Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion)
November 2023 I found this piece, all alone, and decided to publish it after all, as it was, bare and broken, angry. Written November 2012, long before my creative non-fiction academic studies
Dear Diary
The amount of time spent unstitching, cast on, cast off, and again - to explain that it’s perfectly justifiable that women would want control of their own bodies – and no, we don’t want control over yours as well. It’s ridiculous: decades of academic writing, case studies, projects, art and music. Now we need to analyse the entire mediation process involved in creating a narrative in art, music, film or theatre. The medium, or outcome is not the (only) message. In cultural terms, that means every fucker’s involvement along the way, their background, influences, and the choices made. If it weren’t all our idea, I’d insist it was delay tactics re patriarchy’s inevitable downfall, a conspiracy.
For 21st-century feminism, women having control of their own bodies is a common bond of all strands, a serious issue with regard to child brides, FGM, abortion rights, pronoun choice, and not just everyday sexism.
Here’s the wag: we don’t have control over our own bodies, or more specifically our uniquely female biological phases. They happen whatever pronoun we choose and lifestyle we demand. We only get to talk about them in the options of given languages, psychology, psychoanalysis, science, biology, literature, film, and music.
My hormones and in particular oxytocin, the nesting hormone, ambushed me on my journey and left me dying in a ditch, never able to go back to the moment when I was happily sat in the coach looking out the window wondering and open to the thrills in my personal journey ahead. I wouldn't say I liked the fact I fancied men. I had a love/hate relationship and a fear of my body and mostly opted for anger because anger is an energy.
Spring 1990
When I am loud and excited, selfish, rude or impatient to adults, partners and friends, I am reminded, and later forgiven, because it’s probably my hormones. I have learned behaviour now: when utility bills I can’t pay arrive, in the same week that the rent looms, on an ordinary day when people have been more stupid and inconsiderate than usual, I will crush you with indifference or a sabre-sharp tongue, because I am only learning how to take responsibility for my emotions, but my universal explanation is to say my period is coming, which is acceptable, understood, not my fault.
I use this explanation to give me time, space, and a reason for being in a room of my own – creativity and personal fulfilment don’t seem to be regarded as an acceptable excuses, but having period pain, headaches, and being grumpy and sullen make sense. I stay up all night writing about a band called UT, and Pauline Murray.
Spring 2009
It’s a big shock to find that all the good stuff is missing in the absence of my hormones as perimenopause makes itself at home: anger becomes utter fury and frustration, not creativity and collaborative, solitary activities and inspirations just lonely habits, sexual desire does not exist, and worst of all, the drive to get clever so I could fucking explain myself and join in is gone … all gone. I think I have depression, and crave the melancholy of my youth, a sometimes pleasant companion.
It’s funny at first, the dynamics in a single-parent household of a twelve-year-old girl gaining hormones, and a 45-year-old mum losing them.
I haven’t the strength to apply the complex behavioural strategies required to live peacefully in a house with a teenager. I go on HRT. I prescribe 8 days of HRT and 20 days of taking a placebo tablet. It makes me laugh aloud when I clock the desperation with which I check to see how long now till I’ve got to take the real thing – I need that energy to keep up Now I blame my lack of hormones for everything, and that’s a dire error on my part. I’m in such a hurry to get to the end of the game when I become an untouchable elder. I’m desperate to be invisible, ready to accept and embrace being an eccentric, independent woman, with cats, and a love of big hats, expected of hags or crones*
In fact, there’s a far more sinister event lurking in the background, criminal and despicable. I should have noted it sooner – life was so screwy - but I didn’t, so focused on assuming it’s related to womanhood and women, women’s things, for the clashes and confusions. Nasty things I can’t write about without being sick.
If I’d had a perimenopause comrade I would have discussed the domestic chaos and had an inkling that it wasn’t just about us. If I had experienced any spoken word, art, literature, film or theatre related to the women’s phases I would have had comparison and contrast, and reassurance, but this work is not in the public domain, and that’s where you are during parenthood, in a town, in a county, not letting your freak flag fly… you forget to ride your women’s phases as Jung suggests we should ride our ego (like a horse, trot, canter, gallop – but don’t try to control it).
Nov 2012
It is Autumn and my birthday, and also the celebration of my birth mother’s death, I unknowingly push people away so I can grieve – that melancholy was sweet and ritualistic. But now I am mourning the loss of everything, from then till now – so much is the hopelessness, and pain of the tragedy we are in – everything requires knowledge I don’t have, despite decades of accumulating knowledge. My periods are not reliable, darker than ever heavy, or nothing. I make one of my pictures, unknowingly beginning and purposefully completing it. The perfect house and garden, with the cat and the happy child waving at the window, is falling down, under the rubble, daisies and tiny wild orchids poke out and smile at the sky. I stick things on, a feather from a cat’s toy, a piece of my writing, and make words like hope and no fear in broken twigs and shiny leaves. It is an awful mess, like my life. It is beautiful.
After three days the darkness has passed and I eat and clean the house. I pay most attention to the corners because though the darkness has cleared it still lurks there, sweeping in a rhythm and singing a farewell song, welcoming the wind from the open windows.
By Easter, we are moving back to London. But that’s another story.