Why I Don’t Believe in New Beginnings
When I was a tween I would write fake profiles of myself for young women’s magazines. In each of them, I was some kind of wunderkind who had managed to survive a broken—but not too broken—home and leapt through the depths of despair—but not complete tragedy—to be an award-winning actress, a published author, a director, and the best damn talk show host you’ve ever seen, all by the age of 14. In my fantasies I was an anomaly. The YM headline read, “Inside Ramou Sarr’s Teenage Dream” in bold pink font. Seventeen magazine named me one of the coolest teenagers in America. Baby tees flew off the shelves after the Teen People writer opened her piece on me with a quip about my “walking Delia’s catalog” aesthetic.
I love this image of me: A chubby 11-year-old in Sally Jessy Raphael glasses writing pages and pages in a Mead Five Star notebook of a fantasy life created based on her endless consumption of media and pop culture. And I’m proud of her, of me, for being able to use my imagination that way. I feel lucky not only to have felt safe being that vulnerable, but also to have had access to the time and space to write those stories. They were never used to embarrass me so if anyone ever found them they were kind enough to let them be.
If you leave it at that, it’s easy to miss the other image. The image of the young girl desperately uncomfortable and forever anxious housed in both a body and a home where she never quite seemed to fit. I’m not even sure if I even wanted to be all those things: actor, writer, director, and talk show host. Sounds fucking exhausting. I just know that I wanted to be somewhere else. It was the ’90s, and I had not yet been exposed to manifestation mania, so who’s to say if that’s what I was doing. All I know is that writing those stories provided me with a few hours of escape from a life that did not feel safe to me.
I had learned a new skill that allowed me to cope. I learned how to create a new life for myself with the tools available to me. The writing provided an outlet for the overwhelming feelings I had of not being enough and not knowing why. I wanted to exist in a world that made sense to me. I wanted a life that made the trauma of that home and that body worth it. I wanted a comeback story. So I made one up.
Around the same time I became the revered journalist whose only subject was me, I found another way to cope.
I don’t remember exactly how old I was that first time, just that I was old enough to be left home alone, or at least old enough to be left alone long enough for me to drive a sewing needle through my fingernail. I have vague memories of the sound the sewing machine used to make from a corner somewhere on the first floor of that townhouse, but I don’t have any distinct memories of it ever being used. I can remember the silence in the room the moment it happened and the tiny dot of dark red blood atop the nail of my index finger. I remember feeling something—if even just enough adrenaline to remind me that I was there.
We all have stories behind why we do the things we do. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others are the same. Sometimes they’re not.
Self-harm doesn’t really make any sense until you’ve done it, and even then you can spend an inordinate amount of time justifying it to yourself. The goal wasn’t necessarily to hurt myself, but hurting myself was the way I got there. In my mind, I just wanted to feel something other than the very specific pain I was already feeling. Like when you eat too much, so you put a heating pad on your belly, and it feels better only because the feeling of the heat surpasses the feeling of a stomach about to burst.
Sometimes I do pick up on patterns.
The self-harm continued in spurts. For a year in eighth grade, then again my junior year of high school. After I was kicked out of law school. And later whenever I was irritable for reasons that sound silly in retrospect: traffic, a wait for the bathroom, the way my co-worker coughed, a food delivery man who stayed on my doorstep too long. It didn’t make sense, but it felt good knowing it was always there when I needed it.
Of course I’ve learned some new, healthier ways of coping in the years since that first time. I buy myself flowers every once in a while. I do yoga. I drink wine. I stay up until four a.m. talking with women who inspire me. I pay way too much attention to my skin. But habits are hard to break and every time I self-harm, I tell myself it’s the last time because I am great at telling myself stories.
As I write this, we are 24 days into January and this is the part where I tell you that I’ve self-harmed this year. Because it’s January, it’s supposed to mean something more than it does. We do this every year. We demand that we be better instead of allowing ourselves the room to grow and figure out how we got here. There is nothing shameful about looking back and inward, and there is nothing freeing about being so consumed with looking ahead that we forget we can pick up and start again at any time. Nothing is ever truly lost.
I once asked a nurse practitioner if we should up my Prozac prescription because I cried that week. I misunderstood the goal in thinking that it was to make it so I had no feelings at all. “This will always be a part of who you are,” she said.
This will always be a part of who I am. The need to make up stories about a life that isn’t mine (but kind of is) and the rare but powerful pull I have to damage my body in order to not feel something else. For a reason I have not gotten to yet, I have found that they are not interchangeable. One will not do when the other is what I crave.
When I was writing and rewriting my story in those notebooks, the beginning was always the same. It wasn’t about erasing the fucked-up pieces of me that made me whole. They were something I needed to get to an ending I wanted. I was writing the middle in a way that led me to an ending in which I was redeemable. But I’m not 11 anymore, and maybe what’s scary about that is knowing that I am in the middle right now and this time I can’t make it up. The fucked-up pieces are building up and becoming bigger, and I worry that this part is too long and you are wondering when the hell this story is going to pick up the pace and get good. “Where is our vindicated heroine?”
The truth is, we start over all the time because we have to. And I suppose it’s fine to call it brave, but bravery feels like less of an accomplishment than it does a necessity. There is, of course, a fear in knowing that when one of those bad coping mechanisms manages to creep in, I can’t ball it up, throw it away, and start again on a fresh page. I’m learning to not be afraid to keep going and knowing that starting again doesn’t mean I’ve failed. There is also some comfort in knowing that I always get to make the choice even if it doesn’t feel like one in the moment.
I don’t believe in new beginnings and why would we even want to? The middle is where the good shit is.
Why I Don’t Believe in New Beginnings
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