Senses of the Past and Visions of The Future

These cows defined my teen years.

I have always wondered what I was. I realised on my twentieth birthday that I am hungry.

I turned twenty on Halloweekend, my closest friends around my dining room table. It was the best birthday I have ever had— I still woke up the next morning feeling hungry.

I worry I suffer from biblical levels of greed. What more could I want than hot food on my plate, a cozy bed to snuggle into, and proof that I am so, so, loved? Because I am, ridiculously loved. Finally.

Yet still I tear my world apart, maroon manicured nails spilling crescent moons into my thighs. I am unable to leave behind my self-sabotage. I wish (almost) everything I am about to tell you had never happened. I might regret putting this on the internet, but regret is soooo 2015. As I enter the third decade of my life, I try and live in the present. Living in the present is hard when the past feels it is being forgotten, the teenager is throwing a tantrum as I attempt to leave her. I am telling you these stories so I do not forget them; manuscripts never burn.¹

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I spent my teenage years killing myself. I ate pills off the ground; got 12 hours of sleep in one week; ate only Annie’s mac and cheese; weighed myself on farmyard scales; cut myself; ignored my math tutors; smoked too much; was rude to the people I should have held closest; took too much time in books and too little time in real life. I am not proud of any of that. I do not miss 15-17-year-old me— I wish she would have been kinder to those around her. I wish she had washed her hair more.

Thinking about these years of my life is hard; categorisation is needed. The past is too tricky for me to access without a map. A list had to be made.

1. At thirteen, I learned how to listen. I watched Donald Trump get elected for the first time, and felt my stomach churn every time I heard a boy say “pussy,” or “bitch.” I realised I would be listening to these words for the rest of my life. I remember a lot from thirteen, it was the last year before I began my job forgetting.
   I remember being told that Bernie Sanders would have saved the world; it felt like a punch. I remember the first girl I knew who got hospitalised for anorexia. The ringing in my ears got really loud. I remember sinking— the summer of 2017 I heard the word “dissociation” for the first time— I cut myself for the first time listening to Work From Home by Fifth Harmony — the world kept spinning. I remember cutting myself for the second, third, and fourth times and the noise stopped; the ringing in my ears, the chorus of “BITCH!” I was thirteen and I was so, so, angry. I was so, so, lost. I felt estranged in my own body, all of the time. I hated my breasts and my vagina and how they changed me; I hated my period, which left me bedridden; I hated the birth control they put me on. I started each day carsick for forty-five minutes on the way to school. I beat myself up to get through the day.
   I felt like I was going to vomit for my entire eighth-grade graduation; I had not gotten invited to my close friend’s graduation/birthday party. I went to London; in The National Gallery I saw The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. We looked alike. I cried, in front of the whole gallery; I had a vision of myself in the painting, as the Lady and the executioner.

2. At fourteen, I learned to touch. I went to boarding school. I lived with a roommate who was not afraid of being naked, and who was maybe a little afraid of me. At fourteen, I already smoked too much weed, had too many black clothes, and said a lot of bad words. My first roommate changed a lot for me; she made her bed every day but would let laundry pile up for weeks. She was the first person to ask me if I had ever masturbated. I had not. I remember thinking about it for a while. It never seemed appealing: I hated myself, I hated my body, and I did not desire to make myself feel good. I did not desire to make anyone else feel good either. I had crushes the way people wish for shooting stars. I did not put any effort into making these dreams come true; I knew it was not who I was.
   Touch is hard to talk about. Touch is harder to write about. My tone does not come across; I like to sing-song my pain in order to make it less serious. I was touched wrong, I touch wrong: I cut myself again, ferociously, in hidden spots no one would ever see because I would never let anyone touch me again. I would never, ever, let anyone touch me again. Looking at myself in my rearview mirror, this girl is the only version of myself that truly makes me weep. She was so alone. I cannot support time travel— but if I could, I would tell fourteen-year-old Desi that I love her. Visions of fourteen are always clouded by tears, tears spilt then, tears building now; I want to be twenty-four one day, and I hope I have a cat.

3. At fifteen, I was hungry. I do not remember much of fifteen. I began to dissociate so strongly I would lose hours every day. I hated the life I had created for myself. I fell behind in schoolwork in an unimaginable way, I could only write shitty poetry in the cow barn. I felt unable to communicate with human beings.
   I was not eating enough — no one was — and it was beginning to show. I remember being elated when the doctor told my mom to watch what I was eating. I felt like I was finally succeeding. I have spent my life a loser and a quitter; here was something I was good at. I was good at being thin, at being blonde, I thought I was being who I wanted to be. The hunger for acceptance coursed through my blood; one good movie kiss could have satiated it. This hunger in my stomach roared if I ate food or not, what did it matter if I did not eat? I did not think of it as killing myself in the moment. I thought of it as being beautiful, as maintaining beauty, the kind of maintenance my mother was always grumbling the patriarchy required. I thought this starvation was necessary. I convinced myself this starvation was necessary. Starvation from birds, trees, laughter, sun, food, reading, family, friends. I felt unworthy in ways I have not ever been able to write about. I still cannot. The vacuum these memories open up is dangerous, the pull of hatred is strong. Visions of fifteen bleed into sixteen, I knew there was a rip in my sweater, a hole in my yacht.

4. At sixteen I lost my sense of smell. I got COVID-19, and I got my heart broken for the first time. In love, my skin cleared. In love, I ate more. Pushed out of love, I was petty. I lied, I spit on the feet of good people; I was unreachable to myself.
   The pivotal moment of sixteen was in the woods behind the amphitheatre: I got in trouble at boarding school for smoking cigarettes— unbeknownst to them even now—I was high when they found me. I was really, really high. I could not stop crying in the dean’s office; my parents did not pick up the phone when I called to tell them what I had done. I asked to go to the bathroom. I went to the bathroom to hit my dab pen² and resolved to tell the dean of students the reason I was rotting. Not when, where, by whom, or any of the details. I weaponised the only thing I had, my hurt. And it worked. I did not get suspended, I largely suffered no consequences. I think the adults in my life must have sensed that I was being punished enough by the pit in my stomach, by the visions behind my eyelids.
   Without smell, my food issues became worse. I could barely choke down anything, all tasted like cement. My favourite foods were turned against me, my favourite perfumes became unimportant. I skipped meals to smoke in the pasture. I had pink hair and my friend Cyrus had just got pulled out of school. I held on to my one and precious life harder than I thought I did. I had thought I wanted to die, in reality, I had an unquenchable hunger to live. And I was not living, I was surviving, hardly even going through the motions. When I was sixteen, I began to dream of being saved. These visions of salvation, at the hands of Christ or formless love, left me worse off than the nightmares did.

5. At seventeen, I learned it might never get better. I was down in the ashes, ensconced in stone, uncomfortably alone, I hope seventeen knows how much she has grown.³ I was hurtled through rings of shrinks and diagnoses, doctors and weeping mothers. I began to cut myself again with unmatched fervour. It was the only positive experience I could have with my body. I was high almost every single day of seventeen; I was friends with truly awful boys; was rude to some truly wonderful young women; I structured my day around my hatred of myself. How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
   Winter of seventeen was defined by these boys I was friends with, wearing pink sweaters, and miniskirts, listening to these boys cuss out my close friends and say retard. I built an identity of femininity at seventeen that I had been ignoring for the previous four years. I built this identity by wearing as much makeup as possible and being an utter terror: I did not know how to shut my mouth or wear an appropriate-length skirt. I saw my first shooting star.
   I told the truth and people thought I was lying. I read Dostoevsky and realised how greatly I was betraying myself. I cut myself over and over, how close I had become to thinking of myself as a super-human; someone above the rules. I did acid for the first time in the woods with those truly evil characters. They pushed me, I pushed back, I fell. I still have the scars. Visions of their laughing faces are superimposed on every clown I see, in every dream I have.

6. At eighteen I learned how to see.
   To My Better Half,⁴
   I am so in love with you. I miss the feeling of your head under my chin. I have nightmares, you know this. I wake up, an ocean away from you, and in instinct I roll to my left, looking for your sleeping form. Not finding you is worse than the terrors of the dark, am I allowed to cry because I love you so much?
   At my eighteen, we have been friends for four years, but something changed at eighteen. I think it was writing Cardinal Prayers— I guess I started writing about love and realised I did not have a definition for love that did not contain you. Loving you changed me. I could not love someone so awesome as you and not respect their opinion; you seem to love me a lot, it is time I loved myself a little bit. Your name is a prayer when my eyes water with unshed faith. I have never ever had a friendship like ours, and I doubt I will again. We live in the whistling of tea kettles, floor milkshakes, bunny rabbit arguments, whisperings after dark, fights had on paper and in New Wing, running for your birthday, precalculus answers, something wrong with both of us, fire starters, scruffy-chainsaw-anakin, matching opposites all over again, will you hold my hand?
   Nothing aligned for us to meet, we met and made it happen. Our friendship was built by our own hands, our friendship is held together by our own hearts, beating in time across the Atlantic.
   I learned how to breathe when I met you. You drag me into the present, you fling me into the water when I need to be; you are the smartest, funniest, sexiest person I know. I often see the world through a dense fucking cloud —the fog that comes and goes from and to nowhere and keeps me tethered to my worst memories— and when it gets too much, I try and picture the world through your eyes. I break down the problem until I can solve it. I use your worst habits as antidotes to mine; list, list, o list! My visions of future began at eighteen, when I realised I found a girl who I could not leave behind.

7. At nineteen, I learned how to taste. I let myself learn new ways of being, across the ocean. I learned I liked to kiss boys, I learned I liked to be played. I lived for drama, the thrill of it all, and the heartbreak that followed made me feel alive.
   I had always written, but at nineteen it became a compulsion. It became something I had to do, and I did my best writing brokenhearted. I threw myself into the worst possible situations I could find and waited for the other shoe to drop. And drop they did. I put myself in avoidable situations and lied my way out of them—skipping through mistakes and hanging onto friendships by the skin of my teeth.
   I miss when I used to be ashamed of my mistakes. I lost the ability to be careful sometime between eighteen and nineteen— I ran into university with a need to be different. This need shuffled me through men who now avert their gaze when I walk by. I revelled in the power I had discovered at seventeen.
   I hungered so hard at nineteen that I broke all of the rules I set for myself and let a fortune cookie determine my fate. I slit my wrists on the floor of a burger shop and nobody looked up to help me.⁵
   At nineteen, my scarlet letter was not haunting, it was coveted. I wanted to be talked about behind my back— I just wanted people to talk about me. I felt alone at university, so far from my family and Phoebe, I wanted to know that I existed as something tangible. I settled for being something and not someone and I broke my own damn heart. I let myself be defined by others for the first time in years. I wanted to be defined by others because I had suddenly no semblance of who I was. I was different at university than I was at home, just when I thought I had conquered the fear of myself. I wanted to experience the world, I wanted to feel my life, on my tongue, through song and sensation. I wanted to be known for something, anything.
   The last time I was really nineteen was August. I was not twenty until October 30, but between nineteen and twenty was someone monstrous. In August of nineteen, I hugged every boy I had ever kissed to my chest and murdered them all. In August of nineteen, I swam until my lungs broke and I wrote about that. I will never have to be nineteen again. I have visions of Augusts to come— I do not think I can handle another important August like this.

These memories that I have just shared with you are not to be played with lightly. They are the scaffolding of my haunted house; they are the insulation in my cozy home. I have shared them with you because we can never leave who we are behind. I wonder if I can ever leave anyone behind. I do not know if I want to; I would only want to leave myself behind. But do I even want to leave myself behind? I seem to get left behind often, and it hurts my feelings. I cannot leave behind my self-sabotage, because it is who I was (maybe who I am) and I have come too far now. The teenager throwing a tantrum has a point. She knows more than I gave her credit for. I hope she continues to teach me, continues to throw her hat into the ring, and continues to call heads over tails. I do not miss this teenager, but I worry I will. When I miss her I will come here: to relive the good, the bad, the Phoebe.⁶ I will come here when I am hungry, and I will remind myself of all the times I have been fed.

I feel myself growing up. I have visions of the good life: there is no weight on my shoulders and the breeze is light. I am coming for it.

1. Master and Margarita reference.

2. A genius move on my part.

3. Sharon van Etten reference.

4. Phoebe.

5. This is a metaphor

6. She is more than good or bad, she is more than sin or virtue.