Skin Game: A Memoir (7 page)

It would never have occurred to me to seek out other counsel, to find someone else I might confide in. Such a notion was beyond the realm of my experience of the world, as inconceivable as reciting the Gettysburg Address in flawless Russian—I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea how to do it. It was the natural order of being that you figured things out on your own.

What worried me was that I didn’t seem to be coming to the right conclusions. I couldn’t seem to come to any conclusions at all, but rather just kept stumbling along blindly, trying to stave off some looming, inevitable disaster.

As though mounting some kind of manic diversionary tactic, I continuously shaped and reshaped and effaced myself to appear in the guise I thought the situation demanded, orchestrating various Carolines for my parents, for the boys, for my administrators at school. I’d long had a habit—no doubt from the influence of so much reading—of imagining myself in the third person. When I was a little kid, this narrative tendency had applied itself mostly to my games:

… her breath ragged in her throat, she pressed herself deeper into the shadow of the trees, hoping to avoid her pursuers.

… “Well, thank you, Merv, it’s certainly a pleasure to be with you here on the show today.”

… dragging her shattered leg behind her, she inched her way painfully through the mud, knowing everyone’s survival depended on her.

Now this manner of regarding my life from a distance, as though I were a character in a performance, had begun to pervade my every transaction with the world. Every word and gesture, even sometimes when I was alone, started to feel more like a theatrical enterprise than anything real. I no longer experienced things so much as I experienced them
as
experiences, a step removed. I played my part, and though the emotions of this character were powerful and vivid and sometimes even overwhelming, still they unfolded at that remove. Over it all, a dry, dispassionate Narrator rambled its observations in the background like the voice-over on a 1950s grade-school science film:

Now he is kissing you, and your fingers brush his arm.… Now you are raising your hand in class.… Now you are walking along by the lake, and the wind is gently lifting your hair.…
I could almost hear the faint strains of theme music.

After a while, how do you know what is honestly your own anymore, and not just a fabrication for the sake of the audience?

It was a troubling disembodiment, like a near-death experience in which you can see your self, and everyone around you talking, but you are no longer connected to that self. There was this Caroline, operating in the world, and though I could not detach myself from her entirely, neither could I rejoin her. Every day I got up and went to school, ate my meals, did my homework, walked and talked through my life, but every day I felt I was spinning a little bit further out of my own control, as if I had only the most tenuous connection with that Caroline.

Was it this dissociation that caused me a terrible, itching, twitching restless unease, like the too-familiar hug from a relative I didn’t care for? Or was it the classic, irresolvable conflict between desire and duty that left me so anxious, so weighed down with dread? Or was it just my mind itself, coming undone of its own accord, on its own preordained schedule, drowning all my thoughts in a sea of static like the background crackle of an overseas telephone call, where a thousand frantic conversations are carried on just beyond the edge of intelligibility?

It felt physical, this oppressive tension, like something crawling on my flesh, and I wanted to shake it from my skin the way a horse shakes flies. I sat on my bed, digging my fingernails into my face, wanting to tear the skin away. What do you do with a want like that?

In the woods behind my house, on a still winter morning, I smashed a bottle on a rock, a green ginger ale bottle, holding it by the neck with both hands and bringing it down against the smooth face of weathered stone like an ax, a baseball bat, a club. It shattered in a rain of green shards and the fragmented chord of breaking glass, and right in that instant of its shattering came a flash of some release, like a brief rush of cool, fresh air into drowning lungs. Then it was gone again, and I was left with a scattered field of debris and a wash of self-recrimination for the excess of the gesture. I gathered the glass in a sudden worry that one of our cats would step on it and be injured. Then I slunk in the kitchen door with the chunks and slivers of bright green glass heaped in a pouch made by folding the hem of my sweatshirt up to my chest, and buried the evidence of my crime under a layer of garbage in the can.

At night, I danced wildly around in my room in darkness lit only by the yellow glow from the family’s old console stereo, which I’d commandeered for my bedroom, the cheap needle scratching out “Helter Skelter” until my father banged on my closed door, demanding, “Do you have to play that music so loud?”

One Sunday afternoon, my mother stunned me with the casual announcement at lunch that we would all be heading into Charlottesville for the rest of the day to visit with family friends. When I HAD OTHER PLANS! Plans I wasn’t supposed to have, of course—since they involved time spent in the company of boys I was expected to be spending less time with—and therefore plans that I couldn’t raise as an objection and counterpoint to my mother’s.

I sat at the table, staring hatefully at the roast beef and gravy on my plate, deaf to the dining room’s clatter of cutlery and rumble of voices and the
whap-whap
of the swinging wooden exit doors, hearing only my own frantic dismay. This was the final outrage, I thought.
I can’t bear it.

I bolted out of the dining room, banging through the swinging doors, even as my Narrator was counseling,
This is stupid. What do you think this is going to do for you?
I ran all the way down the academic building’s hall, and shoved through the door, and ran across the lawn, and onto the road that crossed the campus, past the lake, my lungs burning, jumped a fence, cut across a field, raced up the driveway past our house, my feet slipping in the loose gravel. I ran into the woods, slapping at thin branches, my Narrator jollying along going,
Well, my goodness, a runaway scene, and what are you going to do now, stay away forever?

I already felt stupid. What
was
I going to do now? I could see that I was just going to end up plodding embarrassed out of the woods in some utter anticlimax.

I threw myself down on my back on the forest floor, still gasping for breath. The damp and the chill crept through the thin flannel of my shirt, and I lay there wondering if there was some way simply never to get up, to lie there until the thin winter air and the wet leaves beneath me had emptied me of all concern, all caring.

*   *   *

Somewhere over the course of that winter I started thinking about killing myself, though not so much because I wanted to be dead, precisely, as because I yearned for resolution, for escape from the scratching distress of now. I thought killing myself was the only way I’d get that. Somehow, I wasn’t really picturing the long-term consequences of dead: that I’d be dead now, dead later, and dead ad infinitum. I was looking for dead in the short term. Dead until maybe, say, it was time to go to college.

Would I really have killed myself? I don’t know. I was skeptical enough even then about my theatrical streak to suspect that suicide might be just another piece in the performance. Slit your wrists in the bathtub, where the warm water makes it easier, I’d heard. The plinking drip from the faucet. The billow of red clouding the water against the bone white of the tub. I could see it all just a little too cinematically, a movie starring the soon-to-be tragically regretted third-person Caroline.

I needed to kill something
in
me, this awful feeling like worms tunneling along my nerves. So when I discovered the razor blade, cutting, if you’ll believe me, was my gesture of hope. That first time, when I was twelve, was like some kind of miracle, a revelation. The blade slipped easily, painlessly through my skin, like a hot knife through butter. As swift and pure as a stroke of lightning, it wrought an absolute and pristine division between before and after. All the chaos, the sound and fury, the uncertainty and confusion and despair—all of it evaporated in an instant, and I was for that moment grounded, coherent, whole.
Here is the irreducible self.
I drew the line in the sand, marked my body as mine, its flesh and its blood under my command.

11

Why? That’s the question you always come back to, the tough one. Why cut? Why, of all things, take a razor blade to my skin?

This is a story about how an ordinary sort of person can end up traveling some dark and unexpected roads. So I can tell you that any one of us might sometimes be driven by blind, inchoate need. I can tell you that the idea and the urge to cut seemed to arise from my very skin itself. That doesn’t really answer the question, though.

I can tell you that a well-timed wound focuses the mind marvelously—don’t you remember the sudden clarity that followed a skinned knee, a split lip, when all the world came down to body and blood, nerve endings and adrenaline?

I can tell you that on a global human scale, ritualized self-mutilation is surprisingly common. What in Western culture is pathologized as an indicator of profound dysfunction is in other cultures the very vehicle, the visible sign of a society’s claim upon that body—in scarification, in tattoos, and in measures more drastic than anything I ever considered.

None of this, of course, answers the question.

I can tell you that our bodies sometimes serve as the symbolic ground where order and disorder fight for supremacy, an uneasy divide that to some of us feels as porous and inconstant as a frayed tatter of gauze. The minions of chaos threaten to cross over at every turn, lurking in the cheating spouse, the undiscovered tumor, the murderous dictator, the brewing tornado, the salmonella in the Christmas turkey, the leak in the brake line. At any given moment, life is falling apart as fast as we’re shoring it up.

“Self-mutilation may sometimes be a creative act linked with the restructuring of chaos into … order,” writes Armando Favazza in his study of self-mutilation,
Bodies Under Siege.

Not that any of these points necessarily brings us closer to an answer.

I can tell you that I am far from alone, that there are cutters and biters, pickers and pokers, bangers and breakers and burners and pullers and prickers. Some of us are specialists in our chosen method, and some of us care only to get the job done and will take whatever’s handy. Have you ever wanted to punch the wall, pull your hair out? Don’t think you might not be one of us.

I can tell you that the “typical” self-mutilator, the textbook case, is someone just like me: young, female, probably with an eating disorder thrown in (but that’s another chapter), who started cutting sometime early in adolescence.

I can enumerate the various theories of self-mutilation, the sociocultural and the psychosexual, the biogenetic and the family-dynamic, all of them argued ardently by their various proponents armed with statistical charts and case studies.

Would any of these details really explain why?

I can offer you, as I have, my little penny-ante repertoire of teenage troubles. Collectively or individually, however, do they constitute sufficient grounds for taking up self-mutilation? Even as I set forth these explanations, I want to withdraw them again. I think what I thought when I was twelve, and thirteen, and fifteen, and twenty: None of these is reason enough, none of these is legitimate cause.

Well, how many troubles
should
equal a legitimate reason for self-mutilation? Ten? Twenty? One hundred? And how monumental must these troubles be? There’s probably no critical mass beyond which cutting yourself would ever seem, to most people, like a reasonable choice. I cut because it did look that way to me. I cut because something had to give. I cut because the alternatives were worse.

We’re always looking for the logical explanation, the smoking gun, the inscrutably sagacious detective who will reveal all in the final chapter—but some things are too complex to suffer reduction to a simple equation of why/because. I know that cutting was my defense against an internal chaos, against a sense of the world gone out of control. What I can’t tell you is where that chaos came from, what exact balance of factors blew up the maelstrom of my mind. Maybe what drove me to cut doesn’t have any cause I can name. Maybe it oozed up from nowhere, from within my blood, my cells, my very DNA.

Our family tree is hung with cranks and eccentrics, the merely batty, the existentially despondent, and so on down the precipitous decline to the drinkers and depressives and suicides. My father, in trying to explain to me once how I was related to a distant cousin, took me along a genealogical pathway strewn with bodies, including one entire family done in by razor and rope and revolver. So maybe I got my father’s eyes, my mother’s nose, and in the bargain an altogether murkier inheritance.

I suffered homesickness so extreme when I was a child that it bordered on panic, with frantic midnight calls begging my parents to come rescue me from wherever I had been invited to spend the night. I was paralyzingly afraid of the dark, and sometimes visited by nightmares so vivid and strangely disturbing that I can remember them still in almost perfect detail. I was so easily and thoroughly absorbed into the imagined world of my books or my toys that the lived world sometimes felt less real to me. It was an absolute policy of mine that I would not read any book in which the animal died in the end. In retrospect, should we have understood these things as indicators of a mind playing in the wrong key? Or is it only in retrospect that they start to look odd?

*   *   *

On a trip to West Virginia once, I stopped at the place billed as the official headwater of the Potomac—a paltry spurt of water burbling up into a trickle of a stream choked by winter leaves. In the end, if we could ever really pursue the question
why
to its true headwaters, we might find it is often no more than this: a beginning so trifling that it hardly bears notice. The flip of a switch. The flash of a neurotransmission. Maybe there was always something amiss, like a bulb planted and forgotten that blooms when the season is right. I can’t stop wondering what, if anything, about who I’ve become was written inevitable into my chromosomes, lying in lurk, waiting for the apparently insignificant event that triggers an endless cascade of consequences. A thousand girls could have gotten through my seventh grade and breezed on with a laugh; I didn’t. I sometimes think I carried my unhappiness with me like a portmanteau, and finally unpacked it in the heart of an unfortunate year.