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The Spiritual Path at Fat Camp

George Peters / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Mona Kirschner | Longreads | November 2019 | 20 minutes (5,102 words)

Day One

I look around the pool as I kick my legs backwards. I wonder how I found myself in a swim cap and a full-piece bathing suit doing water aerobics with eight ladies over 60 at a health retreat that turned out to be an upscale fat camp.

Why is it that we never tire of talking about love? Of analyzing all angles of heartbreak?

No Uber driver’s English is bad enough to deter us, no stranger on an airplane too disengaged for it to all come spilling out, the same story, again and again.

Filling the void, my therapist had said. I always hoped that when I inevitably fell apart, at least I’d be original about it.

The previous day I had rushed down to the waiting taxi, stalling outside the high gates of my apartment building in São Paulo.

I was late, throwing clothes onto the bed and settling for stretchy workout pants and an old blue sweater that was too tight on the arms. The flight was smooth, the two hours going by quickly as I stared out the window in dark sunglasses that covered most of my face.

On the other end, I shuffled through the airport with my head down and bought sweet and salty peanuts after I couldn’t talk myself out of it. I walked outside; the muggy heat relentless, but I kept my sweater on, joining a group of elderly women next to a van stamped with a logo I recognized from the website. This should be good, I thought, making eye contact with no one and finding a seat.

A friend had recommended this place, deep in the countryside of southern Brazil, a short flight from my place of birth and my home for the last 10 years, having moved back after falling in love and dropping out of school in Canada, where I had grown up with my immigrant parents and privileged life.

I was always looking for something. For love, for adventure, for a story worth telling. I shifted happily from a good kid with a scholarship to a bartender in shorts and knee-high boots with no plan, chasing the drama.

And then I fell in love with a man in that way you do when you throw yourself into something so hard, you don’t even recognize yourself when you take a step back. Fully, entirely consumed.

He had green eyes and skin that actually glowed. I saw him for the first time from the side, across a cheesy wedding dance floor. I remember feeling short of breath. I hardly saw his face. Yet I recognized him as if I had known he was coming.

The van bumped along. I watched a series on Netflix on the drive out about an artist from Brooklyn and her many affairs. I noticed how all the actors on it were thin. Something I would have never realized a few months before.

We drove onto the property, a long, winding driveway with cornfields on either side. The sky was a rich shade of blue and the sun peeked out from the clouds, hot and unforgiving.

A purple and yellow butterfly flew next to my window as we drove up. I hated butterflies, always thought of them as the mean girls of insects. All colorful, flashy wings on the same old insect body.

We arrived to a welcome drink of green juice, the glass only filled halfway, hinting at the moderation that was to come. I noticed I was the youngest person there by at least 15 years. They showed me to my room and instructed me to turn up for my doctor’s appointment at 3:15. I let my bag drop off of my shoulder.

Everyone was in their provided white robes, the blue logo embroidered on the left side. I put mine on, noticing gratefully that it hid everything that needed hiding. My thighs chafed in the heat.

The nurse was gentle, especially when asking me to step on a large, rectangular scale.

“That’s a good girl.” She said, making a note on her clipboard. The doctor put me on a diet of 850 calories a day, which sounded absurd. “What caused the weight gain?” he asked.

“Heartbreak.” I shrugged. “Wish it was a more original reason.”

What is it about comfort from strangers that is so soothing? That makes us feel as if our uncertain futures are less terrifying if someone promises they won’t be? Someone who couldn’t possibly know? And yet.

“Do you think I’m going to be okay?” I would ask anyone who would listen.

I missed him. I could feel his hands, the callouses on his palms. The softness of the finer hair on the nape of his neck. The smell of his shirts. I could see the wrinkles on the side of his eyes when he laughed. I could hear his voice. My chest on his. Could feel him pinching my side when he thought something was funny. I’d say his name aloud.

They say our brains label pain, give it a face. He had a beautiful face.

How do you determine the difference between love and fear? Should it feel so similar?

The love had been there, at some point. Perhaps it was passion. It faded. The fear was constant. I was afraid of the fights, I was afraid of staying, I was afraid of leaving. I was afraid of being alone, of regretting it, of missing him, of realizing there’d be nothing better.

We introduced ourselves at the welcome address, our names, where we’re from, why we were there. I sat in the back. They assigned each one of us a table that we’d sit at for the week. Mealtimes clearly required military-level control. I looked down at the sad six grapes in front of me and tried to concentrate on chewing whatever absurd amount of times was recommended by one of the many (thin) doctors who gave a painfully slow speech before we could eat. Was it 40 times?

My ex and I used to get kicked out of bars for our screaming matches. He was jealous, I was hysterical. I thought it was romantic. I ended it after almost 10 years. He was my first love, all I knew. It was my decision. Courage and strength showed up suddenly, like unannounced dinner guests to an otherwise lonely affair.

He loved me. But he was terrible to me. We were terrible to each other. I plotted and hoped for my freedom for years. Yet the loss, the gaping hole felt like it was only getting bigger.

Love or fear?

They gave a tour of the grounds, the clinic, the vegetable garden, the main house.

I set my stack of books on the bedside table. I looked at the clean, neatly made single bed and sighed. I listened to Miles Davis.

Dinner was pea soup.
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What Hockey Gives and What Hockey Takes Away

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At The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten recounts what beer-league hockey has given him over the years: occasional bragging rights, countless happy sud-soaked memories, a feeling of camaraderie, and three concussions whose lingering after effects caused him to leave the game.

The third concussion came months later, in another Intangibles game, the clock running out on a late-night midseason loss. A freak accident, a collision with a teammate: we hadn’t seen each other. I got the worst of it. The light dimmed, the ringing kicked up, and the fog rolled in again.

In the following weeks, my skull felt as though someone had draped a towel over it and was pulling down on all four corners, or maybe cinching tight a bank robber’s stocking. I had trouble concentrating. If I tried to exercise, the headache came galloping in. I couldn’t handle crowds or concerts or the ordinary din of New York. The thought of playing hockey, the sight of men playing football on TV: it seemed as reasonable to stroll on foot across the New Jersey Turnpike. After an hour or two in front of a computer screen, a kind of dizzy fatigue washed over me. I began napping a couple of times a day. The Advil stopped working. My moods darkened. My work stalled.

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Under the Influence: White Lies

Photo by Benne Ochs / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  9 minutes (2,302 words)

Part one in a three-part series on the influencer economy.

* * *

When I hear “influencer,” I think Caroline Calloway: a tepid blond with tepid thoughts who fulfills the minimal standards of idealized American femininity, a woman so forgettable I had to look up her name multiple times while writing this essay even though she dominated the media for a week after her ghostwriter blew the whistle. In my mind, which has only been exposed to the influencer industry by osmosis, the influencer — anyone who uses social media to sway their audience — is always a woman. She’s neither too beautiful nor too smart nor too edgy nor the contrary. From what I can see, if she’s not a basic bitch, she’s parked pretty close. You could say she’s a grifter — she has nothing worth buying, apparently, but she sells anyway — but that suggests a level of intrigue and premeditation that the woman floated in front of me fails to embody. On every level she appears pedestrian. And that’s why she’s so divisive. This fictitious prototype’s banality is what makes her appealing to so many people with marginal dreams, and so repulsive to those of us whose nightmare is that this dream is all there is.

When I hear “influencer,” I don’t think of the men, the people of color. The influencer industry is populated by a significant number of successful athletes and gamers and entertainers of multiple races and genders, but you wouldn’t know it; the big-i influencers, who get the most play and the most pay for acting out the most insipid stereotypes, dwarf the small-i influencers who don’t. Though engagement rates for sponsored posts have dropped 1.6 percent over the past year and a number of fraudulent interlopers have eroded the public trust, according to Business Insider, by next year the influencer marketing industry’s value is estimated to reach as high as $10 billion. And that money flows the way it always has — men at the top, white women below them, and everyone else at the bottom. 

This isn’t about who is better at influencing, it’s about who is allowed to influence: who has the right look, who knows the right people, who lives in the right place, who has the right means. Check any of the top 10 most successful influencers lists and Calloway is nowhere near it, nor are a number of other icons of the influencer economy that paint a limited portrait of its totality. Yet they’re all we see: Tavi Gevinson on the cover of New York magazine analyzing how Instagram has fractured her identity; Natalie Beach, also in The Cut, disclosing her thankless history as Calloway’s ghostwriter; James Charles (the rare male beauty influencer) squabbling with someone named Tati Westbrook (also covered in The Cut). We see attractive, upwardly mobile white people showing off their best angles and causing drama — a Jane Austen novel without the self-reflection.

* * *

“With it you win all men if you are a woman — and all women if you are a man,” announced Elinor Glyn, who popularized the concept of the It Girl, the pre-influencer influencer, in 1927. Clara Bow embodied the term that same year in the appropriately titled film It, in which she played a lower-class shopgirl who is nonetheless irresistible to her upper-class boss. From then on, “it” became synonymous with “young attractive white woman with a certain je ne sais quoi.” From Eve Babitz to Chloe Sevigny, the It Girl’s innate talent, whether writing or acting or some other romantic art form, is buried beneath her persona, to the point that all that is visible is the way she plays chess or how she parts her hair. It’s a paradoxical concept: The one woman we want to possess cannot actually be reduced to something that can be. Instead, her accoutrements — Twiggy’s androgyny, Joan Didion’s cigarettes — act as a stand-in for her humanity. With men, it’s the opposite. There are cool men, of course, but their talent, the work they do, always comes first. Their persona, their bad behavior often, is only a token of something more indelible. They are defined by their product, while the women are defined physically. We remember Edie Sedgwick for her dimples, for being a constant on Andy Warhol’s arm. We remember Warhol, meanwhile, for his profound weirdness, yes, but more for the art he left behind. The social media influencer falls into the same tradition as Sedgwick, except this time the public-facing woman does not need to be in close proximity to celebrity for her abilities to be eclipsed by her body.

The stereotypically successful, ultimate big-i influencer online is the stereotypically successful woman offline: blond, attractive, open. Stanford professor Rosanna Guadagno, who is writing a book on the psychology of social media, tells me that the kind of retrograde gender dynamics you see in rom-coms tend to play out online as well: The male heroes are average Joes, while the women are the (white) hotties they want to fuck. Not only that, the pay gap applies here too, with men reportedly earning 23 percent more on average than women despite the latter making up more than 75 percent of the industry. Women perform best, according to a number of social media studies conducted with support from the MaLisa Foundation, when they hew to traditional femininity: getting personal about their lifestyles, showing their bodies in their private spaces, being vulnerable with others. When they try to break away from this formula, they are criticized. Influencer Rachel Sullivan, for example, who is known for her hoop dancing on Instagram, was harassed for writing a post supporting immigrants. She blames misogyny for how she’s been perceived. (“As soon as I started stepping back and seeing them not hating on me but hating on women in general,” she told The Chill Times, “I was able to step away and approach it from a more analytical place.”)

Men, meanwhile, are encouraged to cover more subjects — from politics to gaming — and to shoot depersonalized images in public spaces, to remain professional, stoic, and unemotionally informative. As Emma Grey Ellis has noted in Wired, “James Charles is a ‘male beauty influencer,’ while any woman who streams herself playing videogames on Twitch is a ‘female gamer.’” Per her point, last year Forbes released a list of the most successful influencers divided by area of interest. Men dominated the substantive, professionally-coded categories, like tech and business, while women were overrepresented in what are regarded as the more superficial, personalized categories like fashion. The implication seems to be that men work, while women work on themselves. And if you digress, you’re small-i, and once you’re small-i, good luck finding fame and fortune.

This has a lot less to do with how men and women are, and a lot more to do with how men and women are encouraged to be online. As Guadagno deadpans: “Facebook started as a ‘hot or not’ website.” Ten years ago, influencers were better known as bloggers or YouTube stars, even Vine stars. But companies, run largely by white men, found it more efficient to market on closed platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which consolidated all the influencers into one visual space, producing more easily verifiable content faster. That is likely why 25 percent of the sponsored posts on Instagram are fashion-based, while all other categories trail much farther behind, and why there is such a thing as big- and small-i influencers now — it’s a crowded space and the tried and not-true rise.

Cornell assistant professor Brooke Erin Duffy, author of (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work, tells me that a lot of small-i influencers are “not thrilled” that the market has pushed them onto Instagram. They found blogging more thoughtful, more autonomous. Now it’s all about image and competition, with each of them jockeying to produce the sexiest selfie. Which is how “influencing” becomes a euphemism for selling out, and why Duffy and so many others prefer “content creator”: Calling people influencers “elides a lot of the creative work that these individuals do.” Still, you can’t separate the work from the money. Duffy says the word influencer was “essentially hijacked” from marketing, which is itself attached to femininity. Shopping is still traditionally considered a female pastime, with many women having internalized the belief that they are natural-born consumers and that consumption is a path to self-actualization. Of course, in this case, self-actualization is only accessible to the big-i’s; the small-i’s, regardless of their work, regardless of their popularity, face a glass ceiling, though this one is clearly frosted — black plus-size blogger Stephanie Yeboah revealed in one interview that she once earned 10 times less than the white influencers on the same job. Just like our society offline, online influencing shuts out diversity unless it comes in a familiar form.

The most successful influencer in the world is the big-i who masquerades as the small-i: Kylie Jenner is white, but she passes for nonwhite, cornering the market in a way Calloway can’t. Like the rest of the Kardashian clan, she highlights her big lips, big curves, and tanned skin, and even sometimes goes all-out with cornrows. “How popular the Kardashians are speaks volumes and can’t be overlooked,” Instagram influencer Ericka Hart told NBC last month. “They have been able to capitalize off black bodies, and people will want to emulate that.” Last November, writer Wanna Thompson observed a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “niggerfishing”: white women basically performing beauty blackface and earning accolades in the process. “Black women are constantly bombarded with the promotion of European beauty standards in the media,” she wrote in Paper magazine, “so when our likeness is then embraced on women who have the privilege to fit traditional standards yet freely co-opt Blackness to their liking, it reaffirms the belief that people desire Blackness, just not on Black women.” Even when they are not trafficking in appropriation, white influencers catch breaks where their peers of color do not. In Metro this summer, Yeboah criticized the lack of diversity in marketing campaigns: “By exclusively using white influencers to tout holiday experiences, beauty and skincare products and fashion pieces, the story being told is that these experiences are only available to white people.” The irony being that black women spend nine times more on beauty products than white women, according to a 2018 Nielsen report, which explained, “if a brand doesn’t have a multicultural strategy, it doesn’t have a growth strategy.”

* * *

I couldn’t see a way to fix influencing — the male-coded and female-coded areas of influence, the pay gap between men and women, the pay gap between white women and women of color, the wider power divided along gender and racial lines — without correcting the systemic issues that are affecting everything right now. I thought maybe it would be best to just burn the whole thing down and start again. But the academics I spoke to were less hopeless. Duffy believes the solution is transparency, correcting the false narrative that influencing is a fuss-free way to make an easy buck. While we lavish attention on successful influencers and mock those who slip up, we rarely talk about the work involved (or, in a case like Calloway’s, the help received). The individualization of the influencer industry means we are not privy to the emotional labor it requires, nor the money, nor the risks, predominantly for marginalized groups. “They’re constantly dealing with hate and criticism and harassment and the devaluation of their profession,” Duffy says, pointing out a site I had never heard of called GOMIBLOG (Get Off My Internet), which buys into the narrow, big-i view of the influencer and which polices authenticity on women’s sites. This gendered monitoring of social media extends to how interpersonal relationships are covered by the mainstream press. While the fight between Charles and Westbrook was all over the internet for days (Westbrook is currently being pitted against Jeffree Star — whether they are actually feuding is unclear), you don’t often see male influencers making gossip news the same way. Smaller spats are ignored entirely until the men are caught up in serious shit — PewDiePie being named-dropped by the Christchurch shooter (“subscribe to PewDiePie”), Logan Paul filming a dead body — which is then treated soberly.

In order to mitigate online stereotypes, Guadagno prioritizes increased diversity at tech companies. These biases are not only perpetuated by the predominantly white men creating our social media platforms, however; a similar demographic also dominates marketing teams. Last year the brand Revolve was criticized for using only white women on a series of press trips, triggering the hashtag #revolvesowhite. In response to the glaring oversight, blogger Valerie Eguavoen launched the Instagram page You Belong Now, which promotes content creators who are otherwise ignored. Two Canadian influencers of color, Shannae Ingleton-Smith and Tania Cascilla, have also founded The Glow Up, an invitation-only Facebook group that provides support, in the form of transparency, for black influencers (money is one of the major topics of conversation). This is one of the rare spaces online in which white women like Calloway do not have carte blanche. “The point of The Glow Up has never been to exclude other women,” blogger Coco Bassey told Forbes in March, but, she said, “sometimes these conversations need to be had in the absence of others, so we can get real with each other and get down to our unfiltered truths.”

Behind all the Calloways being pushed into our paths, the influencing community is clearly mobilizing, one of the many microcosms of the larger global move towards equality. While the big-i’s unknowingly pose for their latest selfies, if you look closely you can see the small-i’s poised in the background, ready to claim their rightful place. 

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Enjoy your Airbnb. (Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Allie Conti, Joe Sexton and Nate Schweber, Alexander Chee, Nell Scovell, and Bee Wilson.

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The Name Change Dilemma

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Hannah Howard | Longreads | November 2019 | 10 minutes (2,420 words)

Although Tony speaks with an elegant English accent and I with a prosaic American one, although I am a writer and he works in business doing things with spreadsheets that I can’t even begin to comprehend, although he grew up Anglican and I grew up Jewish, and although Tony’s parents are from Uganda and a small island off the south coast of England and mine are from the Bronx and Queens, respectively, when it comes to both everyday decisions and big life things we are usually on the same page.

We both love New York with an obstinate devotion. Recently our friends have started to move to the suburbs. We both give a polite smile when they share the news. Then back in the safety of our one-bedroom, which becomes an inferno in the winter because it’s an old NYC apartment, we make gagging noises and giggle. The suburbs may be nice for other people, but we like it right here.

We both always want to get an extra order of short ribs at our favorite barbeque place in Koreatown and splurge for the fancy bubbly any time we can think of a half-decent excuse. We want to travel the world. We want to live in Brooklyn Heights, in a brownstone overlooking the promenade, after I sell the movie rights to my future bestseller or we win the lottery.. Manhattan will sparkle across the East River. For now, we walk around Brooklyn until the soles of our feet begin to hurt, and choose our favorite blocks. We have so many favorites we lose track.

Last September, we got married.

We agreed on so much, as usual. My parents consented to a pig roast even though we are Jewish. We decided to have the ceremony in their back yard by the Delaware River, where Pennsylvania meets New Jersey, and the party under a tent. There would be fairy lights and a band that got everyone dancing. There would be really good food.

We looked into fireworks, but the price tag shocked us. Who needs fireworks? We didn’t need fireworks.

Reader, the night was magic. Tony’s family came from England and Denmark, and mine came from Baltimore and South Dakota, and friends came from everywhere. There was no feeling like walking out into the backyard and seeing all the people I love in the world, their soft smiles and flowy dresses. My heart exploded into heart dust.

The sun peeked out of cotton ball clouds right as we said our vows under the chuppah my dad had built for us. The river was right beside us, and we made another river of happy tears.

Even though my strapless dress had been tailored not once or twice but three times, my best friend Ursula still had to safety pin my bra into its stiff fabric. Miraculously, it stayed up the whole night.

Our friend Leigh made us a cheese platter and a lemon cake with strawberry jam and buttercream frosting. Our friend Rena wrote us a poem. We had not just delicious-for-a-wedding but actually delicious food. The music was so electric that our friends and family spilled off the dance floor, out of the tent and into the night. The moon’s reflection danced on the river.
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A Woman’s Work: Till Death Do Us Part

All illustrations by Carolita Johnson

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | October 2019 | 26 minutes (6,450 words)

 

Death is a process I knew very little about until my life partner began dying. He and I had to learn everything while we went through the process together. I say “learn,” but at this point I’m not sure we learned anything. Sometimes I think Michael was the only one who learned anything real and true, as in Pete Townshend’s words in “The Seeker”:

I won’t get to get what I’m after, till the day I die.

He died three years ago, and this is the first time I’m writing about it in retrospect. I took notes during it all — the before, the during, the after — and I’m glad I did because I sometimes barely recognize the hand of the person who wrote them, much less remember much of what I wrote about. If there’s anything I’ve come to understand while reading these notes, it’s that dying isn’t just about the one person doing the dying. It’s an undertaking woven by and around many people, and this has a certain beauty.

In a couple, though, along with the unfathomable strengths it can prove, it also has the potential to expose deep, carefully camouflaged structural flaws in a relationship. It imposes financial considerations and logistical burdens, sometimes revealing unsuspected shabbiness; or worse, deliberate malice. For good or for bad, what a death unfurls in its wake will always surprise you.

The deaths that I’ve known so far all began with aging and illness. So, I won’t presume to understand death by any other cause, not by war, not by accident or any form of deliberate (first, second, or third party) intent. The deaths I’ve seen involve watching the body of someone I love get tired, begin to fall apart, stop working right, and finally begin to degrade, as they watch in helpless terror, into food for pathogens.

First my husband, then a couple years later, my dad.

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My Year on a Shrinking Island

Historic Map Works / Getty, Animation by Homestead Studio

Michael Mount | Longreads | Month 2019 | 25 minutes (6,236 words)

The home I moved into was not what you might associate with Martha’s Vineyard: it wasn’t a sweeping palatial estate near the ocean with views of crispy white foam. It was a simple shingled house tucked far in the woods, sitting in a rustic subdivision near a graveyard and just beyond the commercial centers of the Island, with power lines cutting an artery through its backyard. I schlepped my things inside, bubbling with optimism about what my year of rest and revelation would bring. My housemate was a 70-year-old man who helped me move my luggage while screaming at the Patriots game every time he walked by. It wasn’t until the fourth quarter that he asked questions.

“Most people don’t move out here until May,” he said. “What are you running away from?”

“Just New York.”

“I don’t blame you,” he said, laughing.

It was September of 2013 and I had left everything in Brooklyn. All of the carefully assembled Ikea furniture. My job. It all seemed to recede behind me on that final glimpse from the ferry that morning as I watched Woods Hole, Massachusetts, shrinking to a pinhole. All of the chaos and the heartbreak of summer in New York was like a muted roar — Facebook would remind me, but I had every reason to forget.

Some families have houses on Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t. My friend from home (home is a distant place) had moved to the Island last year to work full time for an agricultural non-profit. I did not know her well but her suggestion came to me in a time of need:

“If you hate New York so much,” she said, “you should move out to the Island for a winter and write your book. There are tons of writers out here.”

I was 24 and as weightless as dandelion molt. Leaving a job meant nothing. My longest relationship had been eight months long. I knew one person on Martha’s Vineyard and — it seemed — only a few more in New York. It hardly felt like a sacrifice. Those in New York whom I told about my plan expressed two contrasting perspectives: “Why would you do that?” and “I’m so jealous.” I chose to listen to only the latter.

It only took two trips to the car to carry all my things into the old man’s house. He seemed fine with me renting the room for next to nothing — if anything he was enthused to continue renting past Labor Day, to have company at the end of the season.

That evening we watched Tom Brady smear the Jets. During commercial breaks he fiddled with a small police scanner sitting beside his armchair; there were distant calls for drunk driving or speeding incidents. When it was time to eat he walked slowly to the kitchen and boiled two hot dogs, piling them on a paper plate.

“No dishes this way,” he said. “Bachelor life.”
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Frenzied Woman

Illustration by Homestead Studio, based on a photo by Morgan Petroski

Cinelle Barnes | Longreads | excerpted from Malaya: Essays on Freedom | October 2019 | 15 minutes (3,929 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

We had everything, then we had nothing. But I always had books and dance. This was my shorthand response to anyone who asked about my distant past, my pre-America. I say distant because the past happened in the Philippines, thousands of miles away, before the internet was as routine as checking the time or eating breakfast. The past had no online footprint. The past lived in recesses of my brain that had been walled off by art history facts, sewing techniques, and memorable World Cup plays. I had found a place for the past and there I kept it. The past was so distant, I could tell it like the summary of a fairy tale. Once upon a time, and I lived happily ever after. The shorthand was enough for years, for over a decade spent in New York, Georgia, and South Carolina, until I got a therapist who liked to read. She understood words, therefore she understood what I used them for, and how. My sentences were never too short nor too long for her—she liked to break down both. When you said this, what did you mean? An English major before she was a licensed trauma specialist, she saw my every anecdote as a scene, every verb a cause or effect, and every subject or object a motif.

Today’s motif: Tell me more about dance.

What about it?

Tell me about it as if you were describing a ritual, something you religiously do. Your memories of it. You do it religiously, don’t you?

I suppose. I’ve been dancing since I was three.

We start there. I was three. Or, more precisely, I was turning three and as I was turning numbers, growing, growing up, my baby brother died. I was going and he was stopping—these were the verbs I used for myself and him then. I’d been in ballet class that year because Mama thought first position could cure my pigeon-toe, and a tendu could fix my bowleggedness. The ballet did work, if we’re talking about returns on my mother’s investment. But it also worked in that it introduced me to a space that allowed for nothing but the movement of limbs, sashaying across floors, routines to go with the music, and outfits (always in aqua—en vogue at the time) to go with the routines. My body was not detested at the dance studio, like my mother detested my body, so long as I could plié and tiptoe to the beat. One, two, three. Two, two, three. Three, two, three. And four. I was lucky, too, to not have the kind of ballet teacher I saw in movies. My teacher, Ms. Anna, had a dimple on one cheek that always showed because she always smiled. My mother, on the other hand, stopped smiling when my brother stopped going. We buried my brother, his body, in our garden the night of my third birthday, and from that point on, my mother obsessed over what my body was doing—was it expanding, stretching, bowlegging, pigeon-toeing, making room for hives, scabs, and scars? She watched the end of every ballet class, when we would run through the entire routine learned that day, to assure herself, I understand now, that my body was plié-ing, tendu-ing, sashaying, tiptoeing, going. Dancing was going, an effect of my mother’s grief. This is the physics of our relationship.

Did you keep dancing? my therapist asks.

I tell her yes but not in the studio. We lost our money sometime in 1990. There was a war and a flood, and together they caused an avalanche — Mama became erratic and unruly, even violent, and would disappear for a string of nights, and Papa left to salvage what he could of his business from the war. My older brother entered into a sad and angry mood that eventually led to frequent drug use. But even with the mood, my brother managed to take on the role of parent, and he found ways to make money so we could eat. There were days when we’d go without food until sundown, and the only way to ignore our hunger was to inflict pain another way. We would play with the flame of a candle, pinching it with thumb and index finger until it went out.

My body was not detested at the dance studio, like my mother detested my body, so long as I could plié and tiptoe to the beat.

One way my brother made food money was to run a taxi service with the van our father left us. He was a high school junior, old enough to get a driver’s license in Manila. We shuttled fellow students to and from our schools, charging them enough for a meal each way. My brother, who took piano lessons during the time I was in ballet, hadn’t lost his love of music even when we had lost everything. If anything, the poverty and our family’s version of orphanhood intensified his love — need — of music. The van he drove was popular among commuters because he outfitted it with cassette jackets, Super Orange car fresheners, and cases of tapes: hip-hop A-sides and B-sides. My brother was a muso—we all knew that the first day he laid fingers on a keyboard. He read notes as though he could sense them from the air; life with sound was a constant osmose for him. So he chose hip-hop, and only hip-hop, for the van and his passengers, as a way to subtract, to home in, to detract from the chaos of Manila noise, a belligerent and negligent mother, and the deafening sound of silence after one’s father leaves. Hip-hop made sense to him and to me because the top tracks of the day were as angry and angsty as we were, and were cadenced lyrics from the mouths of ’90s justice seekers. It felt apt. And because it felt apt, I danced to it. I popped and locked, tutted, ticked. I carried over the muscle control I developed in ballet and used it to isolate rib cage from neck and rib cage from hip, and I was as high as someone could get without the help of drugs. But my brother needed the help of drugs, even more so when Mama stole the van service from us and operated it with her lover. Without the van, without the music — what was a boy supposed to do? There was no rhythm now, not even the grumm of an engine, so my brother — my personal DJ — went from sad to sullen to resentfully silent. His vibrations changed. When I was in a room with him, all I could feel was the antipathy emanating from his body. And bodies communicate, so I shuffled as far away from him as I could, taking his muteness as a warning.

And you stopped dancing then? my therapist assumes. She is wrong for the first time in the months I’d been seeing her. I feel a sense of pride. Maybe I am finally the enigma she can’t decode. Maybe I like to be a mystery. What child of trauma doesn’t?

You’d think. But I danced in front of the mirror a lot. I had nobody, so my reflection was my company.

She writes on her clipboard and bites her lip. She is silent for a minute before she asks, Did your reflection talk?

My reflection didn’t talk as much as she echoed. I sang a song to her and she sang it back to me. I sang a line from a song about things being gone before you knew it, first like Joni, then Janet, because at that point I was a preteen sliding on a scale of bemoaning to bewildered. Everything was equally irritating and intriguing, and add to that the fact that my brother was sent off to live with his biological father (after years of our mother keeping him away), my mother had turned into a con artist who sold nonexistent real estate, and her lover had turned the house into a breeding and fighting space for gamecocks. There were also strange men coming through the house, some of whom visited me while I slept. I woke up to memories of dreams of memories of even deeper dreams. So Joni’s brooding and Janet’s sultry sounds fit—ranges that both went over octaves, but one came out sounding strangulated and the other, sexed. The dance moves that I paired with their songs involved swaying, a whole lot of it, mostly with my eyes closed, at tempo with my breathing, and just briskly enough to lift the hem of my shirt or skirt into a parachute. There was joy in seeing my shirt or skirt let air come in and through the fabric. There was a soothing quality to it — that I could be touched without being touched; that something could be close but safe. Later, in college, I would see my preteen reflection in the Martha Graham dancers I watched in New York City — dancers trained in Graham’s style of contraction and release, which went directly against the illusion of weightlessness given off by classical ballet. Her technique involved meaningful, cumbersome steps — the dancers leapt only to be on the ground again, gravitropic. The gold border of the hallway mirror outside my bedroom framed these steps well. It was taller than it was wide, and much of the upper portion of it served as negative space — most of the moving was done so my body would end up crouched or folded or splatted on the floor. This was laborious, and I liked it. Sweat begets sweat.

Did you ever feel separated from your reflection? Was she watching you or were you watching her?

Neither. I was watching me. I know what you’re trying to get at. But I am not my mother.

My mother lived as two — at least two — people. I had described her/them in my book and in therapy as Tiger Mama and Orchid Mama. Tiger Mama had a gun in her purse; Orchid Mama hummed while she brushed her hair or did her makeup. Mama split in two after my baby brother died, and she kept splitting, or kept going deeper into her two personalities—I lost track: Was it multiplication or division or addition?—and became scarier to us with each year. By the time I was eleven, she had habitually forgotten to feed us, had assisted her lover in multiple embezzlement scams, had flailed and shot a gun in the air, and had bathed in the rain with one breast hanging out. I had told all this to my therapist, probably by our second session, and by our fourth, she had asked permission to share an observation she’d made: Can I tell you what I think your mother has, why she acted the way she did? I had wanted this answer since I was three. I think your mother is dissociated—dissociative identity disorder.

I have read plenty about dissociative identity disorder, and I know I don’t have it. I could have had it — it was right for my therapist to take note of eleven-year-old me speaking to her reflection in the mirror. But I had never been splintered. My joy was always enmeshed with my sadness, my levity with my pain. I could cry and laugh at the same time, and still do. And I have never entered amnesiac fugues. I have the opposite problem, a gift and a burden — I remember everything. Is that not why I write memoir? And is the essay not a form of uniting the multitudes within us, within me? Everything connects. I follow my body’s and brain’s lead.

That’s not what I’m saying, my therapist says. I know you are not your mother, and I don’t think you are dissociated. I just want to know where the point was.

What point?

When you could have dissociated. Look, you’re very strong. I really don’t know how you’ve held up as well as you have. I am not worried about you at all. In fact, I’m fascinated by you.

By what?

By how you’ve survived and thrived. You are more high functioning than most patients I have who’ve never been through the amount of trauma you have. I was just interested to know how you came out of all that this way, and I think I know now.

I popped and locked, tutted, ticked. I carried over the muscle control I developed in ballet and used it to isolate rib cage from neck and rib cage from hip, and I was as high as someone could get without the help of drugs.

I give her the time to explain. She tells me about dance/movement therapy, the importance of paying attention to our breath, and the physicality of psychology. That muscle is memory, too— contractions and expansions of tissue that have emotional and mental provenance. That a human being is an anatomical organism, a whole made up of many smaller wholes, or systems. She asks if I kept dancing through my teen years and college, and I say yes. Bingo, her smile tells me. Last time she asked me to imagine my happy place, I started crying. I imagined my bed, my head on my pillow, my hands clasped in prayer. She told me to stop and open my eyes, because what I had been considering my happy place was obviously a sad place. Prayer at bedtime, she said, although sacred and important to me, might have been tinged with lonely and fearful memories. She asked me at that same session to imagine another place, and I couldn’t produce one. Let’s try doing happy place again, she says today. Imagine yourself dancing. Four, three, two, one.

It is my first college dance performance, and before me is an audience of two hundred. I am a spider creeping to stage left, the spotlight following me. My arms are two of eight limbs, shooting into the air like daggers, and my feet are ball-heeling in rickety syncopation; I must be frenzied. And frenzied I am. I am a black widow orbiting my mate. I luxuriate in leg movements — the tendu I had practiced since childhood, the full and demi-pliés that make me more insect than pigeon. My arm extensions are to part the web I had spooled around him, biceps and triceps and trapezius activated and in sync. Which should I devour first, head or heart? I say to myself, thinking back to the strangers that visited my bedside when I was asleep. The lights dim, the stage goes black. Applause.

I am scooping air out of air, my pelvis is dipping in sequential Us while my legs bring me forward and back. I do this, with some variation in head and hand flicks for every verse, to M.I.A.’s “Bamboo Banga.” I am at the end of my college dance career; it is the last performance, in fact, and I have just decided to drop dance as a second major. I didn’t want to major in dance, I just wanted to enjoy it. I am giving the routine all my power — or as the song says, “Powah! Powah!”— and when the techno-tribal-world track introduces the sound of dogs barking as an interjection to the chorus, my mouth opens to let out an inaudible howl, then a very loud laugh. I am standing over my prey, paws heavy on the carcass of a mammal who didn’t know that my body was not their body, but mine. I am a pack leader, I belong to a tribe. I am no longer a sad, abandoned, hungry child. I just fed on the meat of someone who now knows they’re weak. The song ends, I am a frozen wolf, and the class and teacher are staring with their jaws hanging.

I am a young bride of twenty-four, newly unveiled from under polyester tulle and dressed in an empire-waist sheath with a lace overlay, as light as the day’s atmosphere. My groom is twirling me next to a koi pond in Central Park, while two sparrows play in a birdbath next to us. I think of us as the two sparrows, washing off trauma from our opposite but parallel pasts. My groom spins me, and my quadriceps and gluteal muscles ground my standing leg so the rest of me is ethereal, and the hem of my dress parachutes up, just like when I was little, and he keeps spinning me around until we make our exit—the hand-holding, snickering, shy little dance our recessional.

One, two, three, four. You can come back now.

I hesitate to come back but know that I have to. It is what dance has taught me to begin with: being present. I open my eyes.

Looks like you found your happy place. My therapist and I are both smiling; we have been rewarded for our work. She tells me that I should dance again, maybe find a local studio or a gym offering dance classes, and tells me that since I was diagnosed with complex PTSD, my body has likely been longing for rhythmic movement, for an excuse to be frenzied. She reminds me that I started seeing her after I had a baby, because having a baby is equal parts physical and spiritual experience. Like dance, childbirth shifts your inside and outside, and nothing is the same after. Like dance, emotions surface once dormant muscles are put to use, once your body learns it can do painful, incredible things. It tests reality, it grounds you. You reach otherwise lost positive body memories. It reclaims your body piece by piece.

 

* * *

I find a local dance studio and a gym offering cardio-dance workouts. I pay for memberships, now that I can afford them. My therapist has released me from under her care. You have your tools now. I feel broken up with, but also ready to move on — now that she’s found me out, where’s the fun? I feel like my brother when he had just been discharged from rehab, like I’m buying a new plant, unsure if I can, as the rehab counselor had instructed him, keep a plant alive. I plan on showing up for Beginner Contemporary and Beginner Hip-Hop at the dance studio, and Afro-Caribbean Cardio at the gym. I consider whether this is my new shorthand, talk therapy as once upon a time, dance as ever after.

I go every week, and I get my husband to take classes with me. It is my happy place — I can see his reflection in the studio mirror, and it is wiggling and jiggling and getting down harder than I will allow myself. He is over six feet of musculoskeletal joy reclaiming memory. Sometimes I stop in a deep squat, immobilized, my face in my hands, because the laughter is paralyzing. When we pick up our daughter from the gym day care, a woman from our class who is also picking up her child says, Your mama and daddy like to shake it, and bless them, they bring me joy! And we are happy to be someone else’s therapy.

But then I go to a community service and prayer meeting with a bunch of old White ladies, ladies who lunch, and not only do I feel out of place in my sports tank and leggings, the “praises” I share from my week are scrutinized and compel the ladies to ask if they can lay hands on me. I say thanks but no thanks, there is no need to pray — Afro-Caribbean dance is not voodoo. They say that it is tribal, therefore pagan, and I must cancel my gym membership at once. Someone suggests I switch over to the very technical, mechanical routine of Pilates. Pilates?! I say, disgusted at the thought of muscle control without magic—of fixing my body without using my body to fix the rest of me. A woman says I am in dire need of prayer, for I might have summoned unwanted spirits into my life. Dance as a curse. But I don’t believe her; there is nothing visible nor invisible that proves her point. My form of dance — the arm throwing, gyrating, backbending, toes reaching into pockets of air — is the visible and invisible me: reflection and person, laughter and tears, spider, wolf, woman. I get up and leave without saying goodbye, and I don’t come back. I find spiritual people with leanings toward the charismatic. If dance is a summoning, it is only summoning mental health, physical strength, and deep relationships for me. I have my unlikeness to my mother to prove it. And I have a daughter watching. I see her snap and bob her head.

My form of dance — the arm throwing, gyrating, backbending, toes reaching into pockets of air — is the visible and invisible me: reflection and person, laughter and tears, spider, wolf, woman.

I become an evangelist for dance. I proselytize one woman and family after another. It is that point in the Carolina summer when even the pool isn’t refreshing — the water is as warm as air in a parked car. I entice moms with an air-conditioned dance studio and a summer activity that will wear out the kids. I also text them things like AND GREAT FOR THOSE EXPERIENCING DEPRESSION OR ANXIETY! TRUST ME! I organize an inaugural Family Hip-Hop and Creative Movement class, fifteen dollars per family. No prior experience necessary, just bring your body and your memories, and we provide the rhythm and routine. It is my mission today to make everyone crazy. Tribal crazy. Just as all of our ancestors, no matter where we hail from, used to do—gather round, pull out the lute and drum, and circle the blazing pit while flitting and frolicking. I tell everyone, Don’t be nervous. Your body just wants to tell you things. I don’t tell them we might travel in space and time, because we will come back to the present. That is the point, anyway.

Five, six, seven, eight. And—

The routine starts with two steps forward, a cross of the arms, and a nod. Step two is a whiz of the right hand to the left knee, as if we’re washing a big window, and we come back to standing position by clapping our way up. From that point, there are jumps, slides across the floor, swiveling on one hand, and marking the air with punches, cutting it with leg hikes, and clutching at it as if to collect all the oxygen for later use. At water break, everyone tries to catch their breath and everyone is talking at once, but nobody is talking to one person in particular. We are all saying, That was so hard! My legs are on fire! My arms feel like twisted noodles! I am more exhausted now than after a marathon! But everyone is saying these things and smiling. This is painful, incredible work.

We all get back in front of the mirror, to our respective spots on the floor, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers. The music starts. One of the moms commits to her body roll, and it is the most sensual I’ve ever seen her. Another mom is looser than I’ve ever known her to be — she organizes homes and offices — and is breathing deep, breathing slow, breathing into her muscles. My daughter, who is an achiever and rule follower, is lying on the floor and doing the same moves as the rest of us but on her own lateral plane. I have succeeded, I think, because everyone is moving through time and space like their pituitary glands are regulated: thyroid is stimulated, oxytocin is high, and there’s nary a trace of cortisol. The only fight-or-flight reaction here is flying en pointe to the ceiling and fighting for stability when balancing on one foot. I watched my mother dance in the rain once — she had both feet on the ground but could not maintain her balance.

I look at myself in the mirror, my reflection looking back at me. We are sweating, our clothes clinging to my/her skin, my/her sweat smells and tastes salty, like the ocean between here and there, then and now, and we are one with ourselves in this frenzy.

She is. I am.

 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez

* * *

Cinelle Barnes a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, is the author of MONSOON MANSION: A MEMOIR (Little A, 2018) and MALAYA: ESSAYS ON FREEDOM (Little A, 2019), and the editor of a forthcoming anthology of essays about the American South (Hub City Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed Reader, Catapult, Literary Hub, HYPHEN, Panorama: A Journal of Intelligent Travel, and South 85, among others. Her debut memoir was listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Bustle and nominated for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award. She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College and was a WILLA: Women Writing the American West Awards screener and a 2018-19 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards juror, and is the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. She lives in Charleston, SC, with her family.

* * *

Records on Bone

Photo courtesy of the author

Tali Perch | Colorado Review | August 2019 | 46 minutes (9,154 words)

 

Vladimir Vysotsky, or the “Russian Bob Dylan,” has been dead for almost forty years, but were he still alive on this day, my father’s sixty-seventh birthday, we wouldn’t be playing his music anyway. We would play the music that made us American — Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Neil Diamond — the same music we play now on this television, in this living room, in this beautiful house of my parents’ immigrant dreams. My brothers and I dance uproariously with our children to “Dancing Queen” and “Born in the usa,” and tenderly with our spouses to “Human Nature” and “Heartlight.” As a child I remember dancing with my father to these songs. But back then the parties were in the cramped living room of our tenement apartment near Newark, New Jersey, or in the similar dwellings of other immigrant families we knew. We ate Russian food, for it was the only food the mothers knew how to make, and the men drank vodka, for some habits are too hard to break. But in those early post-immigration years, no one cared to play Russian music or to be otherwise reminded of a past they loathed enough to flee.

Tonight Mom and Dad watch from their separate loveseats, beaming with joy, in a rare peace that has as much to do with wine and vodka as with the frolicking of children and grandchildren. Occasionally they hold the gazes of my two younger brothers, who managed to be born in America and have no memory of the post-immigration chaos that we three endured. I am jealous of how easily they are able to look each other in the eye. For Mom, Dad, and me, eye contact is like an embrace, a tear, or perhaps, one of Vysotsky’s melodies — too intimate. Our eyes are mirrors reflecting truths more easily avoided. Read more…

‘I Was Being Used in Slivers and Slices’: On Feminism at Odds With Evangelical Faith

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | October 2019 | 19 minutes (5,214 words)

 

I first became aware of Cameron Dezen Hammon during a group reading at Powell’s when she filled in for Alexander Chee at the last moment. Lithe and ridiculously hip, her voice as smooth as glass, as soon as she started speaking, I was mesmerized. Cameron read from the first chapter of her book This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession in which, as worship leader for an evangelical megachurch, she’s guiding the congregation through the flashy funeral of a young girl. Increasingly conflicted about her role as a woman within the church Cameron writes, “We’re both objects in this space, the eighteen-year-old girl and me, two different kinds of painted dolls. We are lit and arranged and positioned to scaffold the belief that women are to be seen in specific, prescribed ways.”

When I finally got my hands on the galleys several months later, I remained enthralled. Cameron’s prose is lean, whittled, spectacularly exact. Yet her world is achingly alive. At twenty-six, a half-Jewish New Yorker, Cameron is baptized into a charismatic evangelicalism in the frigid waters of Coney Island’s Atlantic Ocean during a lightning storm. Soon she’s speaking in tongues and giving testimony and feeling as if she’s, at last, found family. A gifted and ambitious singer, she falls in love with a fellow musician, Matt, and they settle in Texas where they have a child; together they become more and more immersed in various evangelical churches — even serving as missionaries for several months in Budapest — until Cameron and her magnificent voice move up the ranks to worship pastor. Read more…