Donât be angry if I tell you that it is the aim of my life to get people to look at me. Why should you be angry about things that donât concern you? Iâm angry when I do something wrong, but when somebody else behaves badly Iâm pleased.
1. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.
2. A man preoccupied by his skin who believed that it was too loose. He used a staple gun on both sides of his face in an attempt to keep his skin tight. The staples fell out after ten minutes and the man narrowly avoided piercing his facial nerve.
3. A man who was preoccupied by the appearance of his chin deliberately cycled into the back of a lorry in an attempt to fracture his jaw so that it could be reset in his desired position. At the last moment he decided against the plan and dropped his head, fracturing his skull.
4. In an unnamed European country, a medical case study refers to a man who was obsessed by the shape of his nose. Lacking the means to get cosmetic surgery, he carefully chose and cleaned a piece of chicken cartilage. Looking in the mirror, he makes a deep cut down the centre of his nose and goes about trying to replace the bones with the chicken cartilage, which he has moulded to his ideal shape, thinking âFinally, finally, finally Iâll be free, oh do it you motherfucker, finally, finally, finallyâ.
Once I fell in love with a boy and gave him what was left of my body and the rest of me too. I made a decision to be a wife- in action if not by law- because a wife was the thing I felt least like. A wife was as different to me as a bird of prey, or a tree, or a car. To be one was as far removed from my natural state of being as I could imagine, and was therefore desirable. What mattered was to give my body to him, and it didnât matter what he did with it- whether that meant loving it or doing it unimaginable evil. What mattered was that he would take it, and we could both agree it was no longer mine. Â When we could do so, my suspicions that I was not a real girl at all were muted for a time.
Do you believe that you are alive?
I have never been truly convinced from within myself for a single instant that I am alive. I dread to become alive because in doing so the potential to be destroyed is immediately realised. If I never believe that I am alive, I can also never believe that I will die. What this means is that symptoms of severe physical illness can pass through my life like a dream through the head. I can easily ignore indignities and suffering of almost any imaginable sort, whether a simple skin infection or a foetus growing cancerously in the womb.
When I was young I had chronic stomach pain and vomited blood after most meals which I learned to tolerate with incredible ease. I would rather simply die of an illness than be told that I had one; to be forced to accept that I have a body and it fails.
Back then I was hungry all the time and liked to feel the thin acids wash around my stomach. I liked to feel cleaned and soured by them, as though being boiled sterile from the inside out. Back then my body was no longer sweaty and bloody and warm. I did such good work that instead of flesh and sinew I was made of cords and rope and muslin. I was beyond body, the insides clean of mess, the veins filled with hardening concrete. I felt strong and inhuman and read compulsively of dissection, of marrow and pus and disaster. I bought books about autopsies and memorised phenomena which occur depending on the method of death.
I read about the messy corpse of a man who had thrown himself off a building. A witness reports that without fuss or warning, he neatly dips forwards as though he had merely dropped something beneath a table and was attempting to retrieve it. When a doctor arrives, he must check as a matter of course that the heart has stopped, and using a stethoscope hears and then feels a strange crackling sensation throughout the manâs chest. It sounds like Rice Krispies when the milk is first poured on. The manâs lungs had exploded upon impact, and all the pockets of air normally contained within them were now travelling around the body at speed, trying to settle.
Lungs are light as spirit because their tissue is so thin and delicate; the membranes within them arranged so as to maximise exposure to breath much as the leaves on deciduous trees maximise exposure to air.
When you do not believe that you are alive, you live psychotically, pretending to have no body. The implicit meaning in my way of life is: âI am only what others regard me as beingâ. My way of seeking to obtain conviction that I exist is to position myself as an object in the world.
Because my world is unreal, I must become an object in the worlds of other people, for objects seem to other people to be real, and sometimes even calm and beautiful. But to be an object for someone else necessitates the presentation of myself, a constant unveiling, an offering of my utility in all its forms. In a world full of danger, to be a visible object is to incite violence. The fact of being seeable exposes an animal to the threat of attack from its enemies, and no animal is without enemies.
Since I know that I am not alive, to be looked on as though I am pains and bewilders me. To be seen is such violence- because I can never truly become an object, which is unchanging and knowable, to be seen is such violence. My face feels flayed, an eyesore, and Iâm constantly boiling with anger at the people who accidentally look upon it. I find my ways of playing possum and trying to disappear or fade as completely into my surroundings as I can.
When I was a teenager I conquered the disturbing reality of my own boundless greed by denying that appetite existed at all. Both greed and starvation are of the same cloth to me- in either case an absolute refusal of need. When I am greedy, the abstract notion of feeling hunger at some time in the future is so unacceptable and frightening to me that I am unable to allow for its possibility and must eat constantly as precaution. When I am starving, I am saying to myself that there is no need, that I have moved past it.
I was physically vulnerable, easily smashable. Because I am not real, I have always enjoyed overt examples of incongruity, real-world illustrations of the fact that there is no single knowable part of my self. I liked being thin and knowing that nobody who looked at me from outside would know how wicked and greedy I truly was. I liked that on my lunch break from school, still wearing the uniform, I would go to an older boyfriendâs house to have sex and be hurt. I liked to find the purple marks from his teeth on me when I went back to class. It was good to be hit by him because it was so outrageous, so disrespectful, that it confirmed the feeling that everything was insane and that there was no real way of ever knowing in what way a human being could expect to be treated. Eventually I would learn to take comfort in the prescriptions of S and M, where there is no ambiguity about what personality to have. Even without the accompanying fluff of handcuffs and whips, which I find embarrassing and too openly acknowledging of performativity, there is comfort in shared agreement about who is the giver of violence.
                                ââââââââââââââââââ-
1. Patient suffers from a monothematic delusion, denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of oneâs body. Even if provided with undeniable proof that the limb belongs to and is attached to their own body, the patient produces elaborate confabulations about whose limb it really is, or how the limb ended up on their body. In some cases, delusions become so elaborate that a limb may be treated and cared for as if it were a separate being. Patients may, for example, mistake their arm for the doctorâs arm.
2. A man preoccupied by his facial skin said he would use sandpaper as a form of dermabrasion to remove scars and lighten his skin.
3. A man who was preoccupied by redness on his skin repeatedly exsanguinated himself by a syringe and needle or, when he was accepted, by going to blood transfusion clinics to âmake himself look palerâ.
4. A woman who was preoccupied by the ugliness of multiple areas of her body who desired liposuction but could not afford it used a knife to cut her thighs and attempted to squeeze out the fat.
I had lived in England for nine weeks and steadily was becoming more strange to myself. Because I had come here more or less alone and for no good reason, all of my minor humiliations and losses had no narrative or audience. The things that happened to me were public, but not in any meaningful reality of mine as the people who witnessed them had no connection to my life. My feelings were suspect and dream-like, merging as they did with half-forgotten adverts and television shows. I stood at Waterloo Bridge one night after work and was quietly excited but felt that I would never again be sure if such things were real or were absorbed from tourist boards and cinema in an effort to cope with the trauma of existing here.
The person I was in love with had moved suddenly to another country. Other men, who I hated, were boring but necessary consolations to pass the time. I worked 60 hours a week for minimum wage, ate packaged carrot sticks and hummus for dinner at 11pm. I felt numb and self-perpetuating except in transit when I broke down frequently and with  unattractive self pity. There was an evil pushing at the world and all it needed was a little give, a little slipway. It was when I travelled it seemed in greatest danger of reaching through- when I ran until I was nearly sick but missed the last train home anyway, when a display board said my bus was coming in 2 minutes, but kept saying this perpetually, unchanging. In these moments the great and pointless dread of London seemed most apparent and intolerable.I felt my body growing apart from me, swaying in these stations at night, trying not to be where it  was.
I went on some dates with a sweet and oafish boy who seemed several decades younger than me, though it was just that he was happy and reliably employed and somewhat stupid. He did odd things, like steal the garnish from my cocktail when I had excused myself. When I failed to notice and a dozen minutes had passed, he unfurled his clenched fist to reveal a wilted mint leaf and a crushed and bleeding cherry, saying âsurpriseâ, and more faintly âgotchaâ.
Housesitting for a married couple I know, I went a little more nuts, alone for too many days in a row. I raided their liquor cabinet and watched Scream 1, 2 and 3 on their projector and call in sick to work. I was chatting with an old boyfriend one night, telling him about my increasing indifference to my own welfare.
âIt sounds like youâre suffering from depression,â he said.
âNo,â I replied, âI think Iâm just suffering.â
Then he said an odd thing; that if I was meeting strangers to have sex with them, I should stop doing so. He said I was vulnerable and physically weak and that the city was full of people whose motives could not be predicted. Well Ok, I thought, lets go- like it was a dare.
I joined a popular fetish site and dispassionately ticked the preference boxes. Submissive. Not into pain. Soft yes. Hard no. I try to remember what my soft yeses and hard nos were when I was sleeping with someone I loved, how different they might be with a stranger.
It is not hard to find a taker when what you are offering is a woman willing to be hurt.
On the train there I checked my makeup and felt ashamed that I have blurry tattoos and short hair and am a little bit fat. I wished I was completely blank in the way generically beautiful women are, able to exist without scrutiny in the way they can, where beauty exists to neutralise the squalor of being a person. I am sick of the feeling my guts are going to leak through some unforeseen split in my casing, that the shabbiness of what I call a body will become clear to everyone.
The man lived in Hampstead and was a lawyer, his house incredibly beautiful and tasteful and completely without characteristic. It seemed eerily sealed, contained, in a way that implied secrecy and, feeling this, I realised I was frightened and that being frightened was the whole point of my being there. The man asked me if I had told anyone that I was coming to meet him. I told him I had, but I hadnât. I had orchestrated the situation to be as dangerous and foolish as possible, to be a red flag waved in Godâs face, saying: Iâm here, Iâm finished being able to take care of myself, so whatever happens now is up to you.
Thinking of the fact that nobody in the whole world knew where I was at that moment suddenly brought tears to my eyes, the acrid loneliness of my new life, all the people at home I had left and rejected in order to get it. Being there, in this lawyerâs beige living room was the proof I was seeking that my body is extraneous to the goings-on of the city, that it moves around unnoticed, that it is not a thing which can be needed or missed.
When he touched me and restricted my movement I began to shake with fear. For both of us the game is this actualised potential of violence- that he really could kill me, that I really could be killed. And this was enough for both of us, what we had come there to do. I tasted hot metal in my mouth, my pulse soaring like an ocean. I thought parts of poems, prayers, thought of the person I love, thought: Oh God, give him back to me, I will not stop asking you.
I thought of other people I have loved, of my my sweet first boyfriend, the son of a famous actor, who was the first person I ever knew to be both rich and unhappy. We walked together through a river behind his house after having our immeasurably careful sex. Â Between our feet, salmon swam- beautiful slick salmon, silver- and I laughed with pleasure to feel them slide cool against me. There they were, touching off of us, and yet from a different world to ours. Their world was one we couldnât be a part of, one where air and weight meant different things; one which, like ours, seemed to be held together by absolutely nothing.
Afterwards the lawyer led me to the door and somehow that was the worst part, anticipating him turning around with a grin and refusing at the last moment to let me leave. The moment the lock clicked I pushed past him and ran through Hampstead Heath, my face hot and thinking go go go. I knew from the animal spite in my heart when I saw that he wanted to hurt me that I just dont want to die, dont want to, and so I ran and ran, and as I did I thought to myself what I wished for someone to say to me, what I wished the person I love would say to me, what I wanted to say to him for the rest of our lives, which is simple but also everything and is Dont die dont die dont die, rushing with the blood sea crashing in my ears, dont die.
In May of 1998 a seventy-nine-year-old man from New York traveled to Mexico and paid $10,000 for a black-market leg amputation; he died of gangrene in a motel. The man had Bodily Integrity Identity Disorder, a condition in which the sufferer is persistently obsessed with the idea of amputating one or more of their limbs. The man saw his healthy leg as an aberration.
Sufferers believe their body is incomplete with its full complement of four limbs, and they will only feel normal when they have three. âI have always felt myself to be an amputeeâ they say. Of thwarted attempts at self surgery, they say âIt was an attempt to see myself, to be myself, as I have always known or felt myself to be.â
âMy left foot was not part of me,â said one amputee, who had wished for amputation since the age of eight. âI didnât understand why, but I knew I didnât want my leg.â A woman in her early forties wrote to me, âI will never feel truly whole with legs.â
A man who had packed his leg in ice hoping that doctors would be forced to remove it said: âI knew not my leg. It was utterly strange, not-mine, unfamiliar. I gazed upon it with absolute non-recognition. The more I gazed at that cylinder of chalk, the more alien and incomprehensible it appeared to me. I could no longer feel it as mine, as part of me. It seemed to bear no relation whatever to me. It was absolutely not-me â and yet, impossibly, it was attached to me â and even more impossibly, continuous with meâ
I spoke to a man who owned a farm in Iowa who told me:
âThere was one time I had a laborer working here on the property and I started my chainsaw to cut off a small tree close to the ground so he could easily remove the stump. I was standing on the side of the hill with this chainsaw in my hand and I just thought, Oh, it would be so easy. The temptation was very real.â
Iâm waiting for the person I love to come home. Thereâs a dull sticky pain throbbing beneath my pyjama bottoms, up in the soft part of where the upper thigh branches into bone. Iâve sat for a long time on the cool white tiles of our bathroom, with my back against the toilet bowl rounded and heaving slowly. Almost erotic when I feel this way, so totally empty and worn and projectile, like my insides have been pulled clean through my mouth. When he left this evening I came here and fell to my knees, crashing against the towel rack, and having steadied myself quickly- one, two- cracked my head against the cistern so that the itching inside my brain quieted a little from the thump. This dulled the immediate panic enough that I was able to collect myself and prepare the tedious little routine he so hated. Once ready I undressed and began to cut through the old healed scar tissue in that spot. I keep it to that area now- my arms are already dotted with silver wormy scars from years ago and I canât afford any more. I begin in a rush, trying to open as much flesh as possible as quickly as I can, to get a steady stream of blood, and then when itâs all flowing at the right pace I start to take my time. Itâs almost operatic now, or- what am I talking about, Iâve never even seen an opera. I know what I mean, I mean like in Silence of the Lambs when Hannibal Lecter is beating one of the prison guards to death with his own truncheon. The camera is focused tightly on him as he kills the cop, his movements elegant and rhythmic. Blood is spattering increasingly onto his face, and on it you can see- you can see just, ah, bliss.
areudirty
janainaart
annaxmalina
stormborns
izzy806
romaincrisis
