2/22/2021
TW: SELF-HARM
“I was once called a wound-dweller. It was a boyfriend who called me that. I didn’t like how it sounded, and I’m still not over it. (It was a wound; I dwell.) I wrote to a friend: “I’ve got this double-edged shame and indignation about my bodily ills and ailments—jaw, punched nose, fast heart, broken foot etc etc etc. On the one hand, I’m like, Why does this shit happen to me? And on the other hand, I’m like, Why am I talking about this so much?”“ (Leslie Jamieson, Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain).
I feel like we all hail Jamieson as our pain-legitimizer. ‘We’ as women, as some-what women-identifying people, or gender neutral yet femme beings. The “we’” can be larger though. I’m generalizing. Her essay in question is called the Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, though. Which carries with it its own problems, I think.
It‘s so weird, and I’m not mad at her about this... but it’s almost as if she’s complexified the issue of self-harm. Not her. Not her specifically. Rather, It. The literature on self-harm, the smart, brilliant, eye-opening, authentic and important academic work that’s been done to explain, debunk, and delve into cutting. But now—and I don’t think this is the fault of that kind of literature but maybe more so just a consequence of it—self-harm can be somewhat...intellectualized? It’s not only legitimate, authentic, and performative yet real pain, as Jamieson explains, but now it’s also... smart. And I recognize that saying this in a blog post or in whatever scheme is yet another way to authenticate it as something ‘smart’. It’s not. I don’t think it’s objectively ‘intellectual’. But in the way that we do things for whatever reason that are ‘bad’ or not exactly ‘smart’ for us but feel productive, feel like we’re moving the brain, churning it in some way as to make it more advanced or developed than other people’s (I can’t think of a good example of this...doing psychadelics to make ourselves feel more ‘worldly’ or in touch with the physics of it all, not that acid is ‘bad’ per se), cutting feels rational, in that way, sometimes. Maybe even just the fact that it is written about, to some extent, makes it feel that way. Legitimate. Something not just under covers or closed doors, but something real, concretized by academic literature.
This is just something I’ve been dwelling on. I have been dealing with self-harm issues for years now, and maybe I need to stop dwelling on the deeper analysis of it, because sometimes it sucks me in, brings me further into that hole.