Life in a Torn Photograph

By. Eleanor Higgins

*please note this content may triggering to those who have experienced sexual violence and mental health struggles

She lives in a photograph I have kept folded in my wallet for the past twenty-six years. I never take it out and look at it - the shame of it has burnt holes in my retinas such that I need only know it is there, to know she was real, so that I am never resting on my laurels. Never taking for granted what could be if I let myself go, let go of my self-restraint. She is my nemesis. A hostile spectre bidding forth old taunts and accusations. I hate her. Hated her. Maybe I’m ambivalent now; that’s got to be progress. Right? The truth is three days ago I began to grieve. The kind of grief that pits the stony tombs from your belly and unsettles the bodies buried deep decades earlier. 

I am myriad bodies. I carry the carcasses of my foremothers and they have rotted my flesh to the bone. Each one flinging their trauma through the generations, unable to contain it in one body, one self, oneself. I am the canary in the mine, the daughter of all those mothers, catching each wound in my teeth and swallowing them whole without realizing, breathing them in like air. I am full to the brim and hollow at the same time. At first, I am noisy, visibly sensitive, crying, but soon with the mocking, the suggestion I join the amateur dramatics, I then swallow my aches and hide in my wardrobe. I try to work out how to make them realize I am not just a child being upset over something trivial and I realize that adults rarely make a noise when they cry; their tears spill over their lids and down their faces (if they are allowed to travel that far before being wiped away), and they are taken seriously. Thus, I set about teaching myself how to weep quietly. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t change a thing. The mine is my reality, denied by many. I carry the despair I do not understand nor have words for; it is too old for me to comprehend. As I move through my years it becomes clear that I am unable to send these projective missiles back to where they came from. No one is there to receive them, to be the receptacle, and so I die inside. I fall off the perch. Spectacularly. 

I am a two-year-old body banging my head on the concrete in a fit of something. No one knows what. The translation is tantrum, but it is one of those words that refuses to fit the thing it describes. Tantrum sounds so superficial, but this is an existential protest, an attempt to smash the dis-ease from my still-forming mind. I want to say: to let the cat out of the bag. I have no language for the anguish, just visceral sensations that feel worse than I imagine to be the despair of a baby’s unmet hunger. I am carried like a sack of potatoes by my reins, arms flailing. Hold me.

I am an eight-year-old body. Thighs spreading more than my friends’ in my coral joggers. The biggest kid on the block. Only, old photos tell me this was a mirage. A cruel mind-fuck. I am oozing toomuchness: too loud, too brash, too there. In truth I am slight with little muscles, yet still so monstrous and huge and overpowering. I am precocious and proud and ashamed. I am alone in my youth surrounded by people who care about me. I have shelved myself to come back to later, like canned beans I can make something of in years to come when I have collected enough recipes for a good dish. Inside, it is barren; my internal landscape makes me think of Hiroshima, which I learn about in school. 

I am a ten-year-old body, curled like a comma on the bed in a cottage we have rented for the week in Devon. I am a bookworm inhaling the scent of old crinkled pages. I disguise the cover of the book from my parents and cannot peel my eyes from the descriptions of a young girl with anorexia. It feels like God is speaking to me, offering up a manual for a future time. Something to be kept secret and squirreled away where I hide my sweets.

I am a thirteen-year-old body under the pier of the beach I grew up on. A betraying body responding to the mindless gropes of a boy whose saliva pools at the edges of his mouth and hangs string-like between his lips. Desperate to go through the motions of what a teenager should be doing but not wanting to, I stay silent. I rush home scared by my wetness, unable to tell anyone nor ask if this was meant to happen. Never hungry, I eat constantly. I am half sugar. I am bloated and podgy in the most pubescent, ungainly way. Distressed by my appearance, I tell my mother I will make myself anorexic. I asked for it, didn’t I? 

I am a fourteen-year-old body. Bleeding heavily, nauseous, in pain. I do not speak about periods to anyone, and I hate the squelch of pads, but cannot ask anyone about tampons. I am darkness. My mind is a dank place, unpeopled, and yet noisy. The one thing I love is my child development class in which we run a playgroup from the classroom once a week. I am given a photo of me alongside the child whom I am doing a case study on for my class. Horrified, I see what I have eaten myself into. At home I pull out the bathroom scales from underneath the sink, undress, place them in front of the mirror and step on them carefully. Disbelief and shame descends along with my heart into my belly. I am full.

I am a fourteen-and-a-half-year old body. After school I have forgotten my keys and I go to the garage to look for a spare set. On the floor I see nails and screws strewn about. Without thinking I pick up a screw and drag it across my forearm. I keep scraping over and over my arm, mesmerized by the little beads of blood forming along the lines, and my clackety chest stills for a moment. Later I find a Stanley knife in the kitchen drawer and lead myself into a long-sleeves-all-summer situation for years to come. 

I am a fifteen-year-old body, shrinking violet-lipped, dry-skinned, smug body. See my unravelling, see me feast upon my own flesh, see me disappear, see me. Don’t see me. I am a hologram – here one minute, gone the next. I am carved-out guts-hungry. Untouchable and a self-contained unit with no needs. That’s what it tells me. Less food, more exercise, put the scales within the same square tile of the bathroom floor, step on, step off, three times, take the average, the number never low enough. Triumphant is the North Pole to my desperate South Pole. No one talks about the pride. The arrogance that comes with visible bones breaching through paper-skin.

I am a twenty-one-year-old body lying on a special spinal bed. Broken back and shattered heels; I am fragments of myself. I can’t remember the fall. The jump, I should say. Under the bridge the ambulance crew try to get me onto the stretcher. Leave me here, I plead, you will break me further. They are not kind nor patient. The siren is loud and it feels like I am still lying on concrete as they swerve corners. In resus, they catheterize me. I think, if I was here right now this would embarrass me greatly. A small cut is made near my collarbone. A central line is threaded into me and still I know they’ll never reach my heart. I am above this body. Below, a single tear travels from the corner of her left eye, down her cheek, and into her ear. 

I am a thirty-two-year-old body spinning and dancing to music playing from my phone in the back of a churchyard in Kensington. I am an escapee. I jumped out of a taxi on the way to the burns unit for treatment to a wound I caused. On the run from the psych ward, I am given two choices by the psychopath in my head: hang or burn. I still don’t know why I choose fire, except that maybe I want to be present for my own cremation, to make sure it is really all over. At school we were taught, ‘stop, drop, and roll’. In order to successfully complete the mission I know I must spin and spin to fan the flames that I have conjured with the brandy as fuel and an orange Clipper. A man appears from around the corner and pushes me hard onto the concrete, rolling me along the floor like an old rug. The ambulance say I am no longer alight, but I swear I can still feel the fire biting into my arse cheeks. 

I am a thirty-four-year-old body, rounder and fleshier, and feisty. I hand in my notice and no longer work for the Ministry of Starvation. I have an appetite I can trust and I can hear my body speak ‘enough’ and ‘more’. We are becoming acquainted. I join a feminist activist organization and find my people. My friendships are becoming ocean-deep and a salve to my self-hatred. I have purpose and feel connected web-like, a thread among many holding me to account in the gentlest of ways. Madness lives a parallel life with me – ever-present, but slightly muted. I lie on my therapist’s couch like meat on a butcher’s table. I am no longer a soothsayer. Instead I carry a curiosity about what lies ahead, no longer sure of myself. Pushing my head through the cracks in the concrete, daring to raise myself up above the parapet.

I am a thirty-six-year-old body on hunger strike. My medication is in a box under my bed, which I leave unopened. I am a walking ‘fuck you’ to all things psychiatry. I am confined against my will in a small, barren, pastel-coloured room on a locked psych ward. The soundtrack is of jangling keys and shouts of ‘Medication! Breakfast! Checks!’. The psychopath is back and relays details of how we will get the train to Gairloch, Scotland; eat chips on the beach; and then swim to our deaths. Words come out of my mouth that are not my own. I remember what that bone-deep hunger feels like. Hunger is my drug of choice. I bring her to life, open up my guts for her to scoop everything out. If I am not allowed to leave the hospital, I will shrink myself so there is less of me to claim. I am lying on the floor. I have collapsed and am unresponsive. Waking up in resus I feel invincible. Five days later, I am lying on a gurney while liquid sleep is pumped into my veins and electric currents course through my brain. I am rage. Months later I begin to eat, knowing this is the last hurrah. The final time I will take this sojourn to the very marrow of my bones. I emerge.

I am a thirty-nine-year-old body with middle-aged spread. I am lying next to my girlfriend in a single bed in my little studio. My heartbeat slows as I rest my head under the nook of her arm and I swear it syncs with hers. I am growing. I don’t much like the swell of my belly, the wobble of my thighs, the shape of me, but I am refusing to hate myself. I call a truce and work on truth and reconciliation. I am words and emotions and experiences I never thought possible. I am so much more than this body and the madness. We have somehow become each other – all the pieces are forming the scene of a life in all its bloody, grotesque, beautiful, tragic, comedic, messiness. I am not whole, I do not wish to be, I am evolving into a complex constellation of ‘me’s. 

I am a forty-year-old grieving body. I have compassion for the older bodies of me, but not the teenage me. I am wishing she had someone - an aunty, a role model. Someone to tell her that her body was good, that she was creative to have found a way to survive the despair, that she was not too much just because she longs for connection, for attachment, for a gaze that recognizes her. I think, I wish I could’ve been that figure for her. I would have held her and guided her. I would have been able to see through the ‘I’m fine’s. I would have sat down with her, pulled a chair up to her table. I would have given her more than food. 

She is still in there. She lives in my wallet. I take her out now. I’m looking at her. She is a torn photograph, ripped from who she was meant to be. She’s not smiling with her eyes. Her hands are big and her body spreads. She takes up space and has an apologetic look on her face. I think, you are not shame anymore. I refuse to carry you as shame. I return her to my wallet; she will rest there for ever. I turn my gaze inside. I see her wandering the playground, trying to disappear. I see her desires, her thwarted dreams, her impossible situation. The canary gasping for breath on the mine floor. I adopt her. I am her aunty now. I pick her up in two careful hands and bring her with me. I tend to her with breath and light; she’s been blinded by darkness for so long. She squints. I see her look at me. I reach out a hand, and we walk until our footsteps become one.

Eleanor Higgins is a queer British writer of poetry and non-fiction. She is a feminist, survivor of madness and passionate about telling her stories in the name of healing and breaking down barriers to understanding those who experience mental distress. Eleanor is currently studying for a Master’s degree in Psychoanalytic Studies and teaches writing at a project for people experiencing psychosis. She lives in London.

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