Sexual abuse is deafening and everything is dark. Even now I am raped by senseless memories in the form of freezing hands that make me feel like I am choking.
My father had schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type: a basic combination of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. After some time of diligently taking his medications, he would feel miraculously cured and stop them at once. When the meds wore off he would snap into psychotic breaks which drew him to creep into my bedroom when I was four years old, again and again, for three years. My mother did not find out until I was seven. That year, in the dead of night, in a moment of lucidity, he made a phone call and confessed. But by then I was already dead inside. I had progressed from an outgoing toddler who ate everything to a painfully withdrawn little girl who ate like a bird. Whose grandfather had to play endless games to get her to finish her tiny plate. My anorexia grew from an omnipresent nausea over my most fearsome childhood recollections. Eating made me physically ill. Everything made me ill.
The starving reached deeper and deeper into me as I grew up, and by age eleven I was emaciated and hospitalised. I remember hating everything there so clean and white, so opposite of the putrefaction inside of me. By age fourteen, I was drowning in violent self-loathing and scratching my arms until they bled, just a little. Slowly though after so many years of self-denial, my appetite was growing like a cancer and at fifteen I was insatiable, vomiting everything I ravenously consumed. At sixteen, I was emaciated again and using box-cutters to gouge grueling scars into my skinny limbs. At seventeen, I was heating knives with fire and pressing them hard into flesh. At eighteen, I was carving around my femoral artery wondering if I should push just a tiny bit further to sever it.
It was in my eighteenth year that I began to play with death, intentionally or unintentionally I never figured out. I would cut to expose bone and artery. I would purge until I passed out and aspirated my own vomit leading me to an aspirating pneumonia in both lungs various times. I would inject drugs into my vine-like veins until I ended up in comas, on respirators, and in full cardiac arrest. I reached my lowest weight, a BMI of 11.0. I was a scorched and shredded skeleton of a human. It was hospital to hospital, residential to residential, ward to ward, and institution to institution. I grew up among a sea of faces immersed in a plethora of suffering. And my family would plead, “Look what you’ve done to yourself. When will it be enough? The next step is death.” I didn’t want to die; I wanted to be incorporeal and devoid of human emotion. I was delusional to think my quest was possible. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore or why.
Finally I grew tired of it. I ceased to self-destruct and in turn was unable to get out of bed I was so worn. It was only in that exhaustion that I was able to see in any way at all that the hideous acts of my father were not my fault, that I was a helpless child. And I began to form into something other than a shell. But still somewhere I felt the parts of me that he killed hanging heavy and dead on my insides. And in the new endlessness of feeling, of being, of molding and burning and healing, I formed too much. I found the opposite extreme. I longed and loved and listened too much. I didn’t purge anymore, or cut or burn myself anymore, but I still ate. My body existed in spaces it had never been before but somewhere it all became too much and I became too much.
This is my journey into the lull. Into the dimmer light, the quieter music, the smaller corporeal being. I do not intend to barricade my feelings as they once were, nor do I intend to become a skeleton again. I only seek to be just a little less than I am.
