Villain Era

Losing myself in the corruption of being

“My own corruption is violent, tumultuous, enticing, and entangling. As it conceives sin, it wars within me and against me.” - John Owen

I was a different person three years ago. In many ways I was a better person.

I moved from San Diego to Oklahoma (for the second out of three times.) with my husband and my dogs. I was learning how to live with a family. I started planning for a baby. I pried open my heart and found infinite possibilities in the places inside me I’d tried to ignore. 

For the first time in my life I felt beautiful when I looked in the mirror. People would stop me on the street to tell me that I was beautiful. That’d never happened to me before.

And I was beautiful. My happiness transformed the way I held the muscles in my face. I felt sorry for all the iterations of Autumn in the photographs I took where I used to think I looked cool, or intellectual, or pensive. Her eyes couldn’t hide the pain she carried. It dragged down the entire infrastructure of her being.

I started making eye contact. I held my shoulders up straighter. Other people didn’t feel like enemies anymore. Their souls waited on the cusp of their gaze, reaching out to touch another person. They were open to being wounded.

I even wrote better. I’d spent so much of my life trying to hide from my own revelations and blind myself. I curled behind my shoulders like a disaffected ghost. How could that not affect my writing? But once I started to see, I started to find the places I hid from myself. It was like I’d been living in a basement my whole life, only to discover there were stairs to a first floor, and a second, and a garden, and a path to the street, and a field that led all the way to the mountains that dangled underneath the moon. My writing seemed to gain purpose.

When I think back to that time I can’t pinpoint exactly what I did to change myself. I went to therapy. I did EMDR. I tightened up my diet and exercise. I learned how to shoot a gun. I helped my grandparents around their farm and cooked their meals. I became more disciplined in my schedule. There were a hundred little adjustments that I made. But it all seemed to come down to this:

I had hope for a better life. Hope for a future that didn’t end in the slow erosion of my soul, death to a great godless nothingness. I was going to have a family. I was going to be the writer I always wanted to be. I was going to become someone who could light a fire and not flinch and turn away from the spark.

It didn’t last.

I won’t get into the details of what happened, but I closed my heart again.

I emptied out the reservoirs of my spirit. I became empty.

People often think that corruption is a single and abrupt decision. A villain’s journey is marked by a recognizable turn into darkness, an obvious point of no return. Othello puts his hands around the neck of Desdemona. Anakin Skywalker makes the choice to accept the dark side of the force. Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain for eternal youth. The light and the dark don’t intermingle. There’s a clear line between each and once you step over the whole landscape changes.

The thing about corruption is that you rarely recognize it as it happens. It breaks you, piece by piece, and then fills in the empty space with a new version of you. The part of you that could recognize the corruption taking place has been replaced by this new thing that carries your face and your name.

If you looked behind you to see your old self you wouldn’t even be familiar with its eyes.

Villain era.

I didn't even have the pretension of being a cool girl anymore. I couldn't lose myself in the sadness the way I used to, tell myself that my tears were unbottled inspiration and every good artist was tortured. Red lipstick and gunpowder in tequila and emotional neglect to bring out the best of my writing. Pain like nectar.

I'd been happy before. I'd seen how it made everything better. The idea that unhappiness brought special insight was a lie, but a useful one. We needed to hide our flaws from our sight, because if people saw how broken and miserable they were, the full extent of it, and for no particular gain, many of them probably wouldn't survive.

Now I didn't even have that.

And besides that, I became a mother. I couldn't go out partying or lay in bed to revel in my sadness all day. Things that seemed edgy and sexy in my twenties seemed ugly once a child became involved. It no longer became acceptable for me to lose myself in my pain, my little acts of self-destruction. My child needed me.

But that meant all of my feelings rubbed raw against me. All of my flaws blistered in the sun. I couldn't hide from them anymore.

Isn’t being a villain supposed to be freeing? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to not be caged by the responsibilities that other people have? You don’t have to feel guilt anymore. It’s been devoured by a greater ambition.

Even when we see the downfall of a villain we recognize the pull of the devil’s bargain. Maybe it is worth it. What is a soul, anyway? A soul is such an insignificant and small thing in the face of my overwhelming desire to stop feeling this pain. 

If only that were true. It’s a devil’s bargain because it’s not really a bargain at all, and once you truly see what you’re getting for it, you’d realize it’s worse than nothing. Hell doesn’t come after you’ve gotten your wish. It’s always been there. It’s created the toxic environment for your desires.

How do I get back to being that person I used to be?

It’s easy for me to get lost in all the ways in which that’s impossible. I love to romanticize my sadness. It’s my mating call. I could tell myself that I already destroyed my chance at happiness. I took my Faustian bargain and now I have to spend the rest of my life submerged in a hell of my own making.

But there’s another easy solution.

I have to find hope again.

I have to learn to accept pain as an ordinary part of life.

Day by day. Moment by moment, if I have to.

Right now I’m typing this while I watch my daughter sleep on the baby monitor. It’s like her breath is curling around every part of my being, like our spirits are connected in suspension. Earlier we headed into the city and bought a Christmas tree. My daughter and I played in a baseball lot while my husband got the tree tied to the roof of his Jeep. She stomped around in her pink light-up shoes and blue sweater. Oklahoman wind ran through her blonde hair.

And for just a moment I wasn’t lost in self-pity and pain. I was alive. We were alive.

That’s hope.

It dances in every strata of all existence.

I have to keep looking at the sun until my eyes remember to let the light in.

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The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb is now available for pre-order! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.

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