The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls Read online

  It was strange how it all started . . . I was overcome by a sudden and intense compulsion to take a knife to myself. I had never before felt this, nor had I ever imagined feeling it. It came from within me—from some dark, primeval place. No one put the idea into my head. No one told me how it worked. I had never read about it. There was no provocation. It was all me.

  The call is coming from inside your house . . .

  Once the desire had come into me, I could not get the idea out of my mind. I was like an alcoholic who’s never had a drink—I needed a fix of something I hadn’t even tried yet.

  The first time I gave in, I took apart a shaving razor. I was surprised at how easily it gave up its blades to me. The moment I made that first, fateful slice, I experienced the gratification I had anticipated, and more. I knew instantly, as I sat upon the dirty pink tiles of the bathroom floor, watching the blood rising to the surface of my thigh, that I had just embarked upon a path I could never turn back from—a path that would change others’ perception of me, as well as my perception of myself. That first slice was the severing of my already fraying bonds to those around me. I was now separate. I was branded, and I was glad to be.

  I had always been ashamed of being manic depressive, and recently having post traumatic stress disorder tacked onto that diagnosis was even worse. What right have I, I thought, and still do think, to be depressed when there are people in this world who suffer so much worse in their lives than I? I was ashamed to have a disease that nobody could see, but now, I had proof. I had visible symptoms, and I wouldn’t have to explain myself anymore. I soon learned that I would spend my life defending myself instead.

  Excerpt #4 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  I inspect my newly carved chest in the mirror that does not belong to me—nothing here belongs to me except my violin and my razor blades. And I see that it is my logo. My crossed heart. The one I sign my name with. God, how self-indulgent, I think, but whom then should I indulge if not myself?

  I remind myself that my logo did not start out as a logo at all, but was merely a symbol I painstakingly painted upon my right cheek each morning during a particular period of my life when I needed it, as I still do, and the fact that hundreds of thousands are now aware of this logo and associate it with the brand that is me, Emilie Autumn, the girl who screams on stage and wears striped stockings up to her scars and ties a corset tighter than anyone, doesn’t take away what it originally meant to me.

  I have a heart to break is all it means. I am killable. It doesn’t mean down with love or I hate my ex-boyfriend or any other mundanely pedestrian sentiment. It means that I have that within me that can also destroy me.

  I learned this in the cruelest of ways. I am not special. I am not polished, or strong, or protected.

  But I am protecting myself now.

  When I paint this symbol upon my face each day, using a waxy scarlet lipstick and cheap black liquid eyeliner, it is the battle scar that reminds me both of my beating heart and of its fragility, and of how very raw I am. Besides, studying the fresh wound blazing upon my chest, the prohibitive X, the two curves and the point where they meet, you may think I had tried, quite literally, to cut out my heart.

  And perhaps I did.

  Excerpt #7 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  How is it that it is considered perfectly acceptable that I am harmed by endless external attacks, in infinite ways—from abuse, from rape, from this patriarchal culture in which females are spiritually slaughtered the moment they are ripped from the fucking womb, from the mundane cruelties of life that affect us all—and yet I have no right to harm, even superficially, myself?

  It does seem a bit backwards to me that I must treat myself as a precious object when nobody else does.

  Everything that is done to me from the outside—all of that I am advised and expected to “get over” and “forgive,” and I can even pay a therapist hundreds of dollars per hour to teach me how to do this (there are a lot of people making money off of my pain). But I am not allowed to forgive myself, even if I wanted to. I am not allowed to forgive myself, because no one will forgive me.

  Excerpt #21 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  There is not one, solitary reason why people cut themselves. There is never just one.

  In my own personal case, I am driven by profound disappointment, a sense of irretrievably lost control over even the most intimate parts of my body, and, oh yes, I’m also gifted with one of the deadliest forms of mental illness.

  I need this. But for how long? I can’t do this forever, I’ll run out of skin. There is thus, inevitably, an end date on this activity. But I am frightened. For cutting is just like crying . . . so much easier to start than to stop.

  Yet there is also that element of entertainment—of wonder at the almost sensual pain during the cut, at the speed with which the crimson pearls rise to the surface, at the moment one waits in breathless anticipation to see whether, when the blood does come, it will be in the form of a thin, red line, or will it actually spill out in droplets, and then still more wonder at how the wound rushes and weeps, suddenly impatient, as the iodine is applied, just as a hug from a friend when one is on the verge of tears sends one into floods of them. It’s almost as though we wait to see that it is all going to be OK—that we are someplace safe, with someone that we trust.

  Excerpt #32 from confiscated notebook, passage of EXTREME interest, typed out for clarity:

  Most of the insults I have personally received as a result of my cutting (which really does seem to make people curiously angry) have not been to do with how this act may hurt me, or what it says about how sad and desperate I must be—no, they have all been exclusively to do with how disgusting it is. How perversely disgusting it is. How perversely disgusting it is to them.

  And, sure . . . perhaps coming from boys who have never suffered more than a scraped knee and are utterly unaware of what it really is to be badass, and who also no doubt look upon my body as something belonging to them, in which case I am also committing the crime of property damage, this does make a lot of sense. Yet it should perhaps be considered how very much blood I have to both see and feel pass through me for the too-many tedious months of my life before I am told that finding solace in seeing my own blood is so very perverse and shocking.

  The truth is that girls are conditioned from the age of approximately twelve years old to see their own blood, and lots of it. We have all touched our own blood, because you can’t do what girls need to do without coming into occasional contact. And, the thing is, it becomes perfectly normal.

  Please . . . take a moment to explore the mind-numbing reality of just how much blood one girl not only bleeds but sees during the course of her life, and that’s not counting childbirth, my friends, which is on a whole other planet.

  I am hardly suggesting that this lifelong proximity to blood is any catalyst to begin cutting.

  It isn’t.

  I simply believe that for friends, family, doctors, lovers, all of those surrounding a person who has cut herself to behave as though she had committed a crime, a disgusting, disgusting, disgusting crime, a crime against herself, and a crime of the worst kind because it damages her body, her precious, precious body, is a bit ridiculous.

  For this precious body is the very same that is hooted and honked at, demeaned both in daily life as well as in ever evolving forms of media, harassed, molested, raped, and, if all that wasn’t enough, is forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little—a million billion never-ending details which all point to the solitary girl—to every solitary girl—and say:

  DESTROY YOURSELF

  Excerpt #39 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  I have been really, really careful to do this right. I am a perfectionist in this as in all things. I am bein
g clean, sterilizing everything I touch, protecting myself against infection because, again, I am not cutting to fucking kill myself. I am doing it so that I can get away from this constant compulsion toward suicide. I am doing it not to die.

  And, in the end, I can tell you exactly what cutting is about, because it's not nearly as mysterious as anyone thinks: It is not about attention, or pity, or “self-harm,” which is a terribly stupid term by the way. No. It is about one thing. It is about control. And I am filled with twenty-six years of female rage and a deadly determination to take mine back.

  Though I had never set out to display them, I made my cuts in particularly intimate areas of my body that would only be known to the next person I allowed too close in a moment of forgetfulness. I wanted that person to know, and before it was too late, that I was crazy and scary and should be backed away from immediately. I didn’t want to have to talk about it anymore. Just like a good novel, show, don’t tell.

  Excerpt #48 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  Practicing my violin tonight, my fingers are trembling and stiff, wobbly, drugged. I cannot imagine how I could possibly walk let alone play intelligently. And I know now that I am being experimented on. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just throwing pills against the wall (or into my mouth) and seeing what sticks. I am a lab rat. I am a fucking violin-playing lab rat. I am a fucking violin-playing lab rat who wants to cut off her tail again. And her ears. And her whiskers.

  Excerpt #52 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  The trouble with forgiving people is that it makes writing terrible things about them so much more difficult.

  I have promised not to cut myself in his house.

  (Doctor’s Note: “His” is assumed to be referencing W14A’s boyfriend at the time of this writing. We have been investigating the identity of this man and have narrowed it down to two subjects, one extremely famous, one marginally so. Names will be made available to specialists upon request.)

  Fair enough.

  I have managed to keep my word, and I am too strung out on what the doctor has forced into me to go anywhere else, so that means I don’t cut at all, which is a good thing I suppose. Perhaps I am over the “phase,” as he calls it . . . that would be nice. This was never supposed to be a way of life . . . it was about survival. But, is it not strange that the only things I don’t feel guilty about are the very things everyone else has put me on trial for?

  I know that what I was doing was madness in all eyes but mine, yet I wasn’t shy about it at all. I hadn’t done it to show off to people, nor to hide. My fault was that my sense of self-worth, or lack thereof depending upon where you’re standing, was not bound up in my physical appearance—especially not in my legs or my chest. In my over-medicated (wrongly medicated) state, I couldn’t remember to make everyone else around me comfortable first, and, for once in my life, I didn’t care.

  I wore the same clothes I always did, and it didn’t occur to me that, because they could see an inch of a scratch that ran lower down my thigh than my skirt did, I was making the people around me extremely uncomfortable. It didn’t occur to me because I wasn’t ashamed of what I had done, which is not to say that I was proud of it—I wasn’t. It was just something I did, because I needed to. For me.

  Just for me.

  Would I cut myself now? I don’t know. When I did, it was for a good reason. If I did again, I’m sure it would also be for a good reason. I suppose that the cutting is really beside the point—it is the reason for cutting that I would like very much to avoid . . .

  (Doctor’s Note: We are unsure if W14A actually discontinued her pattern of self-harm as she seems to be claiming here, but no further reference to cutting is made in the notebook we confiscated, though some pictures have tested positive to having been painted in blood, as suspected. The marks currently found upon her legs—upper thighs—appear to be fresh, but could have been made within the last two weeks, perhaps more as her healing may have been slow due to extreme anemia.)

  Excerpt #65 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  The very worst thing about being bipolar, depressed, or mentally ill in likely any way, is that any time you’re legitimately sad—any time you’re truly angry—and with good and clear reason, you will be told that you are only feeling as you are because of your illness. Every time your boyfriend is being an ass and you call him on it, this is what you will hear, so get used to it:

  “Have you taken your medication today?”

  A life of non-credibility, even amongst those you love—this is what you face. It is the eternal equivalent of being asked if it’s your “time of the month” every time you get upset. If this doesn’t make you want to kill yourself, I don’t know what will.

  Excerpt #78 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  It’s difficult to tell someone that they shouldn’t be defined by their illness. Or, rather, it’s easy to tell someone, but it’s difficult to hear.

  It is impossible not to become defined by your illness, even to yourself, when everything you do is so closely intertwined with it. There is virtually no part of your life that you live like other people do—even the smallest detail is adjusted in some way—a way very possibly imperceptible from the outside.

  And then there is always the question of what you are allowed to define yourself by, if not by something that affects you more than any other influence in your life possibly could.

  Manic Depression surrounds me as much as my own skin does. It is my skin, but it is also my blood. I still own my heart, which I know because it hurts so much.

  Excerpt #89 from confiscated notebook, passage of EXTREME interest, typed out for clarity:

  For the Asylum doctor, a cured patient represents a serious threat; if you’re well enough to leave, you’re well enough to talk.

  (Doctor’s Note: W14A exhibits paranoia and inability to remain in her own reality, begins to reference “Asylum” more frequently.)

  Excerpt #96 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  The Asylum serves to control rather than cure us . . .

  Excerpt #99 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  I have only just tonight had the courage to open the bottle of Lithium that I have had in my possession for some time now. I’m stalling . . . I don’t want to take these.

  L . . . I . . . T . . . H . . . I . . . U . . . M . . .

  Of course, to my eyes, the writing upon each pill only seems to taunt me, each precious pink gem of promised sanity reminding me just how far into the madness I have gone.

  Lithium.

  “It’s just a salt,” they said.

  It’s just a salt, though you must be sure to drink a great deal of water or else you’ll die. But it’s just a salt.

  My cure is salt and water?

  “Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia . . .”

  Lithium. Lithium. Lithium.

  You don’t come back from Lithium.

  Zoloft?

  Prozac?

  Maybe.

  But not Lithium.

  Lithium isn’t for people who have bad moods.

  Lithium is for lifers.

  You’re not going home after this.

  Excerpt #102 from confiscated notebook, passage of interest, typed out for clarity:

  I am nodding off now, eyelids drooping, exhausted.

  As the medication kicks in, my writing becomes smaller and messier and seems to spiral downward into places that I don’t know about . . .

  It is almost like being possessed.

  I look down at the journal I have been obsessively keeping, and I find page after page of words I can scarcely make out, written in a hand that is not my own, and yet, I’ve got ink on my fingers.

  It is the following morning, and I can barely read what I wrote last n
ight, and that is what both fascinates and terrorizes me.

  Even now, I have no idea what I’m writing, and have to review the sentence I just finished in order to know where my thought started, just elljwlg, and here it is, the place where I lose my mind Ifjkors and cannot discern with any degree of confidence what is a dream and what is reality . . . what was just a thought that found its way into my mind . . . I wish I could cancel my work on this new record and lose this whole month because it was nothing like Lunioiwhfowi, a system that chooses what comes out wenthorywghh and what stockill hwwijf an mourr asleep and will remember nothing tomorrow I have been chemically maipulated since fy first xolofy I am so sad that I have gone ahd they, those lunitic and por suisidal girls are still inside. I often fanatize about being indise again,,,rats rats inmates rats rats rats inmates leeches rats rats rats rats rats(((>