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Heads up: this post has some references to self-harm/suicide, so feel free to skip it if needed.
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It’s almost Halloween. I’m walking around the East Village with my friend on Thursday night. I wish there were more people in costumes. So far all I have seen are women in cat ears and their boyfriends dressed in waffle shirts without jackets. Then Mario and Luigi scuttle past us on the crosswalk. It’s hard to tell who is in a costume and who is just dressed like a New Yorker.
It’s also Sylvia Plath’s birthday. I’ve been thinking of her most of the day. I love the wind, I say to my friend when a gust blows open our coats and makes messes of our bangs. Earlier my friend told me that hair is a sensory organ. I remember when I saw Plath’s ponytail from her first haircut in the National Portrait Gallery, the first ever exhibition of her visual work and other tactile objects. When I saw the long chestnut ponytail in the glass case, I started to cry. A part of the body even when detached, it doesn’t decay.
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I wrap my arm in pink gauze to make it look like a cast for my Lady Bird costume. By one or two am, I’m sitting on the floor with my friend in someone’s bedroom. We needed a break from the party. In the Mood for Love plays on the tv above us. My fingers feel slightly numb from the wrap. Commitment, two people have said to me about my fake cast. I am committed, going as far as to put a red tint in my hair for my two costumes. Halloween seems to require doing something stupid. My friend helps me unravel the gauze. It takes a few minutes so we start to pull like an impatient child opening a present. There are deep indents on my arm from how tight the bandage was. Earlier I worried someone would think the fake cast would look like I was making light of self-harm. We look at the damage I did to my arm, which I know is only temporary. I want to stay in this moment of release.
my name is NOT Christine, it’s Lady Bird
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Twitter and Instagram have been littered with “my culture is not your costume” memes. What is my culture? Manic pixie dream girl? Disappointing and disappointed? Writer who doesn’t always write? Girl who is always a little sick? Charlotte and I text about our costumes. For Halloween I’m either hyper feminine or a boy, there’s no in between. Often a character people have to ask me who I’m dressed as. I make it a point not to ask others who they’re supposed to be.
One college Halloween I dressed as Sylvia Plath. I carried around an oven I made from a cardboard box. My friends were Virginia Woolf in the river and Anne Sexton with the martini she took into the car during her last minutes on earth. I received a message from an acquaintance explaining why this was bad. It was bad. I took their criticism. Later I explained to my poetry professor the controversy. He brushed it aside, told me the statute of limitations was up. I wasn’t so sure. I was twenty years old, I probably should have known better. But I didn’t.
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Who’s your favorite poet?
Sylvia Plath.
Sylvia Plath is the favorite poet of girls who slit their wrists.
She’s more than that.
This is a conversation I had the night before her birthday. This man told me Bishop was better than Plath, before saying he hadn’t read much Plath.
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The kind that goes out then sleeps for a week. The kind that goes out on her own. Maybe you’ve gone somewhere wrong if Ryan Adams writes a song about you. Or you might just be a dead girl. Like Birthday Letters, another famous Plath mythology in the form of a poetry collection written by her ex-husband, the Ryan Adams song about her peppers in famous details to uphold the manic pixie dreamgirl archetype. Her love of baths, the sea. Her mania. In the song and in the poems, the romantic details are still meant to be tragic. But you don’t need me to tell you Plath was more than the tragic details.
Even those who love her earnestly romanticize her mental illness and various tragedies. Myself included. There’s even a plathcellectuals account on Instagram. Most of the memes are not really about Plath, but the general discourses about the sad girl archetype. Associations pop up on the account. Mitski, Sailor Moon, Chloë Sevigny, Patrick Batemen. Rayne Fisher-Quann has an entire essay about the sad girl archetype, trying to “understand [ourselves] in the fictions of the more actualized.” And it’s true. The more I read about Plath in her journals, biographies, poems, and letters, the more I saw myself in her. Her hard work, her unhealthy obsession with being seen as “good,” her hunger (literal and not), her love of love, her health problems, the pictures of her laughing in the sun, her nervous baking habit.
The memes don’t capture that. The mythos leaves all of that out. The mythologizers want what isn’t actually there, without going below the surface. Even Heather Clark’s brilliant and caring Red Comet: the short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath biography can only do so much. It didn’t reshape the public perception of Plath as reviewers promised, though it tries again and again. So maybe it’s less the “fictions of the more actualized,” but the fictions of the more mythologized that we want. And maybe, if someone believes in her image enough, they will find what is beyond the mirrors she loved writing about.
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Sylvia often got sick. A “bad fever” followed her around for most of her life. When she was in college, she often ended up in the infirmary. In the last month of her life, she was battling a cold that brought her to her lowest point. Still she wrote in bed. If you need evidence, read “Fever 103.” My theory is she worked herself so hard her body demanded that every once in a while she needed to stop.
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Every year on her birthday, I post Sylvia’s “program to win friends & influence people” from her Cambridge journals. Many of the bullets are reminders to herself to be more mysterious. I can relate to this, too. The desire to be someone people saw as worthy of attention because they didn’t make a show of themselves. Even Sylvia wanted to be someone who she wasn’t. She couldn’t keep her troubles to herself. Which, thank God she didn’t, at least not in her work. I try to be aloof and then I end up bubbling over. I try to not throw myself at people, but I do because I want impossible closeness. I, too, am bewildered at colored sandals.
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I often get sick, too. As I write this, I’m in bed fighting a virus. Yesterday I woke up with chills and a sore throat. I took a walk thinking it was just a bad hangover. My eyes had little stars in them. By the time I got home, I was shivering. Then the fever came. The augey tendon, the sin, the sin. I took a hot shower. It took me a few hours to give into going to urgent care to get tested. There was a wait, even when I was taken to a room. I shivered the entire time. I overheard a nurse say, all negative but that patient is very sick. The doctor returned and told me it is just a virus. I missed my Saturday Halloween plans. Time stretches out differently when you’re meant to be somewhere you’re not. The Lyft that picked me up claimed it was arriving in four minutes for ten minutes. He tells me how ride shares are back, that he has to go into Manhattan. I wish I could go into Manhattan. I took another hot shower when I got home, then I slept for twelve hours. Sylvia would have probably gone out.
my fomo speaking to me
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My second costume was supposed to be Juliet in her angel costume from Romeo + Juliet. I assumed most people would just think I was just an angel. Someone suggested I put some blood on my temple to make the costume more obvious. Once again, a very easy opportunity to be seen as making light of suicide. Have I learned since college? Yes. Besides, I didn’t want to buy the ingredients to make fake blood. And I know I would still have had to explain to people who I was, or at least why I was wearing a long white dress that could be mistaken for a wedding dress.
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I ask a man sitting next to an outlet in a restaurant if he would mind if I charged my phone. He clearly is a few drinks in, because he says he wouldn’t mind watching my phone if I did him a favor in return. If it’s not too much to ask, he says, but would you just kill me? I won’t press charges. I tell him he couldn’t but someone else would. He lets me charge my phone. When we’re leaving, he starts talking about crying all the time. I ask if he is a Cancer. Yes–how did you know?
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Sylvia and me under the tree on the North Quad freshman fall. I opened the collected poems to “The Rival” and read for the first time what would become my favorite poem. This may have been the moment I decided I wanted to be a poet. She would later be with me as I decided to not be a poet anymore as I read Red Comet. Plath never stopped writing poems, but she left no genre unturned. I scribbled some poems for a creative project for a World War I lit seminar. Little did I know I was preempting Taylor Swift’s bizarre, growing canon of war-themed songs. What I wanted to be was a girl someone noticed walking by. I wanted to be a romantic, like the idea of Plath I had at the time. I didn’t yet know that wasn’t the Plath I’d come to admire.
Now I’m mythologizing myself. The moon, too, abuses her subjects, but in the daytime, she is ridiculous.