Notes to Self

by Emilie Pine

It is hard to love an addict. Not only practically difficult, in the picking up after them and the handling of those aspects of life they’re not able for themselves, but metaphysically hard. It feels like bashing yourself against a wall, not just your head, but your whole self. It makes your heart hard. Caught between endless ultimatums (stop drinking) and radical acceptance (I love you no matter what) the person who loves the addict exhausts and renews their love on a daily basis. I used to push myself to reject him, to walk away, failing each time. I oscillated between caring for the man who was afflicted with this terrible disease, and attempting to protect myself from the emotional fallout of having an alcoholic father. It took years of refusing him empathy before I realised that the only person I was hurting was myself.

Because what my dad really taught me, despite himself perhaps, is that writing is a way of making sense of the world, a way of processing – of possessing – thought and emotion, a way of making something worthwhile out of pain. And so, inevitably, as I sat beside him in those hospital rooms in Greece, I wondered how I would describe the room, and the man in the bed, as if it, and he, were a scene. I wondered how to tell the story of blood, of nurses and gloves, of doctors and waiting. I wondered who was the protagonist, him or me. And I wondered how I would, if I could, use these notes as a way of understanding the larger story of me and my dad.

Sometimes, when I am in the company of more glamorous women, I wonder if I – a white, Western, middle-class, heterosexual, cis-gender woman – am a ‘proper girl’ at all. Just like that, ‘Am I a proper girl?’ I look from myself to the women around me and I feel that I do not measure up. And then that’s when I know that I am a girl, that I am proper. Because, of course, this paranoia, that I am not feminine enough, not desirable enough, not good enough, is the ultimate performance of femininity. This paranoia is a crucial part of how women are policed. And of how we police ourselves.

Why do I let embarassment silence me? And why is it so hard for me to treat my body well? Perhaps it is because I associate having a female body with suffering. From the first day that I bled, and I felt crap, and I said nothing, I have gritted my teeth and borne it because I believe that’s what other women do, that’s what women are expected to do. Because, as a woman, my body is supposed to be a site of pain. And pain is something women are meant to be silent about, from the pain of bleeding to the pain of waxing to the pain of not measuring up. Our pain is not important. Our bodies are not important. Pain is the real tax we pay, and poor health is the dividend we reap.

But desperation, in itself, can be attractive. I learned that if boys wanted to use my body I could rediscover that early feeling of triumph and lightness that I’d previously only felt through not eating. That I found the encounters themselves fairly distasteful was neither here nor there.

Though I have no fear of speaking publicly, or of being perceived as ambitious, both of which are classic stumbling blocks for professional women, I am prey to an equally treacherous problem: I give away my power. In side-stepping, in not calling out the sexist remarks, I act as if they are in the right, I act as if women should not have voices, and I act as if I am not a feminist. And the truth is, I am tired of being a feminist. I am tired of it being women’s responsibility to identify and tackle and fix sexism. I am tired of it being so necessary and so difficult. And I am tired of my own acts of internalising, tired of my complicity, tired of playing the game.