It's not that serious, except when it is

On Backrooms, lizard brain, desire, limerence, the uncertainty brought upon by truth, and a few book recommendations

Hello,

There’s a scene near the end of Backrooms where the therapist is running for her life, maneuvering absurd spaces and obstacles to escape the clutches of a spiraling mind. She hurries through a claustrophobically narrow “hallway” only to find herself released onto the edge of a bottomless pit. She has her back to the wall, on a tapering panel with barely enough space for her to stand straight, one wrong move and she will fall into the void. She notices an escape hatch on the ceiling, above the bottomless pit, and a staircase leading to it. It’s a slim staircase without railings, and requires her to risk falling into the void. But it’s the only way out. She shuffles along the wall as the “monster” closes in on her. At one point she is on all fours, crawling up the stairs with a broken leg, doing all she can to stay alive, to get back to reality. It was such an apt representation of what my life feels like. It’s just me, on all fours, trying to survive my own mind.

I’m glad I got over my fear of horror to watch this in the cinema, to be shown what it’s like to be trapped in the backrooms of one’s mind, to sit with a visual representation of what happens when we let the comfortingly familiar but harmful self-narratives run riot in there. A friend calls this our lizard brain. The part of us that hurts us, doesn’t trade in reality or any kind of truth, the part that wants to keep us trapped within our worst fears. I’ve spent years trying to break free from my lizard brain, trying to tame her, to stop her from dousing my reality in gasoline, scorching it beyond recognition. Most days I’m successful, and the days that don’t go my way, I know to hunker down, wait for it to pass. I repeat lines from my favorite Mary Oliver poem to myself, a talisman. I don’t have to be good. I don’t have to walk on my knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. I only have to survive. I only have to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves.

Which brings me to my recent discovery of the existence of the soft animal of my body. My disassociation from my body was verging on a kind of madness. Until last year I didn’t know quite how much of my life was designed around the illusion that I was all mind, no body. Considering where I come from and everything my body has gone through since I was a child, this makes sense. I just wasn’t aware of this split. Because I didn’t see myself, I lived under the illusion that the world didn’t see me either. Somehow the not being seen by the world translated in my mind as not being shameful. A patriarchal hang up, of not wanting to be reduced to my body. But a brown woman with a shaved head demands attention, apparently. I didn’t know this. And I couldn’t cope with it. I also couldn’t quite explain it to my friends. They thought I needed to be told how stunning I looked, how beautiful I am. But I didn’t care how I was being perceived by others, it was that I could be perceived at all that was the issue.

I’ve always been disappointed in the fact of my body — not in a “I don’t think I’m pretty/thin/tall/attractive enough” way but in a “oh my god I exist in a body” way. I thought by existing in my head, by being perceived through my writing, I could somehow replace my body of flesh and blood with my body of work. In my actual body lay all the shame my family wanted me to carry. In my writing I was free to exist without that shame. By responding to my body, by looking at me, the world was making it impossible to deny my shame. It was also bringing up things around mortality, and how alone we all are in our bodies. But how was I to explain this to others?

Late last year I finally managed to articulate what I was feeling to a friend. I was meeting him for the first time in my new look and he couldn’t stop gushing. But the more he complimented me, the worst I felt. Halfway through dinner, I started crying. I tried to explain to him what I was feeling. “I know this sounds silly, but I’ve just realized I’ve a body and people can see it and it’s upsetting me”. He moved to sit next to me and held me as I cried. He kept repeating to me that my friends love all of me, that to them my mind and body are not separate. “And if it helps”, he added, somehow still managing to keep a straight face, “all your friends already know you have a body, and we are familiar with it. And for what it’s worth, I think you carry it really well”. This helped, the knowledge that my body was not new or mortifying to my friends (only to me, yay!), that I didn’t need to protect them from it, that they aren’t repulsed by the fact that I’m basically just a soft animal.

A friend who gets it

It took almost a year to get here, but I’m a lot more comfortable in my body now, I’m able to look at it and I recognize it as mine. I feel grateful for it and I feel joy too. The only major hiccup was when desire entered the chat. Because truly the most mortifying thing about being in my body has been confronting its desires. All of my favorite female writers have written extensively about their desires, how their love for another has made them lose their minds, their selves. Cusk, Heti, Bennett, Ernaux, Rhys, Parker, Sontag, Plath have all spilled ink on this subject and it was the one aspect of their writing I didn’t relate to. I felt smug, better than my literary heroes in this one way. I didn’t waste time pining after men, I was not controlled by my body. Even my therapist noted this lack of sensuality in me, she thought it was unusual in an artist, in a writer who thinks so deeply about everything else. I just shrugged. Then a guy smiled at me from across a crowded room and it all came crashing down (and it wasn’t even the first time he’d smiled at me). We knew each other in passing, and had even spoken a few times. When I tried to explain how this moment felt to a friend, how the room seemed to go quiet and nothing else mattered, she said “normies call it having a crush, but go off bestie”. Having a crush, qui ça, moi? Ew.

When I mentioned this to my childhood friend, she squealed so loud it made me wince. She said she has been waiting since we were teenagers for me to finally have my sexual awakening (strong words, high hopes). The general consensus was that I needed to ask this guy out. But I simply couldn’t imagine being in his presence or being perceived by him. It was too much. I couldn’t imagine a conversation and I couldn’t imagine a world in which our hands might touch. And what I can’t imagine, I can’t realize. This dearth of imagination wasn’t from a lack of trying. There simply wasn’t any headspace to imagine these things because my lizard brain was drowning me in shame for feeling desire. Anything (female) body was labelled bad by patriarchy and I was always so keen to be good that I pushed myself away from all that could jeopardize this (self)perception. That I entered and left a marriage without getting my desire involved is shocking to me now, but quite normal where I come from, especially for women.

A friend recommended Spells For Transmuting Limerence into Liberation by Yumi Sakugawa and it really helped. Sakugawa defines limerence as “a crush on steroids fueled by unprocessed trauma”. I was making meaning out of meaningless gestures, I was using this as a way to beat myself down, to feel ashamed. Classic lizard brain. There’s a graphic in the book, a Venn Diagram of how limerence is the overlap between two circles, the first is a crush and the second is compulsion, addiction, unprocessed trauma, unmet needs from childhood, obsession etc. It was hard work, to allow myself to feel normal human feelings without letting self-loathing and shame take over. I had to keep reminding myself that feeling things and acting on them are two separate beasts, and there is nothing wrong in sitting with the truth of it all.

Last year I told you I wanted truth not only in my writing, but also my life. And while I’m making my way towards that goal, being truthful about desire has been a real test. I continue to be in denial about it. I speak nonsense, I create obstacles, I cause confusion. And these are just things I do to myself. I don’t even know how I’ll cope when I choose to let another person into this space. I hate nothing more than being the cause of confusion and bad feelings for others. I’ve marked it as “body work” and filed it away for another day. This work takes courage I don’t yet possess. Courage to stick to one’s truth in the face of uncertainty and potential rejection. I want to become a person who can trust again and to be able to engage with the truth of the person rather than the fantasies I’ve created in my mind about them. To be okay with the uncertainty that comes when pursuing truth. To be kind, to not feel shame! And maybe once I’ve figured all that out, then I will be ready to ask someone out. I look forward to it.

I can’t believe it’s June already. In January I decided it was time to go back into the real world. I started meeting friends again, and made new ones. I avoided conducting my friendships on my phone or spending too long narrating my life. When I met people I found interesting, I asked to hang out with them. I got over my rejection sensitivity, I worked against my shyness. I let conversations happen. In February I pushed myself to get over my fear of leaving London (related to my shaved head and scared of the attention I was receiving because of it). I visited Florence and Bologna with my sister and it was the best thing ever, to be with her.

March is a bit of a blur because I dared to get some work done in the bathroom and my nervous system was not ready. I got into a parent-child dynamic with my builder (I was the child). I said I wanted to work on being okay with uncertainty and the universe presented me with a top tier uncertain situation. A task that was meant to take five days went on for almost two months. He came to fix stuff but kept breaking them instead. And then wouldn’t admit to it. Or communicate his next move. His communication style is similar to my father’s and it pushed me into a child ego state because both of them were making me feel like I was responsible for things that weren’t in my control. What a dynamic to get into with a random man from Kent, highly do not recommend. I was supposed to get some work done in the kitchen this summer, the lino floor is a mess, the shelves are peeling, some of the cabinet doors don’t shut properly and there’s actual duct tape keeping the top layer of the kitchen counter around the sink in place. And yet, it will have to do because my body simply cannot handle anymore builder related uncertainty right now.

At the end of April I visited a friend in Vienna. It was there, while recounting the year so far to him that I realized I’m still going through it. The only difference is that these experiences are no longer pushing me into the bottomless pit. I’m able to hold myself steady, however close to the edge I might be. I’m able to absorb the pain, to live alongside it, and not let it control my life. When I was having a wobble about it all, another friend suggested an affirmation, lyrics from Lorde’s If She Could See Me Now — “Cause I’m a mystic, I swim in waters/That would drown so many other bitches”. She said she thinks I too am swimming in waters many others would drown in and that I should feel proud continuing on anyway. (Sidenote — wherever possible, fill your life with friends who really, truly see you.)

I spent my time in Vienna having my sense of self un-distorted by the loving, gentle witnessing of my friend and his husband. I saw what a healthy partnership could look like, what family could feel like. When I got back to London at the beginning of May, I ended things with my therapist, blocked my parents from my phone and celebrated my one-year anniversary of having shaved my head. I’m done thinking, it’s time to just live. I asked my therapist if she had any closing advice for me. She said two things I’m holding on to as I continue on my own:

Your will is formidable, Zeba.

You are in touch with the part of you that loves you and wants to thrive. What is my advice in the face of that?

At the start of June I took myself to Paris. I’ve only ever gone to Paris in great distress, as a last resort. So it was nice to visit the city when I was feeling good about life. I walked from morning to evening, going wherever the road took me. I looked at art, I watch the sun rise, and I watched it set. I walked in the rain. I asked myself if I was ready to write again. I confronted the fear that engulfs the draft I haven’t been able to revisit since September. I can’t open it but I also can’t let it go. Anytime I try to write something else, all I can think about is the book I abandoned. Am I unwilling to let it go because I think it’s possible to make it better or am I just too scared to accept that the last three years’ worth of work has not led to a finished book? Am I acting from a place of fear? Is there shame? (With me, there’s always shame.) I’ve now started my fourth year with this book, that was hard to sit with. But then I read the below journal entries by Annie Ernaux:

Sunday, February 4, 2007

… what I’ve written, patiently, painfully, for about four years, and which seemed to me inane from start to finish? I wondered if I was not pursuing a path in the blind way of an ant, having ceased to think about the structure, the whole when it is read.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

What exactly about this text is making me suffer? The fact that I’ve been working on it for too long—four and a half years? Not being sure that it’s acceptable or can be read without boredom? No longer “discovering,” not inventing a reality in a new form at every moment? Gide: When you hesitate, you’re lost. I am indeed, horribly, lost.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

I am desperate. Working for four years, five years on a text that is improbable and, shall I say, unpublishable in its present form, as is? All the books I hear about, or read, condemn me. Each fragment in itself “holds up,” but the whole does not. It would take me months more to do something (how humiliating to say it) “clean.” Or to make huge cuts, as I did for A Man’s Place. Does this form contain my life, my time? I don’t even know how to answer that today. All I know is that it ate me up, doing nothing the way that everyone else does and wanting the world to accept what I do.

I’m grateful Ernaux didn’t give up on any of her books, they are all so important to me. Maybe it’s a sign to not give up on mine, the four years she spent on her book validates the four years spent on mine. Also, this book is not letting me go. There have been other books I’ve written, entire novels that I finished and then never thought about again. This feels different. So I’m going to keep trying. I still want to make chairs and films. I want to keep drawing and painting and collaging and taking photographs. But I’m also going to try and make this book readable. Because really, what else is there to do except keep trying?

Another friend who gets it

I hope the year is going well for you. I hope you are able to move from a place of hope rather than fear. I hope you are surrounded by people who know when to let you have your self-deceptions and when to call you out on your nonsense. I’m going to leave you with a few books I enjoyed reading since my last letter:

Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Love in the Void by Simon Weil, A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, Small Comfort by Ia Greenberg, The Cracks We Bear by Catalina Infante Beovic, Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth and A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot

And a few articles: Good Medicine by Sheila Heti, Mother, Death Becomes You — On the Interior Life of Grief by Moon Charania, Transference in the Afternoon by Jesse Barron, Kafka and Brod by Elif Batuman, How to Have a Career: Advice to Young Writers by Sarah Manguso.

Best,

Zeba