Women’s Space

I limped around tightlipped through the months it took me to find a job in another city and disappear.  I took a bus to that city and spoke to no one, signed the papers that made me a low-level government clerk, and wound up sitting in a motel room eating peanut butter sandwiches so I could use the per diem to buy respectable skirts and blouses…

Part of me knew what I was doing, knew the decision I was making.  A much greater part of me could not yet face it.  I was trying to make solid my decision to live, but I did not know if I could.  … By day I played at being what the people who were training me thought I was — a college graduate and a serious worker, a woman settling down to a practical career with the Social Security Administration.  I imagined that if I played at it long enough, it might become true, but I felt like an actress in a role for which she was truly not suited.

…There was only one thing I could do that helped me through those weeks.  Every evening I sat down with a yellow legal-size pad, writing out the story of my life.  I wrote it all:  everything I could remember, all the stories I had ever been told, the names, places, images…

I wrote out my memories of the women.  My terror and lust for my own kind; the shouts and arguments; the long, slow glances and slower approaches; the way my hands always shook when I would finally touch the flesh I could barely admit I wanted, the way I could never ask for what I wanted, never accept it if they offered.  I twisted my fingers and chewed my lips over the subtle and deliberate lies I had told myself and them, the hidden stories of my life that  lay in disguise behind the mocking stories I did tell…

Writing it all down was purging.  Putting those stories on paper took them out of the nightmare realm and made me almost love myself for being able to finally face them.  More subtly, it gave me a way to love the people I wrote about– even the ones I had fought with or hated. … I was not the kind of person who could imagine asking for help or talking about my personal business.  Nor was I fool enough to think that could be done without risking what little I’d gained.  … I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people’s lives seemed real…

I finished that month, got assigned to a distant city, put away my yellow papers, and moved– making sure no one who knew me from before could find me.  I threw myself into women’s community, fell in love every third day, and started trying to be serious about writing– poems and essays and the beginnings of stories.  I even helped edit a feminist magazine.  Throughout that time I told stories– mostly true stories about myself and my family and my lovers in a drawl that made them all funnier than they were.  Though that was mostly a good time for me, I wrote nothing that struck me as worth the trouble of actually keeping.  I did not tuck those new stories away with the yellow pads I had sealed up in a blanket box of my mother’s.  I told myself the yellow pads were as raw and unworked as I felt myself to be, and the funny stories I was telling people were better, were the work of someone who was going to be a “real” writer.  It was three years before I pulled out those old yellow sheets and read them and saw how thin and self-serving my funny stories had become.

The stuff on those yellow pads was bitter.  I could not recognize myself in that bitchy whiny hateful voice telling over all those horrible violent memories.  They were, oddly, the same stories I’d been telling for years but somehow drastically different.  Telling them out loud, I’d made them ironic and playful.  The characters became eccentric, fascinating– not the cold-eyed, mean and nasty bastards they were on the yellow pages, the dangerous frightened women and the more dangerous and just as frightened men.  I could not stand it, neither the words on the page nor what they told me about myself.  My neck and teeth began to ache, and I was not at all sure I really wanted to live with that stuff inside me.  But holding onto them, reading them over again, became a part of the process of survival, of deciding once more to live– and clinging to that decision. …

I took those stories and wrote them again.  I made some of them funny.  I made some of them poems.  I made the women beautiful, wounded but courageous, while the men disappeared into the background.  I put hope in the children and passion in the landscape while my neck ached and tightened, and I found myself wanting nothing so much as a glass of whiskey or a woman’s anger to distract me.  None of it was worth the pain it caused me.  None of it made me or my people real or understandable.  None of it told the truth, and every lie I wrote proved to me I wasn’t worth my mother’s grief at what she thought was my wasted life , or my sisters’ cold fear of what I might tell other people about them.

I put it all away.  I began to live my life as if nothing I did would survive the day in which I did it.  I used my grief and hatred to wall off my childhood, my history, my sense of being part of anything greater than myself.  I used women and liquor, constant righteous political work, and a series of grimly endured ordeals to convince myself that I had nothing to decide, that I needed nothing more than what other people considered important to sustain me.  I worked on a feminist journal.  I read political theory, history, psychology, and got a degree in anthropology as if that would quiet the roar in my own head.  I watched women love each other, war with each other, and take each other apart while never acknowledging the damage they did, that we all did… I went through books and conferences, CR groups and study groups, organizing community actions and pragmatic coalition fronts.  I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.

That was all part of deciding to live, though I didn’t know it.  Just as I did not know that what I needed had to come up from inside me, not be laid over the top of my head.  … The decision to live when everything inside and out shouts death is not a matter of moments but of years, and no one has ever told me how you know when it is accomplished.

But a night finally came when I woke up sweaty and angry and afraid I’d never go back to sleep again.  All those stories were rising up my throat.  Voices were echoing in my neck, laughter behind my ears, and I was terribly, terribly afraid that I was finally as crazy as my kind was supposed to be.  But the desire to live was desperate in my belly, and the stories I had hidden all those years were the blood and bone of it.  To get it down, to tell it again, to make sense of something– by god just once — to be real in the world, without lies or evasions or sweet-talking nonsense.  I got up and wrote a story all the way through.  It was one of the stories from the yellow pages, one of the ones I’d rewritten, but it was different again.  I wasn’t truly me or my mama or my girlfriends, or really any of the people who’d been there, but it had the feel, the shit-kicking anger and grief of my life.  It wasn’t that whiny voice, but it had the drawl, and it had, too, the joy and pride I sometimes felt in me and mine.  It was not biography and yet not lies, and it resonated to the pulse of my sisters’ fear and my lovers’ teeth-shaking shouts.  It began with my broken ribs and my desperate shame, and it ended with all the questions and decisions still waiting– most of all the decision to live.

It was a rough beginning– my own shout of life against death, of shape and substance against silence and confusion.  It was most of all my deep abiding desire to live fleshed and strengthened on the page, a way to tell the truth as a kind of magic not cheapened or distroyed by a need to please any damn body at all.  Without it, I cannot imagine my own life.  Without it I have no way to know who I am.

One time, twice, once in a while I get it right.  Once in a while, I can make the world I know real on the page.  I can make the women and men I love breathe out loud in an empty room, the dreams I dare not speak shape up in the smoky darkness of other people’s imaginations.  Writing those stories is the only way I know to make sure of my ongoing decision to live, to set moment to moment a small piece of stubborness against an ocean of ignorance and obliteration.

… I put on the page a third look at what I’ve seen in  life — the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope, who has made the decision to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.

– Dorothy Allison, from Trash, in Writing Women’s Lives by Susan Cahill