Sadness is a Beauty (October 06)

Painted toe-nails make me feel more like a girl. More than wearing a dress or even flirting, those toe-nails shine and shimmer in shades of varying me. My toes are short and somewhat stubby, but I’ve heard them described as sexy by others. Funny how sometimes you have to hear it first from someone else before you believe it yourself.
My feet are calloused from years of marching band and walking around barefoot as often as possible. My ankles hold old nick-wounds from shaving legs that grow hair too coarse, too dark, too often. My legs are shaped by marching and my mother’s genes. They are most often shielded from the sun in a pair of jeans. I am also often found in a long skirt or, if the mood strikes, a short skirt and thigh-highs. I have a healthy mistrust of short skirts however.
Short skirts make me feel dangerous. Reckless. Short skirts make me want to jump off the edge, into a deep blue sky moving a deep blue sea—the kind where it doesn’t matter where you land because it’s all just this beautiful blue. But I’ve tempered that recklessness with experience; skirts are easy access and I am no longer easily accessed, so I tend to stick with the blue jeans.
My hips are wide and give me a swagger when I walk. I have to wiggle when those jeans slip up or down, a sort of hip rolling dance move that has become my own private ritual. Hips don’t lie. This body was made for childbirth, and the little children at the daycare where I work certainly find the curve of my hip to be a perfect fit when I hold them. It would be nice if hip size was any indication of how good a mother you could be. Maybe then a curve of hip could outweigh my fears of losing control under the pressures of parenthood. But they are no indication, and I still get scared.
The tops of my thighs are smooth and strong, while the backs of my thighs show my love of chocolate in pits of cellulite. My butt curves into my back with a crescent indentation, and this crescent becomes split by my spine.
There was once innocence between my legs, between my feelings and my brain, but that designation is long since dead. A part of me I never had a chance to claim was lost to me then, in the frozen hot torture of my first disastrous relationship. It is hard now, looking back, to believe in the depth of innocence I had. It is hard to know, looking at the years of my depression, if there are any memories left that haven’t been corrupted by the haze of sleeping pills, alcohol, and over-analyzation. How is it that you can have something without ever knowing it and then lose it in a fast ride of salty confusion and shame?
That’s what it was, a loss. It was not a communication, or love, or even lust—just a fast spin that left me shaking for months to follow. You think I’m talking about sex here, and in a way I am, but what I really mean is the rape of my self—self-worth, self-identity, self-esteem. I was not raped. You cannot be raped if you don’t say no, if in fact, you don’t say anything. For it to be rape you have to do something to try to stop it—and so I told myself that my actions are my responsibility and I tried not to be a whore in the future. But the future was relative, and not even my paper smiles or my pen miles could disguise the trauma I found myself living.
As you can perhaps infer, I’ve had to be strong or I would have broken, and my back reflects this in wide, smooth slashes of muscle and skin. There is a place on my lower stomach where my skin is a stretch of nerves that makes me respond to any touch. There are a few who have already discovered this and use it against me shamelessly. My belly was once smooth and firm, with a sheet of muscle just under the surface. This was once my favorite body part. You can still feel the muscle under the bulge. But I have yet to find an exercise as good as marching and playing the clarinet at the same time, so the muscle lays unused.
My waist indents at the belly button, and spans up to my rib cage. I love the wide, four finger spread of my ribs when I arch my back to stretch out the stress that gathers between my shoulder blades. My breasts are high and firm, soft and smaller than average, but perfect for me. I enjoy bras and cleavage—two more things that make me feel like a girl. There’s something nice about a good bra. A good bra can make any woman look great. And that knowledge—that you look good under your clothes—makes you feel so much more confident.
I have a surgical scar on the top of my right breast, from the removal of a mole that was never malignant. This scar is recent and both uglier and larger than the doctor had presumed. The scars on my left wrist are not so recent, not so ugly, nor so large. They are like lacework—beautiful and complex, perhaps more memory than fact—and so faded now that only I can see them. I know intimately where each stroke is, where I forced the tip of blade into skin. These scars are spider web kisses of a former blade, from a time when the face reflected in the mirror was not mine, from a time when I held a shallow portion of a lip, a star in the palm of a stranger’s outstretched hand.
The blade of the carpet knife I used to cut into my skin never broke the Y-shaped vein, never spilled my life onto my dorm room floor. Death was never the point. I needed to feel something besides numbing anger and consuming depression. I needed a fierce competitor to the tears and the lies. These red seam lines—ragged and scary looking even now in memory—held me together. I just needed to see what I was made of. I can still feel the cuts now, like how an amputee feels their lost limb. I imagine the seductive pull of that knife as it cuts through flesh, through thick cylindrical vein, through nerves and muscles, to the bone.
It didn’t last long. I graduated to the blade of a pen, though not in the way my friends had hoped. I had been a writer, but after I started seeing shadows in my mirrors and my reflection in those shadows, I was not. I lost the desire to put words to the page, to feed my sorrow with a soundtrack. So instead, I wrote upon my legs with a permanent marker in trance-like states where my legs were left a black, screaming mass of nearly incoherent words. My therapist later called this healthy, since it stopped me from slitting my wrists.
My shoulders are wide and strong, showcasing my collarbones and the indentation at my throat where bones meet and curve. My neck is a neck, not long, not short, just there—a spacer between head and shoulders. I’ll let you in on the worst-kept secret never told: I’m a sucker for soft lips and wet kisses along the line of skin from ear to collarbone. (Shh).
My face is small and round, most of it cheek. My mouth is really the first thing people notice about my face, since it is wide with a full lower lip. They assume I’ll be better at kissing than other girls. (I don’t like to disappoint.) To downplay them as much as possible, I wear little to no lipstick, and only wear Chap Stick as a concession to the annoying trait of my lips to shed skin like a snake.
My nose is short and round and squat. I don’t much like it now, ever since someone said it looks like a pig’s snout. My eyes are deep set, which I regret, but they see much. They are dark brown, nearly black. I have silent eyes. Dead eyes. I wish they spoke volumes and other clichés, but they don’t. They never have. I do tend to win arguments however, because people are disconcerted that I stare with such undivided attention when they speak with me.
I once thought I had a disease. It had to do with my hair. I can’t remember now what it was called, though it started with a T. It involved the pulling of your hair from its roots. As a method of coping with stress, you understand. I have a tendency to align myself with different ailments given the smallest provocation, which I was told is pretty normal for people with anxiety disorders. So, I guess it’s good to know that there are times when pulling out your hair is normal.
I really like my hair too. It’s thick, and has these gold strands that run through it from the sun. But I guess you could say it’s been places, seen things. When I started college, I cut it all off—layered and short. I guess I felt the need to break out of my packaging a bit, become a new person. The problem was that, once I cut it…I didn’t have the patience to grow it out again. I finally grew it out to my shoulders after two years, and started experimenting with color. I have been a redhead, a darker brunette, and raven-tressed. I still like the idea of black hair, though it washes me out too much. This color experimentation follows me even now; my driver’s license still says that I’m a redhead. The lady at the BMV said she had to go with what she saw. So no matter what you think, officially, I’m a redhead.
I think my hair was black when I first began pulling it out. Anxiety attacks were brutal—sucked all the life out of you in shakes and sobs. Fisting my hands into my hair and pulling was the only way to relieve the pressure in my head. Pulling my scalp away from my brain seemed to make the load lighter. Maybe a medieval doctor would have told me that anxiety was caused by my brain being too hot. But today’s modern doctor wouldn’t agree. For them, my problems were because of how I thought.
If anyone ever tells you that teaching yourself how to think differently is an easy thing, smack them. It was the hardest and most gratifying thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. It’s like tearing away flesh, burning it like truth before a flame, until there’s nowhere left to hide. My final breakdown, the one that made me decide to drop out of school, it was a retreat. It was a burning of flesh and a silence bare. It was the sunset of a new day.
Depression is the loss of hope. It spreads over your skin like silk until there isn’t anything left of you that isn’t wrapped up in it. I spent so many days staring. Not speaking, unable to physically say words. Silence was better, with the meaning of nothing hanging in the air.
Those were the moments when I didn’t have the energy to fake it anymore. I had faked it for so long, and for so hard, that I didn’t know what me was anymore. I was done with dreaming. I had nothing left to dream. So I stared, out windows at views that never changed with the passing day, at the ceiling of my bedroom as the night shifted to day. I created my own little island where no one else could reach me.
My intention here, in these last paragraphs, was to go inside my brain. To show some thoughts to illustrate what my thinking was like. But I find that I can’t do it. That once again I do not have the words to describe it. I can’t relate it and having not been there, you wouldn’t understand.
Don’t feel bad about not understanding. You haven’t been forced to spend the kind of time with yourself that I have. You haven’t traveled the same road I have. Even if you know someone who has depression, or have had it yourself, you still haven’t traveled the same road. You aren’t inside my head. No one has ever been able to get inside my head.
I never found therapists all that useful for just that reason. The first therapist I saw I was not honest with. The second was too busy to give me the time of day and diagnosed me as bipolar after talking with me for half an hour. The third gave me a prescription for my mood disorder, which my next therapist then promptly told me not to take. But, the last therapist was the best. I saw this “psycho doctor,” as I called him, for fifteen minutes twice a month, with visits to a therapist in the same office.
He told me once that I could do his job. I thought things out so thoroughly that I was capable of coming to the same conclusions as he. He acted like a regulating force, much as my medication did. He was necessary to my recovery. I said once and still say, that I was self-destructive yes, but also self-aware.
Depression has no cure. It is something you learn to live with. I’ve come to see choice as this all-encompassing philosophy. I make myself be aware of my motivations. Awareness is a self-fed addiction that I cannot live without.
Sadness permeates my skin like mist, even in my happiness. It is a part of my character. It is fused to my bones, comes out in my voice. Sadness is a beauty, though not in the traditional sense. I could write my body with sadness.