On Protecting Women

Barbie, the Long Island Murders & what I've been contemplating

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tw: sexual violence, suicidal ideation, violence

Communion, Zayn Qahtani

“I’ll never renounce the pleasures the feminine has always given me: its materials, its histories, its small rituals and grand designs.” — Margo Jefferson, Constructing A Nervous System.

*

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how they caught the Long Island serial killer, aka the Gilgo Beach murderer, recently, after almost decades of being mysterious to law enforcement. I don’t want to name him because when I look at the killer I think of how we become what we think we are. Monstrous; because we are inept at loving ourselves violence becomes us, rife with the crude indignation that the pain we have suffered must be thoroughly subjected onto others.

It’s hard not to think of the dead women, instead, of their precious bodies, and the lives that could have been. When confronted by such ugly truths as the desire of men (and serial killers are almost always men, aren’t they?) who only want to inflict, never remedy or comprehend a better solution… it’s hard to feel optimistic.

The New York Times reported that they were able to identify the killer for a few reasons, one of them being that he would google about the murders, obviously obsessed with his own spectacle. Men like him want to self-mythologize, and yet this is all that comes to mind? Domination? Interesting. A couple of years back I wrote an essay about Ted Bundy, deconstructing the self-made terror around him, all the bravado that killing can give you, and I started to deflate the ego and see such a sad, sad man and abused and neglected child underneath. Nothing of note, but self and moral destruction. What does it say about America that it has produced the majority of all known (and unknown) serial killers… I wonder how this is related to so much of the fragility around the construction of masculinity as a larger identity that’s been (enforced through socialization/osmosis) that we’re still disrupting and re-establishing in a genocidal, land grabbing white supremacist nation. And yet, I also keep thinking about why more men don’t think beyond their “birthright” of violence, and… I don’t know… evolve. Likeeeeeee, why? Why do the rest of us have to suffer for unhealed trauma turned into vindictiveness?

“He treated me with a chivalrous masculine know-how that I sopped up like a person who’d never heard of how chivalry was just another nefarious masculine scheme to keep women in their place,” writes Eve Babitz in “Slow Days, Fast Company.”

I keep thinking: what’s gotta give for more men to invest in their own self-betterment and self-evolution?

*

I watched Lost Girls over the weekend, the film about Mari Gilbert, the mother of Shannan Gilbert, potentially one of the girls murdered by the Long Island serial killer. As I watched the movie, I kept thinking about how trauma lives inside families and how painful it can be to witness the unfolding, and yet how strategic trauma is. Especially when you begin to track the patterns. It unfolds quite formulaically. Gabor Maté wrote a whole book on it.

Researching Who Is Wellness For? made me realize how often “illness” is a sign back to ourselves; illness is a conversation your body is trying to have with you, and it is up to you to decode it—but all the evidence is there. It was strange, through my own studies, in my own interview processes, with several people who had chronic illnesses, I realized there was a crossover between many people who suffered from IBS and those who were molested as children. IBS is located in the solar plexus region in the chakra system, and the weakness of the solar plexus, as the rishis have explained for thousands of years, is due to feelings of unworthiness and worthlessness, a somewhat common trait among other child sexual abuse survivors I talked to. It astounded me that so many of our stories were the same — not necessarily the times of violence, but rather, how we felt about ourselves afterward.

Mari was an activist, who, in trying to find what happened to her daughter, ignited the link that there might be a serial killer out there killing young women. Up until Mari started an investigation into her daughter, the bodies of Maureen Brainard, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Costello hadn’t been found. Mari fought for the media to see her daughter as a human, a person deserving of our attention, regardless of how we teach society to value women, she fought. She fought till the very end for justice.

*

In the backdrop of these murders, I watched Barbie, and it was somehow the perfect companion to showcase the dilemmas of the world. Without giving away any spoilers, I cried… a lot… like… an embarrassing amount, and I think it’s because the movie filled the void that many girls like me, the weirdos and the freaks, aka Depression Barbies™️ unite, have felt in the face of perfection, whiteness—so, Barbie. I remember thinking, as a child, admiring her rubbery thin legs, that I would have to look like her if I wanted to be beautiful, acceptable. I started to see that for women an entry point into a better life was how hot one could be, especially how conventionally attractive someone could perform to be. I realize, now, this is because I was sexualized very young, that I never got to develop normally, or safely; I’m still unlearning that my physical self is not my only value as a person.

The irony is that I have never successfully felt like a girl or a woman and definitely not one worthy of beauty. I have fought my own and been uncomfortable with other people’s admiration of me, confused that when I felt so low about myself, how anyone could find me attractive. For people like me, haunted by some untenable thing that doesn’t allow us to fully be in our bodies, a good relationship to the physical self has felt near impossible at times. I didn’t expect Barbie to contend with that so effortlessly, so concisely, and yet Greta Gerwig really did do the thing. She carried a linear story about Barbie’s existentialism, to showcase the meteoric inequalities that we’re facing as a people, bringing it back to self and community as well as the power of women loving other women. Showing us, not in a cheesy smarmy way, but rather in a seamlessly constructive way, that when women + femmes unite, we can do anything.

How rarely is this depicted in film and TV… showing the hyper-objectification of women whilst also showing the power of our shared unity when there is authentic love shared between us? I admired Frances Ha (which Gerwing stars in, she also co-wrote the film with her husband Noah Baumbach) for its depiction of this kind of love, the ardent love you have for a best friend, one that is like seeking a lover across the centuries, or a room. This scene in particular is so beautiful when you realize she’s talking about her best friend, Sophie. I related to Frances heavily when I watched the film, more than ten years ago at the New York Film Festival, where I was working at the time. I think I have been seeking a best friend for my whole life, something I’ve been unpacking a lot with my therapist recently, how quick I am to name and claim people as “close” or my “ best friend” because then the relationship feels safe, or more real. Traumatized but over-eager, I’ve always been over-eager for love. Like Frances, I felt like I was flailing and emotional and overly self-conscious, lacking direction and somehow always unlovable romantically. I didn’t know who I was even if I knew who I was, do you know what I mean? As in, I denied myself my own truth and story, but that version of me was pining to come out and show herself. I think we always are, I think there’s an honest version of ourselves underneath all the onion-peel layers, and evolution is literally peeling those other versions off to reclaim your personhood, or if you’re lucky, you’re already given all that from birth.

Gerwig’s characters always seem untethered yet fundamentally reliable. They might float in existential confusion and doubt, but they are on the verge of something, they are at a threshold, with self. I think Barbie, and really Gerwig’s work, as a director and writer, has carved a phenomenal space for the depiction of women on screen. Not in a schticky girl boss way, not in a Capitalistic — Sheryl Sandberg Lean In kinda way, either — but in a way of accepting us for who we really are, and the layers of self that are profound and real and deserve our witnessing through that utterance. It’s a feminist film most because it advocates for a Barbie that might want an average life, or a quiet life, or a Barbie that has childhood trauma and therefore extreme IBS, lol. We are all here, and we are all worthy of being reflected, even by each other. And that’s what she does most well, she remembers our diversity in those details. We don’t all want the same things, but how do we work together to see each other, uplift the other, and do what feels good for us? Isn’t that a future worth fighting for?

*

A really good friend male friend of mine recently called me intense. It’s a pejorative comment that’s been swung at me often and is most obvious, perhaps… at first glance… when you realize I’m incapable of making small talk, lol. My therapist keeps telling me so what if people think you’re intense because you are. And I agree, I am. We discuss how I’m mostly proud of it (if I were a man, I’d be treated so differently) but the shame always creeps in no matter how good I feel about myself in that moment.

There are mild accusatory ways people observe you that can be so shocking to a being like me, someone who primarily exists within my own imagination. My friend and poet Tarfia Faizullah said that to me a few months ago about her own self, and it resonated so deeply that I keep turning back to it as a state of being I most relate to, existing within my own imagination. Accepting this has been deeply healing for me and it has given me a lot of spatial freedom in myself. What is safe in my imagination? Who gets to be in my imagination? Since I was little, my imagination has been my tool to get out of my horrible life. I dreamed of the life you see today, and at times it’s quite wild to admit that I have gotten everything I dreamed I could when I was a teenager, cutting myself trying to understand why I was so sad and so angry. I knew if I didn’t get out I would kill myself, I’ve always had that kind of volition. Especially toward self-destruction—so, what do you do with that kind of momentum? You learn how to use it. You create. You use it dream. Survival Takes A Wild Imagination, my next book that comes out in October (and yes you can pre-order now), contends with exactly this. In the last few months, I’ve understood that who gets to be in this world, the safety of your mind, who you let in close to your heart, must be the people who can hold and contain and contend with the full scope of you.

These days, without judgment, I allow myself to be. In my intensity. And I’ve realized I need to safeguard my own image for myself because many people might be, even in good faith, invested in making me feel small as a power move. These days I’m less self-conscious because I’ve become very good at keeping track of myself, which means I try to have fair judgment over myself and others. It’s also been a deliberate action to remind myself that no matter what anyone thinks of me, what do I think of myself first? If someone accuses me of something, can I sit with it and evaluate myself truthfully? If someone has hurt me, can I identify why and acknowledge that to myself so I’m not in denial? I trust my own interpretations of myself and others, now, because, through dedicated self-work, I am becoming an honest interpreter of myself and my life. I also have several people that I trust to see me clearly, like my beloved Zeba, who I have known for thirteen years, and so many of the things we dreamed together have also come true. It’s strange to be witnessed, but it’s important to have people on your side, invested in seeing you truthfully, because they’re invested in the truth in themselves, as well.

I think many of us mimic badness, or we project that others have to be good but afford ourselves our own little leeways, or sometimes we don’t even comprehend or acknowledge ourselves completely, we just hide from parts of ourselves that we’re ashamed of, pretending no one else can see them. A lot of us do this, I did this for many many years. For a lot of my twenties, I did bad things to see what I could get away with. I took more from relationships, I slept with other people’s partners. I was selfish. I felt really deserving of this after the life I had and I thought this would bring me the peace I sought after, lol. But I think this naivety or frustration resulted from watching other mean and cruel people get away with so much. I saw my friends or people I knew get away with things and I felt entitled to ease, too.

Yet, it took me many years to understand that I’m not owed shit, and none of us are. The most sacred and delicious way to live life is through being the truest, most healed version of you, and that attempt is a life worth living.

I think media has done so much to sever what we contemplate as sacred or deserving of our attention. We think fame is a worthy pursuit, and we see vacant rich and famous and violent people upwardly mobilize into blissful denial and many of us perhaps seek that life of ease, again—misreading vacancy for ease. Maybe I’m intense because though I want to rest, I want rigor as well, I want spiritual and emotional rigor. I want to learn, I want to expand and I want to change into more different iterations of myself, learning who I am in new and industrious ways. I don’t want to be a mirage, I want to be a real person with real accountability.

Not a philosophical stance; who are you when nobody is looking, when you’re not diverting the gaze away from your soul, misdirecting your focus to your phone, who are you in the silence? What can you gain from parts of you that you’ve denied or forgotten about, the lost parts of yourself… what can they teach you about who you are? Not the hardened parts, but the ones that have been denied voice. What does your small one say? What did you long for as a child?

*

This world is not good to women. As I watched the outpouring of love for the darling Sinéad O’Connor / Shuhada' Sadaqat yesterday, I wondered if she could ever have known that so many people respect and love her. She was having difficulty and her dear son committed suicide last year, and I don’t think someone like her ever felt rest or at ease. To piss that many people off, when she did, speaking about abortion, criticizing the pope (as an Irish person!!! Can you imagine!!!) — this kind of fame doesn’t exist anymore. The fame of revolution, the fame that comes with the fist of a believer. But clearly, she wasn’t protected and I mourn what her mental health has been through all these years and how we failed her that she died so young.

Hanif Abdurraqib wrote this best in his IG:

“Sinéad O’Connor was — among a great many other, better things — a victim of society’s gleeful, neverending obsession with prolonged punishment. With punishment as spectacle. She was also someone who suffered, openly, vulnerably. She was open in her songs, in her writing, in pleas made on the internet. The world is not equipped to hold a person’s suffering, gently or otherwise. And I find that to be an especially enraging failure. I am a broken record with this, but I truly encourage people to look within and ask yourself hard questions about your relationship with interpersonal cruelty. How you might enact it, how the enacting of it is serving that desire to see people, often strangers, punished. Structural cruelties are not only accelerating but new ones are accumulating, adapting. Multiple apocalypses are intersecting. That’s the reality of our living. Interpersonally, people have to demand more of themselves in the midst of ongoing, accumulating crisis. It doesn’t serve me to despair, because despair drives me to cruelty. I’m not asking people to consider some broad, mindless approach to “kindness.” But ask yourself how you might be contributing to the quiet and loud sufferings of others, ask yourself how your sufferings can best be tended to so they don’t echo harmfully outward. I’m sad about this one. So many of her expressions of emotional/mental anguish felt familiar to me. She was owed so many apologies that she never got. I’m glad we had her for a while. So glad she shared herself with us.”

We don’t protect women until they die, but even then, do they rarely get justice. We don’t care about women until they die, and by then it’s too late. Mari Gilbert was stabbed to death by her daughter Sarra. May she rest in peace. I keep thinking about that ending. Where the justice lies in that, but when I think about how trauma lives in our DNA, and what causes people to glitch (Sarra had a schizophrenic episode) in these ways it’s almost always the hand of trauma—whether it’s epigenetics or it’s poverty or it’s anger masked as redemption. This world itself is traumatizing… so how do we heal? How do we even begin to heal?

Remarkably, I think it’s in loving women. Healing with women, and other femme folks, but really let’s start with women who identify as women. So many of us have not even confronted ourselves and why we hate each other, even if we know we do, but that’s where it starts. I felt this as I watched Barbie, how limited we are in our adoration or love of other women. How we betray women when we can’t uplift them or hold their pain or tell them that they’re powerful and amazing. I have felt that so much of my depression is rooted in other women or femme folks not being able to show me love. Yet I also wonder how I’ve participated in that as well. So I want you to do a little exercise right now, are you angry at a woman? Is there a woman or femme person on the internet that you hate or are jealous of? Can you identify why? Write down why. Talk to yourself about it. It’s not about judgement, it’s about truth. So what is the truth. Speak to yourself openly and confide in yourself, what does the hatred really signal in yourself? What are you really feeling? Is it hurt or sadness or betrayal… well peel back even father, sit with those feelings and try to understand where they come from… how these feelings are really tied to how you feel about yourself. Does that resonate? Maybe it won’t. But if it doesn’t, keep using this exercise.

This has become clearer to me too… the fact that many people can’t see me clearly because they can’t even see themselves clearly. But what we owe each other now, and what real revolution is gonna lie in is, can you see yourself clearly so you can see others clearly? Then, can you love yourself fully so you can love others fully? That’s where I think this all begins.