I drew the cards for our March tarot reading weeks ago, but until now have refused to write about them.
Part of it is that I feel I don’t have anything “universal” or “mundane” to say to people at the moment. I’ve been stuck in that petulant place of: I only have my own experience, and my own experience of reading the cards. I only have what these cards mean for me, and the pain I feel when I draw even the “good” cups in readings, and I don’t want to project the petulance of my own shit onto a petty-mass reading for people who I don’t know well, or don’t know at all.
Part of it, too, is the sway of the feminist stance I found myself beholden to for the last several years. It was the one that rolled its eyes at the overused, now-institutionalized adage “the personal is political.” Wary of confession, wary of lazy boundaries, wary of narcissism—all some of the grosser parts of my past, and a current cornerstone of my own self that I until recently I tried to hide with irony, make-up-less makeup, and a totalizing devotion to paranoid reading—I could write all day about the pitfalls of the confessionals, in U.S. poetry, in 20th and 21st century women’s memoir, in my own life. Even in our Anna Karenina book club, even in our Discord care chats, I am always fighting the urge to tell my story, in the context of Tolstoy’s story, or in the context of the group’s story, and also always wanting to give into its pull, wanting others to give into that pull, as well.
There is something to the personal, and to the stories of personal suffering, and yet I am ever attuned to the co-optation of it. In my dissertation on the trouble with and potential for illness narrative as resistance, I said something just (exactly) like this:
“How does a woman tell the story of her own suffering from mental illness when the very reality of that suffering arises out of sociocultural forces that benefit from the continued narrative of that suffering as particular, individual, and unique to her, or else unique to her gender? Women writing memoirs of mental illness in the first two decades of the millennium have been divided in their attempts to address this question. Outside of the academy, women—usually white, usually benefiting from the support of independent, familial, or celebrity wealth—have produced narratives of what scholar Leigh Gilmore calls neoliberal striving: In these tales, the narrator begins with the revelation of a harrowing experience with mental illness—the gritty details of a life revolving around the accoutrements of bulimia’s binge and purge cycle, for example, or the descent into depression arising out of an unhappy marriage, postpartum period, or work situation—and the book tracks her progress out of the depths of mental anguish through the wealth-assisted quest for and discovery of a newer, illness-free, “authentic” self. This authentic self often appears at the end of the narrative as one who has embraced her flaws and imperfections as a kind of resilience, whether through an acceptance of a cellulite-prone body, the freedom of divorce, or learning how to ask for help with the kids. The canny appeal of these types of redemption narratives that “whisper of true goodness as birthright and destiny,” Gilmore writes, “depends on traveling a neoliberal life path of personal redemption that does not lead to political analysis or action” (106). Though the material of mental illness narratives such as Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, and Brené Brown’s memoir-adjacent psychology volume The Gifts of Imperfection “teem with political material,” they ultimately take “pain as material for self-transformation rather than an adequate politics,” each ending with the vision of the authentic self, transformed yet obedient within the constraints of a society that rewards women for speaking about their pain, even profiting off of it, if they promise to fall back within accepted lines of polite performance and “the right liberal politics,” albeit styled slightly differently from the beginning days of the writing process.”
I’ve got little game anymore in the pursuit of the authentic self, my own is as prickly and as stricken as the cactus-desert of pain where my breast skin flaps are now stitched to the scarring tissue atop my chest wall. But sometimes the reach for something wide and true to say, about the cards, about the world, about being a body in it, falters.