Previous installment: Life After “Dead Inside” Part 2
[Parts of this blog post have been removed to be part of a work in progress — Janet, 12th May 2025]
“Not Like Other Girls”
I learned early enough not to go to my parents for emotional validation or reassurance. What I didn’t know was that I would still seek it anyway, from others and from experiences that I could use to claim intellectual or cultural superiority.
The “solution”, again, was for me to pretend not to care about validation, admiration, connection, or affection. I still wanted a relationship to boost my social standing (why else–besides sex–did anyone suffer relationships, I wondered). Besides real life (which sucked), my education on sex and relationships came from books and media, some more questionable than others. The characters from Shirley Conran and Virginia Andrew’s books hardly made for good role models. The heroines from fantasy novels were not much better, though some of them had swords. Swords were cool.
1998, Kentucky. If I’d had a sword during this picture, I would have posed with it.
I had swallowed so much misogyny that I unironically believed the best woman was one who acted and thought like a man. Women were beautiful, yes, but everything inside them was wrong and feeling and weak.
The worst accusation you could have leveled at teenage Janet was of her being feminine. I eschewed make-up, pinks and pastels, princesses, kawaii toys, and pretty things. The dress above? Was a gift and had “historical”, cosplay and dramatic value. It wasn’t for being feminine. Capisce?
When I got into my twenties, I slowly allowed myself to look feminine (while still pretending not to care about it). Acting feminine was still a no-no. At least out in public.
2002, Michigan State University, at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.
Shadows & Soul Fragments
In the writing of this, I realise that I put my disowned femininity into my artwork. The women I painted were allowed to feel everything that I was not.
It means I hid them for TWO reasons:
- To escape the parent who called making art stupid
- To hide their emotions and femininity, because I could not safely admit they were also mine.
I could not admit that I wanted to be beautiful and brave. I could not admit that I felt isolated, sad, hopeless, and depressed. I could put these things into my paintings, but I also had to hide them, hide them, hide them. If I was caught, I had to say they were just what somebody else wanted and paid for. (Even that would be scoffed at and mocked.) Claiming the paintings showing shameful emotions or desires would only bring disaster. It was hard to predict what the Roulette Wheel of Parental Overreaction would bring: Panic and yelling? A crying parent and shaming that I caused their distress with my distress? Or maybe hours of being talked at to tell me that I was actually fine, maybe just oversensitive or paranoid like my brother. (We’ll get to that later. This is a lot of tragedy to pace.)
Easier to hide my work as much as I could, and hope my parents never looked at it on the Internet.
The Prayer Tree, 2004.
In the shamanic approach to healing, soul fragmentation and soul loss can happen when someone goes through extreme shock, trauma, or prolonged abuse. To quote:
Soul Loss can result in post traumatic stress disorder, gaps in memory, or feelings of “being spaced out” and unable to focus or concentrate. It can manifest as chronic depression, dissociation, immune deficiency problems, addictions, prolonged and severe grief or — in extreme cases — as suicidal tendencies or coma.
Alison Skelton
I set out to write this installment about how my upbringing fucked up shaped my ideas about femininity, sex, and sensuality. About being soft and feeling. The summary is this: I wasn’t allowed to be, and I didn’t feel safe. Some days I still don’t feel safe about it. But I can see that I put it into my art, and I wonder if this was my way of protecting and preserving my soul, without knowing it.