Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

The first time I saw him, I pitied him terribly.

What do I know about the body of a man – and can any single one of them deserve or need a moment more of praise? What must it feel like to be beautiful but also invisible whenever you choose to be? To be a beautiful man?

I needed these things, fixed them as soon as I arrived somewhere new, but now I was alone they seemed foolish. They looked like props for a bad theatre production, trying to summon up a personality where there was none.

Living alone, I began to split apart from myself in a deeper and more grotesque way than ever before.

I really was happy when I seemed happy. I am incapable of lying about my feelings, it’s only that the feelings have no coherence, are not continuous from one hour to the next.

Love itself sustains and validates the rotten moments you would otherwise be wasting while you practise being a person, pacing back and forth in your shitty apartment, holding off till seven to open the wine.

Female suffering is cheap and is used cheaply by dishonest women who are looking only for attention

It was sort of amazing seeing men who weren’t particularly attractive but who believed, more or less correctly, that they could have and do whatever they wanted.

I had never felt so unlike a human being, so disposable and flimsy and built purely for function.

They were in love and there was nothing torturous or humiliating about it.

Either you can be famous for being a shrill prop in a great man’s work, a victim sacrificed to the gods of art, or you can nod along and applaud. You can have a seat at the big boys’ table for being such a good sport.

Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once.

This is part of the horror of being hurt generically. Your experiences are so common that they become impossible to speak about in an interesting way.

My body was not glorious or miraculous or alive, it was just a thing of use. This did not sadden or surprise, so much as bore me: I looked at myself, lumpen and inelegant and abused, and thought: So what?

The act of unwanted sex was not what angered me most, but rather the tedious reminder that men can often do whatever they want and that some of them will.

From a purely physical point of view it didn’t even feel very different to some of the worse consensual sex I had had, those times where I had realised immediately that I would rather not continue, but did so to be polite, feigning enjoyment to make it end quicker. It would be easier if I could paint a line down the middle of the house, and have rape on one side and sex on the other. I have had sex without wanting to many times in my life. It was only once that I protested and was overpowered.

(What could people be expected to tolerate of me?

What I was feeling was the failure of superstition and charms – the unreliability of prayer.

And so in moments like this one when I was unexpectedly confronted by my own need, my reaction was to deny – to hysterically deny – that it existed. Hence the wailing of sorrys and pleases, the desire to make him forget at once I had ever demanded anything of him.

I said through my huddling and hiding that I was nothing, and I was happy to be nothing if nothing was what pleased him best. If nothing was the least trouble, then I would be it, and gladly.

Couples will often disappear together for months in their beginning stages, which is not just about lust but also about building.

I feared vaguely that this meanness implied other things to people, that they were embarrassed on my behalf.

But when I returned to Waterford it seemed again my defining trait, my characteristic failure. Every time I came back it was a reminder that, at least there, at least home, at least where it counted, I would always be wrong. I would always look like a misshapen version of my True Self, a hastily sketched approximation of a human being.

People are scared of teenagers having sex but we might think sometimes about the misery of having a teenage body, a teenage girl’s body especially, how tedious and painful and punitive, and remember that sex might be the first time she realises that bodies can be made to feel good. That the million sensitive places which cause you to feel pain can also be sensitive to pleasure. That when you want to cry it will not always be from sadness. My body disgusted me when I was that age, but at the same time I was learning to love it – love it too much.

When I go back home I am angrier than ever. I am all at once submerged in every body I ever was, all the failed attempts at being a certain kind of person.

I was putting off the moment of unlocking my door and stepping in to the emptiness and having whatever was happening happen to me.

That the pain was private made it better – I made them torture me, without their consent.

I was fifteen or so, shopping with friends, and the most manically able to endure pain as I ever would be.

You hate me, I thought sometimes, when you see me drink or cry or cut myself, but you don’t hate me in the right way.

She was attractive and slim and buoyant in waking life, and this night remained with me only because it was a sight which taught me that a woman’s nudity was not always erotic, not even always pleasant, was, indeed, at times pathetic to behold.

He did not love me – couldn’t, for what Me was there to love? What Me had he ever known? – but he had become attached to me, dependent on me. I had carefully created a circumstance in which a kind of love could be bred in him, like a scientist manipulating lab conditions. I had exhausted his reserves, eroded his natural resistance, and now I was finished.

My huge, ridiculous ego – the belief that I could stop and start the world with my presence.

My dad was always able to save me from anything, no matter how reckless or inexplicable, he was always able to save me from anything but myself.

I was unhappy even then, even when I was blissfully happy with him. I was already deeply into my cutting and starving. I knew enough to keep that hidden from him at first, and then I slowly forgot. I began to confide in him how I felt, my inability to function, what I was driven to do to myself. It upset him. He was harsh with me – harsh for him, anyway. ‘You can’t complain about feeling bad, about being depressed, if you aren’t trying to sleep, trying to eat, trying to care about yourself.’

Nobody who loves me from now on will ever know, really know, really believe, that I was a beautiful child once.

It was like the feeling of talking late at night after the light had been turned off and trying not to let your laughter run away with you.

I looked at his beautiful sleeping face and felt a pain so tender and engulfing it could hardly be called pain at all.

The discrepancy between what was going on inside me and how good I looked made this power of mine seem infinite.

I wondered how they always knew that I was someone to be hurt. Even when I didn’t tell them to, they knew somehow that there was a part of me that accepted or desired it. But how was it that they knew? Why was it that nobody ever thought to ask me in which way I wanted to be hurt, or for how long, or how hard?

The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain. It was binding yourself and feeling good when the bandages came off, it was cutting a hole in your leg so you could feel it heal.

I resent the fact that you can take pleasure from me.

When you change someone’s no to yes by wheedling, you have stolen from them what does not belong to you. It was the last thing I wanted to do, and I did it.

There were things happening inside me which there were no words for, or too many words – things that were so simple that they seemed infantile to even think of but which I hadn’t been able to think of for so long. Things like the creamy orange sky which was making my heart feel split and open and free as it had when I was a teenager.