Disordered

 

Photo taken at art gallery in Berlin
Artist is Christine Guibert

Her bathroom looks nearly identical to Whitney Houston’s before she died. She’s not
quite a drug addict, but a very, very messy person. She lived in Spain for only a few weeks before returning home after a near-death experience. She nearly drowned in her mess. First, there were the 1 euro tequila shots, buckets of beers downed in minutes, cigarette butts, trashy kebabs, and party hats, but whose birthday was it even? Then there were the kisses with strangers, loose tobacco, hookah tabs she forgot to pay for, and empty bags of weed smoked in parks with girls who left their shoes at the bar. Plus the fact that she often got drunk in the day and came home with bags from stores she didn't have enough money to shop in. Add another cigarette, one more tequila shot, and she was submerged in a dark abyss. She came to in a shallow grave, begging for death. When the mess became chaos, she put down the blackout curtains and slept. Sometimes at 3PM, sometimes at 6AM, sometimes not at all. Whenever she woke up, she’d contemplate suicide as she rolled a cigarette and sipped coffee from the vending machine in her residencia, anger pulsing throughout her bloodstream.
          This is not the black hole she is used to, the one that’s filled with Russian Standard vodka and repeat episodes of Keeping up With the Kardashians while laying in bed, listening to the rainfall steadily, avoiding every notification. That hole is harmless for her. Time gets wasted, friends get lost, plants die, bills get paid late, self-care gets tossed aside, assignments get sloppy, the soul dies a little bit, but no one gets hurt beyond repair. She usually crawls out of that darkness, refreshed and excited.

          This abyss is a different kind of devil; the one that prays at the altar of self-destruction. She doesn’t know what to make of this new enemy (or is it a friend?), so she cries in the afternoons when the hangover wears off, and panics while doing simple tasks, like getting snacks from a grocery store. The drugs only make it worse.
"Her herbs were powerless; they changed the body's limbs but could not change the heart...They do not harm the body, but cruelly wound the mind" (Boethius). She is at the mercy of her emotions, drinking intensifies everything, but she’s too wrapped up in herself to notice. Within 20 minutes, she can feel euphoric, energetic, intensely angry, and deeply depressed, but the sense of ennui never fades. She can count on these waves of emotion more than anything else. They give a steady rhythm to the disordered state of her mind. Alcohol makes the downward spiral seem smoother than it would be when sober.
          When she looks in the mirror, she questions everything. No, that isn’t me, she thinks. She doesn’t believe what she sees, doesn’t recognize it. She buys new clothes, new chokers, new glasses, and pierces her lip like she’s 15 years old again, trying to find herself through her appearance, trying to make something connect with the sharp edges she feels are slicing the gentle folds of her brain. It wasn’t enough. Nothing was connecting. She cracked one day.
          She went out the night before, came back early in the morning. She fell asleep to the sound of her roommate's alarm clock, and an hour later woke up mad again, still drunk from the night before. She scrambled to put her shoes on, not bothering to change out of the clothes from last night. She got lost on her way to class. The girls in her residencia were no help. “Act like a grown up,” one of them said to her because she got out of bed too late. She responded with obscene names, used offensive language. She was so angry at this point she was practically begging for a fight, looking for a reason to explode.

          This anger is all-consuming. It feels entirely out of her control. She begins to scream because it feels like the only way to get it out. She yells fuck, cunt, all the bad words she can think of, wavering in and out of rough Spanish. She sobs and wails and desperately tries to explain her pain, but it falls on deaf ears. Her words do nothing to help her case. She becomes just another problematic woman. She screams some more until she feels she could faint. The beast has been released, but no one is responding. She’s more isolated in this pain than she has ever been. She stormed home alone, using the bars as landmarks to find her way. She stuffed her clothes in a suitcase, barely breathing through the tears. She furiously wrote a note. None of this is worth it. I don’t understand this anger. I don’t recognize who I am anymore. I want freedom. I need freedom. If I knew of a less painful way to make it stop, I would do it, but this feels like my way out. I don’t want to feel lonely anymore. She presses a razor blade to her wrist, testing the pain. The blood stains her sheets as it drips down her arm. She hears a voice, her voice? No, it’s the housekeeper.
          “Lizzy, ven aqui!” Judy knocks on the door, peeps her head inside. “Cariño, tienes que-- ayy no.” She gasped, seeing the blood. She rushes in for a hug. She speaks urgent, rapid-fire Spanish, so quick it only makes the creature feel more lonely. Margaret Atwood might say, what fresh hell is this? Another voice answers, softly and sweetly: This is life, honey. There’s a lot of it left to live. A lot more time to learn how to explain to a Spaniard you desperately want to kill yourself, that you can’t take this life shit anymore. A lot more time to determine which drugs take away the pain, and which make it all worse. But you already knew that, didn’t you? You just chose to ignore the signs. She can’t ignore this sign. She’s suddenly grateful for Judy and her powerful hugs; Grateful she can grasp onto something fulfilling. The voices are right- she has to stay and fight, but first, she needs to go home. She tells her host mom, the friends she partied with, and they are all sorry, but everyone is sorry when they figure out how fragile this creature is. She isn’t sure what they are sorry for.

          Everything becomes messy and disordered eventually because everything dies eventually. Spirits die, souls die, experiences die, brain cells die, memories die, and people die, until you’re left with all that wreckage, all that baggage, all that mess, and it’s so thick you could drown in it. This is what happens to some people. This is what happened to her. When her blood and tears dried, she booked a plane ticket home and slept on the bus, on the plane, on the car ride home. She was heading back to Denver, but besides that, she had no idea where she was going. It felt like a pilgrimage of her own- one that might lead to a spiritual awakening. “It is clear that it is through the possession of divinity that they become happy. Each happy individual is therefore divine. While only God is so by nature, as many as you like may become so by participation” (Boethius, 71).
          She knew she wasn’t powerful enough on her own to find this happiness-- she needed something divine. She made an appointment first thing in the morning after she landed, she needed to find the divine quickly. The news she received was some people’s worst nightmare. It was an answer, but not an official answer. She could be bipolar, maybe have mild schizophrenia, perhaps borderline personality disorder. It took only an hour of tearful confessions to her divine presence before she was put on antipsychotics and intense anti-anxiety meds. She isn’t psychotic, right? She can’t be crazy, and yet here she is. She is used to fighting devils; anxiety, crippling depression, physical aches , and pains, but this beast will take more time to tame than the others. It doesn’t even have a name yet, so how can she even begin to remove herself from it? How can she heal from this? A teacher once told her you can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you have to go through it. She filled her prescriptions and continued to open her mind to her divine presence.

          The anger is what needed the most attention. It had a life of its own inside her, boiling and pulsating like skin bubbling up after a bad burn. She was mad at herself for being so susceptible to her own demons, mad with the world for not being more forgiving, and angry with her therapist for being so expensive. She could list the reasons she was mad until she died, but still, none of it would make sense to her. She can’t get over her perception of herself: sweet, funny, open and warm Lizzy, that’s what she knows. Where did that girl go?
          Her dad kicked her out, so she moved into her mom’s house. The mountains of Colorado were a better space to heal, but his decision feels like a knife in an already sensitive wound. “There are two things on which all the performance of human activity depends, will and power. If either of them is lacking, there is no activity that can be performed” (Boethius, 88). Where she is really doesn't matter. She's ready to get better. She wants to reach the divine.
          This divine presence reveals itself over time. It is her therapist, her dog, her medication, the mountains she hikes in every day, and the house she gets to return to every night safely. It is the incense she burns, the journal she writes in every day, and the books she reads to not feel lonely anymore. These bring her closer to herself, closer to happiness, and therefore must contain

some aspect of the divine. Gone are the days of manic partying, gone are the endless poor decisions. She discovered the secret to defeating the beast: inner peace. She had the keys to the problem the entire time, all it took was connecting with the right divine presence. She is safe in this space, she doesn’t need any answers.
          She finished this book, The Female Persuasion, and Faith Frank chose to ignore all the signs, at first, just like our dear creature. Faith slept with a married man, knowing he was married but never wanting to admit it to herself. She made a mess, and let it become chaos. She still went on to be this feminist icon, a beacon of hope for so many women, knowing all the while she’s committed one of the worst crimes a woman could commit against another woman. Sleeping with someone else’s man? That’s unforgivable. This creature, too, has done some unforgivable things. There’s hope for her yet. There’s still time for me to clean up my mess, she thinks. 
          This is the most divine presence of all: Time. It lets her ignore the signs, make mistakes, go in and out of mania, and gives her the chance to get back in touch with herself. Yes, she doesn’t need any answers as long as there’s still time...