Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

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.

I do not understand what I do; for I don’t do what I would like to do, but instead do what I hate. What an unhappy man I am. Who will rescue me from this body that is taking me to death? –Romans 7:15–25

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

What would you choose? 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. So, go ahead: ha ha ha.

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.

I was angry at having been made real in that way against my will. There is good reason for not living inside your body all the time, and this event trapped me back in it for a long while, until I could struggle back outside again.

I knew it was childish, behaving this way, but it was painful to be reminded so casually that everything I cared about was subject to the whims of others.

I’ve always seen my body as nothing so much as deeply disturbing in its constant variance, a fluctuating, unmanageable thing that has basically nothing to do with me, is not really any of my business at all.

Sometimes this distance between everyone comforted and pleased me. I would die knowing things about myself that nobody else on earth did. There were experiences that lived only in me and could never be replicated or recounted. And sometimes, like now, the distance seemed too sad to live with.

It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do. And it’s a peculiarly impotent sort of anger that domestic labour brings about.

Your disgust is domesticated.

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

You grow cold, or you die yourself.

The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain.