Mary Moody
Bio
Queer, intersectional feminist exploring my identity through art.
Stories (5/0)
Sugar, Cream, and Mental Illness
I often joke that I've felt anxious since I became conscious. Though my childhood is foggy, the few moments I do remember are riddled with the symptoms of my lifelong OCD. Playtime, holidays, family vacations; all marred with obsessive thoughts and rigorous routines I created as a desperate attempt to regain some control over the anxiety I was assigned at birth.
By Mary Moody2 years ago in Psyche
Conscious Sleep
My body felt heavy. A deep, inconceivable heaviness I had never experienced. Not in sickness. Not in exhaustion. A weight with a pull so powerful that it had to be killing me. My limbs sank into my mattress with such significant pressure I thought they would bore straight through. It felt as though lead had bloomed over my skin like lichen, covering my body from head to toe in an immobilizing force. My organs too had grown impossibly dense, painful but preserved, coated in thick cement, pressing, and scraping against the thin line of delicate flesh left beneath the armor formed over my skin. I was in agony. All these sensations were felt with a new kind of awareness. Every cell of my body felt overstimulated and raw. Though I had never felt more conscious of my physical body I was not experiencing this turmoil from within it. Instead, I was looking down at myself from above.
By Mary Moody3 years ago in Fiction
A Single Slice
I was hungry. I was uncomfortable in a lot of other ways too. The surgical tape that kept my nasogastric tube in place had irritated my cheek. The result was a patch of scabby, raw skin, roughly resembling the outline of a heart. My nurse, Denise, had taken the time to cut shapes out of the tape before sticking it to my face, a gesture that was so kind it made me feel miserable. My throat ached from the tube itself, even days after it had been removed. I figured that was normal, shoving a plastic tube up your nose, down your throat and into your stomach isn’t the definition of comfort. I was also freezing but too weak to pull the extra blanket I had been provided up over my chest. I was experiencing all of this discomfort yet feeling hungry caused me the most distress. This was because it was affecting me mentally much more than it was physically. Over the course of my eating disorder, the hollow pain that resulted from skipping meals was one of the first things I was able to overcome. My first “accomplishment.” The first moment of satisfaction that ultimately sent me spiraling, landing me in my current situation, stuck in a hospital bed being force fed like some sort of humanoid foie gras. The fact that my body was beginning to readjust to a regular diet and my hunger cues were returning terrified me. I had been forced back to square one. Everything I was in control of was slipping out of my fingers and I was helpless to stop it
By Mary Moody3 years ago in Fiction
Family Traditions
The old barn in the back of our property was a bit of an eyesore. The deteriorating wood that shaped the roof was peeling badly, and the rotting walls of the structure had been permanently stained a syrupy brown by bouts of heavy rain. The average person would have considered it an embarrassment, a glaring scar sticking out harshly against the rolling hills of our orderly pastures. Having grown up alongside the barn, I didn’t give much thought as to how the building looked. I disliked it for an entirely different reason. I associated two things with the building: hard work and the sacrifice of my free time. During the summer months I spent most of my Saturday afternoons shut inside the cold, fluorescent lit structure working alongside my father as I helped him butcher our livestock and any wild game we'd managed to secure. I began accompanying him to accomplish these chores a month or so after my twelfth birthday, my Saturdays snatched out of my grasp right as I was old enough to start enjoying a bit of freedom. This fact often shocked individuals who had no experience growing up on a farm. Understandably, watching a twelve-year-old handle a captive bolt capable of downing a fully grown bull would make any city dweller’s heart skip a beat. Despite this, I never felt as if I was in any danger. My mother made sure of it. She was the one who had insisted I turn twelve before helping my father. She wanted to preserve my childhood innocence as long as possible. Even after I began working in the barn her wariness still lingered, ingrained in the back of my father's mind. She'd never forgive him if I was hurt, and he knew it. Due to this fact, it was months before I was even allowed to use a bell scraper, much less touch the scalding tank. Contrarily, had it been left up to my father, I would have been helping him out as soon as I could lift a meat saw. He often boasted about skinning his first pig at just ten.
By Mary Moody3 years ago in Horror
Among Roaches and Ash
As a child I worried. Over my future, over the safety of my family, over the state of the world. It seemed to me, that on the day I opened my eyes to this Earth I was engulfed in a near constant state of anxiety. As I grew and I learned more about the world around me, my suspicions and anxieties only increased. As a result of this, a lesson that I learned at an early age, quite possibly the first lesson I ever learned, was that people didn’t enjoy listening to your worries. It interrupted the delicate balance they held between hopefulness and despair. People especially didn’t appreciate the sort of brutal honesty children seem to be unaware that they possess. As a result of this lesson, I tried my best to keep the turmoil inside. However, there were moments where these fears exploded from me, in the form of bitter tears or anger. At those times it was my mother who tried her best to pacify me. She would do her best to calm me, mostly with stories of God and reassurance of an afterlife, but there was only one phrase she shared with me that consistently stayed in the forefront of my mind. I think these particular words had such an impact because, as a child, they left me unsettled. However, as I aged and my fears morphed into much more selfish concerns, these words of comfort were something I found myself growing into. My new worries were a result of witnessing my relatives grow old and die. I became overwhelmed with the reality that life was fleeting. I found it increasingly difficult to find purpose for myself and to hold on to any kind of meaning. If one day everything was just going to end, then really, what was the point of anything at all? One day I would die, and nothing would be left of me. The exception perhaps being a stone, which too would age, disintegrate, and disappear. The very Earth itself would eventually blink out of existence and every bit of human antiquity with it. How was I supposed to find motivation or purpose in my own little world, knowing that not even the whole of human history was safe from extinction?
By Mary Moody3 years ago in Fiction