Baby Teeth (dead lamb)
it does not matter that she was more miserable than i am. it does not matter.
“I am obsessed with the person I once was. I want to wear her like a sweater. I want to cut away her flesh the way they do with dead lambs and drape her over my orphan body in hopes that her skin will disguise my scent and render me lovable. It does not matter that she was more miserable than I am. It does not matter.
I play her music and study her pictures, sad eyes and short skirts. An ink splot on colored paper, something tragic and strange in a child’s bedroom. On the nightstand: a collection of love poems, a journal, and a Robert Olmstead novel. On her face: exhaustion, lip gloss, and the carnal charm of decaying innocence.
She is the same as every other girl who grew up in one shaking painful breath. Every child who knew the deep yearning plea for death before they learned algebra. There is nothing unique about her. Nothing except the fact that she was once me.”
When a lamb or other livestock offspring is orphaned, there are several age-old methods farmers may use to encourage an adult female to adopt the baby as their own. One method, often called skin-grafting, involves skinning the ewe’s deceased offspring to fashion a ‘vest’ in which to wrap the orphaned lamb. The hope is that the ewe will recognize the scent of her biological offspring on the new lamb while simultaneously becoming accustomed to the new animal, which she will soon adopt as her own.
I was first introduced to the practice not in the sheep-raising manual I received for my eighteenth birthday (total I’m-not-like-other-girls moment) but in my favorite comfort film, God’s Own Country1, which is screenshotted below. In the movie, the concept is later paralleled in a scene in which we see the main character, Johnny, wrapped in the sweater of his love interest, Gheorghe, in a similar fashion.
The idea is morbid, sure, and kind of gross - but metaphorically quite romantic. The concept of (wanting to) physically envelop yourself in a loved one is a familiar one to a lot of people (thinking of that tweet that’s like “cuddling my bf is not close enough i want to wear him like a skinsuit”). And more than that, the urge to disguise oneself in order to gain acceptance is an experience I would wager to be fairly universal.
I was recently reminded of the concept when I stumbled upon a self-portrait I had taken with a self-timer and a $30 digital camera when I was thirteen. I’m wearing a tiny black slip-dress and posing, nonchalantly but with the obvious intention of appearing seductive, on the bed in my childhood bedroom. What struck me most about the photo was the contrast. At thirteen, I already looked nearly grown; in the photos, I could easily pass for the age I am now if it weren’t for the background - my walls are an obnoxious neon color I picked out in elementary school, and the decorations and bedspread are straight out of the Walmart tween section of the 2010s. It’s obvious that the girl in the picture is a child, but she doesn’t look like one, she isn’t dressed like one, she isn’t posing like one, and she certainly didn’t feel like one.
Until I’d stumbled upon this picture, it hadn’t occurred to me how young I had been at that age. Looking back at my life, I tend to separate it into two segments: childhood (before mental illness) and now (from about 11 years old onward). Subconsciously, I treated everything that happened to me after the onset of my mental illness as though I had been an adult, because that’s how I felt. It seemed impossible that I could know that much pain and heartache and misery and retain any semblance of adolescence. It took actually laying eyes upon my 13-year-old-self and seeing the poorly disguised anguish in her eyes as she tried to look sexy for the camera to realize: oh my God, I had only been a child.
I think that when people experience things that make us ‘grow up’ too fast - whether it be trauma, assault, abuse, illness, poverty, pain, whatever - we have a tendency to rationalize our ability to cope by telling ourselves, ‘oh, I was mature for my age anyway’, or ‘oh, it made me more responsible/empathetic/perceptive/etc.’. We tend to shy away from thinking about our younger selves the ways we think about the platonic ideal2 of an 11-year-old or a 7-year-old or a 15-year-old or whatever. Because the thought of a child going through what we went through is distressing, we make an exception for ourselves - I was different, I could handle it, it wasn’t that bad in my particular case, etc. - when in actuality, we should afford ourselves the same empathy and care we would to any other child in pain.
Still, that realization wasn’t exactly a comforting one to me. In some ways, it made me feel worse. Because in many ways, I still feel like I’m in the same place as that child. Not the physical bedroom, but the desperate, lonely despair. I had an excuse, then - youth, naivety, ignorance - what do I have, now? The same pain and the same problems and nothing to show for the past near-decade.
I found myself, somewhat inexplicably, feeling envy towards the girl in the photo. She was miserable, yes - but the misery was new, unfamiliar, trendy. When you’re thirteen and fucked up, there’s a certain intrigue to it; but if you’re still that way at twenty, it’s just like, damn, you really haven’t found antidepressants that work for you yet? Fr?3
So, I thought about the lamb, and I thought about wanting to be that girl again, and I wrote that I wanted to skin her and wear her like a sweater. Objectively a fucked up thing to say, even about yourself. Really, what I wanted was to be back in that place of potential. Before my youth was wasted at the hands of something bigger and stronger than myself. Before I hurt the people around me and myself in the process. I wanted that je ne sais quoi, the cinematic quality, the feeling of being something interesting. It’s why Sally Mann’s 1989 photograph of her preteen daughter posing as an adult is one of the most iconic images of the 20th century4. When you are a child acting like an adult, people like to look at it. It’s pleasing to the voyeurs in your life. It’s something novel and strange and Nabokovian5. It feels empowering. When you are an adult acting like an adult, all you feel is inadequate.
I know this is unfair of me. I also know that, if I were to return to that time, I would wish I hadn’t. In many ways, I am much happier and more secure than I was then. Now, when I have breakdowns, I can laugh at myself and know it will pass. Back then, I thought the world was ending. I thought there was no way I could make it to eighteen alive. I didn’t know there was a name or a reason for what I was experiencing. All I knew was that I was very scared and very alone.
So, I am caught in limbo between gratitude for how far I have come and shame for not having gotten further. I fear that if that little girl saw me now the embarrassment would swallow me. Here we are, I would tell her, crying ourselves to sleep again. Still uncool and anxious and posing in the mirror. Here we are, still afraid and still alone.
When, really, I should be telling her that I can make it through the day without crying now. That I have met new people and come to love them and be loved in return. That there is a name for what she’s feeling and there is help for it and she is not alone would she only ask for help. That, as corny and trite as it sounds, things really do get better.
It takes effort not to fall into the trap of romanticizing our shitty pasts even as we are still reeling from their consequences. It’s especially hard when we live in a culture that eroticizes youth and pain, and two-fold for the two of them together. It’s also difficult to give ourselves credit for the progress we have made (if any) or for simply continuing to survive in a life that is marred by suffering. So, I’m telling you (yes, I know it sounds corny! I know!) that you have done well. That simply being here is something to be proud of. That your child-self would be proud of you; they would. Even so, you don’t have to seek their approval, anyway, and you certainly don’t have to scramble to throw together some sort of pleasing aesthetic for your pain or your journey. You don’t have to wear someone else’s skin to be loveable - not even your own.
As always like, subscribe, and write me a soliloquy about the one that got away in the comments! xoxo and blessed Passover/Ramadan/Easter to those who celebrate <3
God’s Own Country is eternally my favorite movie about repressed gay shepherds falling in love in the mountains for many reasons but mostly because neither of them FUCKING DIE AT THE END. Spoiler alert for Brokeback Mountain 2005 I guess…
Also, how the same director that made this masterpiece somehow came out with the lifeless snoozefest that was Ammonite is beyond me.
Basically, what you think of when you imagine a certain concept - for example, when you imagine “an apple”, you’re not thinking about a particular apple you once saw, but the general idea of the epitome of an apple. So in this case, thinking of what you would imagine when you think of the idea of “a twelve-year-old”.
I kind of did, this year, finally! But now it's making my hair fall out (to keep me humble).
Not that it’s not a great photo! It’s powerful and beautifully arranged and I genuinely love it.
There is so much that can be said about the impact of Lolita as popularized through tumblr, the 1997 film, and Lana Del Rey on people growing up online in the 2010s. So much. Maybe later!