Janice at Thirty (draft)

I. Sunday Morning, Upon Waking Alone and Thus Not Distracted

What do you do
When it hurts to move
But if you don't move
It'll just hurt more
And you'll eventually
Never move again?

What do you do
When pain pills kill you
(repeated overdoses leading to lethal allergy. bittersweet irony)
But if you don't find an alternative
You'll grow crippled
And eventually
Die anyway?

How do you find the energy to run
When the energy to walk alludes you
How do you explain that you are rotting
You are atrophying yourself
Forty feet above the street
in a crumbling rented play penthouse

How do you explain to others
That you just may be slowly killing yourself
(albeit lazily and without any conscious and direct intention)
As you crawl away from society
As you hide from the light
As you accept the seizing of organs and joints
And you are ashamed
You are so ashamed

II. I Hate This Part. Disney Movies Have Poisoned Me And Fucked With Life Expectations.

If I don't call you and you don't call me
It must mean it wasn't meant to be anyway
And I have proved the world right
In this model it is you
It is never me

But then no.
It is both of us.
Me being the Ursula, the disgusting sea-witch
(and thus obviously not deserving of love)
and you being the asshole Prince
who won't even try to peer past the supposed evil and ugliness
and who'd never attempt to kiss a toad
just to see if a Princess would appear

I hate you.

I find joy in being right
That it is you that is unfair and unloving
but also that I am not worthy
of attempts to slay dragons
and struggles through briers and thorns
to rescue me in my castle tower

no, indeed it is proof
it is logic and irrefutable facts
that i am no sleeping beauty
and I can dream myself quietly
into gentle, un-fettered death
undisturbed by attempts
at resuscitation

III. I am a masochist and a sadist. I like the color of my own blood and the taste of my own tears.

Perhaps I am an ugly creature
Perhaps I am a sloth, a mole woman, a warted witch
Perhaps I am best suited for dark internal rooms
Perhaps there is reason why nature has
Declared me not suited to breed (if only by omission)

Depression and self-loathing are nature's way
it's neo-Darwinism
my species has no place for party poopers
only the happy and well-adjusted survive
and let's face it, I'm not the best specimen anyway

IV. Self-pity parties are the cheapest to throw and saves you hundreds of dollars in catering costs.

I turn back into myself
I waddle and huddle
into my cave with the view
I am retreating from all that I want and love
And for the life of me
I don't know why

I am thirty and arthritic
I am thirty and obese
I am insulated and safe
And eventually life will leave me alone
With its disappointments and pedestals
And other high places I can no longer place others
Only to watch them fall and roll away

Fuck, I think I hate myself

V. A reflection due to a lack of objective mirrors. with an acceptance of distortion.

Go away
I will run from you
I will hop a city bus

My motus operandi
is to hide and to be the center of attention
at the same time

My own paparazzi
my own shampoo-bottle Oscar speech
I don't take photos
of myself anymore
and the pills that have half-helped
leave me bloated, thin-eyebrowed, and still
probably
damaged goods

VI. A review of conditions, disorders, medications, and attempts to diagnose and pinpoint reasons why I am not responsible for my own self.

So many labels I have tried on
They never fit, they curl and split, tear and crumple
As if one term can explain all that is Janice
and one reading of the DSM-IV can find the cure

Can it be Effexor, Depakote, Topomax,
Paxil, Celexa, Klonopin, or Xanax?

And how do I get off and how do I get on?

Serotonin syndrome
Withdrawal syndrome
Suicidal crisis
Black box warnings
And me spending the early part of my twenties
on cliff edges with no FDA advice or knowledge
and no doctor's notes to get out of life

I have embraced crazy, creative, poetic, different, chaotic, tortured, misunderstood for so long
my arms are cramped and my view too close, too blurred
to properly see they are excuses, not personality

Thirty years of chicken or the egg
Is it my thyroid? Is it my parents? Is it genetics?
Why so fat so early?
Was it emotional abuse on the playground?
Are my class mates to blame?
Or the gym teachers who forced me to run
and balance my bulk on gymnastic beams

Borderline, Bipolar, Depressed, Eating Dis*ordered
Crazy, Agoraphobic, Obsessive Compulsive, Emotionally Unavailable
Spinster, Self-Medicator, Binge Eater, Post Traumatic Stressed

Unstable. Warning. Do not enter. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars
Approach with Caution. Unpredictable. Check any applicable symptoms. Be aware of any
potential side effects. Please sign here, you have been informed.

I sit in the back of the group therapy session
The titles and faces change
depending on which condition, which affliction
I have decided this week
has made me its victim

VII. Here is the part where I'm going to scream. Bear with me, gentle reader.

I am not a part of everything you think you know
By proclaiming this so loudly and so fucking righteously
I am stepping outside of this society that I am rejecting

What the hell do you think of that?

Look at me!
Get your fucking eyes off of me!
I am a passive aggressive whiner
LOOK AT ME!

Please.
Please.
Understand that I hate you.
I fucking hate you.
But ....
I am fighting demons you can't see
And thus I am important and raw and
DAMNIT
I have something crucial to say
that YOU
that YOU
could NEVER understand.

And look at me!
I am better than you
because I am vulnerable and did i mention raw?
I am talented and memorable and
(please please please don't forget me)

Buy a book, support a true artist.
I am entitled, you see, I have suffered
And thus I deserve your attention
and your money, your penance

Can't you save me more quickly
stop giving me crutches and pills and kind words
Won't you feel awful
if some years after this night
you read that I am expired and moldy?
See this?
This is your responsibility
I am a just a voice and a series of letters on a page

THIS IS YOUR FAULT!

I am bad genetics, I am bad environment, I am malnutrition, I am a memorandum
of psychopharmacudical pamphlets, I am simply a product of rape, cruelty, of a society that doesn't love me.

That's what I used to tell my mother.
Sent to a corner, punished for sassing
I'd cry and whimper
why don't you love me?

Nothing will ever be enough.
You can never be enough
I am an imploding star
a black hole that sucks the air from your lungs
I am a car accident about to happen

It is inevitable that I will crash and burn

I will be spectacular, a fucking cosmic event
And you
will
NOTICE.


VII. I'm sorry, you see it's not my fault. In fact, nothing's my fault. You see, I....

I am incapable
I am a writhesome, a fucking anomaly

The doctors told me
they assured me when i was locked away
when I was twenty-three and institutionalized
they told me it was not my fault

and back, at nineteen
my first psychiatrist
during my first mind-fuck
proclaimed me "chronic" and forever diseased

i never forgot.

it's my excuse for everything.

i never was one to question authority.
i was always took the drugs i was handed
my mother raised a good, polite girl
that understood her place
and rarely ever thought for herself

VIII. New perspective spoken by an older lover who has a good eye for such things.

"You have issues with growing up."

I laugh. I say I was menstruating at eight
I was wearing a bra on the playground
I have an apartment, I pay my own rent
I have lived in New York City on ten thousand dollars a year
I am in a union, buddy, and have a hundred thousand dollar education

I laugh because he is new, he is not yet proven mal-intent
although me, ha, well I just assume it's coming

I consider a past boyfriend who'd accuse me of manipulation
of crying instead of talking and screaming instead of communicating

"you're a fucking child! a bratty, immature, emotionally crippled child"
he'd say and I'd act out more, I'd slam my head into walls
bruise my hands and head and use that as proof that i am just "troubled"

Yes, we're walking down the street
My new lover casts me a sideways glance

I'm sick of being sick, I said five years ago.
But I never grew sick of talking about it.

Perhaps at thirty, it's time to seal my juvenile record
Pack away my Liz Phair cds and wear long sleeved shirts
Perhaps it is time to look ahead
Get off my couch
Get off my high horse
Walk off this anger
Cry out these tears
And say good bye

Yes, I need to say goodbye

It may mean I walk about for awhile
With no past, no papers, no history
I am growing up before I grow old.
Being an adult is more than meaning
you can eat ice cream for breakfast
And not getting carded at bars

I am letting go of crazy.