Looking through frosty glass can make the world outside appear imaginary. Maybe it is an illusion, even unfrosted. After all, it is only what it is while someone is thinking. Depending on what kind of thinking is attending, it can shift shape and meaning. Who knows what colors others see.
The woman said that she would rather that she had never been born. Her fans were telling her that they were dismayed that she could be thinking that way and advised her strongly against it. She made no apologies and dug her heels in deeper — saying, “I stand firm. I wish I had never been born. I wouldn’t wish life on anyone.”
She gave no clue about feeling this way until she said it outright. She was effervescent and animated in her videos and so natural and earthy. She spoke her heart and minced no words — shit, fuck and damn fell out with ease, unedited, and well-congealed thoughts tripped out of her mind with ordered precision. Her communication was easy, made good sense and she was unabatedly funny. She claimed later that that was because of anxiety and not because she was actually comedic.
She was sticking and stitching bright colored scraps to a backing making a new piece of fabric out of bits and pieces left over from other things she had sewn. She seemed so full of life and was so very chipper and everything she picked to patch was cheery and so well considered. She turned pieces this way and that while the camera was watching, trying to make the piece aesthetically pleasing — it was obvious she was filled with a fluid artistic persuasion.
It’s easy to hide behind the fog of the war that is living.
She didn’t seem to be trying to hide. She seemed to be undressing while still keeping on her clothes. She was emotionally fully exposed.
Unrehearsed and played aloud, more about her story started coming out. She had set a stage for telling her truth. She said she wanted an audience to help her understand herself. If it helped someone else, she didn’t mind. The sewing and cooking were just a way to make her viewers look and find a content value. Her story was as much.
“I had a parka that I opened the seams of the pockets so that I could fit all the beer cans along the bottom, inside the lining. It was hard to stuff it all in my locker at my elementary school. I don’t know why no teachers ever confronted me. I was drunk everyday. It was as if nobody cared. My parents certainly didn’t. I was taking beer to school when I was twelve and stumbling and falling in my parent’s presence. I drank champagne when I was ten and drank as much as I could get my hand on at a wedding. When I couldn’t find alcohol elsewhere, I stole. One day my father had to pick me up, drunk and lying in the snow and bring me inside. He never said a word. I was a child. I never hated myself for drinking. And I always thought I was living a grown up enough life to warrant doing grown up things. I hated the people who never seemed to care and who let it keep going on when, clearly, they had to know.”
She was rambling. It seemed like she could burst out crying any minute but didn’t. She stuffed it in. She’s claimed to be a hoarder.
“I hate to look at pictures of the past. I’ll look and see that someone’s gone — has died — and that some of the others will leave before much longer — one way or another. I wouldn’t wish life on anyone,” she repeats. “It’s just a bunch of crap. Whatever’s good isn’t enough to make up for all that’s bad about it.”
She claims it’s not depression, just a realist’s way of seeing her condition.
Her condition might just be a way for others to see what can end up being so subtly gorgeous once the full measure of its being is exposed. That she has undressed, so to speak, is what has let others see. It’s a useless exercise — someone, who once has been, cannot go back to never having been — and certainly not without others losing what they gained.
She is certainly subtly gorgeous and anyone who has seen her has gained.
Image credit: Simple Stylish Makes
Writing Spool 