Under the Bridge

Under the bridge downtown, is where I drew some blood

Under the bridge downtown, I could not get enough

Under the bridge downtown, forgot about my love

Under the bridge downtown, I gave my life away

Yeah.

My first real, “Yes, I could do this and no one would be able to stop me” suicidal thought happened while I was crossing a bridge over a slowly defrosting Italian river in the town of Lana, where I lived in Italy as a teenager. I had recently been told I would not be allowed to finish the student exchange program I had been a part of because apparently there had been some complaints about me and my behaviour. One was that I didn’t want to learn German (granted, I had mistakenly used the Italian word for “boring”, noioso, instead of annoying, which is what I was trying to describe it felt like in my ears and head, and I can understand why that might feel offensive to some of my German-speaking host family members – still, no grounds for cancelling my stay). Another was that I had been “rude” while staying at another host’s house because I had used her matrimonial duvet when I had stayed at hers overnight (granted, it was very neatly packaged in the top shelf of her guest room closet, just like she claimed afterwards, but in my defence, that was literally the only shelf I could access through the upper sliding door, as all the other doors to the cabinets, which contained the normal blankets, were actually locked! So, maybe a little bit rude, yes, but still, no grounds for cancelling my stay). But another one is that my family thought I was pregnant. Ah, there it is. That was the real one, the specific rule-breaking issue. And honestly, the main reason I was completely, soul-crushingly suicidal. Not because I was actually pregnant, but *specifically* because I wasn’t. Sure, my being pregnant wouldn’t have made my situation much better, but at least a) the reason for cancelling my stay would have been valid, and b) I wouldn’t have had the reason to feel so despairingly bad about myself that I wanted my life to end.

See, here’s the deal: not only was I not pregnant, but it had been made abundantly clear to me that I wasn’t wanted by anybody, ever. I will now go deeper into some aspects of my mental and physical health I have touched in previous entries, as this is the moment when my self-confidence plummeted into a zone of no-return, even though I briefly thought I’d had it back about a decade ago, but now I realise it was merely superficial confidence.

That moment, when I was told I was believed to be pregnant, felt like the most devastating situation because I was 18 and had literally not even been kissed – not in a real kiss kind of way, as there had been experimental pecks with friends before, but that’s a take for another story, which will come in another entry – and in fact, I had constantly been told by boys that I wasn’t attractive enough to date, and very often that I looked more like a boy than a girl (see my other piece “What it means to be a woman”, linked at the end of this entry). I had not had my first kiss, I had not been told I was wanted by anybody, except the one time a couple months before, by a married man I’d met only once and saw me in the bus a few weeks later and told me he was so lonely and wanted to have company for Christmas, and to marry him! What 17-year-old actually wants to hear that? Honestly, the only way I could have been pregnant was if I had been raped at the exact time of my fertility window, and considering that rape is not actually about attraction but about power, the fact that that could be the only way that I could have got pregnant makes the whole situation extremely creepy as well as depressive. I guess my host family could not have known that, though, so I can’t claim that they were malevolent in their intent when they reported their concerns to the organization.

However, the reasons they thought I was pregnant was because one evening my theatre group had ran late and my host dad saw me coming out of the centre with the young man that I was head over heels in love with – not that my host dad knew my feelings for M, or that M reciprocated! But a few weeks later, they saw that I wasn’t putting pads in the designated pad bin in the bathroom, that my belly was growing rounder, and that I was throwing up in the mornings. I wasn’t using pads because I had had no need to use them in over two months, and my belly was growing rounder because of the same reason I wasn’t needing the pads: PCOS. I had only had the actual cysts about two years prior, but as I’ve said before, the side-effects continued for the rest of my life. Back then, just turned 18, my hormones were ravaging my body and it seemed like nothing worked properly (which turned out to be correct). The reason I was throwing up in the mornings was because I was waking up with anxiety attacks every day because I had made a fool out of myself in front of M at New Year’s Eve, thinking he reciprocated, and the anxiety was kicking of the same reaction that my stomach used to have due to the antibiotics I took for years for the PCOS. In short, I was 18, had PCOS, had gastritis due to the antibiotics for the PCOS, had never been kissed (or been told I was wanted), and was having anxiety attacks due to unrequited love, and on top of it all, I had also been dealing with depression and schizoid-affective disorder for several years (please read “Swimsuits and Lingerie for Mental Health Awareness”, linked at the end of this piece). It would also turn out that during that time I was dealing with my first experience of bisexual feelings, as I couldn’t quite understand why I felt so attracted towards the girl who I thought M actually fancied (see “How could I have told her?” linked at the end of this piece) . So, when I was told that the main reason for kicking me out of the program was because they thought I was pregnant, I was devastated beyond belief! On my way back home from the meeting with my assigned counsellor, I mindlessly walked towards the bridge by the bus stop instead of heading towards the house my host family lived in. I remember watching the icy water rush around the stones. No one would miss me, I was nothing but a burden for everyone around me, with my mental health issues and my useless, unwanted body. I was just a waste of space and resources. Why was I having to take medication so often, if others who deserved it more could use it instead? I had only felt this close to an urge to ending it all a year before, when I saw my best friend kissing the boy I liked – although it wasn’t about him at all, it was just a mere crush, just a passing fancy – it was her and what it meant to have my trust broken, that she of all people would stab me in the back like that. This time the urge was so potent and so strong, I really thought I’d succumb. Both times, only one thing stopped me: the thought of my parents’ angst, the thought of hurting them with my actions. The first time it was only a passing moment, a fleeting thought as I took a knife out of the drawer to chop up some veg to make dinner for when my parents got home, as a treat I wanted to give them and had planned beforehand, the second time it was very very real, and honestly, the only thing stopping me was the thought of my parents’ devastation.

Now, what does all of this have to do with Under the Bridge? Two things, mainly!

1) It was M’s favourite song, a song we had greatly bonded over, and which meant so much to me because of the loneliness expressed by Kiedis in the lyrics, and at that very moment, over the bridge, wishing myself under the bridge, I remember deeply wishing someone, *something* to take me to the place I loved instead of me throwing my life away. There are other songs which later also saved my life, and perhaps one day I will write about them, but today it’s the moment for Under the Bridge because,

2) Flash forward 23 years: I was truly honoured when my artist at this year’s Bath Bodyart Weekend, Amy Maxine, decided to paint me as the song due to her very own personal story of resilience and survival – she may tell her own story later in her own way, or she may just let me tell it for her as I did in the catwalk and by wearing her design.

To be fair, I’m always honoured that any artist wants to paint me at all, because I’m well aware that I’m not commercial material, and it’s very rare that an artist shares their pics of me and gets any real attention (outside of our friendship circles being lovely and encouraging of both the artists’ talents and myself while modelling their designs), and that most photographers steer away from working with me outside of the events (and some even during the events), and that when the few who share their photos of me on their pages, plenty of comments will be regarding my weight; so I can understand why it tends to be difficult for artists to work with me, and why most photographers won’t add me to their usual rotas if they can avoid it, although obviously I’m sad that that’s the fact that I have to contend with. So, with that in mind, I was already feeling very grateful that someone wanted to work with me, but the fact that she resonated with Anthony Kiedis’ story of recovery and survival and wanted me to wear that particular design for her for the competition made me feel elated!

Weeks later, I have to deal with the reality of things again, knowing that none of the photographers are likely to use their images of me in their professional profiles, and that those who do will likely get the usual comments about my weight, and knowing that Amy’s beautiful art won’t actually get the visibility it deserves because outside of my friendship circles no one will ever pay any real attention to me, and because Amy is not on facebook then it falls on me to try to push the design outwards, but it’s not likely at all that it will ever happen, given the extremely low reaction I always get. I have contemplated lately to make a proper profile in a professional modelling platform, but that’s yet to be decided, considering how non-commercial I am.

Unwanted, that’s the word. Flash forward 23 years and I still feel so deeply unwanted. To be honest, the suicidal thoughts have never truly stopped, and that is something I have to deal with, because it’s not actually that I want to die, it’s that I just don’t want to be alive. Like Bohemian Rhapsody – I don’t want to die, but sometimes I wish I hadn’t been born at all – and I know I will never actually attempt suicide, as I know my parents don’t deserve to have that pain cast upon them, nor does my husband for that matter. But the experiences I have talked about before, the bullying in Mexico, constantly being told I would not make it as a model or an actress because of my looks, this very story I have just told about being thought of as pregnant, and, unfortunately, the crisis that I’m going through at the moment.

You see, I’ve recently found out that I can’t actually have children – that I could try, with the assistance of highly expensive IVF, or that if I did perchance get pregnant naturally I would probably require a lot of treatment and help to bring the baby to term, with little guarantee that the baby would be completely healthy, on top of that. Neither option is doable, as my husband and I can only really afford a one-bedroom flat at the moment, into which we will be moving into as soon as the loan company stops being a jerk about my nationality and allows us to move forward (another story for another time), so there’s no way that we could afford the kind of treatment for either option, nor my taking time off work for it, as we’re both self employed artists. Although perhaps I should have never been.

Here's the kicker: when we first got married, I kept putting off having children until I had made it into acting and modelling. I knew I would always regret not trying and that if I had a child I would always have an ache and resentment for not having taken the second chance I was given when I first married Stephen. I know I was right, because I lived in the “What if” for several years, after I gave it up the first time for being “too fat”, “not having a pretty enough face”, and not letting my director sexually abuse me. Yeah, I was in a very bad place when I first gave up on acting, and I hadn’t even been able to give modelling a go. So, when I first got married to Stephen, and he gave me all the support to go for it, telling me that the UK was a different country, with different beauty standards than in Mexico and that even UK high school students would see me in a different way than Mexicans would have seen me when I modelled for their life drawing sessions. So I went for it, I went for it all! I took the second chance with glee and pleasure! But, as I’ve mentioned before, due to different aspects of my health issues, I now look the way people used to think I looked like back in Mexico, so, unfortunately for me, the results haven’t really been very good. In life drawing, I’m usually painted extraordinarily fat, and very often depicting pregnancy, which I understand an artist’s desire to portray, but feels a little bit like rubbing salt in the wound. The high school students I have modelled for have been for the most part very talented, but it has always been made clear that to most of them I am a fat, middle-aged woman they have to put up with drawing for their grades, instead of them being able to draw the gorgeous women on TV and magazines that they actually wish to draw (I have glimpsed into some of their portfolios, and the difference is very clear), plus I’m often portrayed as the Venus of Willendorf (even literally two days after this Under the Bridge set was taken), but students and teachers alike. In other groups, I have been marked out as the chonky model, and have been told by various artists that I remind them of the models of Paula Rego’s art, who specifically created her art with the express purpose of shocking and depicting the stark reality of being a woman, not in beauty but in her pain and anguish – not words anyone might ever wish to be described as, me thinks. I haven’t even mentioned my face: I’m usually portrayed very grumpy, manly, or with ethnic features I don’t actually have, and when it comes to photography there’s no escaping the damage that the extra testosterone has done to my skin all these years of dealing with PCOS, and both my face and body show signs of how much I needed oestrogen and collagen to work properly but they never did… I have previously talked about how much damage two miscarriages did to me in my 20s, so I don’t wish to go into detail here, but I want to add that said damage shows up constantly and persistently.

Anyway, I’m at a conundrum because it’s clear to me that no, I haven’t made it in the modelling or acting fields, and that I gave up the possibility of having a child, so I don’t quite want to stop trying to make it in the industry because otherwise my sacrifice will have been in vain, but at the same time, if I keep trying and I keep failing, my life will literally become financially unsustainable. At this point I need to acknowledge that even though a lot of our rent comes from my modelling, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make ends meet with, and that I will continue being left out of photo sets by photographers in big events, or that some of them just won’t wish to attach their name to mine if I make reels or posts as a collaboration, as most other models seem to do perfectly fine. I need to acknowledge, as well, that maybe, just maybe, if I had been in the UK back in my 20s then perhaps I might have stood a chance (some of the models that do get all the attention look a lot like I used to do when I was being told I was too fat or unattractive to model or act). I also need to acknowledge that I am not someone who will ever draw that kind of attention, as not even having the word “NAKED” in the title of my first piece about bodyart, with a picture of me actually naked as the cover has been enough to move people to click on the link. I do believe that this one won’t have over 20 reads, and that number will maybe comprise just some of my regulars and a couple of family members and friends, but I am honestly struggling so much that I just need to vent and see this as a safe space for my distress.

I’ve decided to turn the comments off on this piece not because I don’t want to know what people think about me, but because right now I can’t cope with answering. One thing I can assure you all is that, even though it’s been hell to struggle with suicidal thoughts for years on end, last time I saw myself wanting to end under the bridge, I immediately reached out to friends. I don’t want to die, I just deeply wish my life choices had been proven right.

I also deeply thank Amy Maxine for allowing me to carry this inspiring design and in doing so unleashing all this pain that had been held at the back of my throat for so many years. Art is healing, so I hope this heals me too.