The body as a weapon
Let me tell you a story.
I read a lesbian manga recently called Alter Ego by Ana C. Sánchez. The plot concerns a woman, Noel, who is madly in love with her best friend Elena, who begins a relationship with a man. Noel erupts, seeing Elena as hers, terrified of a loss of exclusivity. She is a rotten best friend, vicious, and uses her misery as a weapon to drag down Elena and her newfound happiness..
This was the mirror I fear to approach, lest it stoke my greatest fear. That in times where I should be joyous and celebratory for my friends, I am cold and selfish.
The body as a weapon is a term mostly associated with the Red Army Faction, German political terrorists who punished their own bodies in prison to gain certain privileges. I punish myself, my body, my mess of a heart that insists on continuing to beat.
I am an arsonist.
It is nothing less than psychological warfare on people I claim to love. It is a betrayal of a contract written in the dark where we see more than ever before.
This really should have been in the post about the rebound. I did not have cases where the darkness roiling inside came over, but I was subjected to that darkness. Abundant, ever-flowing, my love and sense of service did not matter. I know I do something like that with others. I don't eat, I cancel all my social engagements, friends making big plans to spend time with me find out I'm staying in my apartment and brooding.
It is a constricting poison. There every day is the dread that whatever my admirable traits, I am only as lovable as my worst impulses. I work on it in therapy, I get better habits, I increasingly go out to events at proverbial gunpoint. But it remains my instinctual reaction when people I care about find happiness with other people, and I feel shortchanged. What an unfair and self-destructive attempt to weaponize misery.
Perhaps others feel that the only way out of the labyrinth we find ourselves within is to blow a hole in each successive wall. I told someone recently that there is no prize for doing something the hardest possible way. How can I heal if my nemesis knows everything about me?
One day my body will stop being a weapon and be a bridge instead.
Artemis