Lot's Wife Edition 3 2024

Standing on the Borderline
By Erica Di Pierro
Nowadays I scrub myself clean of anything representing a stereotypical mentally ill person.
No more will people say I remind them of Harley Quinn or Ramona Flowers, no more will
I meet their sexualised expectation of a mentally ill woman.
I’m dying my hair back, thinking carefully about the tattoos I want, I don’t fall asleep at 3am
with some depressing playlist, and I’m finally selling all my lifeless clothes at the Sunday
market. I no longer identify with that. I’m not proud of it, I wasn’t happy, it wasn’t me.
I’m not insulted that I dress “basic” now, I’m not insulted I no longer meet your expectations
of me. I traded my chains and fishnets for basic tees, and I feel better now.
As I reach for that abrasive loofah, I do contemplate why I can’t accept who I was when
I was deep in the trenches, begging everyone to believe that it was a stranger, begging
myself to believe that was never me. I’m not my illness, that’s not who I am, but as someone
who has walked in my own shoes, shouldn’t I be a little more understanding of the roads
I’ve travelled?
Too often I’m sitting on the fence between accepting myself and being okay with it or
tearing any resemblance of mental illness and keeping it as far away as possible. How
can I be okay with this, do you know what people say about me?
Sometimes I feel like I must carry the agonising burden of being a spokesperson for BPD,
those three words come up in a conversation and I feel eyes pierce me like they know
a big secret I’m hiding. The desperate need to say something to disprove of borderline
symptoms is haunting, cursed with the fear that people think I want this and I’m so quirky.
Screw you TikTok.
Even the few positive attributes this illness gifts me is something I wish I could get a
shovel and weed out of my garden. Everything feels like a double-edged sword, everything
is a double-edged sword. A sweet sensitivity that snowballs into debilitating anxiety,
compassion, and loyalty like a dog, and will never be reciprocated in any relationship. It is
not fun fighting everyone else’s wars yet never being able to stand next to your own army.
Shame is unfortunately ingrained in me, one Google search and there’s more results on
BPD being toxic manipulators than there are helpful resources. I walk around with a scarlet
letter, people stop and stare knowing I’m a horrible, toxic gaslighter. Constantly scared
that those around me walk on my field of landmines, running a never-ending marathon
questioning, ‘what if I am the stereotype?’ It’s getting quite lonely locked away with a moat
of eggshells and glass shards.
Perhaps this is a perspective that changes with the years, right now detachment feels like a
home, maybe I’ll keep dancing with these ideas. I am not borderline; I am not a borderline.
No one says I am a thyroid problem, or I am a cold. The less I dwell on stereotypes and
playing the painful losing game of trying to change people’s beliefs, the easier it is to
cope. Maybe at the core of wanting to appear so extremely unwell is just simply wanting
someone to care, not to be immediately seen like a monster.
An Offering in Defense of Aphrodite
By Lucia Lane
This piece was originally published by Pnyx Magazine
Love and war lay tangled together, laughed at
but the punishment was a failure
being bare before them brought her no shame,
she was the goddess of beauty
seeing her marriage dissolve brought her no pain,
she was goddess of love, not matrimony
She didn’t hate her husband because he was ugly
but he demanded her hand and expected fidelity
only choosing her because others lusted
and fought over her frequently
But Ares didn't hesitate to remember
that love finds the spot where it hurts and adds pressure
she was older than the others and wilder
finally, someone who matched him in power
he saw the parts of her nobody knew
she had begun as goddess of war
and would always be the more violent of the two
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