Note from the author: Below is an excerpt from the title chapter of Fuse, my memoir in mediations on mixed-race identity and mental illness. All other chapters sprung from this central one, which I wrote as a stand-alone piece before it ever crossed my mind to write a book about my experiences. When I wrote this essay—the first draft of it—I was still in the thick of addiction. My OCD ran unchecked, I was struggling with my eating disorder, and fighting constant urges to self-harm. But I despite all this chaos, I also felt an urge to start to try to make sense of things: of why I was the way I was. This chapter is the result.
Fuse
Girls are dying, but it doesn’t happen all at once.
The therapist searched my file. “Which one of your parents is Iranian?” she asked, pulling out my intake questionnaire. The form had taken longer to complete than our session would last. I’d registered through the outpatient program at the hospital; and after three months of waiting I received a phone call letting me know I had an appointment in a week.
“It’s just that women who are biracial are prone to eating disorders” she explained. I nodded. I didn’t ask why. I didn’t care, but when she told me this, I jerked my spine straight, grinning and shrugging loosely and dumbly as a marionette.
This happened years ago: I was twenty-four and it was the first time I’d been to a therapist. I was only there because my boyfriend wanted me to talk to someone, and I would have done anything for him.
“And people with eating disorders are more likely to suffer from co-occurring diseases, like depression, anxiety, substance abuse” she continued, flipping through my paperwork. “And OCD. I see you’ve been diagnosed.”
My eyes darted back to her. I’d been staring at the scuffed baseboards in her office, which I was pretty sure was, or had been, a storage closet. I was hungover, trying to piece together my surroundings. It gave me a small measure of comfort to be able to order my surroundings there, since I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten home the night before. I know there’d been live music in a dive bar. Many vodkas and diet cokes. I remember giving a hair-tie to a girl who’d been throwing up in the bathroom; her offering a slurred thanks and saying she usually doesn’t drink that much. I’d told her I usually drink ‘til I’m hot. Haha. We both thought I was pretty funny.
Focus. I shuffled my feet under my chair. Focus, I said again to myself. I repeated the word over and over until the swarm in my head condensed into a dull throb. Until I could clear a space to take something in.
The office: brown stains spread across white dropped ceiling, boxes crammed into corners. One was holding a bouquet of fluorescent lights. Another, tangle of extension cords.
The therapist was still talking.
“You were diagnosed with OCD,” she repeated.
The system that gives names.
“When you were thirteen.”
That gives me Brillo pad brains.
“The co-morbidity of these diseases is well documented,” she continued when I didn’t answer. I was not sure I had even blinked. My eyes felt dry. My skin, dry. My mud-cracked tongue, impossible.
“They’re connected.” she brought her palms together, interlacing her fingers. “There’s the need to compulsively control your world: an impulse founded in anxiety, which is why eating disorders and OCD are classified as anxiety disorders. Since this impulse is exhausting, people often resort to substance abuse — drugs, alcohol, and so on — to escape these restrictions. Then, there’s the aftermath: guilt, remorse, and the return of the obsessive need to reconstruct that controlled world. The cycle starts again.”
Rebuild, restrict, release, repeat. Got it. Drink ‘til I’m hot.
The stains on the ceiling bulged oppressively overhead, and I squinted, trying to erase them with my mind.
“In biracial people, this impulse often stems from tensions in the way we see and understand the self: the technical term is biracial identity disorder. This is what happens when a person experiences no fixed identity. Each person will deal with it in a slightly different way: they may identify with one race, the other, both, or neither. Or they may identify all of these ways at different points in their lives. This lack of a solid sense of self can inform the development of those other disorders.”
She looked back at the questionnaire, and bounced the tip of her pen off one of my answers. “And along with the OCD, you were diagnosed with depression. All in your early teens.”
In addition to the questionnaire, I saw she had medical records from my doctor. I recognized his classic near-indecipherable scrawl. My tongue unstuck from the bottom of my mouth. I swallowed.
“Yes,” I said.
My mom had taken me to see our family doctor because of my fixation on cleaning and tidiness: my frantic stab at order in the chaos. I’d become undone if things in my home were messy or out of order; crying, screaming, hyperventilating. I would not be calmed until everything was put back together in its place, and even then, the release of tension was slow, like air leaving a tire through a pinhole.
I remember the doctor saying something about an anxiety disorder and remember, by the time I was sixteen, after several more visits to the doctor, I was on the drug Effexor. I know I was sixteen because when I was told the drug might make me gain weight, I’d been terrified of taking it. I remember thinking, I can’t be sixteen and fat. Fatter than I already am. Girls my age were supposed to be lithe and nubile. I envisioned my body, expanding into an unrecognisably gelatinous blob. I also remember thinking that if I took the medication, I’d need to keep it a secret from people at school, because I didn’t want to be seen as different. Defective.
“And that,” the therapist pointed her pen to my arm: “self-mutilation. Another release; another form of remorse and punishment, too.”
I rubbed the thick bandaging wrapped around my forearm. The skin had already begun to heal unevenly. The gash would eventually leave a puckered, jumpy scar with marked needle points on each side, right to left, from bold stitching that will itch and pull as the skin fused. But I didn’t know that then. I just knew that I didn’t want my boyfriend to leave me because I refused to get help.
“My dad,” I said.
“Your dad?” She asked, looking from my arm to my face, raising a thinning grey eyebrow.
“My dad is the one who’s Iranian.”
“Okay,” she made a note and then nodded back to my arm. “Want to tell me about that?”
“He wanted to go to the beach.” I said.
“Your father?”
“No, my boyfriend.”
“Okay, and?”
“And it was too much. Because of this,” I grabbed a handful of my stomach. “And this.” I tapped myself on the temple.
It was too much, but I didn’t want him to stop loving me for being too messed up, so we went. The way the paint hung off the barns kept me winding round the roads, dead set on a grey vein of land. I hung off his words, scanning the lake — its wide wet eye, an open wound on my right.
“You’ve gotta lighten up,” he’d said.
I’d worn a floppy hat, big sunglasses, capris, t-shirt. The sight of my thighs squashed against the seat made me want to gag.
I’d said, “That’s the point.” I gestured around my body, to the rumpled free-fall of my flesh and said, “That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do.”
That day, he swam and ate and got on with the other day-trippers and I’d waited on that beach, watching his head bob. I’d thought, I can wait. I can be beach-nailed as long as he pleases. I thought OK, give me sea-shelled kisses, sun and suede-soft skin, ink-stained khaki shorts on the shore, this coke-flat feeling, and I’ll sit here and wait forever, or as long as he wants, because of all things, I love him best.
The cut came later that day. That night. My mind was moving too fast. I couldn’t fall asleep and he was sleeping so perfectly that I was furious with him for every perceived injustice his perfection carried and I’d woken him up. Or tried to. And when he wouldn’t wake up, I’d yelled, and when he got upset, I’d cut my forearm with the biggest knife I could find.
“How did he react?” the therapist asked.
The blood made him move. He was up and we were at the hospital before I could think of what to say to the doctor sewing up my arm.
“What did you tell the doctor?”
I told him the truth: that I did this to myself, that my boyfriend had nothing to do with it. I don’t know if the doctor believed me. He remained tight-lipped through the procedure, except to say, “I could sew this up more neatly, but I won’t. I need to be somewhere else.”
Whether he meant he needed to be with other patients or just far, far away from me, I didn’t know, but either way, I couldn’t blame him. I wanted to be far, far away from me too.
“And your boyfriend? Was he supportive?”
He’d wanted to know what I was going to do if I ever had a kid. What I planned to say about the scar. I told him, I’ll say it’s magic. It’s the story of a caterpillar who fell in love with a girl and wanted to stay with her always. He didn’t want to turn into a butterfly and forget her, because it’s so easy to change and forget. So, the caterpillar crawled up on her arm and fell into a deep sleep.
Because love is like that.
He’d said, “You should just tell the truth. Black is black. White is white.”
Hollay Ghadery is a writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have been published in various literary journals. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in spring 2021. Hollay’s debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, is due to be released in spring 2023 with Radiant Press. Hollay is also the Reviews Editor for the Minola Review—a literary journal dedicated to publishing women-identifying and non-binary writers.
