Chapter 10: On Self-Care and Self-Harm - Who Is Wellness For?

My default setting is primarily self-harm. When I look back at my twenties, I see someone desperately trying to understand who they are but failing because of a lack of tools and resources. My tendency to self-annihilate, I assumed, was a strange sado-masochistic quirk that I downplayed as a charming attribute. You know how people cloak things in archetypes, like an “artist’s life.” As I began to develop race consciousness, politicizing myself, at first I assumed it was the plight of being a person of color in a world of white supremacy. Upon further examination, I realized that was just one part of the jigsaw puzzle.

But when you’re a woman, inquiry into the self is seen as a solipsistic endeavor. Throughout my life, that much has been evident—the way people would constantly couch my depth in language that disregarded me. We puncture and poison each other through the many ways we enforce gender. “Early in the formulation of classical psychology women’s curiosity was given quite a negative connotation, whereas men with the same attribute were called investigative . . . ,” Estés writes. “In reality, the trivialization of women’s curiosity so that it seems like nothing more than irksome snooping denies women’s insight, hunches, intuitions. It denies all her senses. It attempts to attack her most fundamental powers: differentiation and determination.”^[1]

In Judith Lewis Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, she shares that Sigmund Freud, after declaring, in an 1896 report on eighteen case studies entitled “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” “I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood,”^[2] privately repudiated his claims within a year of publishing the report, because “hysteria was so common among young women that if his patients’ stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice. This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credibility. Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients.”^[3] Out of this research, Freud developed the theory of psychoanalysis. Yes, the most dominant psychological theory of the next century was founded on the denial of women’s reality and testimony. “Freud had concluded that his hysterical patients’ accounts of childhood sexual abuse were untrue: ‘I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.’”^[4]

I’m glad that the evidence is so blatant. We have constantly been denied our truths, while we are cajoled to believe that we are wrong, that we are hysterical, that we are the madwomen. All along we have been screaming to be taken seriously, while our bodies, minds, and hearts are compromised first by the tenacity of sexual trauma (usually rooted in our home life, or in our close physical proximity) and then by the ruthless dismissal of what we know to be true. “Though the identity of ‘woman’ has erased and excluded many (especially women of color and trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid people),” writes joanna hedva, a nonbinary person of color, “I choose to use it because it still represents the un-cared for, the secondary, the oppressed, the non-, the un-, the less-than.”^[5] Our stories are radical because here we are, in the twenty-first century, still having to determine and explain our humanity—let alone our trauma—to you. It’s absurd that anyone could think that someone would hallucinate—or desire—this level of violence. That our fantasies are a representation of our inherent brokenness, not the consequence of the actions taken against us by the people who wish to overpower us.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to die. The earliest that was palpable was at age ten. At the time, we were living in Brisbane, and I was already completely disassociated from my body. I didn’t know how to be in my body, and I was always trying to escape it, to exist outside of it. I spent a lot of my time in the physical darkness. I found spaces in the house where I could disappear, behind curtains, in the garden, in the folds of cracks. If I was imperceptible, I wasn’t a burden; if I wasn’t seen, then maybe I wouldn’t have to engage with anybody and I could be left alone. When I was lucid enough in my teens, I would wonder why I hated myself so much, but I was too obsessed with my pain to really analyze it. All I knew is that it depleted me. In public, I was a happy-go-lucky high-achieving school role model—in private, I wanted to kill myself. Unsurprisingly, Dead Poets Society was my favorite film in my late adolescence. I related to Neil Perry—on some level I believed I was like him, wanting so badly to stay alive while the tyranny of my home life, and the expectations that had been placed on me, despite how I had been transgressed as a child, had left me in a state of suspended violence, constant alarm, and suffocation. The people whom I had tried to signal to help me, including my own father, hadn’t. I now understand that back then what I felt was helplessness. “When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living,”^[6] Herman writes.

Few people understand what the absence of maternal love feels like unless that’s their life, too. How it is to feel forever deficient. How it is to feel like your very livelihood has no meaning. How it is to feel like you are a burden in every relationship you ever have because no one has ever told you that it is safe to be who you are. It is to feel a calcium depletion where you are left with brittle bones in a world that will try to endlessly collapse you. When your mother has rarely shown kindness, how do you learn to source that from within yourself? Where do you find it, and how? For me, the journey has been over two decades of searching. Searching in friends, desiring protection but instead facing unreliability, instability, and people’s attacks and insecurities against my own.

I tried to find God, to call out, but God hadn’t been helping, and I felt denied love again. So, art became my proxy love. I was consumed by poets. By Rumi, my Muslim brother, my kin. I would watch films and find myself in the folds of the screen, in the pages of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. My life was bleak, but it was also majestic in its misery. I understood myself through art because my pain was large like what I saw in the stories, in the paintings, in the opera of film. My heart has always been too big, and I have always been too eager to give it away.

I have struggled with my sexuality—both because of my latent queerness, which obviously started with and was cemented by my mother, but also my desire for sex, for the control of it, for its grip, for how quickly I can lose myself in it. In the words of Kate Zambreno, “I wanted to be fucked and stay fucked.” My desire was potent, it felt like a penetrating hunger never satiated. I would consider myself an incredibly sexual person, and though I have spent many years consumed by sex in an almost hedonistic, punishing way, I have also been celibate for months and years at a time. The last stint began shortly after I realized I had been sexually abused as a child. You can only deny somatic injury for so long. Herman tells us, “Some survivors may conceptualize the damage of their prolonged captivity primarily in somatic terms. Or they may become so accustomed to their condition that they no longer recognize the connection between their bodily distress symptoms and the climate of terror in which these symptoms were formed.”^[7] You could say my body shutting down to sex is a symptom that I began to notice that was in such juxtaposition to how I’ve felt about sex for most of my life. I was carnal, I was raw—that’s how I saw myself. I felt powerful, I felt desirable during the act of sex. Not something I otherwise felt. But there were years and months at a time that I shut down, my body completely withdrawn from sex. This contrast was confusing. I had so many lost parts of myself, and they all felt disparate to each other. I wanted to know what the connector was. I wanted to understand what I wasn’t seeing.

There was no sense of safety from my mother’s leering eyes; well into my adulthood, if I was wearing the wrong thing—I never dared, so it was often by accident—I was admonished to the point of forced compliance. I would be called a slut, a whore, a seductress hell-bent on spreading evil everywhere I went. This was so often the archetype I was forced into, and it would make me feel so ashamed, a crawling sensation of forever being vilified for the wrong thing. With abuse two plus two equals five, so if a caretaker tells you enough times that you are a bad person, that your body, your femininity, your very existence is bad—even if it’s for some arbitrary reason—you begin to believe it. “The abused child’s sense of inner badness may be directly confirmed by parental scapegoating. Survivors frequently describe being blamed, not only for their parent’s violence or sexual misconduct, but also for numerous family misfortunes,”^[8] Herman explains. I learned my body was unsafe, even in my own home, and that the violence it met was the punishment for my countless sins.

There were a lot of things that worried me at this time, among them the cascading shame I carried with me, and how that made me want to hide myself and my body. As I got older, I realized it wasn’t by accident that I kept getting into weird sexual situations where I was misreading the intensity of the interaction and convincing myself that what I was feeling was love. Then there were the countless individuals I had sex with to minimize the pain of rejection, but then would enter mercurial dimensions with them as well, never safeguarding myself, my body, my heart—not even understanding that was a choice. By the time I was back in Australia, visiting my mother on a strange half pilgrimage of healing, I was working on this. We didn’t have (and don’t have, never have had) a relationship where we talked about real things. I can’t remember any full conversation I’ve had with her. She wasn’t/isn’t someone who checked in with you or asked you how you were, so my care was always one-dimensional. My father once pointed out that she would never even ask you about your day. For the most part, I didn’t mind. I was accepting of her shortcomings and was compassionate toward her own failings and traumas that blockaded her ability to be fully present as a mother. I was eager to change gears, I wanted to forgive her.

“If the abused child is able to salvage a more positive identity, it often involves the extremes of self-sacrifice,”^[9] writes Herman. “The normal regulation of bodily states is disrupted by chronic hyperarousal. Bodily self-regulation is further complicated in the abusive environment because the child’s body is at the disposal of the abuser,” she adds. Is this why was I always expecting to be abused, even if I was hoping for more? The way my mother would abandon me, us, in moments of her disgust or disappointment was deeply devastating, something I’m still metabolizing.

“The emotional state, usually evoked in response to perceived threats of abandonment, cannot be terminated by ordinary means of self-soothing. Abused children discover at some point that the feeling can be most effectively terminated by a major jolt to the body. The most dramatic method of achieving this result is through the deliberate infliction of injury. . . . Repetitive self injury and other paroxysmal forms of attack on the body seem to develop most commonly in those victims whose abuse began early in childhood.”^[10]

When I was quite young, I learned that physical harm, when administered by myself, had a numbing effect. I perpetually felt disgusting and lived in constant fear that people were thinking exactly that as they looked at me, that they could see how ugly and useless I was. The first time I took a razor to my leg, taking a chunk out of my calf, I felt like I was purifying my skin of this wretched hair on my unfeminine body. When the blade came down, taking off the first layer of my dark skin to show the white underlayer, now blistered with the sliced open pores, blood rushing like a deluge, there was a moment of relief. Like a sigh at the base of my throat, a release that felt karmic, divine, elucidating death awareness, a proximity I found intoxicating. I longed for death in a poetic way, as an act of penetrating vindication.

I continued to cut myself more regularly into my teens. It was literally a way to minimize myself. Take a stab at myself, the flesh wound a portal to another world. I became obsessed with the end of my mother’s clothing shears, the sharpest object I knew in the house, outside of knives—but knives felt too close to the bone. After my mother’s knife attack, I preferred something more subtle. Like the point of the safety pin, the edge like a crisp, sharp salutation against my skin. I liked bandaging my skin, cuts I made by accident, clumsiness—but also precision—nursing my wounds with the terry cloth bandages scavenged from my mother’s first aid kit. I liked how the rub of the cloth against my wound reminded me of my secret wherever I went. My strange, fucked-up secret.

I can still feel the sensation of wanting total obliteration. It’s something I have craved through sex, but also when bad news comes. Sometimes, in order to shield the landing, I would buffer myself by exerting more pain onto my body. Either by cutting or sometimes through punching myself, screaming into my pillow to cut the sound of my life crumbling beneath me. As a child, I grew accustomed to cleaning my skin under severely hot water. I taught myself to do that after being told that I was going to go to hell so often that my child self began to prepare for hellfire by preemptively burning my skin. In adulthood, I’ve tried to interrogate my obsession with heat. Heat was comfort—a hot water bottle in lieu of a mother, as well as a purifier of my sins. Once when I was ten, my mother, after missing my bowl, poured hot, hot soup onto my lap, searing my little legs with burns. When I screamed, wanting the natural apology or concern, she looked at me—bored, as if I very well should shut my mouth and enjoy my food. I went to the bathroom and cleaned myself, crying on the cool tile beneath me. Eventually she brought over potato skins to put on the burns. She chucked them at me and never apologized. To this day I’m not sure if she did it on purpose.

“Survivors who self-mutilate consistently describe a profound dissociative state preceding the act,” Herman explains. “Depersonalization, derealization, and anesthesia are accompanied by a feeling of unbearable agitation and a compulsion to attack the body. The mutilation continues until it produces a powerful feeling of calm and relief; physical pain is much preferable to the emotional pain that it replaces. As one survivor explains: ‘I do it to prove I exist.’ . . . Self injury is intended not to kill but rather to relieve unbearable emotional pain, and many survivors regard it, paradoxically, as a form of self preservation.”^[11]

• As a form of self preservation.
• As a form of self preservation.
• As a form of self preservation.

What was I doing if not preserving myself in writing, archiving my life for those who may share these traumas or twists and turns? Looking at why I so badly wanted to die has been a process, but now I understand it, fully. I understand how tricky and mercurial sexual abuse is, how unsatisfying it can be to identify it; how skin crawling the experience is to detail it, but the more I openly talk about it, I realize how many of us carry a deep shame for the way our bodies have been misinterpreted by people we thought loved us. My freedom feels like it was ripped from me. For most of my life, I have felt that as a child some part of me died and died again, causing me to believe that I was a dead thing as opposed to a pulsating ripe being ready to fight for myself. I guess I just needed to see that there was a self worth fighting for . . . and that came by loving myself.

Self-care can be an arduous journey. How do you love a self you don’t? How do you care for a self you have been conditioned to fight? If we can’t even face ourselves in the bathroom mirror, a mani-pedi is not going to save us. Some of us have to fight that self from taking over. That’s what the journey of survival requires, a want to not end yourself every day. You have to find some lightness through it all. To confront the darkness, you need a hell of a lot of light, and that, too, I believe, comes from real earnest love, or with the smallest baby step, to find what works for you. But you deserve to see yourself—to know yourself is such a gift.

These days, that’s what I focus on. I have to remind myself that I have always found ways to begin the journey of loving myself. The first time I got a tattoo was shortly after my abortion. A few months later, on an impromptu healing weekend, I went to Melbourne for the first time, only to get a tattoo of the slivered new moon and three stars. It was my homage to my Muslim roots, to my pride that I felt for my lineage. My next one was La illah il Allah in a shitty cursive I got from a dingy tattoo parlor in Sydney called the Invisible Man. Fourteen years later, I have over fifty tattoos all over my body. I’m glad that I wanted to find ways to love my body at that age and figured out how that would look for myself. My first tattoo was an absolution, it was the first uttering of me to myself, acknowledging that this body that I hated so much, that had always felt like such an ugly hunk of flesh, I was now molding her, I was molding with her. I was blossoming with her, allowing her to breathe, allowing her mercy. Looking more into sigils, I learned there was a lineage in Thailand where ancient spiritual forms of protection were etched into the body. These were prayers, as mine were prayers, inked into skin for all kinds of remedies and spells. It also cut across class lines, where all sectors of society got tattoos. In the West, they were relegated to thieves and thugs, but in Thai culture they were highly spiritually potent acts. Usually through pure geometry, prayers were as specific as the Hindu god Hanuman going into battle with a spear, etched into skin as protection; the sigils were generally designed to favor good luck and power in any given situation. What I liked most about these Thai spiritual coordinations is that their incantation relied on your moral code. Keeping the power of the tattoo went hand in hand with being a good person; otherwise, the energy would leak, rendering a capsized prayer.

“Tattoos play a significant part in the role of the body as archive,” writes Tamara Santibañez in Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work,^[12] articulating what I have felt about my own body for a long time. That it would speak things my voice could not. A tattoo is a boundary. It started as a shield, a marker of my pain tolerance. Then it became a way to mark my flesh as my own. It is mine, this vessel, and I know where it begins and ends like how I know the compass of the etchings on my skin. “Tattooing is basically anti-repressive. I think people’s main subconscious motivation is to clarify something about themselves to themselves, and only incidentally . . . to show other people.”^[13]

A boundary is also a boundary, and in my evolution as an artist and a person, I am beginning to understand how easy it is to be exploited when you don’t know your own self, and thus your own parameters. I’m learning every day that a boundary is knowing what is yours and what is another’s. It’s understanding your value is not determined by how you manage others and their needs, it’s about knowing your needs are equally important, vital, to your soul—so you deserve to prioritize them, you deserve to listen to them. “Without firm boundaries,” writes Bethany Webster in Discovering the Inner Mother, “we can easily become enmeshed with others, causing us to emotionally caretake, be overly responsible, or neglect our own needs. When boundaries are too rigid, we isolate ourselves and push others away. Healthy boundaries are ‘selectively permeable.’ They are not too rigid or too loose.”^[14] They are flexible, they are fluid to embrace the uncertainty of life.

Transmutation is one of my favorite cards in my Medicine Cards deck. It’s symbolized by the snake, a snake I now have tattooed on my skin, as a reminder that I can sublimate anything into gold. I have always had that power. It’s funny that only now I’m seeing it, seeing all these gifts given to me in the folds of my skin, in the voids where the trauma was once stored. These days, I rely less on self-obliteration. The instinct has dissipated. I find myself castigating myself less, too, and the tendency to want to cut myself to haze my peripheries is completely nonexistent. I can’t say this is an arrived state, but it feels different. Healing is changing composition, it’s moving through the tunnel of your own demise knowing that eventually the muck clears. Sure, maybe there’s a whole new shit show awaiting you to face after, but what else is life but this? This beautiful, cyclical, spiral dance. Even our healing is art like a dervish’s trance. Speaking of, I love that nineteen-year-old self who hated her body so much that she knew she had to find a way to love it. Tattoos gave me my body back. But on my own terms. It doesn’t matter how many family members will tell me I’m going to hell, all I know is God led me here. To this body’s acceptance. That is an act of God. To love what was previously unspeakable. To find beauty where only pain once permeated is a phenomenal act of faith, of grace.