“Here is the angel, who does not exist, and the devil, who does not exist; and man, who does exist, is in between them and, I cannot help it, their unreality makes him more real for me.” - Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
These past few years have been rough. I was having coffee with an older friend of mine in Adelaide, Australia, in a bagel place tucked away in the corner of the city’s central market, in a chance meet-up where we both happened to be visiting a continent neither of us calls home. It was one of those morning dates where I don’t remember saying much, but the look on my face must have been enough. “Twenty seven is tough,” he said, hair bleach white under halogen lamps, “I don’t know what’s your relationships with stars, but there’s an event that happens before the thirties, the Saturn Return.” I looked up, surprised - he was also my tax advisor, and I was not expecting it from him. “It’s about reevaluating who you are and where you’re going. What you want out of the rest of your life.”
I did not know about the stars, but I did believe in what he was saying. I was starting to notice patterns, themes that came up in the waters of my psyche, reflected in the wheel of my life. I was getting tired of certain mental landscapes and phantasmagoria, yet uncertain how to get myself out of the rut. Inner demons, I called them. They had stuck to me years ago like barnacles and the only way to deal with them seemed to be not dealing with them. Thoughts about my body, my abilities, how I was perceived by others. Fear around being seen and witnessed. At times just a lot of self-hate. It had compressed me into a tiny claustrophobic space where every move out- and forwards set off a cascade of negative emotions and it was easier to not move at all.
And then there was what was happening outside, the demons of the real world. Some months after the conversation I discovered that someone had started harassing me on the World Wide Web. The perpetrator was supposedly anonymous, but then not really. They left traces of who they might be, where their anger might stem from. A friend said that this is clearly made by someone whose sole goal is to ‘get to’ me. Most recommended to simply ignore it. One said none of it made sense - even in the context of a legal and public fight I had found myself in, one that had left me broken and ill. I retired from social media - the little of it I had engaged in - and found comfort in my pattern of hiding away the moment going gets tough. Like a crab in a shell. Harmless, hidden, hesitant. Thoroughly exhausted.
Thoughts of death would follow me, but not necessarily in a sinister way - more like a shadow or a ghost letting me know it was there. At a gathering in the early morning, just as the sun was coming up over my friends sprawled out on a sofa, I saw one hundred years into future - the skin on their faces fading away and letting the bones underneath shine through, decomposed. Some weeks later, at the end of summer, I would find a dead bird in front of the cabin I was staying in, rotten and full of worms. I picked it up gently with a shovel and held my breath. Half of it had already disintegrated, but not the eyes. I thought of the 13th Tarot card and what it signified and laid the bird gently between the blueberry shoots, for the ground to take.
And then the harasser posted a drawing of my naked lookalike lying eyes open, thighs bloody - with a note that it depicted me, dead.
The previous had been sheer obscenities - the soft underbelly of the collective unconscious - of being called a hag, a witch, a prostitute. There were mentions of my previous workplace (it was, after all, a lousy labour dispute I was involved in, with a touch of 1990s Eastern European business practices for the taste). Lewd depictions of various sexual acts. Politics came up. Racism. Anything and everything that touches the nerve, really. So indeed it would make some sort of poetic sense that as the rage grew it crescendoed in a depiction of death.
But then came the most surprising part - so absurd that it knocked me out of the stupor, the dream, the phantasmagoria and the night-mare that had been living on my chest, holding my breath, constricting my breast. The platform I was on did not think any of it violated their terms of service. Two reviews found that both the picture and the comment and the entire account bearing my full name first and last did not go against their community guidelines. They told me I can challenge it in court, if I want. In court. The ball had been removed from the playing field.
This meant there was nothing I could do, unless I wanted to expend more energy, more resources, more money and more emotions into this entire thing.
I looked at the time stamps when the ugly words had trickled through the fiber optic cables lining the earth. Last Saturday evening. One summer day in July where air had been unusually warm for the latitude I was in. March and April endlessly and ceaselessly. Marking the court dates, the public interviews I had given, the negotiations I was in.
I thought about the person behind this. Many of my friends thought along - what on earth were they trying to achieve? I thought about how sad it must be - to be denied life’s pleasures because of your mind. A mind that, instead of taking it all in, the summer air, the connection, the juice and the marrow, has played itself into a corner where the only thing left to do is to become a demon.
But then of course I had behaved the same way with myself for years. Every time I had been up on the stage, every time I had given an interview, every time I had met someone new, every time I had been photographed or videotaped, the perpetrator in me had turned on and taken myself, my body and my mind, to pieces, in a much crueller way than anyone else ever could. I was immobile and dead, or at least playing it, like an opossum or a common swift. A deer in headlights, its horns a lightning strike against the dark. Unable to put anything out, to put myself out there, to show my face and my heart so close to the skin and tissue that protects the pericardium.
I know that it takes a long time to heal. A really fucking long time. Of half-there years, some mornings where it feels almost gone, others where I’m back in the trenches. I also know there’s no magic that will make the words in me, the ones that have been on repeat for almost a decade, simply disappear. So there is really only one option left. I must figure out how to live with the demons, even if they don’t actually exist.
Thanks for reading. I might post something new one day, so if you want to keep in touch you can subscribe below and do a little rain dance in your garden:
