On Fictions

CW: Mentions of self-harm, suicidal ideation

I have seen myself broken and crumpled below my balcony. I have seen myself mangled and unrecognizable on the subway tracks. I have seen myself bloated and blue underwater. These images rarely cease, no matter how hard I fight them. I’ve screamed, and wailed, and cut, and swallowed pills and smoke and burning liquid. Sometimes, there is respite, and I feel alive for a while—a short stretch of hours or even days. But nothing gold can stay, or so the dead guy says. So, I call myself a dead girl walking. After all, I have died so many times in that space behind my eyes. 

A dead girl walking exists between worlds: external and internal, factual and fictional, living and not.  I’ve traveled to other realms, full of arboreal twists, staircases and doors leading into darkness. Flooded halls full of arches and columns. More stairs, bending dimensions, breaking from reality, descending deeper into my mind. Sometimes, I see shadow-selves wandering in these labyrinths, heads downcast, or peeking at me from behind half-opened doors. Time and again, I’ve found myself gripped by fear, frozen, ice slowly creeping up on my surroundings. However, I am tired of fighting, of beating my head against the wall, of taking various pharmaceutical cocktails that numb and nauseate. I am tired of being terrified by myself and being driven by that fear. Instead, I am trying something different—embracing the terror and finding the beauty in it.

This is where symbolism becomes especially powerful: by recognizing myself in fictions I am able to transform my mental struggles into something more palatable and digestible. Perhaps it’s distancing myself from reality, a form of dissociation or escapism. Psychologists call it “depersonalization,” I think. Psychiatrists peddle drugs, trying to adjust the balance of a system they barely understand, and the crudeness of their tools matches their level of understanding. Still, I am inexorably drawn to fictions and try them on like masks: I am a witch, a vampire, the undead.

Of course, I must consider the dangers of romanticizing or fetishizing my own sadness and madness. What if in my “travels between worlds” I get lost in one of those fictions and never come back? What if I become so obsessed with those broody images that my personality will be reduced to quotes and allusions? But I am not too worried. After all, it is all just mental acrobatics to construct a semblance of normalcy. You see, the world around us is just a story that our brain tells us to make sense of reality. Our life, our memories, our dreams, our perceptions are all just stories we tell to ourselves and to each other.

In this story, I am water elemental. My state is highly mutable, boiling, flowing, freezing, or existing in any combination of those three states in a relatively narrow range of temperatures and pressures. Mental health professionals consider such cognitive and emotional volatility to be one of the defining features of borderline personality, among dissociation, persistent feelings of emptiness, and unstable sense of identity. At first, the diagnosis was a revolution to my self-perception, but over time it began to feel like yet another ill-fitting mask, another umbrella term to cover a cluster of co-morbidities with no actionable outcome. In this story, my curse, my mental masks and maladies, are the source of my magic, my power.

I have been meddling with witchcraft as long as I can remember. Since a young age, I was drawn to fairy tales of suffering and sacrifice. I would mix potions from bottles on the bathroom counter and make up spells to summon Baba-Yaga, the witch of Russian folklore. I would raise my arms above my head and chant in a low voice, spinning in circles. Once, I swear I saw her fly out from the smoke stacks of the factory across the street. Most kids grow out of it, I moved on to tarot and Ouija, chemistry and neuroscience—don’t be mistaken, science is one of the most powerful types of magic. The rituals of protocols and self-sacrificing scholarship have become my salvation. The witch’s concern is the pursuit of power to unravel the mechanisms of the mind, to break it into pieces small enough to understand. In this role I press on, hoping to chip away at the mystery for generations to come, manipulating molecules and circuits one at a time. The brain is a delicate web, with more cells in it than stars in the galaxy, and I am lost in its labyrinth.

My vampirism, too, emerged early: both my mother and grandmother have repeatedly called me an “emotional vampire” to describe how incredibly draining it was to interact with me. I was no older than six. I remember that as a child I cried frequently, complained accordingly, hated other kids to the point of avoidance, and shirked from touch. Self-loathing had begun to seep into my blood, and I had learned to withdraw into myself, to hide from the world, like a vampire from sunlight. By seven I had already begun to consider suicide. I learned keep the vampire starving, knowing full well that a taste of sympathy would unleash a feeding frenzy, a feast of over-sharing. Unlearning that cognitive pattern is nigh insurmountable, and my ancient vampire skin cracks as I attempt to break out of my stiff routine.

At fourteen, I became a ghost as I skipped meals day after day. During the hungry nights, I became unfeeling and untouchable, floating slightly above my bedspread, supine. I listened to the sounds of my family having dinner downstairs. Occasionally footsteps would rise up, pause, and fade away—deterred by the strip of darkness under my door or called away by the wails of my newborn sister. In the light of day, I floated above the eggshells littering every surface, keeping all interactions to a minimum. Now, when my mind heaves under the academic workload, or when my heart bleeds for all that’s been torn from it, or when the utter insanity of human brutality sends me into a frenzy, sometimes, I am able to step out and not feel. I imagine that I am a spirit, thousands of years old, just watching the cycles of human history passing by.  I drift in and out of existence, ephemeral despite my longevity, leaving no mark. Unreal, untouchable, invisible, invincible.

To this day, the dead girl, the witch, the vampire, and the ghost still all reside within me. I transmute the sadness and madness into color and sound, stories and science. I observe, examine, record and manipulate neuronal cells, drawing conjectures regarding my own mind. I float away from myself and others and travel to unseen realms. I remain a cryptid, steeped in mythos, playing with fact and fiction to explore my curse. Somehow, I carry on, despite undoing myself from the inside out. For better or for worse, this is the story I am weaving: I don’t know how to live, so I pretend to be not living.