I am at home the first time my mind lets itself outside my body
without asking and no matter how frantic my hands get they
cannot stop my brain from breaking the lock. My mom has been
on a low dose of Celexa for five years—“just to keep things under
control”—and she holds my hands first, then my shoulders, tells me
this is just an adaptive mechanism until I can repeat it back, how if
you were being torn apart by lions you would want to live in a dream
tooi but caught in this liminal space beyond myself I choke on the fact that
her words take more of a shape in the world than I do how they have strung
together from nothing how they come together to encircle me how we are
all just circling the drain from the background comes the murmur hum the
monosyllabic yoke yet nothing has ever been louder than the feeling
of being fundamentally wrong in my own body the way it screams
like iron on a grindstone means it probably bleeds that way too BETTER
LUCK NEXT TIME LOVE, GOD. It takes an hour to stop shaking
a day to be able to carry a mug without breaking it as if it was not
entirely mine to hold at least a week to Google how to install a
deadbolt. Did you mean: recovering from depersonalization? De-
personalization—even the name finds a way to bend the rules of the
body in a “Dostoevsky-style illumination, where clarity cannot be
distinguished from pain” and escape and forced separation have all
at once become intimately entangled as the word splits my lips apart
in unfamiliar and ugly ways.ii Why have we been forced to accept
unreality as a condition of being? Since when have we needed to live
half outside the world to survive it? The terms of our human contract
must have been written in shadow and submerged in murky water
where like bones they bleached and tattered until we somehow
gathered the courage to do more than just call the obscure god
and move on. Finally we are old enough to look away from the creator
cutting threads in his one-way mirror yet descending unmoored into the
darkness leaves us with so much still to learn about gracefully facing a life
with no ascribed meaning like how often we fail to create ourselves before
fading into nothing and how difficult it is to survive knowing we may
break before the end. It is the body that becomes battleground for these
“as-if’s” and while fighting it, Amiel spoke of distance—madness—blindness—
—a harsh enough departure from the world to turn the self to flotsam, bits of
boats unharbored “cut adrift” by the disorder.iii With no guiding hand he could not
know who chooses or who chooses this who grabs from the inside mangles
us tangles us twists who pulls apart? In 1888 Van Gogh cut off his ear in what
critics have referred to as a fit of “aural hallucination”iv and thus another one of
of us was cut adrift. Red was not a color he normally worked with so we
can imagine the tear he must have felt while halfheartedly staunching the
river am I artist or human as he cradles the razor or neither there is
so much sadness in knowing someone’s future tense how a piece of ringed
skin remains the great question of his life even now how even a starry night
can be eclipsed by such an abrupt turn away from being. We know now
that in the waking hours of his unbeing he wandered aimless into
a maison de tolérance and handed his ear to a woman named Rachel
with a plea to “keep this object like a treasure” the soul outside the
body crying please be my keeper.v How quickly he forgot what to do
with smudges and colors to make irises bloom on paper and was instead
struck by how they have so often been planted over the graves of women to
summon them to heavenvi how he so unknowingly turned the purple red when
we do not recognize what we bleed we look to others to keep safe the
only pieces of ourselves we have left hands first then shoulders sometimes even
an ear. We know now that for every one of Van Gogh’s manic yellows
red must surface too and often with no warning sunflowers will stop becoming
sunflowers and start corroding we are always aware of the underbelly of “better”
which is knowing what it is to be worse to watch parts of yourself
split from their hinges cut loose from one another haunted by the word
devii off, or from (another) personalviii in Latin “personare” to push sound
through a mask, amplifying one’s voice (the air shrieks between
the self and its shell) izationix I am the farthest thing from
united the latter half of an action suspended forever in halted
progress (I will always seek a beginning) yet when the word comes
together it leaves me here and nowhere a body (mind) breaking (trying to
cobble its pieces back together) too far gone (there will always be
something missing) we are all screeching (screaming) it begins
again the separation hairline fractures cracking the glass (in a room of
quiet students) I scribble in looseleaf the pages are shedding
everywhere there is no treatment except for talk therapy I AM
LOSING THE ABILITY TO PLACE MYSELF IN MY OWN BODY chalk
screeches on the blackboard the mind begins its own self-
portrait “—the internet” and how easy it is to lose all semantic
content the mirror shatters threads snap the body is so small
too small this is what happens when you have no
keeper THINGS FALL APART another one of
us is crushed under the river THE CENTRE
CANNOT HOLD the body buckles under all it
cannot carry MERE
ANARCHY IS LOOSED
UPON THE—x
—
i “DPD can also exist in isolation, and the general understanding is that the brain has triggered a natural defence mechanism against extreme anxiety; having reached an arbitrarily defined limit, it has entered a complete emotional shutdown, taking with it sensations of pleasure as well as pain; love as well as hate.” https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/04/depersonalisation-disorder-the-condition-youve-never-heard-of-that-affects-millions
ii Dr. Elena Bezzubova is a Russian psychoanalyst who treats people with depersonalization in California—the Dostoevsky quote is hers. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/12/enlightenments-evil-twin/383726/
iii Henri Frédéric Amiel was a 19th century Swiss philosopher and writer whose posthumously-published journal is thought to include the first reference to depersonalization, as he mentions: “All is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness?” https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/12/enlightenments-evil-twin/383726/
iv “Aural hallucination” was one of Van Gogh’s posthumous diagnoses—among others include depression, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, alcoholism, absinthe poisoning, and sunstroke. It is said that cutting off his ear “might have been a vain attempt to silence those noises”. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/van-gogh-ear-slash-motive-trnd/index.html
v A “maison de tolérance” is a brothel; Van Gogh “put on his beret” and dragged himself there to give the severed ear to a woman and then promptly fled. He was found the next morning feverish and immediately brought to a hospital, yet his mutilated ear was a constant reminder of what he had done. https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/06/05/van-gogh-and-mental-illness/
vi “The iris’s mythology dates back to ancient Greece, when the goddess Iris, who personified the rainbow (the Greek word for iris), acted as the link between heaven and earth. It’s said that purple irises were planted over the graves of women to summon the goddess Iris to guide them in their journey to heaven.” https://www.teleflora.com/meaning-of-flowers/iris
vii Etymology of “de”: Latin adverb and preposition of separation in space, meaning “down from, off, away from,” https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=de
viii Etymology of “person”: OED offers the general 19c. explanation of persona as “related to” Latin personare “to sound through” (i.e. the mask as something spoken through and perhaps amplifying the voice). https://www.etymonline.com/word/person
ix Etymology of “ization”: word-forming element making nouns of action, process, or state. https://www.etymonline.com/word/-ization
x Yeats, W.B. The Second Coming, www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html.
