Bleed Pretty
Some scapegoats learn to love their knives
I’ll be 40 in September, through relaxed fists and feeling more beautiful than I felt in my 20’s or 30’s. I’m on my second trial of Accutane at my big age and my skin looks great. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anyone teaching me about retinol or how important it is to take off your makeup before you go to sleep when I was young. That would have been nice. The internet wasn’t as big as it was now. We had Tom from MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger. There have been countless benders, snorting lines off the backseats of toilets and more blackouts than birthdays I can actually account for.
I’m a late bloomer. A late learner. A quick talker. I put my foot in my mouth way too often, usually finding myself humbled and still laughing about it anyway. What’s a laugh if not for filling the uncomfortable silence? What’s a neck breaking cackle if not a mask to cover up the ugly things lurking beneath? You get to your 4th decade and realize you’ve had to laugh your way through every decade before that. There’s not much to laugh about if we’re being serious. But I don’t know how else to not cry about it.
Hating myself would be easier than what I had planned, right? I think about how much of my youth was wasted on drugs and alcohol. On hating myself and thinking I was hideous. Fuck, who am I kidding? Sometimes I hate myself now, but make it less obvious. There’s a confidence I can project like a light beam. And people gravitate towards it. Other people are repelled. Some try to steal it for themselves, manipulate it to make everyone think it’s just a big laser beam meant to attack everyone. Yeah, I project things, but so do they. Whether it’s fake or not, does it even matter? It’s still a lighthouse. It’s my lighthouse I built between big rocky cliffs and oceans that build waves as strong as a million soldiers. There’s salt and sea in my mouth and I’m laughing about it, spitting all over the monstrous gray rock with saliva as long as my track record. And sometimes those are the only words I have—spit and light beams. A wave hasn’t destroyed it yet. Isn’t that true confidence?
Underneath it all, I don’t hate myself. I really don’t.
There has been so much sexual assault in my life, I don’t know how to stop talking about it. I don’t know how to cleave it from my identity. There’s a million scapegoats I’ve become, yet none of them are dead. They just follow me around, bleeding on everything. I find them stumbling about behind me, next to me and hovering over me while I sleep—like I can fix them. Like I’m the one who started the slaughter. That’s the thing about being the poster child scapegoat. The knife is at your throat while you bleed yourself dry on marble alters and question if you deserved it. Every scapegoat does. I have to tell myself I deserve it or I can’t justify my reality. Plus, I bleed pretty and I think that’s all that matters sometimes.
Men. My arch nemesis. I really don’t like you. Everything is a manipulative tactic for an inflated ego or to get your dick wet. Devaluing women when you’ve based your entire value around how many of them you can acquire. So much time has been wasted. So much youth has been poured down the drain of a man’s sink. As I stand above it, for years it was like waiting for my reward to come crawling up from the sewer. To tell me I’m a good girl and my suffering was all worth it. Like any of it meant something. It didn’t. It never does. I am a late bloomer, a late learner and a fucking idiot. But you are an ocean of monsters and salt. None of which you can remove from the sea. None of which my lighthouse could ever change.
I think some part of me kept hoping love would eventually stop feeling so humiliating. It hasn’t.
There is less evolution and more personas, more performance. And we’ve all become addicted to it, haven’t we? Filters and porn. Competition disguised as friendship. Focus on the most insignificant issues because we can’t look at ourselves. We can’t even admit when we like someone anymore—out of fear of being hurt or exposed or manipulated. You don’t realize it, but when you’re born, they shove a game controller in your hands and tell you good fucking luck. We’ve forgotten our humanity because humanity has forgotten us.
I want to love myself. I want to love men. I want to hold hands with women. I want to enjoy the last few months of my 30’s by writing and loving and getting fucked an inch from my life on a balcony in Peru. Then I want to enjoy the first half of my 40’s by writing and loving and getting fucked an inch from my life in a haunted castle in Scotland. There is a big lighthouse in me, bright enough to see all your monsters and love them anyway. Some scapegoats learn to love their knives, but some of us just try to bleed pretty while it’s happening. Maybe when I’m on the next alter, I’ll laugh about it like I do everything else. Then I can justify it because everything’s justifiable when it’s funny. I’ll paint a joker smile on my face and hope the whole world laughs too.
I still want things. I am still allowed to want things.