The Girl in the Mirror

Dead.

I am dead. 

The walls pass by unseen and the floor does not exist as I walk down the halls. The charade I put on has been dropped. No one is around to see me as I am. Empty. I turn the corner and continue my walk, more from habit than from thought. The lights overhead seem to hurt. The dark is what I want; a never-ending darkness that I can walk into and keep walking through. I don’t want life. Another corner and this time I walk up to a door, three paper snowflakes and a purple whiteboard stick to the fake wood. My key fits. I open the door, drop my armload of blankets, boots and sweaters and close the door.

I am walking down the halls again, but I don’t know why. There are paper snowflakes on the floor, as well as pieces of my decorations. I had spent hours on that. Someone must have come through the hall and torn it all down. I stop and stare at nothing, wondering why they would do that, but not caring to know the answer. The bathroom - that’s why I’m walking. It’s behind me. Oh. I shuffle until I’m faced the opposite direction and once again begin padding silently down the dim hallway. There’s the door. It’s dark inside. I don’t like the dark. I turn on the light and carefully, slowly, place my key and key chain on the little metal shelf above the sink. It’s so fascinating how it rolls to the very edge and then that tiny metal lip keeps it from falling into the sink.

I look up.

Her eyes are dead. They stare unseeingly from the face in the mirror. Her hair hangs limp and slightly tangled by her face. The make-up has gotten smeared from lying on the bed. Her mouth is slightly open, the lips chapped; but her eyes – I look for life in them, but they just gaze back at me, not blinking. I see the dark blackness of the pupils, the green-gray-blue of the irises and then the whites, tinged with pink. 

I hate the face in the mirror. There’s nothing beautiful in that face, no smile, no laugh, no life. I hate her.

I drop my eyes – I can’t look at her. The floor is covered with trash and the toilet is plugged. I pick up my key again and walk out, flicking the light-switch gently. The hall is still shadowy and littered. The big bathroom is down the stairs. Each step down is eternity. 

The big bathroom is stark and bare and I hate it too. Four shower stalls, dripping water, drift past. The floor is cold. The trash can in here is full too. The four sinks are just around the corner; but there is a huge long mirror there, watching for me. I don’t want to look; I don’t want to expose myself to its hateful words. I keep walking. I can’t stop. The mirror is there, passing slowly by, begging me to look. And I do. 

She’s there again – that ghost gliding beside me – her eyes portals to nothingness. I don’t recognize her, but she recognizes me. She hates me too. She wants me dead so I can join her behind the mirror’s glass. I’m afraid. The mirror ends and I’m staring at a wall. I’m stupid. The toilet stalls are in front of me and I walk to the very end one. The fluorescent lights are gossiping again, pouring light into every flaw and pockmark of my body, of me. 

I have to return to the mirror to wash my hands. The eyes of the dead girl lock onto mine and destroy me. I can’t hold onto myself, but letting go releases a terror I didn’t know existed. I don’t want that. She can’t have me; but she will.

There’s a fly on the wall outside the bathroom. It’s crawling slowly across the white-painted bricks. I stop and stare for a long time and then slowly reach out my hand to squash it. It disappears into the air in a tiny gray streak. Maybe, if I tried hard enough, I could disappear too and the girl in the mirror wouldn’t be able to get me. I stand there and look at the wall, seeing her, and hating myself. Then I turn, walk up the stairs and open my door.

A description of depression and depersonalization written in 2013

Open Letter to Myself

*This letter was part of an essay I wrote for Scholars class, in answer to the question "How are you going to live your life?" This is not a comprehensive ethic for my entire life, but simply what I am asking myself to do at this time. I have posted it because there are people in the world who need to hear it.

Dear Cheyanne,

Question. Act. Live. Every day that goes by you shapes a little bit more of who you are and if you don’t take control of who that person is, you will wake up one morning and discover you are a stranger in your own bed. So, because I am you and you are me, here is what I want you to do – ask questions, of others and of yourself. Act on what you believe to be true. And take the time to enjoy living. Don’t complicate your life beyond this. For one thing, we both know you can’t handle it. For another, I don’t have the time or energy to develop an ethics like Plato or Aristotle or Jordan. You need simplicity. So just question, act and live.

Remember reading Franz Fanon and having your breath taken away by his last line? “Oh my body, always make me a man who questions” (206). Say that to yourself – ‘always make me a woman who questions’. Don’t take what others say for granted. Don’t accept the status quo. Don’t believe exactly as you are taught simply because you sat in a classroom listening to a person with a degree. Progress dies when questions are silenced! Ask the questions that need to be asked.

What’s wrong with being gay?

Why are Arabs demonized?

Can God and evolution exist together?

Might every religion hold some truth?

How can we be better people?

Don’t assume – ask. When you would give the excuse “but I thought…”, Daddy used to say “Don’t think. Check.” He was wiser than you realized. Question the answers you receive, always think for yourself and strive to understand. Do not be afraid of asking a question or receiving an answer.

I know you have been afraid in the past. Your search for God has caused you to ask questions that other people have not appreciated. You have been scorned for doubting the primary-school answers given to you.  You have suffered ‘religious interventions’ by friends and concerned adults who have heard your questions and taken them as an indication of your rejection of God. I know these reactions have discouraged you from asking, from seeking. I understand. Remember, you are me and I am you. Remember, too, that Scholars and your parents are the reasons why you still believe in the Divine. Do not stop seeking with everything that you are! Believe the words in the Bible that say  "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13, NIV) and believe the Bhagavad Gita when it says “If you focus your mind on me and revere me with all your heart, you will surely come to me; this I promise, because I love you” (Mitchell 195). I do not know what you will find or who you will become in this search, but do not give up.

Don’t just question others and question God – question yourself. In the rush of living, in the myriad answers and limitless information available to you in your search for truth, do not lose track of who you are; always question who it is that you are becoming. Be aware of yourself and your actions. Evaluate your character, your choices, your morality – constantly. Ask yourself who it is that you are, who you are becoming and whether that is the person you want to be. I do not know who you will be in ten years, or even five years, or two months from now; but you won’t be the person you are now. You can’t be. You are alive and, therefore, you change. Make sure those changes make you the person you want to be.

You have values and beliefs, so act on them. You believe that every human has worth and that they deserve to be treated with kindness and respect. Oppose racism, sexism, prejudice and hate. Support and advocate for those who are abused because of their skin color, their religion, their gender or the people they choose to love. Don’t just protect people; protect the other creatures that inhabit this earth, as well as the earth itself. Listen to Elizabeth Johnson when she says “We are not the center of everything. It is not all about us. Rather, we belong in the first instance as fellow creatures alongside God’s other creatures” (272). She goes on to say, “living the ecological vocation in the power of the Spirit sets us off on a great adventure of mind and heart, expanding the repertoire of our love” (286). You believe that love is an action and not a feeling, a verb and not a noun. This ‘ecological vocation’ is yours. Act on it.

If you are to act in the world, you will have to engage with it. I know this can be difficult. The images of hunger and thirst, pain and violence, hate and destruction tear you apart because you want so much for the world to be beautiful and kind, but you cannot hide yourself away and shield yourself from the ugly tragedies that occur; you may miss the beautiful miracles. The world is not static and to be a part of it you must be changing as well. Embrace the change that occurs around you and strive to create the best world possible. Be a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan, involved in your family, your town, your country and your globe.

You will hear stories. I used to think that stories were just words, thrown together in a pretty or ugly mess, that told truths or lies or mixes of both. I never believed in the power of stories like I do now. Scholars taught me that stories can change history, change hearts. I learned to recognize the pain, the joy and the reality of life through ‘fairy-tales’ like The Odyssey, My Name is Asher Lev, Two Solitudes, and Memory of Water. The ‘true stories’ like City of Thorns and Our Story allowed me to share brief moments of life with people who existed in my own time and on the same planet. It was Thomas King who woke me up to stories. In his book The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, he ends each story with a challenge, almost identical, but tailored to the preceding account. Here is one example: “Take Louis’s story for instance. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Cry over it. Get angry. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now” (King 119). For all the stories you read or hear, always end with the voice of Thomas King saying, “You’ve heard it now.” Listen to stories. No, don’t just listen, seek them out and treasure them. Learn from them, not necessarily life lessons or spiritual instruction, but maybe just what the memory of “jasmine on a night in July” in Palestine smells like and what it means to a poet who has lost his home (Darwish 95). Listen to stories.

You have suffered for too many years in a darkness that makes you feel nothing. I want you to enjoy life again. Make time for family and friends, caring for them and letting them care for you. Recognize that the past cannot be changed and move forward. Stop blaming yourself for other people’s mistakes. Always learn, be proud of your femininity, live with art and accept yourself as you are.

You thrive on knowledge, on discovery, on learning. Don’t stay the same person that you are now. Today, you are better than you were four years ago and the Cheyanne of the future can only be better if you continue to learn. Plato gives the famous allegory that educating someone is like leading them out of a dark cave into the light of day (Bloom 193), but perhaps education and learning is less like a cave and more like a tunnel – it may get brighter as you walk, but you will never quite reach the end. Always seek new knowledge, always reach for something more, something deeper and further and harder to find. Be open to the changes it brings in you and take joy in those changes.

One of the most difficult changes I have ever undergone is becoming a woman. The history of women’s rights is not a clear and clean picture of progress and equality. It is a battle. Because you were born female, you were born into that battle. Not everyone chooses to fight, but you must. I am not giving you a choice in this – you are a fighter and this is your battle. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “to explain her [woman’s] limits, we must refer to her situation and not to a mysterious essence: the future remains wide open” (750). That wide-open future is what I want for you and for every other woman I know. Fight for a future where equality is the norm, where the situation of women does not differ from the situation of men. Live your life proud to be a woman, embracing your body, your abilities and your sexuality. Do not be passive. Accept your feminine body, be confident and be happy.

Think back to Italy, when you were learning about art and beauty and when you realized how essential art is to human survival. Make a place in your life for art and continue to make art a part of you. Take time for music, dance, poetry, paintings, sculptures, theatre and novels. Give yourself the room to express through those mediums too, being patient with your creative processes (which you hardly ever do) and recognize that art doesn’t have to fit a pre-determined formula. Search for beauty in all things, whether they seem beautiful at first glance or not, including yourself. I hope that through art and the emotional healing – and challenge – it brings, you will find joy.

One last thing – I said to find beauty in yourself, even if you don’t seem beautiful at first glance. And I said to be happy; but I know how impossible this can seem. I know your struggle. I know how much work it takes to get out of bed in the morning, how much courage it takes to face people, how much energy you spend pretending to be alright. I have come to accept this part of myself and I want you to as well. I know you recall, in perfect detail, the day Grandpa died. You left class, you didn’t turn in assignments, the reading wasn’t completed and your final project, although meaningful to you, was not your best work. Your depression had begun attacking you once more and while you received condemnation from yourself for your slack academic attitude, your teachers only ever offered encouragement. They have continued to do the same during this school year, when your depression and anxiety nearly tore you to pieces. Late assignments, missed classes and unread books were met with concern rather than frustration. If Dr. McDowell, the man you admire so much, could still have faith in you, in your mind, in your worth, and if the classmates that you love so much can still love you, then you must believe that your broken mind does not have to break the rest of you. After five years of hating your inability to conquer your mental illnesses, give it up! Accept it. Depression and anxiety are a part of who you are now. You will have days when the most you can do is not enough for anyone else. But it must be enough for you. Accept yourself.

You are strong. I know you don’t feel like it because you still sit on the porch steps at night crying because you feel alone. I know you still refuse calls because you’re scared to talk on the phone. I know you still binge eat and then regret it and fast for days. I know you think you’re broken and every ‘friend’ just pities your existence so you drive them away by ignoring them and then you end up on those porch steps once again and I know that it’s a cycle you want out of but can’t escape on your own. And all of this makes you think you’re weak. You are wrong. You have always gotten up off the porch steps and that is what makes you strong. 

I know you and I know that you are doing the best you can. The advice I have given is the best I can do. Perhaps one day, because you asked a certain question or did a certain thing, you will find yourself living by different guidelines. Until then, keep doing your best and, like I said, that is enough for me.

With Love, Cheyanne”

Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books, 2011.

Bloom, Allan, translator. The Republic of Plato. Basic Books, 1968.

Darwish, Mahmoud. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems. Translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche, University of California Press, 2013.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.

Johnson, Elizabeth A. Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love. Bloomsbury, 2014.

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003.

Mitchell, Stephen, translator. Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation. Harmony Books, 2000.

The Bible. New Living Translation.

Enjoying a moment of sheer delight at the amphitheater in Delphi, Greece (2015). Photo credits go to Jenn, who also was a rock-solid support to me during the trip and who, when my grandpa died, gave me a potted plant and a list of peaceful cafes to visit when I needed time alone. She was, and is, an angel to me.

Extraordinary Eve

We've all heard the rhetoric: the fall of human kind is the fault of a woman. Whether or not that is accurate is not the point I wish to make today, although it may come up. I think Eve is seriously one of the most amazing women the Bible speaks of. Let's go through her story and maybe you'll see why she is one of my heroes. (I will be using the New Living Translation for my Biblical quotes.)

Genesis 1
(26) Then God said, "Let us make human beings in our images, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground. (27) So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (28) Then God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground." (31) Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good!

According to this passage, God creates Eve with Adam, both in the image of God. God blesses Eve and her husband and tells both of them to multiply, govern the earth and reign over all living creatures. Eve must have been an amazing woman. She was the first woman in a brand-new world. She was the pioneer of everything feminine. She was made Queen of the earth and Mother of all people. When God created humans, They could have picked any combination of genes and personality. They created Eve because They wanted her. She was the first choice - the first woman.

Genesis 2
(22) Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib, and he brought her to the man. (23) "At last!" the man exclaimed. "This one is bone from my bone, and flesh from my flesh! She will be called 'woman', because she was taken from 'man'. (24) This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.

According to this passage, God creates Eve after Adam, since Adam is lonely and needing a partner. When God brings her to Adam, you can hardly ignore the excitement in his words: "At last!" He declares her equal to him - bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh - and names her with the same words he uses for himself. He has seen every other creature on earth and is not satisfied with his life until he meets Eve. She must have been spectacular.

The trouble arises in their Eden paradise when the issue of the forbidden fruit arises. What is often skipped over is the fact that the direct command forbidding the fruit is only given to Adam. Eve has not yet been created and there is no Biblical record that God gave the same command to Eve. It can be assumed that Eve knew the command, since she recited it to the serpent, but the Bible doesn't clarify whether God or Adam said that to her. Further more, she doesn't recite it perfectly; she says they cannot eat or even touch the fruit. Is that her exaggeration or Adam's? We don't know.

She speaks with the serpent, debating whether or not they are allowed to eat the fruit. Genesis 3:1 says, "The serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild animals the Lord God had made." Eve is not chitchatting with a mewling kitten - she's debating with an intelligent creature who convinces her of an alternate opinion. The word convince itself infers that she was thinking with her own mind - it does not say coerce, pressure or force. She made the decision. She was an independent, free thinker and she wanted more knowledge and wisdom. The tree offered that, and she took that offer.

Genesis 3
(6) So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too. (7) At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness.

Can we please pause and look at the order of events here? Eve takes some of the fruit, eats it and apparently nothing happens. Then (meaning after) she gives some to Adam, who is with her, and he eats it. At the moment Adam eats the fruit, their eyes are opened. Seems to me, from what is laid out in Genesis, Eve didn't feel any adverse effects of eating the forbidden fruit until Adam eats it. So is Eve to blame? Or Adam?

Moving on, the two hide from God as They walk in the garden. God calls to Adam (verse 9) asking where he is. Adam comes out, saying he is afraid because he is naked. God then asks Adam if he ate from the tree and Adam says Eve gave him the fruit. (She didn't convince him; she offered and he ate, no questions asked.) When God turns to Eve, They don't ask her the same question They ask Adam. "(13) What have you done?" Eve replies that the serpent lied to her, so she ate the fruit. God punishes all three of them, but They (once again) only mention the tree when speaking to Adam.

The next section is very interesting to me. Genesis 3:20 says, "Then the man - Adam - named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all who live." Looking at these names, I see a gentle surprise. "Adam" plays on the Hebrew word for earth or dirt - adamah. "Eve" plays on the Hebrew world for life or breath - chawah or chayah. So the first man and first woman are named Dirt and Breath. Does this sound familiar? Human beings are nothing but dust until God breathes the breath the life into us. And we need both Dirt and Breath, both Man and Woman, to be human, to be alive.

Now that Eve has been cursed with a painful reproductive system, she is the first woman to have a period. There is no one there to reassure her that she is not dying. She endures a pregnancy without any advice from older, experienced women. Every day is terrifyingly brand-new experience with no friends in the world to help her except Adam, who cannot understand what is happening to her. And when the first baby is born, she goes through labor with only Adam to help her. Then Eve has to figure out motherhood on her own. There are no books with advice. She herself did not have a mother - there is no example to follow. How amazing must she have been to survive all that?

Years pass and then the moment comes when her little baby boy, Cain, kills his brother and she loses two children in one day - one to death, the other to banishment. But she does not lose hope in God. After everything that has happened - their eviction from the Garden, the punishment of modern womanhood and the murder of her son - she still believes in God. We know this because when Seth is born, she says, "God has granted me another son in place of Abel, whom Cain killed". She remembers both her boys, Cain and Abel, and the pain associated with them, but says God has given her another son to comfort her.

Whether or not you believe the first woman was the first sinner or that Eve is a character to be admired, I will always see her as a great woman. She explored and discovered the newly created earth. She thought for herself, made decisions and accepted the consequences. She suffered and survived the trials of womanhood without any feminine support. She trusted God after the murder of her innocent son and the banishment of her criminal son. She is an extraordinary woman.