.. your hair will grow long when you leave that man
spring equinox, loss and transformation of The Lover as guiding archetype
CW: mentions of intimate partner violence.
For this edition, I wanted to explore a type of grief I find particularly bewildering—relationship grief, which can involve grieving a loss of self/ favorite archetypes, time lost, and futures that will never be. Grief upends everything and asks us to find new ways to keep time.
Spring came calamitously. Some of the strongest wind I have ever felt ripped through the city. It sounded like it was going to blow the house down. In the morning, I walked to the park near my house and saw that a tree had fallen.
Its thick trunk hollowed out. Roots severed from the ground. It had withstood many storms, but could not stand through this one. Over the course of the past week, the caution tape has remained, and each day the tree is cut into smaller pieces, although it remains. I took a small piece from the roots and brought it home with me.
As some of you know, I was celibate for almost a year— I stacked the wood panels of my ikea bed frame into a twin size and hunkered down.
I saw a psychic rune reader in New Orleans winter of 2023 as I was separating from a controlling partner. I didn’t bring up my relationship—I just wanted to know the color of my aura. She said, “I rarely give directives but my guides are loud and insistent. You need to get out. And if he doesn’t do some serious work on himself, the next person he’s with might not be so lucky.”
She compared him to Icarus, blinded by hubris, and warned me that I would tumble down with him–-burned by the same sun.
This reading only served to confirm the things I already knew.
As he felt me moving away his grip tightened. The things he said to me during that time were astonishing in their cruelty. Once: “You’re everybody else’s good time girl!” Livid that I was having fun with friends and not giving him enough attention/ texting back quickly enough.
He meticulously cross-referenced my Facebook friends list with my Instagram followers, kept tabs on who had liked which kinds of photos and commented on them. Did constant reconnaissance on people he deemed “threats” to our relationship.
Abusers thrive on severing you from the vitality of your own world…. external and external. It has taken a while to return to the scorched earth of my own psyche. For a month last year, I could only rewatch True Blood and rot in bed. The series was a pacifier. When I turned it off, I would cry.
Post breakup, he flew to my city, threatened to come to my workplace. I safety-planned with friends, lined my doorway with salt.
Once I had gone no contact, he leaked intimate photos of me online.
Reflecting on the whole exhausting ordeal, I think about how abusive power has its own death rattle. Whether it’s a partner or a whole-ass nation state, the fever pitch of violence comes at the end, when power knows its days are numbered.
A man said to me recently that women have it “easy” when it comes to dating because everyone wants to sleep with them. I had a hard time mustering any compassion for this line of reasoning that felt straight from the dregs of an incel subreddit.
Tell that to my dead friends.
I don’t hate men. But, I resent them sometimes when they don’t realize how stupid, dangerous, and casually cruel they can be. When they feel that certain “good” behavior entitles them to carte blanche to someone’s vitality, energy, body, sexuality. I want to be clear— this is a toxic attitude regardless of gender, but it is so present and socially rewarded in men.
I’m reading Sarah Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy and getting back in touch with my own rage. The rage that I muted along with my desires. And I am realizing that the feminist killjoy and the goodtime girl are not diametrically opposed. They are part of the same spectrum and I swing pendulous between them. Both are words used to disparage.
“Goodtime girl” was lobbed at me when my authentic ways of being threatened a jealous man’s sense of self.
“Feminist killjoy” and variants of it have been used towards me when I’ve pointed out consent violations, refused to laugh at sexist or whorephobic jokes, and insisted on better from people around me.
Slowly, slowly, and inching towards my mid-thirties, I realize that I am not the problem here. And also, I am the problem. I’ve spent years trying to will my heart and psyche into different shapes, bought into the idea that if I could just stifle some parts of myself I could bargain my way into security, find someone willing to take care of me.
Celibacy offered me a moment to consider how relationships have been a way for me to outsource self harm. I’ve had to look within and sit with the bewildering truths of my own self-aggression.
The maxim “when people show you who they are, believe them” always troubled me. Since the self is not stable, I rejected this for a long time because I refused to believe that people “are” or “are not” a certain way and end of story.
Maybe a more accurate and apt saying here could be: “when people show they are unwilling to see and know you beyond their projections and cultural programming, believe them.”
“When people demonstrate that they are unwilling to reckon with the harm they cause, believe them.”
So many times, the writing has been on the wall. And I, willfully, and with the carefree optimism of The Fool, have ignored it.
I am ruled by Venus and her paths. Taurus sun, Taurus Venus, I am enlivened by everything sensual. Shamelessly a lover. Guided by “If I want it, how can it be bad for me?” I’ve had such unwavering faith in my own want as a compass. How could something natural as an instinct lead me astray, away from what’s good?
I am no longer a Lover in the way I once was. I felt burnt by the disgusting and jealous words knocking around in my head. My period of no dating was a spiteful one. I was like, okay… we need to batten down the hatches. Energetically, nothing gets in, nothing gets out. I was punishing myself as much as I was punishing the world.
The only way to mitigate risk, perhaps, was to become desireless. I experimented with having no desire, flirting with stoicism.
I wanted to know why these things happened. Why the violations, why the mistreatment. I thought answers would come to me in my solitude, but I was met with a vast silence—the heat death of my own desires.
My body felt like a vault housing a scream. A scream so long and so shrill that if I let it escape it would shatter windows and level homes. So I swallowed the scream, blunted my senses. Started growing out my hair.
It has been a way of grieving through every follicle. As though I could push out the poisonous thoughts from my head. I’m tracking my own health… my hair growing longer and healthier as I put distance between what was done to me and what I am now doing for myself.
Growing my hair has been a silent prayer.
I know a good chop, a dramatic haircut is often associated with relationship grief, bad breakups and new beginnings. But growing it out has been a way of taking care of the animal I was and the animal that I still am. It’s a way of measuring myself against time.
Anger and spite can be blessed and beautiful. Fitting for tomorrow’s Aries new moon solar eclipse energy. In the stages of grief, anger is listed as second… acceptance comes last. But I think that anger and acceptance can coexist. I can accept reality, the fragments of what has been broken, the loss of self that abuse causes—and I can still be very fucking angry about it.
And I will continue to rage grow my hair—one of the very few things I feel have some control over in this moment. Every time I travel, I braid it for protection. If I’m with my mother, I ask her to put two French braids before I get on a bus or plane or train to wherever I’m headed next.
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Creative Updates:
Going to be in New Orleans for the poetry festival again!! This time tabling at the small press fair for Working Girls Press. More info here.
Then, off to LA for the one year anniversary party of The Holy Hour – you can RSVP here!
Call for papers - Diffractions Issue 11 on visual poetics and gender: rendering absence and error. We are accepting thematic articles and creative work!! Send your abstracts, strange erasure poetry, highly curated meme collection.
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As a parting thought… recently, I’ve returned to zen koans. In graduate school, my incredible mentor, Michelle Naka Pierce introduced me to koans… and I used them in developing the manuscript that would eventually become my book.
Unanswerable questions. Riddles. Like, what did your face look like before your parents were born?
Please tell me, what are some of your favorites? Leave a comment! Let’s puzzle together over the bewildering unanswerables.
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So much love. Thank you for spending a little slice of your time here with me. This is a reader-supported newsletter and an always free mostly-monthly offering <3 If you would like to support further, you can subscribe to my paid tier or send me a tip! Venmo duffylala or PayPal duffylala at gmail. Big kisses and springtime blessings. May your rage, when it comes, be an anchor and an arrow.