blood on our hands

body horror is every woman's genre. but our performative squeamishness, silence and shame is a self-inflicted wound.

via beauty in blood

…but all mothers know what to do with blood.

This was a line in my book All of This at the end of chapter fourteen. I could have sworn it said all girls and not all mothers but I went back to double check and there it was. Mothers.

The line was in reference to my son, who had just cut his face shaving for the first time; a segue wedged between a chapter on parenting four children alone during the pandemic and the chapter I wrote about bleeding all over myself.

Chapter fifteen, originally titled My Mourning Period was the first chapter I wrote even though it would fall closer to the end of my manuscript. When you write a proposal for a book you include at least two sample chapters and it was important for me to include one that I knew would attract the right editor or repel the wrong one. And while All of This was only my second book, it marked more than two decades of mining moments of weakness, embarrassment and shame in order to own them with curiosity. Externalizing every experience by publicly claiming what I was conditioned to keep to myself.

Free-bleeding in white lace underwear.

this is my next tattoo // via Julia Fox’ IG

I do not see the point in writing memoir, personal essay or anything pertaining the female experience if one is unwilling to explore both the poetry in the parts we are supposed to edit out and the urgency of exploring the rooms that are only marked private because we were told we would lose whatever power we had by opening them.

But a power that depends on a pretend life is not real power.

Even still, I am met with women who feign disgust over shared experiences that mirror their own because they were taught to be ashamed.

Because women are rewarded for maintaining an exterior devoid of truth.

Because looking at the surgical enhancements of a woman’s face is far more palatable than reading about the surgical experiences of her reproductive system.

Because there are no during pictures in a cosmetic surgeon’s split screen. Only before and afters.

I long to read an anthology of books that include what has been historically omitted from the work of women out of fear it would turn people off or divulge too much information. I want to know where every woman writer drew the line between what they believed would be digestible to audiences and what would be… too much.

I want the bruising and the keloiding and the scabs before they fell off.

The stains of afterbirth. The episiotomy stitches and C-section staples.

I want a three page description of cervical tissue and the jello-shots of discharge that roll down the toilet like marble runs.

I want books and books of the tampon scene in Miranda July’s All Fours.

I want to know about the UTI behind the Academy Award Acceptance speech that was bravely delivered to an audience brimming with misogynists.

I want writers to write assuming their audience isn’t squeamish and doesn’t require trigger warnings because real life DGAF about any of that. Real life gives you a body that bleeds and shits and feels pain in places we can’t describe because no one gave us the words for what this feels like or what that is.

Because a lady never talks... she said, hemorrhaging to death.

***

I work with writers one on one. I have a handful of clients that I have been fortunate to work with over the years and I love them because that is what happens when people show up honestly on their pages. To me, they are impossible not to love. Even when they’re disgusting and make questionable decisions — are often the villains in their own stories. But in order to get there — to work together — we have to make it through the introductory consultation. We must make sure we are a fit.

Most of the time we aren’t. Most of the time I can tell within minutes that the writer seeks approval from her audience and that is no way to write a memoir. Or an essay. Or anything, really. If you are afraid of what people will think of you, you will never tell the truth. If you want to be loved by the masses, you have come to the wrong place. Unless, of course, you want to learn to write a different way…

There is a difference between hunger and thirst. In those who refuse to break a common human experience to her audience nicely, recognizing that the silence and saccharine we saran wrap our stories with does not protect us — and those who say, “I didn’t need to know that,” prioritizing their personal squeamishness over community service.

And while free-bleeding isn’t for everyone — both literally and on the page — hiding the truth about women’s pain, pleasure, mess and mayhem puts us all in danger.

Beyond that, a woman who focuses on her individual reputation becomes the kind of woman who must maintain one.

And just like there is nothing more obvious than a woman who DGAF, there are few things more heartbreaking than a woman who refuses to acknowledge the bleeding — her pain tolerance proof that she has become so good at hiding the parts of her that break and bend and burn that she assumes it is normal to hemorrhage alone.

To fake pleasure.

To say ‘I love you, too,’ even when she doesn’t mean it anymore.

***

Pretending that our bodies don’t bleed and shit and become sick, deformed, grotesque will not make them any ‘cleaner,’ softer or more beautiful. It will just make them more confused, restricted, ashamed.

Guts are still guts even if you keep them in air-tight containers. And there is a difference between women in community and Tupperware parties.

***

I have always got off on writing about the inner life — made a name for myself in my teens writing essays about humiliation. My story, I KISS LIKE A HORSE which was about a boy who told everyone at school that I couldn’t kiss, was the first piece I ever read to a theatre-packed audience. I wanted girls to know that it was okay if they slut shamed you — that not only would the moment pass but maybe one day you could do something with it. Maybe some day you could write story after story about the kinds of things people tried to tell you to make you feel bad about yourself.

I was fifteen when I wrote that piece, and in the time my peers spent laughing at me behind my back, I wrote an essay that was translated in 50 languages — taking my story and subsequent power back from the boy who tried to humiliate me and the girls who couldn’t wait to drag me with his words.

They could talk shit all they wanted and I’m sure some of them still do, but I was the girl in the newspaper, senior year. I was the one who took her humiliation and turned it into a career.

That was my first lesson in how girls and women do a man’s dirty work for him.

I was never afraid of boys hurting me, I was afraid of girls hating me. But something happened as soon as I started owning my story as opposed to hiding in bathrooms during lunch time. I became the girl who wrote about being a girl. I became the girl who other girls slipped notes to in class with confessions of their own girlhood. And then it was letters by mail. From prisons. From rehabs. Bedrooms from small towns.

Being a girl became my superpower. And everything that came with girlhood became fuel.

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I learned very quickly that the right people will love you if you if you are willing to be real with them and the wrong people will hate you because you remind them of all of the ways they can’t be real back.

Because most girls are raised to be afraid of what it will smell like if they open all those plastic containers full of blood, shit and experiences that women aren’t supposed to share.

Not that I blame a single one of them. It takes fucking balls to open the container. But once you do, you’re fucking free.

And while the wrong people will ALWAYS say, ‘TMI much?’ and ‘we didn’t have to know that,’ and ‘oh god her poor children,’ one day those poor children might even be proud of you. And that TMI might save someone’s life. And someone will come up to you and be like, hi, because of this thing you wrote, I left my marriage…

I changed my life.

I wrote a book.

I decided to become a mother.

I decided not to.

I made an appointment with my doctor.

I feel less alone.

I am less alone…

Which in turn, will make you feel less alone, too.

***

I was originally going to title this post, information is like nipples, everyone has them but women aren't supposed to show theirs. Because it’s fucking true. Because Girl’s Gone Child (est 2005), was an extension of that idea and I am nothing, if not consistent.

And as someone who has been flashing her ‘tits’ her entire life — twenty of those years, as a mother (scandal!) — I can tell you that the only reason we are told we should keep our ‘TMI’ to ourselves is because telling the truth makes liars uncomfortable. And women have been taught that our safety depends on our ability to lie.

But I think after thirty years of personal experience, I am in a position to tell you with some authority that it doesn’t, actually. The truth does. Our safety depends on the truth.

All of this to say, I’m bleeding. Heavier than I have in years. A fucking deluge because apparently that’s what happens after this. And no tampons are allowed in until I’m healed.

So here I am, at my desk, sitting on a pad the size of Infinite Jest. Just like I was the day the North County Times came to my house to take this picture of me, all perched and perky on the diving board of our pool.

A mother girl who fucking bled and never stopped.