The TV in my living room was unplugged. It wasn’t entirely necessary to take the cables out, no messages would appear to me when it was off, but it was what unplugging it represented. It was a decision I wouldn’t be influenced by the part of me fabricating threats from the innocent box in the corner. Innocent but still man-made.1 A portal to the views of mad existence as someone who should sit, watch and take in the thoughts of my crazy mind’s fantasy. Take it in, accept it, play your part.
When I unhooked the TV I had been watching through-the-night news, a segment on how Saudi women had won the right to drive. It was a victory for those women, a literal roadway to freedom and more than I could achieve.
I’d never learned how to drive and I didn’t particularly want to learn but the man presenting the piece seemed sneering. I have no doubt he was a respected reporter but beneath his words was the accusation I didn’t deserve the freedom to see myself around. That no matter where I went or how I went I would always be followed, trapped, and would eventually give into the force of those who had rights to me.
The women on the TV were being fooled as much as I was. They knew it or suspected it at some level. They were being tracked. They needed permission from their guardian, their husband, their father to sit behind the wheel. I didn’t need permission from anyone to do anything but I was still being controlled. The pressure on me was to accede to the underlying truth of my station and the presenter was in on it. Here’s your freedom he was saying. Much good it will do you.
Those women hadn’t escaped their cage it had only grown larger. Their tormentors still surrounded them, still fed them the scraps of their peers. It was cannibalistic. Eat each other, it said, for our entertainment. Eat yourself.
The accusation was that I didn’t play my part, that I didn’t give into my role, and so it was a due to be persecuted. I didn’t try to think on it at the time. At least I couldn’t snatch down the thoughts, images, words that flew through my mind. It all amounted to a bodily feeling; my skin crawling; my limbs weak; my flesh thin; my mind rotting. I was eating myself by not taking their facade of help, of progress and growth.2
I knew from this report I was lesser by denying the wishes of my faceless oppressors, and by demanding more for myself in my life—in my very particular ways—I was defying nature.3 The presenter didn’t exactly say it but I had put together enough to know that my cooperation in a desecration of my-self was inevitable. I could see it everywhere. The world accepted there were those who would laugh as they demanded and took, and it’d celebrate as the individual devoured herself.
It wasn’t men that were the problem, I knew fine and good men, it was the threat of men. The idea of men. The stereotype behind the fascist, the abuser, the online kid—in his thirties—who talks of bitches and whores. When you’re wary walking down a dark alley, the dark alley you need to go down to save fifteen minutes of a detour, there’s a history built up in your fear. It’s the same that talks of sitting in the back seat of the taxi you make sure to take with friends. It’s the aunt warning you to only ask for a bottle of beer in the bar and to keep your thumb over its mouth so no-one can spike the few drinks you’re allowed. And it was only ever a few drinks. Not enough to get drunk. Not enough to lose yourself in the frenzy of the night.
I didn’t do any of that. I didn’t heed the warnings passed down from wise generation to wise generation. I didn’t text the friend to say I’d arrived home safely. Instead of the detour I walked down that dark alley.4 I drank with abandon. Nothing happened. I was confident that nothing would ever happen.
Then confidence overtook me. Up to that point every act I gave into was in opposition to my safety. I challenged drunks, bums and the men I could see boasting in dominance. I walked into apartment blocks to find the domestic abuser and cut them low. What I did in defying danger was give into it. I became the very nature of risk. The cautionary tale. To say it was foolish would be wrong, it was madness.
I ran so hard and so fast along a cliff—nearly falling so many times—that all I could think of was the myriad times in myriad ways I did fall.
I imagined myself infinite, crashing down, crashing hard. I never fell but I could feel what falling would be, over and over. Atop the heights of where I ran, scrambling, evading the harm of the world I could feel my skin tear, my bones breaking from the prospect of my tumbling.5 It was crazy to face off against those dangers, challenge them, but the real break in my mind was knowing my refusal of the order the world, my courting of danger, would only bring danger to me. It would push me off that cliff. The world—cruel and malicious—would use a moment of its own choosing to teach me my harshest lesson. I would fall and be unable to stand up again.6
I unhooked the TV because this is what the reporter said to me; not in so many words. I knew there weren’t really secret codes to be deciphered from his report. I knew there was no threat that my comeuppance was imminent. I simply found it in the TV just as you could find it in a horoscope, except your horoscope doesn’t terrify you or connive—never letting up—to convince you.
Help came from my family, then doctors, then mostly from nurses. I took new medication. I was no longer railing against those hazards. I no longer courted them. My real opposition was against the madness that said I was being watched, and scrutinised, and at any moment would be exposed in how vulnerable I was.7
There my TV sat, unplugged. The dust on its screen coming into contrast with the light of the window. It was the end of a morning that cleared. After a dark night full of dread the sun sneaks up behind hills, behind cathedrals, and spills into the sky to say soon again you will see.
I was seeing that TV in a new light, an accepting light. It meant nothing. The messages it held didn’t speak to me. The magnificence of all I had created buoyed me but I was held firm on the couch that saw me through so many terrified nights. I wanted to sit, in peace, where I had previously sat fearful of all that hung watching and where I sat on that day knowing I could stare back. That morning I knew there was value to all I had been through. I remembered myself just those few hours ago on the corner of the building site where I decided to show the world the value in insanity: the value in me considering it.
I went to the kitchen as my first step in my goal. Next to where I set my handbag were the bag of cans I had taken from my grey-hoodied friend. Poking under the kitchen sink I rooted out the tea-lights in my dusty margarine tub of emergency supplies. Back in my living room I took each can from the plastic bag, arranged them on the windowsill, and placed the candles on top. I wouldn’t light them, the wind could blow the curtain against them, but even without a flame their message was clear.8 Standing back I saw how the candles invited, guided, showed the world this was an altar. The cheap beer said it wasn’t an altar anyone need kneel before. No-one need obsequence themselves to freely shared worldly knowledge. I was happy there watching it but it was not for me. It was for the searcher who needed to know they could stand tall with its message.9
My sign on the window was for someone to hear the quiet to listen with. For someone to accept that the world around them, a world possibly judging them, was of no real consequence. To give themselves the space-in-time I had found to withhold self-judgement and just accept.
Looking at that altar I knew someone looking in could, potentially, see what I saw. I also knew there was virtually no chance of that. Just as I sat on a barstool a few weeks before, possibly twitching, possibly talking to myself or the voices that tormented me, no-one could tell what was happening within me. No-one could tell what I found important unless I spoke the words aloud. Signs weren’t enough. I had to enlighten them.
I left my creation on that windowsill but it wasn’t for anyone else, it was for myself.10 The candles were for me to light if I needed a little brightness. My own sign that I had found my way.
Moving into the kitchen I put the kettle on and readied a bowl of instant noodles. I would need strength to follow through on my plan to show the worth in madness. I had failed so far and only found a way to bring myself before a symbol of my own value.
I poured boiling water into the bowl. I’d decided I would go for a drink earlier in the day, but now I knew I would go to the bar where I had sat on a stool for hours, where my friends had seen me as crazy, and I would explain how I had simply been scared. I would find the people who worried for me and show them I was calm and at peace. That I had insight. What formerly screamed at me, incomprehensible, I could now understand.
As I ate I wondered what they saw of me. I would ask them how I appeared, alone on that chair, unable to share the knowledge I was too intimidated by to speak of. I would tell them I was no longer frightened and offer the solace found in hearing the most desperate part of yourself, as long as you searched out your honest truth. If madness closed me down then sanity opened me up. I was calm. I was sane. I took a simple pleasure in just remembering to eat.11 I ate the last forkful of noodles without splashing broth on my top.
I walked back to my living room and studied my offering of candles and cans. I would build it high. I would return to the building site from the morning to add some of the broken slabs to it.12 These chunks of concrete would say the parts of me I put by the window had come from rubble. That our gifts came from the place of the broken down. That we could always build, even with our debris.
Walking out the front door I pulled it shut behind me. I made sure not to lock it. Someone afraid, someone running like I had been might need an escape; a place of quiet to listen and find their words. I had found my place, myself. I trusted the world was sound and kind. That it only took what it needed and I was ready to offer myself.
Index - Moment 31. Woman-made? I don’t typically feel I’m even a person. What is a “self?” And why should I be allowed think I have one?Back
2. There are trends in writing and there is one, at the moment—a probably very valuable one—in writing about a woman’s relationship to her body, about the sick’s relationship to their pain, about embodied existence’s relationship to imposed externalities. My relationship is to my mind, wondering if I have one, if it exists as any whole. There are—for me, certainly—physical concerns, but often they can be dismissed or temporarily ignored (at the expense of comfort, by transgressing social mores, and in a generally all-around destitute attitude to living as a flesh and blood entity.) I’ve read books where people doubt others, where someone doubts how they’re perceived, where they doubt their future and what they want from life. Rarely do I read something where the doubt is over the solidity of the mind. Identities are presumed, or fought for, but rarely does identity’s existence become a question. All the corporeal aspects of life affect me, but my asking is for an entitlement to believe in a me-existence—an existence before my physical reality can occur—and that forces itself to take precedence. Back
3. A nature forced on me by reality, not a reality I made of myself. I couldn’t—maybe still can’t—think of myself as any-thing worth hate. An idea worth hate, maybe? But a thing? I’m barely a thing. Certainly no more than a shape.Back
4. I remember, one time, my mind screaming at me, “DON’T WALK DOWN THE DARK ALLEY!” It was very specific; the dark alley. The dark unknown, the dark dangerous, my dark fear. It was a rather pointed message from myself to myself. Of course, being mad, I rebelled—not realising I was arguing with myself at the time—“Fuck you!” And I went down the dark alley. If someone’s screaming at you they might not have the best intentions, and so I defied them. We don’t always give ourselves the best advice.Back
5. It’s not a metaphor when I write I could feel my skin tear. There was a physicality given to me by my fears. Words will never be enough to direct you to the same feeling, but “your skin crawling” is the same effect, or a shock, “like a hammer blow.” Except mine was realisation, not shock. And each hammer blow brought another realisation, which brought shock and its hammer blow: forever and again, until I became numb, or fought it off, or was drunk enough or tired enough to fall asleep. This is what my thoughts did.Back
6. It’s only now I realise how terrifying this is. Not my fear but the concept of a mental finality. Writing this story I was thinking this crashing was bringing me to a real-world danger, an encounter where I would be harmed. But now—in health—I fear a mental grave. A total shattering of my mind. I don’t know if it’s possible—that my mind ceases to contemplate the world (because surely that’s all a mind is)—but a live burial is something I can comprehend. Back
7. It’s no longer the fear of something happening in the world, something coming for you, but a fear this terror will always haunt you.Back
8. I remember congratulating myself on being conscious of the dangers of fire. Of noticing the simple concern of the flame touching the curtain. It all seemed like a very basic, very normal, very cautionary awareness and one I should be proud of. Back
9. Looking back I’m not sure if I thought this was a joke. There was definitely a level of humour to what I was doing, a hint of irony. I think, in some way at least, this was me attempting to show the power of madness. The failure is it was done from within madness, like trying to look at your own arse—and this was one of my many arses—you just don’t have the perspective. Back
10. In some way it was a trail of breadcrumbs on my journey, one I now know leads to an unknown destination, not that a destination matters. Back
11. Again, the satisfaction in following the simple concerns in life. And the madness in not knowing doing this much was enough in my day.Back
12. At this point I was craving the symbology that had left me (that was slowly subsiding due to the passing of time, the taking of medication, and the help of medical professionals, i.e. the returning of my sanity.) Another theory of schizophrenia is it’s an illness of semiotics. That the associations a schizophrenic makes between an object and its meaning (to them) are looser and less defined than a ‘sane’ person would have; they’re disrupted. With a barrage of meaning coming at the schizophrenic they try to assemble them into cohesive story. Misaligned as these signs are, in combination with a need for order, the schizophrenic begins to create associations and logic that has no bearing on ‘reality.’ With my desire for the broken bricks of the building site I was trying to create, by putting into the world, my semiotic-thought anew. Signs and meanings’ vigour was slowing and leaving me. I craved the exhilaration of decoding the world (when it’s not terrifying) so I tried to create it in the world for me. And who wouldn’t want this? Meaning in everything we encounter. Meaning surrounding us, if we just put it with the right insight.Back