| Written by Diana, on 07-12-2005 06:18 |
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QUOTES FROM SKIN GAME BY CAROLINE KETTLEWELL
"skin has a good memory. skin is like the ground we walk on every day; you can read a whole history in it if you know how to look"
i need to cut the way your lungs scream for air when you swim the length of the pool underwater in one breath
a day would come when i would regret this too-early plunge into the Byzantine complications of desire
as though mounting some kind of manic diversionary tactic, i continuously shaped and reshaped and effaced myself to appear in the guise i thought the situation demanded, orchestrating various Carolines for my parents, for the boys, for my administrators at school, i'd long had a habit--no doubt from the influence of so much reading--of imagining myself in the third person. when i was a little kid, this narrative tendancy had applied itself mostly to my games:...
now this manner of regarding my life from a distance as though i were a character in a performance, had begun to pervade my every transaction with the world.
every word and gesture, even sometimes when i was alone, started to feel more like theatrical enterprise than anything real.
i no longer experienced things so much as i experienced them as experiences, a step removed. i played my part, and though the emotions of this character were powerful and vivid and sometimes even overwhelming, still they unfolded at that remove.
was it this dissociation that caused me a terrible, itching, twitching restless unease, like the too-familiar hug from a relative i didn't care for? or was it just my mind itself, coming undone of its own accord, on its own preordained schedule, drowning all my thoughts in a sea of static like the background crackle of an overseas telephone call, where a thousand frantic conversations are carried on just beyond the edge of intelligibility?
i was looking for dead in the short term. dead until maybe, say, it was time to go to college.
i cut because something had to give. i cut because the alternatives were worse.
i learned, just a few years ago, that among self-mutilators, as many as sixty percent report a parallel history of eating disorders: a statistic that didn't surprise me. from the outsides, their shared theme might appear to be self-destruction, but from where i've stood, what they have in common is something altogether different. i subdued hunger, overcame the animal self's blind instinct for self-preservation, in search of a perfect silence.
she took me aside one day at the end of class and asked me if ther was anything, in light of my story, that i felt i would like to talk about. my story, she said, was very...vivid...but i wasn't falling for that "anything you want to talk about" line; down that road lay trouble and all kinds of explaining and self-extricating. "it's just a story," i reassured her...i figured if a story didn't end with someone dead or crazy, how good could it be? what is it about insanity and untimely death that so captures the imagination of young girls?
i do believe there are people for whom misery is a calling, who are born to it, who make it a life's work, relishing the entire spectrum of woe. i, on the other hand, wore my troubles uneasily, almost couldn't quite believe in them. they troubled me plenty, certanly, but i always felt vaguely bewildered and beleaguered by them, as though i'd woken up one morning and found myself saddled with someone else's miserable life. surely this unhappiness was meant for someone...well, for someone more characteristically suited for the job? surely i was not apt enough an apprentice, always trying to shirk my solemn duties with an irreverent gibe at my own expence?
how wide a divergence between the public and private must there be before we are guilty of living a lie?
one piece of information omitted can make all the difference in the world
blood is a color they never get right in the movies. it isn't a flat, ketchupy red. it shimmers with an iridescence underhued in blue. it is the color of living and dying at once, for surely that boy had severed an artery. with every clench of the fist of his heart more blood arced from his arm in strangely exuberant abandon.
one moment, chaos; the next, a rich, exquisite silence.
while the scar mattered less than the blood, still it placed the final seal on each cutting event, and without it i would have been left with an unsatisfactory sense of incompletion.
i couldn't retain a constant image of myself that was anything like what, intellectually, i thought was probaly accurate.
hunger is a crafty negotiator. once you show the slightest sign of weakness to its honeyed pleas and insinuating manner, it will take this advantage and drive it home, overrunning all your defenses. you can't afford to allow for any hunger at all, or else you find yourself tumbling down that long slippery slope of compromises.
but since it was not my hurt and anger all i could suffer was a distress on her behalf, a distress one step removed from the actual experience of that hurt and anger
this vague dread, like the ominous rumble of distant thunder, set me perpetually on edge; the fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.
I went because there's something fatally seductive about being granted license to talk about yourself virtually nonstop for an hour.
I soon found, as great fun, a highly amusing adventure in which things were bound to turn out all right in the end, and in the meantime you could look forward to all sorts of unanticipated delights and pleasurable surprises. whereas i'd been accustomed to regarding life as a rigged examination i was imminently likely to fail.
i kept cutting, because it worked. when i cut, i felt better for a while. when i cut, my life no longer overwhelmed me. i felt too keenly the threat of chaos, of how things can get away from you in a thousand ways. bodies expand, grades plummet, pets die, paint peals, ice caps melt, genocide erupts. entropy keeps eating at the ramparts, and i cut to try to shore them up. i cut to lay down a line between before and after, between self and other, chaos and clarity. i cut as an affirmation of hope, saying, I have drawn the line and i am still on this side of it.
when i stopped cutting, it was only because i could afford to, because my need for it had apparently run its natural course, like the fever the body mounts to fight off an infection, that subsides when the danger is past. there are self-mutilators whose stories are much harder than mine; their wounds much deeper, and their bodies look like the scarred-over field of a battle. sometimes, after years of fighting, they end up losing the war. but if you make it to your thirties, suggests the assembled evidence on self-mutilation, then chances are good you'll have fount all the way through some kind of truce, some resolution. you have the benefit of the simple luxury of time and perspective.
I stopped cutting because i alwasy could have stopped cutting; that's the plain inelegant truth. no matter how compelling the flood tide of emotions that drove me to that brink, but i had the power to decide whether or not to step over. eventually i decided not to.
i expect that i will always be the kind of person who is too much aware of the boundlessness of chaos; it's like having an unfortunate sixth sense, alive to the teeming, invisible undercurrents of anarchy streaming past us at every moment.
Last update: 31-12-2006 01:54
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