One particularly warm July evening in Los Angeles — I died. I was sure of it.
I passed out
and then I passed out again
and then I ran
and then I passed out again
and then I hit my face on the side of a house
and I was wrapped in a towel and bleeding on the sidewalk
and my neighbor was screaming 911 and GET HERE NOW into her phone
and she was holding my hand but her voice was a thousand miles away —
and then there was nothing.
I felt it. The Big Goodbye. It was too late to change my choice.
Wait, wait! I DO want to live in this body! I know I said I wanted to take it off, I know I wished my quads my hips my butt were different, I know I yearned to cast myself in bronze so that I might stop worrying about my body’s fleshy shapes n’ shifts, but, BUT —
Man arms, from somewhere. They wrap around me and my towel and lift us off the ground. My brain half-participates in reality — there are sirens, there are ambulance lights — and half-floats in idle wonder, dreaming: What will my eulogy say?
“Girl did the classic girl thing where she didn’t eat enough and now she’s dead.” She was a victim of society! Of herself? She was a tragedy! She was Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so tired of being manipulated, so suffocated by societal restrictions that she let herself drown in a slow, passive suicide…
She was a sitcom character who almost-but-never learned her lesson.
No, that’s not quite right. Who was she?
Why don’t women eat?
I’m on Google. Doing research for a one-woman show that I’m writing. I’m a screenwriter by trade, so this project is more for therapy than anything else. My hope is that, by making something insanely close-to-the-chest personal, I’ll identify the demon who lives inside of me, remove her from where she’s stuck at the back of my throat, make her into a character, and kill her.
pandemic statistics eating disorders…screen time vs body image…man vs. women body image… why not like body…
The show is called “Cake and Violence” and it’s staged in a blank white room. The way I describe the show to friends is: It’s a bunch of comedy monologues that are about my body and your body and how we feel disconnected from our bodies. Over the course of these monologues, I smash a bunch of cakes all over the place like I’m in some frustrated fever-dream. By the end of the whole fiasco, the white room and I are covered in cake and — for reasons that would be clear only if I were to hand you the show’s transcript — blood. It’s a crazy fun romp designed to make you and I both feel a little bit more alive, all inspired by my very real, very sexual fetish for cake. I have a weird relationship with food, I know.
I live for my friends’ glazed-but-intrigued responses.
Among my research, the internet gifts me: “Women are afraid to take up space.”
I don’t identify. Not because I’m not afraid to take up space, but because I’m not sure I’m a woman. At least, not in the way that I see Woman defined online. Probably because I grew up wanting to be Men.
Not a man, to be clear. I’m not casting a stone into the heat of today’s gender conversation. What I mean is, I grew up with male athletes on my walls and male role models in my head. I wanted to be the idea of Men, I wanted a Man’s Life™, I wanted a DR. PEPPER TEN!
Remember those commercials for Dr. Pepper Ten? Circa 2011. Tagline: “Dr. Pepper Ten: IT’S NOT FOR WOMEN.” I remember those ads real well, because Dr. Pepper Ten was meant for ME.
Me, a girl-boy, an athlete — I played soccer for Stanford, I studied mechanical engineering, I lived to be the grandson my immigrant abuelo would be proud of. Ah, Abuelo. All dark hair and unsmiling. The stoic face of a man who doesn’t believe in feelings, who doesn’t believe in anything but the Dallas Cowboys. A man who, when I played college soccer, lived in a Stanford sweatshirt, but since I traded my jersey for a job in the arts loves to tell me: “Problem with you, m’ija, is that you don’t know what you want outta life.”
“Women are afraid to take up space.” Body as a space. Body as a place. Body as a home…
I’m not afraid to take up space, but I am averse to commit to it. I never furnish any place I live in, because I’m never inspired to make a place a home. Because what if I want to leave? Every apartment, house, room as empty and echoing as the torso of a guitar.
What does that mean?
My towel and I are on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance. I’m not dead, it turns out. Rather: I am a plant. Calm. Subdued. Relieved.
My arm is umbilically attached to an IV bag of saline that hums through my veins like new blood. Keeps my eyes half-open. I am a big baby girl. I have returned to the womb.
Just last week, I’d told my friend Fernanda, “Take me to a spa or a hospital I don’t care which!” Gimme a massage! Put me in a cot and feed me shitty pudding! What I meant was: Someone take care of me so I don’t have to think about it.
Someone take care of me because I can’t be bothered to do so myself.
Imagine this: You used to be a high-performing athlete who lived a life of sweat and bruises, who inhaled the cheers of sold-out crowds. But now? You’re just another adult in the ho-hum world and you’re not sure how you feel because there is no scoreboard to tell you who you are.
So, you find a therapist. It doesn’t work out. You find another. Strike two. You feel like you’re going on a bunch of first dates in which you’re performing your childhood like a stand-up set. You are desperate. You turn to magic. To alternative therapy. To a woman who is like a therapist but with tarot cards, who leads you backwards through your mind into your past lives, into other bodies you’ve lived in to maybe provide some more gah’ damn insight about this one. This body you have now.
Your new therapist-healer gifts you a book. It’s called Addiction to Perfection by Marion Woodman.
According to Woodman, there is a whole movement of compulsives like you. People who restrict, binge, control. “Most of them are college-trained, sensitive, efficient…whose sensitivity has been honed to a degree which makes ordinary life nasty, mean, and brutish… Their feelings toward their own mother are usually ambivalent.”
You begin to see the shape of your demon. She looks like… your mom? Why in therapy is everything blamed on a penis or a mother? You love your mom, how can the demon be your mom? Does this explain why you don’t want to sign a lease on your own human body? Why you cannot claim it?
“Most of our mothers ‘loved’ us and did the very best they could to give us a good foundation for a good life… but the fact remains that most people in this generation, male and female, do not have the maternal matrix out of which to go forward into life.”
When was this book copyrighted? The eighties. And yet, even now — getting in touch with your feminine side is difficult because it feels like a loss. Because the world around you is built on achievement, not getting in touch with your fuzzy-feelies. You do not commit to your space because you reject it, because you’d rather live somewhere else.
The show is called “Cake and Violence” because, since my time as a college athlete, the only things that make me feel anything in my sedentary, computer-based life are cake and violence.
I’m exaggerating. But only a little bit.
My stretcher’s in a curtained-off section in No Man’s Land, Emergency Room, California. My legs are shaking, like they have somewhere to go. A nurse comes in and puts socks on me. I don’t remember how it comes up, but: She’s Mexican. I mention my Mexican family. Her raised eyebrows ask — Really? I smile. I apologize for my light skin. Yeah, nobody can ever tell. A bridge of warmth, of preconceived understanding unfolds between us.
She tells me she needs to stick another IV into my arm for blood tests. I say sure, no problem, I have huge veins. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger. She laughs and says you don’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
She flicks the needle, preparing. She asks me if I have an eating disorder.
I’m far beyond denial. I say, almost laughing: “Ohhhh, yeah.”
I sound like the Kool-Aid man. I don’t look like the Kool-Aid Man though.
The only things that make me feel anything are cake and violence and a nurse shoving an IV into my arm again and again because she can’t tap any of my veins. Doesn’t matter how huge they are. I’m so dehydrated, my blood moves like wet cement.
You’re deeper into Addiction to Perfection. Searching.
Woodman says: “The goddess at the center of our wasteland culture is a Lady Macbeth… the extreme negative mother, one who would dash her baby’s brains out and sacrifice love to power.”
We’re back to Shakespeare. And you, apparently, are not the only woman who’s poo-pooed her own womanhood in favor of masculine energy. Lady Macbeth knows what’s up.
There’s no way you’re Ophelia. Ophelia died in a dress decorated in flowers. You’ll die in Nike Air Force Ones and a too-big sweatshirt, you’ll die as a power-hungry girlboy, you’ll die as Sir Lady Macbeth, covered in the blood of your own toxic insistence — You are a woman who could be a King! A woman who crushes her own emotions like a beer cans ‘gainst her head!
Back on Google.
there are so many things more important than me like the earth is dying people are racist the ambulance that took me to the hospital is going to bankrupt me so who cares that im destroying myself i am more or less a drug addict whose drug is control i am irredeemable and selfish in my desire to feed the addiction why should anyone save me?
0 results.
3ish AM. My nurse and I are watching my blood. Filling vials, finally.
Our small talk has blossomed into big talk. We’ve graduated from weather to Real Shit. She shares that she’s been trying to have kids and she’s having trouble. She’s in her late thirties. She tells me: “If you want to have kids, don’t wait.” I want to reassure her, but she beats me to it: “If it’s meant to happen it’ll happen.”
I look at her with understanding eyes. I tell her I’m not sure I want to be a mother, but I’d love to be a father. All you have to do is climax and boom! You have a baby. I’m joking. Kind of. She smiles.
“You’re funny,” she tells me. Caps the last vial. “I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks this, but I want you to stick around, okay? Promise me you’ll try.”
I feel my eyes tearing. I make a joke about being dehydrated.
“I can’t cry, I don’t have any water to spare.”
I’ve got it! A diagnosis, an obituary, a summary.
We, women. We are Ophelia, we are Lady Macbeth, we are trying to be okay with not being our mothers, we are trying to learn how to be in our bodies in a way that both embraces our femininity without compromising integrity —
Men! The very same. We are all male-female. Needing a balance of both energies. In ourselves, in the world around us.
And I’ve decided: I would like to furnish this body.
I would like to renew my lease please. To commit to this space. I would like to have a couch here, maybe a couple o’ chairs. For my mom, my abuelita, my gramma Sharon, my best friends, my sister. For you.
Have a seat. I’ve claimed this space for us.
One particularly warm July evening in Los Angeles —
I passed out
and then I passed out again
and then I ran
and then I passed out again
and then I hit my face on the side of a house
and I was wrapped in a towel and bleeding on the sidewalk
and my neighbor was screaming 911 and GET HERE NOW into her phone
and she was holding my hand but her voice was a thousand miles away —
and then there was … everything.
Everything that brought me to this point, everywhere I’ll go from here, unfolding like opening arms. My legs are shaking like I have somewhere to go.
Who is she? She is alive.
