containment failure

Content note: this piece contains intense imagery and references to violence, death, shame, and intrusive thoughts. Read with care. This is intended as a reflection, not a confession.

Act One: Movement and Creation

In my simplest form, I am water. So endlessly deep, like the ocean, and simultaneously as shallow as a stream. Always moving, even when still. Salty and fresh and cold and warm and refreshing and bitter. Big enough to drown in, big enough to swallow you whole. Big enough to keep all the things I have in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul, big enough to get lost. Always shifting, moving past, moving deeper, moving beyond.

But I am fire, too. Something in me burns. I can feel it sometimes. In the middle of the night. After the blizzard has blown in and it’s freezing outside, I feel my fire burning up. I feel its heat in my lungs and in my neck, beating with my pulse. It longs to get out, beating like a butterfly against my ribcage. 

But the shame. It’s sand poured over my fire. It’s trash and oil in my ocean. It is deep snow to blanket my mind, sandpaper to dull my thoughts. Be soft, the shame whispers. Be quiet. Do not provoke. To want is to provoke. To ask: to provoke response, to provoke attention. No one should see you unless they want to. No one should hear you unless they want to. You must disappear, you must be nothing, until they ask you to be. 

It feels, sometimes, like everyone wants me to be quiet. I think, maybe, the shame is right. I should become small and quiet, and remain that way. 

I’ll bury everything down deep, drown that fire in my ocean and then let you bleed that ocean dry. 

But it hurts, it really does. It’s so, so painful to try to feed my fire while carrying the shame. I feel this crawling sensation, like hands grasping at my chest, but from the inside. There is something within, trying to dig its way out of my chest. It might be my fire, it might be some strange and terrible being born of my shame and my desire. It is something dark, wrapping around my heart, crawling up through and into my mind. It reaches its fingers into my lungs and closes a fist around my neck. 

I think that, maybe, I was born with this monster. Though monster is most certainly the wrong word. I have this thing, it lives inside of me and yet I feel as though it is not me. And yet, and yet, it may be the closest thing to my soul. This bloody, raw thing, that calls for me to scream and dance and thrash and move and sing. It makes me a witch, I know, and it makes me crazy, insane. 

How strange I must seem to everyone else. I can see it in their eyes. And this same thing, this same monster, is what drives my desire. It wants things, and tells me to want them too. Achievement, it craves, and victory. It wants and it wants and it wants. It craves the cradle of a sword in hand and the spray of blood across the sand.

In today’s world, though, there are no battles. The closest to the heat of battle I can get is dancing or running or sex. I can spin myself in circles and throw my hands into the air until I get sick. I can run and run and run, from whatever it is that lay behind me, that haunts me, that I cannot see. All I can do is move until my body can move no longer. I have to run and dance and run and dance or else it will catch up to me. Or else the shame will catch up to me, grab me, bury me three feet deep in soft dirt. The only thing I can carry with me is my anger, it’s the only thing that will keep me alive, it’s the only thing worth bringing with me. I must keep going, keep running, keep moving. 

Or it will catch up to me. 

Act Two: Stillness and Death

Maybe that’s the real question. What is ‘it’?

The darkness. Is that what I’m running from? It’s always begging, in its sweetest voice, folding its long cold fingers around my joints. Stop, it whispers. You can stop. You can stop now. It’s okay. It's not worth it, it never was. You are worth nothing, so why not just become nothing? I will love you, the darkness says. I will love you in the way that only darkness can. The darkness is as sweet as a sharpened knife being slid across the thin skin of an exposed throat, as soft as a rope and as smooth as the dirty floors of a cold basement. It is so tempting, so seductive, that darkness. Giving up is easy.

I said before that I must keep running, keep moving. It’s like a compulsion, I can’t stop. But there is something alluring about stillness, about silence.

The darkness, the shame, the monster. So many things I must balance, so much I must hold within myself. How do I let it out? I dream about driving, closing my eyes and screaming and stepping on the gas and driving faster. Scream drive faster. Scream. Drive. Faster. I dream of my body going through the windshield. Everything stops for a moment, and I fly forward, spinning through the air in some deadly sort of dance, and I'd like to hang in the air like that for a moment. But the ground is waiting for me, begging for my broken body like the darkness, like the shame. And when I do hit the ground, a sickening crack and the spilling of red, and it will be over. The darkness will crawl from its hole and pull at my clothes and the shame will seep from my body and find a new host to live in, a new heart to rot. 

For a moment, in the air, I was nothing, and then, I was something. I was the something in the road that made a hundred people late to work one day. 

Please don't look out your window as you drive by. Let yourself be distracted by the sirens and flashing lights. Focus your eyes on the road, please. Don't look at your window, or the fever might reach you, too. Then you'll be the one with so much inside you, so much that you think you'll burst. You won't be able to escape it or get it out. You, too, will close your eyes and scream and drive faster. You, too, will enjoy that moment of weightlessness, of carelessness, and the moment of sharp pain as you hit the ground, the most clarity you've ever felt in your life. You, too, will become nothing, and then something. Something dead in the road.

This dream is vivid, and I am startlingly lucid, but it’s not a wish. Imagining is not the same as wanting. These visions are thrust from my subconscious, my mind taking a seed of desire and pushing its image to its most extreme, to its farthest edge, just to see what’s there.

But the darkness is not the only thing inside me, as you know, and neither is the shame or the monster. I contain multitudes, whole universes of my own spinning with galaxies yet to be discovered. This is one of the darker planets, one of the bloodier ones. I must accept it, along with all the other light and dark and many-colored facets of my internal self.

Act Three: Condemnation and Fury

Leave it to a woman to dream about death. Leave it to a woman to dream about a death as gruesome as that. I don't want to die, believe me. You don't believe me, I already know. Leave it to a woman to desire blood and death and orgasms and battles and the touch of a blade against the throat. What is wrong with me? What is wrong with you? What’s wrong with us? Why are we like this?

I'll say this. I am what you made me. I am made of all the sharp teeth the world has bared at me. I am made of the the cruel, sadistic, hateful violence the world has made me witness. I am made of all the sinful things you've told me to avoid, to hate, to abstain from. I am a woman, and I am the monster you made. 

I shouldn’t be ashamed of wanting things. My body shouldn’t inherently be sexual. I shouldn’t have to ‘embrace’ anything. I shouldn’t have to ‘embrace’ myself and ‘embrace’ aging. I should just be myself. It’s that simple. I was born like this, it’s how I am, that is fact. What I am is simple truth. My appearance should not determine me, should not ultimately define me. The things I cannot control should not be who I am.

Why do I have to fight so hard for that? Why do I have to fight so hard for my peace, for my place? Why do men defend a system that doesn't work for them either? Why do they think that because they are men, they are entitled to the world? Why is it always "not all men"? Nobody said it was. Why is everything controversial? Why is it always two sides, why is it a matter of opinion? Why was it not simply and objectively an unforgivable act, a disturbing and disgusting thing, pure and simple evil? We seem to not have time for bad, anymore. In our search for nuance we came back with too much dimension. We've given three sides to a flat piece of paper. What they did was bad. It was not controversial. There is no debate. They were not 'young women.'

What happened was fucked up. Please, just say it with me. That’s fucked up. That’s fucked up! Please be angry. Can more people be angry? Why aren't more people angry? Don't you feel it? Don't you feel the rage? Don't you want to fight? On principle, I want to fight. But I always want to fight. I've said before, I feel a pathological need to fight something. Why aren't we fighting this? Why is everyone so cold? Why are we ignoring this? Why did we let this one just go right over our heads. Why are we continuing on like nothing happened? Can we burn something down? Can we burn lots of things down? That fire inside me is begging to be let out. Can I use it? I've got a fire and I’ve got a match and I've got a lighter too. What am I doing? What are you doing?

I refuse to be shrink. I refuse to smother the fire with my bucket of sand. I refuse to let my ocean be polluted with your filth.

I am water. I am fire. I am rage and desire and depth and everything and nothing, all I once. I am whatever I desire to be.

so… that was a lot! the last part is a bit of a rant, i apologize. i needed to get everything in my mind out onto the paper, stream-of-consiousness style. first draft of this, i didn’t let myself stop. i just let it all flow out of me. it was actually incredibly freeing and i feel so much relief getting this out. i feel strangely separated from my own words now, as though it was a different person or perhaps a different version of me who wrote them.