I’ve just finished painting my nails a dark, shiny purple. I remember how strange it felt to do this when I was younger. I always loved to sketch and draw (I tried once to create a “museum” by drawing some instruments with marker on my bedroom walls. My mom didn’t like that much). But I never got the hang of makeup – the small, rounded brush handle was always so awkward, the way it tilted in my fingertips. I never understood how much paint to use either – the nail polish usually smeared in globs, flowing over the line between nail and skin, the final result being a poor impersonation of womanhood.
1. Cosmetics are made ritualistic by virtue of its social meanings and repetition. We only notice its ritualistic
nature when the illusions of its magic are broken.
When I looked in the mirror this morning, the first thing I noticed was my eyes. They had grown puffy and red, the creases above my eyes deeply set. Dark circles hung beneath my eyelashes. My hair stuck in slightly greasy patches, laying deflated against my scalp. Horrified, I tried on some mascara. It only drew more attention to my eyes. Then I tried to draw eyeliner along the crease of my eyelid. But my hands, trembling from exhaustion, betrayed me, and I was left more crooked than when I had started.
2. Our bodies are walls upon which our social realities are projected.
Bodies are stubborn, in that they refuse to forget the things that have happened to them. In the context of trauma, our bodies become simultaneously hyperreal to and separated from ourselves. The trajectories of memory lead us along the curvatures of our joints, the surfaces of our skin. When trauma is made salient, we become sensitive observers to the way our bodies change in relation to our realities, and in the way that our bodies are made potent within the realities of others. It is through this dual sensitivity to our existence in our own minds and in the minds of others that our bodies become a site of war.
3. Like a war composed of many battles, our bodies cycle through times of quiet and rage.
I suspect that trauma has a rhythm of some sort. It breathes in and breathes out, with each cycle reverberating, leaving pieces of ourselves in its wake. As we run, the breaths get faster, and at some point down the track, exhaustion in our chests, we lose our self-sustainability. We have moments of weakness. I spent most of this week switching between anger and sadness and somewhere in between. I spent my evenings sobbing, slamming pillows against my bedpost, and afterwards feeling broken and cowardly and ashamed. Surely I am stronger, I think. But am I really.
4. On fighting cycles with more cycles.
Somehow, as our trauma slumbers, we find ways to fall into different kinds of patterns. Every morning I pick out a nice outfit, comb my hair, put on just a bit of lipstick. I’m sometimes asked what I’m dressed up for. “Nothing really” I reply, when the real answer is for survival. If the contents of my being are twisted, the intersections of my identity tangled, is there a desirability to be found despite it all? Does my inner being reflect my dress, or does my dress inform my inner being?
Actually, a better question is: who gives a shit.
It’s simple: I wear my armor to empower and protect myself, end of story. And no, there is no desirability to be found. On the contrary, there is a desirability that is inherent within myself, that will always remain and shall be self-evident.
My trauma will continue breathing alongside me. In the midst of its rhythms, I will prevail. I will draw my own curvatures, gasp my own breaths, construct rhythms that will guide me, and it is in this way that I will become my own armor. I will go on a journey to reconstruct the continuity between my body and my ‘self,’ starting with the glossy surface of some cheap nail polish.
Surely the trauma will creep back somehow. But I will run faster than it can crawl.
1. Cosmetics are made ritualistic by virtue of its social meanings and repetition. We only notice its ritualistic
nature when the illusions of its magic are broken.
When I looked in the mirror this morning, the first thing I noticed was my eyes. They had grown puffy and red, the creases above my eyes deeply set. Dark circles hung beneath my eyelashes. My hair stuck in slightly greasy patches, laying deflated against my scalp. Horrified, I tried on some mascara. It only drew more attention to my eyes. Then I tried to draw eyeliner along the crease of my eyelid. But my hands, trembling from exhaustion, betrayed me, and I was left more crooked than when I had started.
2. Our bodies are walls upon which our social realities are projected.
Bodies are stubborn, in that they refuse to forget the things that have happened to them. In the context of trauma, our bodies become simultaneously hyperreal to and separated from ourselves. The trajectories of memory lead us along the curvatures of our joints, the surfaces of our skin. When trauma is made salient, we become sensitive observers to the way our bodies change in relation to our realities, and in the way that our bodies are made potent within the realities of others. It is through this dual sensitivity to our existence in our own minds and in the minds of others that our bodies become a site of war.
3. Like a war composed of many battles, our bodies cycle through times of quiet and rage.
I suspect that trauma has a rhythm of some sort. It breathes in and breathes out, with each cycle reverberating, leaving pieces of ourselves in its wake. As we run, the breaths get faster, and at some point down the track, exhaustion in our chests, we lose our self-sustainability. We have moments of weakness. I spent most of this week switching between anger and sadness and somewhere in between. I spent my evenings sobbing, slamming pillows against my bedpost, and afterwards feeling broken and cowardly and ashamed. Surely I am stronger, I think. But am I really.
4. On fighting cycles with more cycles.
Somehow, as our trauma slumbers, we find ways to fall into different kinds of patterns. Every morning I pick out a nice outfit, comb my hair, put on just a bit of lipstick. I’m sometimes asked what I’m dressed up for. “Nothing really” I reply, when the real answer is for survival. If the contents of my being are twisted, the intersections of my identity tangled, is there a desirability to be found despite it all? Does my inner being reflect my dress, or does my dress inform my inner being?
Actually, a better question is: who gives a shit.
It’s simple: I wear my armor to empower and protect myself, end of story. And no, there is no desirability to be found. On the contrary, there is a desirability that is inherent within myself, that will always remain and shall be self-evident.
My trauma will continue breathing alongside me. In the midst of its rhythms, I will prevail. I will draw my own curvatures, gasp my own breaths, construct rhythms that will guide me, and it is in this way that I will become my own armor. I will go on a journey to reconstruct the continuity between my body and my ‘self,’ starting with the glossy surface of some cheap nail polish.
Surely the trauma will creep back somehow. But I will run faster than it can crawl.