Fiona Apple: the way things are
And the moral, ladies and gentlemen, is that rum, anaesthetic post-rock and a depressive personality don't mix. Or, rather, they mix excellently, but shouldn't be allowed to. In this respect they are not dissimilar to, for example, the components of a long island iced tea. It's not wrong, exactly; it's just a very, very bad idea.
Today has been a day of faliure, mostly. I failed to remember that it is good friday and the doctor's would be shut, which means I couldn't pick up a prescription and I will spend all weekend enduring the early stages of peroxitine discontinuation syndrome, which is rather unpleasant. I failed to get my boots reheeled, because they are, apparently, too far buggered. Which is a shame, because they were nice boots. I have been quite successful at eating chocolate and reading trash fiction, which means I am also now being successful at feeling rather sick. Other things I might have done successfully: abandoned all last vestiges of my intellectual integrity.
I don't know what it was that made me equate intellectual goodness with a sort of cold-eyed anti-emotionalism. I'd like to say that I got into the wrong crowd at university. I don't think that would be true, though, although it didn't help- if my friends had been fluffy eyed medics and students of the natural sciences, perhaps, instead of a bunch of english students with a love of gallows humour- well, perhaps I wouldn't be sitting here writing this. Perhaps I'd be married and living in suburbia. More likely I would be dead of despair and fraustration and a broken neck. Alternatively, it may have begun in a teenage period spent listening to radiohead, drinking gin, and reading Eliot and Pound and Plato and Euripedes and cutting myself up with razor blades when really I should just have read Sylvia Plath and be done with it. I did read the Belljar when I was about fourteen, between, I seem to remember, Anna Karenina and the rather sinister We. I thought she should just get a grip and a smile and be done with it. It smacked, to me, of a lack of willpower. Anna Karenina, now there was someone I could identify with. Proud. Strong. Dead. That sort of thing.
It would be much too easy to say that this intellectual position is a manifestation of my disorder. It's a tempting inferrence to make, but one which, I think, hints at too much time on the therapist's couch. You could say, though, that my fear and mistrust of emotion, my equation of emotion with weakness, faliure, and getting beaten up, has led to this liking for the clear-eyed, the cold-eyed, the icy-hearted. The modernist. The nineteenth centuary as a concept has never realy appealed to me. I don't like the music, the art, or the writing. I've always been an eighteenth centuary sort of girl- earlier, perhaps- the renaissance and all that came with it has always appealed to me. The triumph of reason, the mind unfettered, all this sitting easily with a sort of thoughtless brutality.
In order to try and combat my excess of self-hate and absolute lack of self worth, my lack of compassionate feeling towards mysef so extreme that I can feel compassion for myself only when I can see myself bleeding, my therapist gave me a set of affirmations- mantras, if you like. There's a large zen component to DBT, a huge element of what they call mindfullness but is in essence a form of practical meditation. When she gave them to me, I stuffed them in the bottom of my bag, slightly embarassed. I showed them to people at a dinner party, held them up for ridicule. What toss, I thought, what embarassing nonsense. They are along the lines of "I promise to treat you like a special loved friend; I promise to care for you through sickness and despair; I promise to stop comparing you to any other living soul; I promise to recognise your talents; I promise to give you your freedom." It makes me feel slightly queezy. This is the sort of thing in which I do not believe. It is the antithesis of everything I hold good- of rigour, objectivism, clarity, control. Strength. Panic rises. It is the opposite of strength.
Last night, I got it out again. I looked at it. I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could actually believe any of these things? Wouldn't it be nice if they were true? I thought, maybe the rigour I apply to myself has gone too far. I thought, maybe emotion and lack of control are not the same thing. A few weeks ago, as I protested once again that the world wold be just much bloody better if we didn't have emotions, my skills therapist rejoindered in exasperation that this just wasn't an option. I didn't have a reply to that, because it was a new thought. I have always believed that with enough self-control, enough selfflagellation in the face of perceived weakness, emotion would just go away, and leave me pure as bone, and clean, and strong. I did a quick strawpoll of some of my friends. They're all good rigorous people not given to embarassing outbursts. Suurely they aim, as I do, to negate emotion entirely? But no, it seems they don't. I am puzzled. I put the thought aside.
And then last night I look again at the mantas and get the thought back out. And I think -why not? It suddenly occurs to me that, whatever I am doing at the moment, it isn't working. My emotions keep bubbling up like tree roots through badly laid tarmac, leaving cruel lines across my skin. The resurgance of the natural. Get the symbolism. I go back to Eliot and flick through, read Gerontian again, and for the first time see not the complex network of allusion, the clever footwork, the technique, but what the poem is trying to express. It isn't devoid of emotion. It is a well crafted vehicle for it. Perhaps- perhaps my intellectualism too has been misplaced. Well, not misplaced. I'll always be more Dorothy Parker than Sylvia Plath- a raised eyebrow, a martini and a joke so dark it's almost invisible. None of this soul-baring nonsense. But perhaps I have been liking the things I like for the wrong reasons, or for only half of the possible reasons. Liking the application of technique without trying to understand what the technique was for. The great morass beneath the words- the space, the darkness filled with unnameable feelings- that terrifies me. So I didn't look. I kept my eyes on the surface.
Suddenly, I think- maybe it is possible to allow emotion and to harness it, to not be out of control, to not be weak. Maybe I could allow myself to feel. Just a little bit. Maybe that wouldn't be weakness. Maybe my mind has been right along. Maybe I should give it some credit. Stop weighing it in the balance and finding it wanting. Perhaps I could try making a few of those promises. Because what is so wrong with liking yourself? Where is the weakness in that? And what is so wrong in listening to your needs, instead of punishing yourself for needing? I look at the mantras and think -fuck it, why not? Maybe I could try liking myself for a change. If it doesn't work, I can always stop.
I pin the sheet up in the bathroom. While doing so, I make a mental note to take them down before anyone comes round. I may have lost my intellectual integrity, but I still have some pride.
Today has been a day of faliure, mostly. I failed to remember that it is good friday and the doctor's would be shut, which means I couldn't pick up a prescription and I will spend all weekend enduring the early stages of peroxitine discontinuation syndrome, which is rather unpleasant. I failed to get my boots reheeled, because they are, apparently, too far buggered. Which is a shame, because they were nice boots. I have been quite successful at eating chocolate and reading trash fiction, which means I am also now being successful at feeling rather sick. Other things I might have done successfully: abandoned all last vestiges of my intellectual integrity.
I don't know what it was that made me equate intellectual goodness with a sort of cold-eyed anti-emotionalism. I'd like to say that I got into the wrong crowd at university. I don't think that would be true, though, although it didn't help- if my friends had been fluffy eyed medics and students of the natural sciences, perhaps, instead of a bunch of english students with a love of gallows humour- well, perhaps I wouldn't be sitting here writing this. Perhaps I'd be married and living in suburbia. More likely I would be dead of despair and fraustration and a broken neck. Alternatively, it may have begun in a teenage period spent listening to radiohead, drinking gin, and reading Eliot and Pound and Plato and Euripedes and cutting myself up with razor blades when really I should just have read Sylvia Plath and be done with it. I did read the Belljar when I was about fourteen, between, I seem to remember, Anna Karenina and the rather sinister We. I thought she should just get a grip and a smile and be done with it. It smacked, to me, of a lack of willpower. Anna Karenina, now there was someone I could identify with. Proud. Strong. Dead. That sort of thing.
It would be much too easy to say that this intellectual position is a manifestation of my disorder. It's a tempting inferrence to make, but one which, I think, hints at too much time on the therapist's couch. You could say, though, that my fear and mistrust of emotion, my equation of emotion with weakness, faliure, and getting beaten up, has led to this liking for the clear-eyed, the cold-eyed, the icy-hearted. The modernist. The nineteenth centuary as a concept has never realy appealed to me. I don't like the music, the art, or the writing. I've always been an eighteenth centuary sort of girl- earlier, perhaps- the renaissance and all that came with it has always appealed to me. The triumph of reason, the mind unfettered, all this sitting easily with a sort of thoughtless brutality.
In order to try and combat my excess of self-hate and absolute lack of self worth, my lack of compassionate feeling towards mysef so extreme that I can feel compassion for myself only when I can see myself bleeding, my therapist gave me a set of affirmations- mantras, if you like. There's a large zen component to DBT, a huge element of what they call mindfullness but is in essence a form of practical meditation. When she gave them to me, I stuffed them in the bottom of my bag, slightly embarassed. I showed them to people at a dinner party, held them up for ridicule. What toss, I thought, what embarassing nonsense. They are along the lines of "I promise to treat you like a special loved friend; I promise to care for you through sickness and despair; I promise to stop comparing you to any other living soul; I promise to recognise your talents; I promise to give you your freedom." It makes me feel slightly queezy. This is the sort of thing in which I do not believe. It is the antithesis of everything I hold good- of rigour, objectivism, clarity, control. Strength. Panic rises. It is the opposite of strength.
Last night, I got it out again. I looked at it. I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could actually believe any of these things? Wouldn't it be nice if they were true? I thought, maybe the rigour I apply to myself has gone too far. I thought, maybe emotion and lack of control are not the same thing. A few weeks ago, as I protested once again that the world wold be just much bloody better if we didn't have emotions, my skills therapist rejoindered in exasperation that this just wasn't an option. I didn't have a reply to that, because it was a new thought. I have always believed that with enough self-control, enough selfflagellation in the face of perceived weakness, emotion would just go away, and leave me pure as bone, and clean, and strong. I did a quick strawpoll of some of my friends. They're all good rigorous people not given to embarassing outbursts. Suurely they aim, as I do, to negate emotion entirely? But no, it seems they don't. I am puzzled. I put the thought aside.
And then last night I look again at the mantas and get the thought back out. And I think -why not? It suddenly occurs to me that, whatever I am doing at the moment, it isn't working. My emotions keep bubbling up like tree roots through badly laid tarmac, leaving cruel lines across my skin. The resurgance of the natural. Get the symbolism. I go back to Eliot and flick through, read Gerontian again, and for the first time see not the complex network of allusion, the clever footwork, the technique, but what the poem is trying to express. It isn't devoid of emotion. It is a well crafted vehicle for it. Perhaps- perhaps my intellectualism too has been misplaced. Well, not misplaced. I'll always be more Dorothy Parker than Sylvia Plath- a raised eyebrow, a martini and a joke so dark it's almost invisible. None of this soul-baring nonsense. But perhaps I have been liking the things I like for the wrong reasons, or for only half of the possible reasons. Liking the application of technique without trying to understand what the technique was for. The great morass beneath the words- the space, the darkness filled with unnameable feelings- that terrifies me. So I didn't look. I kept my eyes on the surface.
Suddenly, I think- maybe it is possible to allow emotion and to harness it, to not be out of control, to not be weak. Maybe I could allow myself to feel. Just a little bit. Maybe that wouldn't be weakness. Maybe my mind has been right along. Maybe I should give it some credit. Stop weighing it in the balance and finding it wanting. Perhaps I could try making a few of those promises. Because what is so wrong with liking yourself? Where is the weakness in that? And what is so wrong in listening to your needs, instead of punishing yourself for needing? I look at the mantras and think -fuck it, why not? Maybe I could try liking myself for a change. If it doesn't work, I can always stop.
I pin the sheet up in the bathroom. While doing so, I make a mental note to take them down before anyone comes round. I may have lost my intellectual integrity, but I still have some pride.
posted by tattybluetrees at 9:55 AM
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