Psychosis and Becoming a Woman Again
4
Leading up to a Women’s New Moon Gathering in December 2019, I began to put together that for most of my teenage and adult life I’d been working toward trying not to be human. New Moon Gatherings were a weekly event for women to talk about anything that had to do with being a woman. This usually meant women shared things about their menstrual cycle and bodies that I never heard of and would never forget. Most of the things said were wild to me and were often astounding in the way of shock, but it was a place I could learn to become a woman, a human again, and talk through it.
Humans bleed, sweat, eat, release waste, and make sacrifices. Being anorexic made human-like symptoms almost disappear. Even before my anorexia, I’d refuse to eat in front of anyone that wasn’t immediate family or my closest best friend. I’d refuse to use the restroom, even during overnight stays (which meant that on one occasion I peed inside my jeans in my Toyota station wagon on my way home in the morning), and even drinking water in front of anyone made me feel self-conscious or ugly. My mother used to say she looked ugly while chewing because she had “a small mouth”, so I thought I must too, and for some reason the thought of looking ugly mattered.
During the first phases of beginning to recover from anorexia nervosa (restrictive), I had moved to Aiken, South Carolina after coming home to Indiana from living in Boulder, Colorado and suffering what some think was a mini-stroke and what others think was a nervous breakdown. I lived on a horse farm in Aiken and was sent their by my father to rest and recover. Today, in Aiken, I was using a pitchfork to shovel horse and donkey manure into a spreader connected to a Kabota in the hot South Carolina sun. I felt an intense sensation under my arms, seemingly expressing from the deepest part of my core, an itchy wool sweater being brushed on the inside layer of my skin in several places around my body.
I stopped, pitchfork tongs poking slightly into the ground, my gaze blurry into the vastness of the farm. I was disappointed. I was ashamed. I was sweating. I hadn’t sweated since beginning to have anorexia years ago.
I wanted to panic, but two other women were with me and I didn’t want to be even more embarrassed or frighten the animals in the pasture by throwing the pitchfork, screaming, and hyperventilating, so I quietly continued to pitch again, pressing my lips together.
Clearing the pastures occurred a few times a week, according to everyone else. In my recovery memory, it was every day. I believe the others. It was a task that truly kept my spirits alive. If I’d be out working at the local farmer’s market or if I accidentally slept through the event, I’d be genuinely upset.
One woman would drive the Kabota, two women would pitch. The pitching women would walk with the Kabota as it moved from manure patch to manure patch, and the woman driving would call out ever so often to the pitching women, “you missed one!” she’d point with her finger, or, “over there!”, the horses and donkeys following. Eventually, the pasture would be clear and one woman (usually myself) would drive the Kabota down the road to turn on the spreader and fertilize a riding field surrounded by tall, thin pines and sprinkled with hand-made, wooden riding jumps.
The year before, I had been living in an intentional community in Boulder, Colorado when I suffered from a mental breakdown, mini-stroke, or whatever one wishes to call it. I knew I had to leave and return home to Indiana. Within my breakdown, I had forgotten how to pack a suitcase. I stood there in front of it, unable to make sense of what to put it in, how to fold an article of clothing, or how to organize. I would be unable to do things like organizing or problem solving for six months or more after this. I would also suffer from severe depression, anxiety, and psychosis. When realizing I couldn’t pack my suitcase on my own, I would call a friend who was driving through Colorado on his way to Indiana from Arizona to help me. I would follow him from Colorado to Indiana at 85 plus miles per hour, only stopping occasionally for gas, and the one time he would be pulled over for speeding. I remember how incredibly soothing simple tasks were. Simple tasks seemed to stop the wildness and mixing-up in my brain. “Ok, you can follow me back to Indiana, but I have to get back for work so I’m not going to stop, which means I’m not going to wait for you if you get behind.” And he meant it, he left me at a truck stop near Indianapolis in the middle of the night, men swirling like sharks around my tiny Scion tC as I tried to curl up my boney body to nap against my tinted window. I just couldn’t drive anymore. It still amazes me that I even made it that far driving in the state-of-mind I was in.
When I got home, I could barely function at all; I could barely speak or make sense of the months I spent in Boulder. What happened? Why had I walked the streets downtown, in my sweet, nearly-translucent blue birthday dress and saddle-leather wedges not knowing how I got there or where I was or where I was going? How can one forget how to fold clothes and put them into a suitcase? Why would one have a panic attack in the middle of the night and go on a run in their pajamas because their male immigration-lawyer-roommate was cooking eggs? Why couldn’t I ask for help? Why was there a community meeting to decide if the living room salt lamp could be shut off during nighttime hours so it didn’t shine into my windows-to-the-living-room so I could maybe beat my insomnia? Then, I’d try to leave Indiana again to go back to Boulder; after all, I had said before leaving, “I didn’t call off my wedding just to stay around here!” But I’d lose strength somewhere around the Ozarks, stop at a café, read the Bible, cry, talk to strangers, and head home. Then I’d stop at a nearby hiking spot and spear a stick into the mud to honor the Eskimo tradition of doing so when one was angry, and keep on driving away from the west. This was all part of the psychosis I had been experiencing. Part of my psychosis was that everything in my head was jumbled, decisions darted back and forth, I’d be lost in physical space, in time, and within my own thoughts or understandings.
In my parents’ front yard in Indiana, I was picking up sticks with my father. There was a wheelbarrow, a warm breeze, a forgiving sun, my dad’s flannel shirt panel flapping with the oak leaves, and we’d bend, grab, pull, and place into the barrow. Again, again, again, the same thing; it was the most peaceful I’d felt since leaving Indiana earlier that year. My dad is one to be fairly quiet. He’s easy to be with. His handmade birdhouses were visible in the tree line. He didn’t ask questions. He only spoke if I needed him to or if he had something significant to say. Today, we were silent. Silence was much needed. Simple tasks like this were needed. Days and weeks ahead, my mental state, my capacity to handle anything at all, and my body would rapidly become more and more deteriorated.
And, many months later, I’d sweat.
In the field that day in Aiken, I pictured myself in Boulder. I had run down the stairs from my bedroom, to the living room, past the salt lamp, and received an ill-willing gaze from my roommate, the manager of the intentional community. The day before she had sat on my bed and gave me a book entitled Women Who Run With Wolves and said she could tell I needed it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t concentrate enough to read anything. She sat with her husband at the long dining room table, both of their red ponytails draping down the decorative wooden seat backs. They were drinking out of bowls with their hands. Her beautiful, floral watercolor art hanging above them. I looked down to gauge what I was wearing and why I received such a stare. I had a shorts bra on, tiny running shorts that gripped like yoga pants, and a black, see-through long sleeve zip-up, undone. I was a size 00. I was only skin, minimal muscle, and bones. She had called me Willowy and we all changed my name to June, which was the month I arrived.
My mind left my memories and I looked back up to the South Carolina field. I missed being that small, feeling superior in that way. I missed being asked if I were a model, a professional runner, in the New York ballet. Now, I was sweating. I was human. I was not a willow tree, or a dancing bird, or an athlete. I was pitching manure into a tractor bed, my underarms and upper lip full of moisture. I still hadn’t menstruated in five years, I still barely released excrement, ate, or made any sacrifices besides not eating. One by one, throughout recovery, each of these human symptoms would come. One by one, I’d turn back into a human woman. Eventually and slowly, I’d read the book the roommate gave me; it would spark uncountable epiphanies.
Years later, at a New Moon Gathering, I’d listen to a woman share how her blood was brown and chunky and how she’d make a New Moon blood face mask by pulling her brown blood from her “woman-opening” and spread the yeast-infected substance to her cheeks and nose, how she’d wash it off twenty minutes later and taste iron. After my disbelief of such a ritual, but also in trying to understand it, I’d share that I bled for the first time in six years. Women around the circle would tell me it was a sign of health. What I wouldn’t share is how much that felt like a failure to a woman who still wanted to look like a prepubescent girl with anorexia.
I’d throw a meditation note into the fire at the end of the meeting, after a couple of other woman, and say, “I’m shedding trying to be a unicorn, one that doesn’t bleed, poop, or eat.” And we’d all be able to laugh about it. And I’d try to be ok with the sweating, the bleeding, the eating, the excrement. I’d try to do more and more simple tasks.
