Sometimes connection comes in the most unexpected places.
Over a decade ago, I was making dinner for my kids when my body and brain disconnected. Since then, I've struggled to write about the deep and all-encompassing effects of that day. About the realization that everything can change in a moment.
When the words won't come, I often push around paint and images in my journal. Through that process, I found myself searching for images of women with similar conditions to mine, and I found a slew—all Victorian asylums inmates.
This past August, I was fortunate enough to travel to Vermont and attend the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference with a Katherine Bakeless Nason scholarship in nonfiction. Once there, I struggled hard with imposter syndrome, with feeling like I was an untalented fish out of the clever and immensely qualified waters.
WHO WAS I, ANYWAY? My inner critic whispered that into my ear at every chance.
One afternoon, sitting in my room with the gift of time and space to think and create, I went through the manuscript to pluck 3 minutes' worth of words to read during my slot at the Blue Parlor reading the next day.
WHO WAS I, ANYWAY? The inner critic started in immediately. I expected it, that voice telling me I had no right to tell this (or any other) story. It was the voice that sought to be louder and more authoritative than my own voice. It was the voice that aimed to keep me silent and small.
Then I thought of all the Asylum Aunties, as I'd come to think of them. I opened a fresh document and began writing the piece below, which I read the next afternoon.
So, critic—WHO AM I?
I am a woman with a voice. And that is enough.
MY BREAD LOAF BLUE PARLOR READING:
I ran my glue stick across the back of the patterned paper and stuck it onto the canvas. I stared down at the collection of women’s faces I’d printed earlier, all women photographed during their stay in one asylum or the other. I was drawn to Emma Riches, who favored 10,000 Maniacs front woman Natalie Merchant. Fitting. Beneath her name were the words: Insanity caused by childbirth. Her sadness spoke to me as I used tweezers and Mod Podge to fashion a crown of syringes around her head.
Next, I picked up a photo of a formidably boisterous woman, her curly hair pulled into a pile on top of her head. One hand resting against her abdomen, the other extended like maybe she was reciting poetry. A Victorian Lunatic the caption read. Great band name, I thought. The Victorian Lunatics. I hopped on my laptop to size and print an ultraviolet Fender Stratocaster that I glued across her, resting her outstretched hand against its neck. I surveyed the image, looked into her eyes, and whispered, rock on.
I’d taken to this strange and delightful hobby of collaging asylum photographs not long after the realization there was only a thin space of time between myself and that same fate. Hysterical paralysis. Menstrual derangement. Novel reading. All grounds for a husband or father or really anyone male to have a woman committed.
These ladies, like Eliza Josalyne, who convalesced with acute melancholia, were my people. Somehow, by transforming their images, by seeing them in any way other than sick and insane and less than, in some way I was convincing myself that I TOO was more than the sum of what ailed me.
During these sessions, my thoughts often shifted to my own great aunts. I had seven of them. There was Lexi, who canned figs and wore her late husband’s neck ties. My own grandmother, Nettye, wheeled her canister vacuum outside every third Saturday to suck the excess dirt from her rock garden. There was Aunt Vivi, who at age 98 hung up on my grandmother mid-sentence. When my grandmother rushed there to see what had happened, Vivi was mowing the yard, calling out over the motor: I’ve been talking to you for 70 years, Nettye. Finally, I just ran out of shit to say.
So and So can See You Now – I’d heard these words, this phrase, in all its variations in sterile rooms, from nurses, neurologists, homeopathic practitioners –
Yet only here, amidst these ghosts and images of women known and unknown to me did I ever truly feel seen
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