Issue 24: Welcome to Obsessions

Five years in, the queer hermit welcomes you to her newsletter

Welcome to Obsessions, Issue 24: I’m sorry, so sorry, but I can’t get into calling you community. Hello community of people that I will never take to the hospital. If I learned anything from teaching yoga, it’s that calling people your community is pure marketing. Also, if I was Julia Fox, y’all would still read, pay and I would never have to pretend you were my community. I decide if someone is my community on a case by case basis. Hmm, why is that? (Sarcastic smirk.) This newsletter is somewhat irregular, but I wanted to introduce myself anyways. Please click the lick button if you want to bring more readers here!

I wanted to write a welcome email to let you know what to expect when you expect Obsessions. And also let you set the mood, soft gold velvet, lots of candelabras, lesbians from the roccoco age. Lots of twisted mouths and grasping at the neck. No, really, Obsessions is one queer femme’s obsession with the body and culture.

François Boucher, French, 1703 - 1770, The Love Letter, 1750, oil on canvas, Timken Collection, 1960.6.3

I am a 42 year old queer femme living in Portland, Oregon who grew up in the valley (that valley), went to school at UCLA, lived and worked as a yoga teacher in NYC for 3 years (2007-2010), fled back to Los Angeles (more yoga teaching), and eventually ended up in Portland, Oregon. I’m someone who loves the trees in PDX, loves the weather, loves the birds, hates the small town feel, and hates the fashion in Portland, Oregon. People dress badly here, and it’s NOT the lesbians.

I’m more than anything interested in how a woman’s access to power and money affects her relationship to the body and culture. I’m interested in Taylor Swift, for example, as a figurehead for white feminist capitalism, a kind of feminism that stands so far form the point of feminism that it might as well be Republicanism. I’m interested in what a pop star that is as desexualized as Taylor Swift says about how fragmented and afraid our country is. I’m interested in what it means, to me, that we have not and I believe will not have a billionaire pop star whose wealth is propelled by their queer identity. I think Taylor Swift has done so well because she is a marketing machine and I have never seen a pop star in my lifetime that feels so, so safe. And the other thing I want to say about her is I think folks are sometimes impressed by her bravery or yadda yadda, and I think they forget this is not a normal, ordinary person taking a stand. Yes, she may risk losing a tiny bit of popularity, but there is not one moment in her life where speaking her truth would mean risking anything wild like her safety, her family’s income, yadda yadda. Billionaires are immune to the failures of the systems that are ruining ordinary people’s lives.

Other things I’m interested in that may land in this newsletter: Britney Spears and family abuse dynamics, the absolute American obsession with the individual, the perfect victim and Amber Heard, the nuclear family as unit of white supremacy, the podcast Guys We Fucked, and of course, Chappell Roan. I’m also quite interested in politics and the election, but find we are in a moment where I find the amount of true focus I need to write about such realities is often too much. I did however write 100 letters to swing voters to get Harris in. I’m someone who identifies more as a leftist than a Democrat, but I do believe my vote is best used to get Harris elected.

In terms of Chappell Roan, I fell in love with her music over a year ago when I watched My Kink is Karma on YouTube. I fell in love with her aesthetic immediately. I don’t feel the need to protect her—I know the media has been critiquing her, but my thoughts are rather simple. She is completely 100% correct that she will not choose to endorse a presidential candidate who is not verbalizing that they will protect trans people’s rights to control their own body, etc.

Anyways, I feel instead this deep rage that a woman like me, a girl in the 90’s who was so confused by the lesbian softball stereotype that I used to joke that I ‘must be a gay man,’ did not get to grow up seeing any queer femmes that would help me envision who I was. I mainly feel the kind of rage that would manifest as blood coming out of my throat eyeballs and ears all at once. I mean, we had Angelina Jolie in the aughts, but honestly, Angelina Jolie looked like she came from another planet before all of the it girlies were getting plastic surgery. Relating to Angelina Jolie was very, very unrelatable. It’s much easier to imagine that you are Angelina Jolie’s dirty dog and she’s asking you to drink water from a filthy water bowl than to think of her as representation. Let’s just say hard to relate to her, even if you are shooting high.

And honestly when lesbians were represented, we were always either portrayed as ugly or weird. We never got to be Rachel from Friends.

When John Leguizamo gave his speech at the Emmy’s this September, I cried. I see myself in John Leguizamo, a Latin guy from Queens, way more than I do in most yoga teacher trainings, most dance classes, or movement spaces I enter. His point in the speech was that you need to see yourself represented to imagine yourself. We are stuck in the great U.S. of A. We are still so, so, so obsessed with the white collar white woman who is usually straight, maybe bi, but always, always relating to the needs of the capitalist machine (and usually the machine is represented by a husband and a male boss). Sometimes, I hate when my voice goes preachy like this. It makes me feel like I’m writing a really bad self-help book. But honestly, I don’t care about the white collar working woman who just leaked breast milk on her silk button down and is bored by sex with her husband so she’s having an affair with a 25 year old male secretary. I also don’t care that her best friend is a lesbian who is exactly the same as her, but a lesbian. Part of it is that these characters feels so robotic; the other part is it’s really time for some new stories.

When I write future Issues, you can expect me to talk about what it means to live in a queer femme body when you are still carrying around the trauma of the culture from the 90s and aughts, what it’s like to watch certain queer youth get to sparkle, and to wonder what it would have been like to get to sparkle at 26. I swam through a lot of self hate in my 20’s, and I look back and wonder how much of that was just lack of representation?

I’m interested in complexity. Can you love and hate your body at the same time? What does it mean to get botox and filler if you think botox and filler shouldn’t exist? How does the whole complex of sassy advice by mainly famous celebrities show that we have stopped engaging in complex relating? Why in the first place is it so popular to get advice from celebrities whose main qualification is that they made a lot of money off of a job that we don’t actually need, and that we heavily reward? How does power and money affect who gets to set boundaries? Who does The New York Times almost exclusively talk about parenting issues like they are talking to the Knights and Ladies of Brooklyn —is it because they actually don’t care that working class people have children? If you are interested in how I write about the body and trauma, consider reading one of my older posts

Thank you! All of my posts could use more likes and all likes perhaps will help the algorithm. Goodnight lovely, broken humans,

Renee

On Saltburn, yes the movie

Eat the Rich Escapism and men with heart-shaped pelvii

Hello Sweet Readers; This is Issue 23 of Obsessions, a newsletter devoted to one lesbian’s obsession with the body and culture. I did not formally publish anything here for the last year because of serious chronic illness. I can say this — my experience navigating chronic illness has opened me up to all the flaws in late stage capitalism. I’m particularly rattled by the overuse of the word traumatized to mean bothered/annoyed/decentered/misunderstood by a stranger/pooped on by a pigeon. However, in this moment, I’m glad to be writing to you about something besides chronic illness. At the end of the post, there will be links to what I am reading/watching/listening to as well as links to help broaden understanding of the suffering that is occurring in Gaza right now.

Here comes Issue 23.

I watched Saltburn on New Year’s Eve as I lay on the floor stretching, erectors, piriformis, hamstrings. These muscles that pull and place the pelvis. In medical education textbooks, it is men that have the heart-shaped pelvis. Saltburn is about men with heart-shaped pelvii. Felix, the narcissistic golden child, is the kind of young college student that you can imagine pulling you in with his pelvis. And Oliver’s pull is his skull. Saltburn is about the psychology of rich people, rich people who are insular, decadent and demonstrably unafraid of being insensitive, greedy, misunderstood, mishandled, misplaced, mistooken. 

Maybe I loved Saltburn because I had not seen The Talented Mr. Ripley. Maybe I loved Saltburn because of Carrie Mulligan’s id-driven character. I love the invisible fool, the teller of jokes, the person who has no idea how they are being perceived by others. Tobias in Arrested Development, sometimes Ilana in Broad City, often times Hannah in Girls.  

Hannah Horvath, Episode 1 of Girls.

Carrie Mulligan’t character spoke to the part of me that when taking a dance class, would say, “Tandu, 1, 2, 3, make sure you dust the floor or you will never get a Russian husband.” I was the invisible femme, the foolish teller of jokes. “Yours is worthy of 4 Russian husbands.”

In Saltburn, Pamela, in fact, is dating a Russian billionaire. She’s my favorite character because she thinks the Russian language is pretty, she doesn’t pick up that the billionaire is calling her a whore, and she is very focused on her outfits. We get to indulge in her thick eye shadow, her curtain bangs, her inability to see that she is not welcome at Saltburn.  

Pamela, played by Carrie Mulligan, in Saltburn.

I think I came back to the movie more than once for self-indulgence. Escapism. While it took me a much longer time to catch onto say The Bachelor (thin, young, attractive women fight over the same man = pretty status quo) than it did The Kardashians, I love me some escapism. I love The Kardashians because beauty and greed interest me. Maybe this makes me a basic b****, but watching 5 sisters with the same face created by probably the same plastic surgeon is kind of fascinating. While wealthy people have been trying to hide their wealth both aesthetically and literally since the gilded age, many of us look when it’s on display. Kim K, of the Kardashian, was held at gunpoint in her hotel room in 2017 so that the robbers could take 10 million worth of jewelry. I can’t personally imagine walking down any street anywhere with 10 million on my body and feeling safe. I get it, she’s not like us, oh my. But 10 million is enough to retire in a prized neighborhood in Los Angeles, 10 million is a wild life changing amount of money. 

I think what we truly desire is more interesting than what we are told to desire. I can’t tell you how many women I know like to be choked, or how many women are sending me Billie Eilish’s new Lunch video because her vibe has gotten just a little butch, and so many queers are like, finally. 

And as you will see if you watch Saltburn, desire leads the show. At a time when Elon Musk thinks he’s contributing meaningfully to the ‘fertility crisis’ and movies like Triangle of Sadness remind us that rich people are often hypocrites who require us not to point out their hypocrisy, there’s also historical precedent. “Qin Shi Huangdi (259-210 BCE) the first emperor of a unified China, had 700,000 men—out of perhaps 10 million—working for three decades on an immense necropolis in which he was eventually buried with 8,000 terra-cotta soldiers and a number of live human sacrifices (including the artisans responsible for building the place.” From the river of mercury that was meant to preserve his necropolis from grave robbers that were fully alive and would now get mercury poisoning to the idea that one would need 8,000 soldiers to go with you in the void, I dunno, feels a little excessive. The problem isn’t desire, but that a small group can have a million desires, and another group, is working so many hours that they won’t get to nap on the couch and think thoughts about what they desire. 

I think I liked Saltburn because I like pretty things, and I like watching Americans freak out about sex. I liked Saltburn largely because of it’s beauty (yes, I have a stellium in Libra that includes my moon). I don’t mean the beauty of a poem you whisper to your first child as you lay in silk sheets smelling their soft head. And I don’t mean the simple egalitarian beauty of a functioning world where everyone can grow tomatoes in their yard. I mean cunning, ugly beauty. The kind that is rampant in the great U.S. of A.. 

A press shot of The Countess (Lady Gaga) in American Horror Story Hotel.

I will say this. I watch movies for costume and character development. I don’t even know I’m doing this, but this is what I do. In American Horror Story Season 3 Hotel, the Countess must keep her nails so sharp that she can slit a man’s throat. In Physical, Sheila must wear outrageous striped leotards over tights to remind us that it’s yes the 80’s. In Clueless, Cher not only wears all yellow to school but the yellow of her clothes matches the yellow of her hair and the yellow pallet of sunny Beverly Hills. The best costumes for Saltburn were given to Pamela who has bright copper hair, big fake eyelashes, and the kind of eye makeup we associate with influencers under 31 who think, genuinely think, that they are old.

Saltburn starts in the mid 2000s at Oxford University in England with a quiet, pensive character called Oliver who is seeking a way to befriend Felix. Felix is the George Clooney of Generation Z. He has a Gaston chin, and the deer like eyes of a man that is so tall and muscular and so y chromosomey that he can blink his eyes and expect to open them up only to be met with shiny things. If there’s anything interesting about Felix at all, it’s his relationship with Oliver (Barry Keoghan).

Is it Oliver’s obsession with Felix that reveals Oliver to us? Isn’t that how we get revealed to ourselves? Isn’t that how we know we are a thing? Just by seeing how we are with another?

Oliver introduces the movie with a moody little monologue that goes like this, “I wasn’t in love with him {Felix played by Jacob Elordi}. I knew everyone thought I was. But I wasn’t. I loved him, of course. It was impossible not to love Felix. And that was part of the problem. Everyone loved him. Everyone wanted to be around him. It exhausted him. People just wouldn’t leave him alone. Especially the girls. Christ the girls. I think honestly that’s why he liked me so much. I was honest with him.” 

Here is the plot of the film. Oliver, through a series of strategic moves, looks to climb the class hierarchy at Oxford University where he has been labeled by other students as a “scholarship boy who gets his clothes from OxFam.” He is teased by Farleigh for wearing a suit that is too big and not properly tailored. But what Oliver really wants more than anything, what he is truly obsessed about, is becoming Felix’s best friend. There’s some mirroring of Jennifer’s Body in that there is some kinky tension and desire between Felix and Oliver throughout the movie. 

At point, Oliver, written as the complex outsider, hooks up with another college girl who is obsessed with Felix and she asks, “Do you think he’ll be jealous?” Oliver’s answer is, “Honestly, I don’t t think it’ll even fucking register.” The timing is horrid (mid coitus), but also are we to believe that he’s an insensitive asshole, a flawed human being kind of sick of playing side show to Felix the playboy, or just bad? I think when we are young, even if we aren’t a playboy or a manic pixie dream girl, it is the plump collagen in our skin that prevents us from being called personality-disordered. We just don’t have our frontal lobes developed yet.

You will not be bored by Salburn.

I would not watch this with children.

Rich people behave badly. There is sex and death. 

Venetia, played by Alison Oliver, drinking whilst playing tennis at Saltburn.

There will be rich people playing tennis in tuxedos and high heels. If Venetia discovers the blisters are so bad that she cannot walk the next day, she can take off her shoes and lie on the couch for the week. Sometimes, I forget that people where ugly (but expensive) REI fleece jackets in Portland because they are sturdy, practical and easy to clean. I forgot this because, growing up outside of Los Angeles in the 90’s, gave me the idea that you dress for your personality, not for the clouds. I didn’t get that clouds, mud, and ice were things, or that ugly clothes are designed with purpose.   

At some point, Oliver, who has already endured dumb bullying by some of the rich kids at Oxford, goes home with Felix to the estate called Saltburn where his nuclear family lives. The entire family live like narcissistic children plopping about, playing tennis in heels, and insulting each other’s sex lives. The Mom makes fun of the daughter’s sex life. The father is interested in talking about who Lord Byron slept with. The daughter, Venetia, giggles and licks her teeth a lot. This is where you learn that Felix actually lives in a castle. This is not like one or several of the Kardashian’s homes. This is a castle that’s made of marble and gold and that has a red room, a green room, a blue room, a piano room, a room where King Henry the VII slept, and an employee called a footman. There is a footman at the castle! Also, they are so rich that their servants are men. Yes, they have like butlers in tuxedos like batman. If you ever forget your class status, look around? Do you have a butler or a footman who is a white man? I mean, not even the Kardashians could achieve this. 

When Oliver arrives without cuff links to Saltburn, there’s someone new for the fully grown children and the parents, Elspeth and Sir James E. Catton, to metabolize. Pamela, the girlfriend to a Russian billionaire, has been hiding out at the estate to avoid the billionaire. Elspeth, proving she will throw her own friends under the bus, describes Pamela as a woman that is so stylish that you wouldn’t know she was a bimbo. Pamela, red copper hair, curtain bangs and raccoon painted eyes, is either the hottest or the ugliest woman in the room. She is also mysteriously dead by the middle of the movie. 

Farleigh, biracial half brother to golden child Felix, bullies Oliver because he is quietly diminished by the family at Saltburn. Farleigh makes fun of Oliver’s suit for not being properly tailored, and sets him up at a dinner party to sing I’m Your Puppet at karaoke. At one point, Farleigh discretely tries to sell some 16th century Palisse plates to Sotheby’s

I loved this movie because it was amoral and indulgent. The sexuality was not American. The characters do not declare that they are born this way. 

If you have seen The House of Yes or The Piano Teacher, there was moralism in Saltburn but it wasn’t caked on thick dripping down the windows like in an America movie.

Saltburn is a silly movie that is maybe the wrong thing. It is silly with death and sex and the copper-haired Pamela. It is silly with a blue room and a red room and a green room and a Henry the Eighth room silly. I think I liked Saltburn because it edged the horror genre, and then the new genre called Rich People Are Idiots.

Movies like Saltburn allow us to revel in our own moral superiority. Saltburn draws from a rich history of rich people behaving badly. In the movie Triangle of Sadness (a 2022 film released in English by Swedish director Ruben Ostlund), a bunch of wealthy elites end up stranded on an island when their cruise ship sinks. This movie is the best written of the bunch I’m mentioning, the most cerebral, the most conscientious of systems of inequity. Other movies like Ready or Not (2019) and You’re Next (2011) display rich people as a bit more willing to hide their relationship to money. In Saltburn, there is no hiding. There are pieces of art strewn about like college sweatshirts. Saltburn feels reckless and young and kinky. And while the horror is a little bit too on the nose at this moment in American political history, I would watch this movie again if anyone asked me to. 

What I’m reading and watching and listening to, just the good stuff:

1. Reading The Creator Economy is Asylum We’re Being Raised In: Engaged communities like the Swifties are data-rich ecosystems exploited by surveillance capitalists. I’ve had a really, really hard time articulating why I have been so disinterested in the obsession with Taylor Swift. I felt the white girl boss feminism from the beginning, but I really haven’t had a great angle on this because I really have avoided engaging — I have absorbed not enough for someone who is pretty obsessed with pop culture. This piece is brilliant! brilliant!

2. Listening and watching How Contrapoints Reinvented Philosophy for YouTube with Natalie Wynn - 267, Adam Conover’s podcast.

3. Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones.

4. The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O-Rourke

I support a free Palestine, and seek out resources to better understand the history of the Middle East, and frankly, the U.S.’s involvement in allowing and aiding in the death of so many innocent civilians. I support a CeaseFire now in Palestine, and recommend researching the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement. If all beings are truly interdependent, we cannot stand for the killing of innocent, vulnerable civilians in Gaza. I believe The Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund through UNICEF is still a good place to send money.\

Thanks you for reading dear humans! Take good care until next time.

That Blue Selfish Archetype

On loving someone because you're young or something like that

This is Issue 22 of Obsessions.

There was a time in my life when I left a dirty city to go visit a very muggy city on a plane, as you do, with my good friend and roommate. We wrote poetry together on the plane, and we ate poh boys in a bar at three a.m. in the morning. I was in love with someone the way you are when nothing really is at stake except for the feeling of being poked by a 1000 needles at once. I was in love at a time before you could phone in a celebrity and ask for advice and the celebrity could say honey walk away. Then, the celebrity, who would be infused in the poisons of late aughts, probably would have said, Honey, why were you in love with a straight girl? I think about this straight girl a lot. How I loved her selfishness. And I think about how a therapist or a friend would say that’s not love without knowing it’s cracks and crevices. And they are right, it wasn’t love, but it also wasn’t not love.

Sometimes when I dot my wrists with Ylang Ylang I wonder if I’m trying to smell like her. Ylang ylang smells like sex and depression.

She was always in a hurry and always focused on herself. But she was a striking brown woman so I never got that icky feeling that you get from Sex and the City. I don’t know what that means.

God, it tastes like blue ice cream to watch a woman be selfish. I love it.

I went through that super idiotic stage where you don’t say anything directly.

S and I would be taking a taxi back form Manhattan to Brooklyn and I would say, “Look my heart just jumped out of my chest and fell on the concrete.”

Or I would see a red rose on the subway stairs and say, “Look that flower looks like you.” And I would cackle a little because the flower was a bit smashed and sitting on the subway steps.

I learn shit somatically.

"Trixie on the Cot, New York City", 1979, Nan Goldin. Silver dye bleach print, printed 2008, 15 1/2 x 23 1/8? (39.4 x 58.7 cm). Image Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2016 Nan Goldin

I don’t have an easy lessons for you or me. I think I’ll stop drinking coffee once I get an ulcer.

I stopped talking to my Mother literally after not being able to make it to work because of wild symptoms of C-PTSD. (I will talk to my Mother again by the way, and fortunately you are not my therapist or my fiancé J).

In that muggy city, I bought a water stained copy of Anne Sexton’s Complete Poems and I read over and over the lines, ‘Yet I’d risk my life on that dilly dally buttercup called dreams.’

I don’t see S in the same honey brown light anymore. She had twenty pairs of black shoes and only vinegar and wine in her fridge. It was 2008 and we were all still wearing skinny jeans. I was taking nude portraits with cibachrome film which made my nipples look bright orange like I was out tanning in Miami. I hadn’t found my queer community so I was toning shit down. Shouting out taxi windows rather than looking narcissistic straight girls in the eyes.

Renee

P.S. Nan Goldin’s very queer film All The Beauty and the Bloodshed, loosely about queer NYC culture, photography and the opioid epidemic, is now available on HBO Max.

The Mother Wound

On womanhood, pole dancing, and my own mother wound

Welcome to Issue 21 of Obsessions, a non-binary femmes obsession with culture, politics, the body and identity. My pronouns have changed. I now go by they/them and she/her. I will continue to slide between pronouns how I choose and for my straight allies, my only request is that you don’t educate others on my pronouns. I will remain she/her when it’s better for my mental health and easier to do so. Of course, if folks land on my writing and discover stuff about me here, I’m happy about that! Being an ambitious writer is just as essential to my identity as my pronouns. What you might want to know is that I am someone who simultaneously identifies as a woman, a lesbian and non-binary all at once. I am also not interested in educating folks about the differences unless it’s at an appropriate rate of pay. Welcome to my newsletter and thanks for reading!

How do I write about the mother wound ceasing metaphor or simile?

A couple years before the pandemic, I started taking pole dancing classes seriously. Like when I took modern dance for the first time, I was often the oldest non-binary femme in the room. My personal uniform was a beautiful leotard I bought from an artist named Rachel at Serpent and Bow. There’s a moon on the belly and a big gold cross at the sternum. I wear a black sports bra and then I roll the leotard down anytime I am trying to hang from the pole. I’m often not in my body when I’m in the room with other people. I’m commenting on my friend Sarah’s beautiful outside leg hang, “Now you will definitely have three Russian husbands.” Way before the pandemic hit and Putin invaded Ukraine, I would make Russian husband jokes.

Pole attracts feminine people who used to dance or do gymnastics. Pole also attracts Regina George from Mean Girls, and strippers and sex workers who are far more self-possessed than I am. There’s also a whole new school of young non-binary femmes showing up who weren’t exactly taught to hate their desires or their bodies or their pronouns or their hair cuts.

Here I am.  A historical 40 year old monument with no Russian husbands.

Before pole, yoga gave me earth and shelter. I could move through sun salutations and when I was finished, I felt like the King of Cups. Grounded, open and confident. I also injured my back once going into kurmasana and watched 45 year old white Jesus-look-alike men explain the word patriarchy to giggling long-haired women.

Pole gave me pain and bruises. Because I like ritual and I like covering my legs with shaving cream and then tacking my ankles, thighs, and hands with something sticky that will help me stay on the pole. Pole gave me one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I love pole and yet I’m often not in my body if other people are in the room. I’m not used to being anywhere where I’m doing something I love with other queer femmes there. My body doesn’t know that the word lesbian is no longer a slur. My body doesn’t know that I am safe here, covered in shaving cream, listening to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Our Mother’s all have wounds. Some build potions made of burdock and licorice to save the next generation. Some take their poison and make a new poison, generously lick the arrow, and throw the arrows into the next generation’s backs. Most, do a bit of both.

But a woman’s hunger is repulsive in the so-called civilized world inhabited by savages. A woman’s laughter seems dangerous. A woman’s skepticism looks merciless. I might’ve talked about Nancy Chodorow’s theory that as long as women are primary caretakers, all of a child’s emotional ambivalence will cohere in misogyny. “Mate.” ‘ASK MOLLY’ (a substack) by Heather Havrilesky

The damage has been done my fellow elder millenials. The hate sunk in and has taken a long time to repair. The metaphors are failing me. HBO will never write enough Euphorias and Showtime cannot make enough L Words to make up for that.

I quit dancing at five years old. I became a little poet at Catholic school writing terrible poems that a different mother would have read to her friends. I don’t remember being in my body much. I remember oil panting classes, how the classroom smelled like a gas station, and how I loved the teacher Virginia.

I love pole and yet I’m not often in my body.

I quit dancing as a five year old. It’s hard for me to imagine wanting to quit, but I have a mother wound. My favorite movies come from the 1980’s and are about dance; Fame, A Chorus Line, and All That Jazz (okay 1979). When you watch those women, there are no queers. We are living in San Francisco creating our own dress codes and languages. We are creating stuff that will be taken from in the aughts and 2010’s and it will be taken from us like it’s a generous thing and networks and television executives will make money off of their generous plunder.

It’s hard to imagine that the costumes when I went to dance as a little one weren’t enough to keep me hooked. But I have a mother wound. I currently own two black leotards, one red one with the thong back, a leopard leotard, a teal shiny one, and two coral leotards that are covered in butterflies and snakes.

Laura Callaghan Illustration. ‘Deluge’. www.lauracallaghanillustration.com

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Maybe my Mom told me I was a bad dancer. She once told my sister, a nationally recognized competitive cheerleader with the muscles of Britney Spears in I’m a Slave For U, you’re not as good as I was. Is the flaw that I kinda believe my Mom? Or that my Mom never had the money, the transportation or the support to compete nationally? I can’t help but resent the mother wound. The way it defers to patriarchy. The way the mother wound defines itself in relationship to the nuclear family. The way we can only look at it at the very surface or it becomes the vagina dentata and everyone runs back to ordering dinner on DoorDash.

In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first movie The Lost Daughter, there is a flash back where the main character refuses to kiss her daughter’s bruised finger. The little girl’s whining and need sucks up space and the Mom rolls her eyes and we the audience are asked to experience emotional devastation. In this film, she has a male partner who can also meet the child’s needs, but of course he’s been conditioned not to do so.

I’m interested in what happens when the emotional devastation is much bigger. I’m interested in how we are going to give to each other when we realize the nuclear family is a shit show.

I’m grieving the mother who wounded me after living in a chronically damp world that gave her nothing but manipulations and tricks. I know that there are little queer kids that hate the pink tights and pink leotards. They feel so overwhelmed by the scratchy leotards that they don’t even know if the movements are fun. I was never that kid. My mother was a tomboy and I wanted to go to London and hang out with my best friend’s Mother Rhonda who had long beautiful dark hair and dressed like a Stevie-Nicks-Witch-Lady.

At my pole class, I have felt like the history book in the corner, the untreated PTSD, and the metaphor.

The history book: There was a time when femme exclusively and completely meant lesbian. It wasn’t an umbrella term for all kinds of people doing emotional labor.

The untreated PTSD: There are times when I can’t feel the skin of my legs on the pole and the rubbing of pole to skin and the stickiness is what shows me I’m not going to fall on my head. I’m sometimes floating in the room uncertain if I should leave or push myself to stay. I always blame myself for diassociating because it makes me feel weak.

The metaphor: The mother wound drips down my spinal chord. She closes my jaw before I begin to speak. She mumbles jokes and flutters my fingers when they should be still. She tells me all these men are acting and behaving just darling just fine when they are behaving like shit shows. She tells me not to know the things because we all know what happens to witches, to Joan of Arc, and to Britney Spears. Holy hell, even Britney Spears who built an empire and never threatened men with her girlfriends or her big thoughts or her fatness or her hairy arm pits.

Last year, I became less consistent with my pole practice. I was learning to do things with my body that required more trust, confidence, and proprioception. I was learning to do things where I could fall on my head. And the teachers were teaching so fast, and I felt finally the way I think some of my friends felt in math classes, like everything was garbled and I was being presented a very complex puzzle rather than a set of clear instructions. My personal work schedule became really difficult and the Mother Wound called to me from little toddlers who weren’t my own. The Mother Wound said: love us even when you don’t have enough for yourself, love us even though this wage won’t get you very far, love us because we are small and vulnerable. I always joke that the first toddler I took care of will either be a pop star, a serial killer, or a very popular girl. She wanted so much from me and I gave her all of my silly and my sweet assurances and my stories, and I can’t say that any of this really helped my Mother Wound. Her Mom was teaching her the word woman and she was obsessed with calling me woman. I started wearing higher cut shirts. My body is not someone else’s kid’s anatomy lesson. I wish she called me Witch instead. To me, it’s as obvious that I am a witch as that I am an artist.

Thanks for reading,

Renée