’ ‘menstruators’ and ‘bodies with vaginas.’” These terms, Paul believes, reduce women to parts. She makes this argument while forgetting the basic fact that no one — not one single person on this planet — is telling cis women that they can’t call themselves women.
Paul finishes with stunning audacity, claiming that her problem with “menstruators” does not come from intolerance. This is the typical position of TERFs: it’s not that they hate transpeople, they say, it’s that women are not being recognized enough for their (history of) pain. Then again, seeking validation that our pain is Important and Significant and Everybody’s Fucking Problem while simultaneously ignoring (or worse: using) fellow marginalized groups is the long-standing motto of straight white feminists.
Experiences of pain do not make a person (or group) unique. Our social framework was shaped by it. But the struggle for equality will never be achieved if previously aggrieved groups hold onto their hurt, seeking retribution instead of healing.
Turning your own oppression into reason to attack those more marginalized than yourself is one of the most narcissistic responses to trauma imaginable. To take a loss like that of Roe v. Wade and to transform it into a personal burden that validates your own hatred is immature, inexcusable and ineffective for creating real social change.
Psychologists might refer to this as “post-traumatic narcissism,” a reaction in which a pained person becomes unable to feel empathy. But on the opposite side of responses is post-traumatic growth, a process wherein a person who has experienced a traumatic event endures some struggle then eventually finds personal growth.
To find this growth requires a certain interior adventureness, the ability to rip out your internal machinery and start anew. Those who achieve new mindsets after trauma are those who journey to the depths of their own rotten hearts, tinker with what wasn’t working and emerge anew. The spiritual River Styx is one that few, if any, seek willingly. Usually you are dragged there and if you drown in it, you might be permitted to walk yourself back.
I don’t speak from experience but admiration. I still have the tendency to run from pain until it builds up and I’m crying although I’m not entirely sure why. My impulses — and they really are terrible — are distractions away from the harm at hand. But now I’m thinking that the most radical act could be to sit with the hurt until it transforms into something else. Is it possible to create pleasure from pain?
Queer communities and communities of color have already done excellent work in this arena. adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, argues that an embodied pleasure practice is one of the best tools for dismantling our inherited social framework. In an interview with Repeller, brown says that activists should “stop equating suffering with a part of how we do our justice work, which it feels like we do now — it’s like you have be suffering all the time — and that’s actually not a good long-term survival strategy.” (brown follows a tradition that can be traced back to Audre Lorde’s rigorous thinking on the erotic.)
The field of pleasure is one that remains largely untapped. I can’t tell you how many of my female/genderqueer friends are still having almost exclusively bad sex. How many of them have earnestly and drunkenly blurted out things like, “a man has never actually made me cum.” How they carry around their vibrators as prized possessions. While pleasure is about much, much more than SEX, at a time when erotic agency is threatened, reclaiming that specific pleasure seems an effective place to start activist work.
A first step in pleasure activism may be an embodied self-pleasure practice (~WHEN I THINK ABOUT ME I TOUCH MYSELF~). It could be tantric play. It could be being an absolute unpaid whore around town. Whatever it is, the radical nature of the act is a deepening self-knowledge — or interoception, the ability to know what is happening inside your body — and an honoring of personal experience above the stories and ideas we’ve inherited. (If you’re looking for philosophy on divorcing your desires from a colonial framework, I highly recommend Amia Srinivasan’s The Right To Sex.)
***It must be stated that for many women and queer people, practicing pleasure (fucking whomever they like and *actually* getting off on it) may not be safe. Allies can support abortion rights organizations and queer mutual aid organizations.***
Other forms of pleasure-seeking may include reclaiming your presentation and appearance. Last month, The Face published an article about the rise of sexy clothing in which Lauren Cochrane wrote that “the fact that more women feel more able to rebuff unwanted sexual encounters means they are more confident in wearing sexier clothes just because they feel like it.” The rise in sexy dressing, Cochrane notes, comes at a time when young people are having less sex than ever before — but this era of SlutCouture is performed with a giant fuck-you to anybody who might be looking. Sisters are dressin’ it for themselves, etc.
I’m in London now, where time moves differently and the past is always on display. As I’ve walked the market stalls, I’ve become obsessed with Edwardian lingerie. The Edwardian era is one that, frankly, I don’t know enough about. Author Samuel Hynes described it as a "leisurely time when women wore picture hats and did not vote, when the rich were not ashamed to live conspicuously, and the sun really never set on the British flag." In short: it seems to have been a time in which power went unquestioned.
There’s a certain innocence to the light, white cotton of Edwardian underthings. A confessional element that I like, too. But what I like best is that if you wear them, you have the potential to reclaim symbols of the era by bringing these intimate, “private” clothes into public. We could juxtapose a restrictive past with a slutty present. Reposition the formerly modest lingerie as a modern fuck-you, bare-all.
I went through the Internet and found you some options just because I care.
But perhaps this is all just my impulses getting the better of me again. Whatever. At least it feels good.
Love you.
xxC