Deadheading Flowers: A Zine by Jordan Dyess

Deadheading Flowers

a zine by jordan dyess

Discovering the true sense of ones self is an ever elusive and turbulent journey. It changes by the day and effects how you present yourself to the world. The desire to feel understood, heard, and just seen by others is part of the struggles of the human experience. The pressures and conines the mind absorbs can greatly effect how one expresses themself.

Figuring out who I am and who I want to be has been a dificult and at times very isolating experience. The pressure to be perfect and please the ones most important to me has been one I have struggled with for years. Only after I began doing things for myself did I feel free and most at peace. Accepting the fact that I am different and that I cannot please everyone around me became one of the most liberating experiences of my life.

In this bound zine, a mix of photography, personal essays, and poetry is used to give the viewer a glimpse into the struggle of trying to discover and deining myself. In doing so, I want to have an intimate moment with the viewer, in which I share the most fragile parts of myself in hopes that they too can relate and empathize with me. It is a struggle that we all go through; the changes from childhood to adolescense to adulthood can take a toll on the human spirit.

The works I have chosen to include relect the intense emotions and inner turmoil that come with growing up. The struggle to feel understood and coming to terms with loss being some of the more prevelant themes. All of the included works explain the emotions I cannot put into words, so I will let the viewer interpret these works as they see it.

A Note to the Reader

Deadheading Flowers

To

cut spent lowers off a plant, encouraging the plant to bloom again

I worship at your feet

I worship at your feet.

For some kind of cure

For some kind of lesson

I should have learned

For some kind of love

YouthinkIdonotdeserve I worship at your feet.

Give me Satisfaction

Imaginary Friend

by Georgia Pritchett

I had a dificult relationship with my imaginary friend. She was called Samantha and she was very sophisticated. She had straight hair, she could blow bubbles, AND she could skip. If only I’d had straight hair or been able to blow bubbles or skip, my life would have been very different.

Samantha found my company tiresome. She was usually too busy to play with me. She was always off having fun with her other friends. Sometimes she’d squeeze me into her hectic social life, but I worried she was doing it out of a sense of duty and she wasn’t really enjoying herself. By the time I was ten, she’d stopped showing up. She didn’t even say goodbye.

ringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It’s tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It’s a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you’re the only raver. There’s no weird New Age guide. There’s no shitty techno. There’s only you and the ininite.

I was born two weeks late, because I didn’t want to leave the womb. When they inally kicked me out, I was like, oh hell no. I’ve been trying to get back there ever since.

Day one on earth I discovered how to not be enough. According to my mother, the doctor who delivered me said I was pretty. I wanted to believe him, because I love validation. Validation is my main bitch. But I was not the type of infant to absorb a compliment. Had I been verbal I would have extended a compliment in return so as to assuage the implicit guilt of my own existence rubbing against praise. Instead, I created an external attribution.

An external attribution exists to make you feel shitty. It’s a handy tool, wherein you

perceive anything positive that happens to you as a mistake, subjective, and/or never a result of your own goodness. Negative things, alternately, are the objective truth. And they’re always your own fault.

The doctor’s perspective was only an error of opinion. He obviously had shitty taste in babies. If he’d called me ugly I would have spent the remainder of my time in the hospital trying to convince him I was hot. But he liked me. There was deinitely something wrong with him.

“ DAY ONE ON EARTH I DISCOVERED HOW TO NOT BE ENOUGH

If you’re never going to be enough, it’s important to ind a way to turn a compliment against yourself- to reconstruct it into a prison- which is precisely what I did. I decided I would have to stay pretty for the rest of my life. If I got ugly it would be my own fault. Don’t drop the ball. Don’t fuck it up. I was deinitely going to fuck it up.

Next they probably put me in a room with, like, twenty other babies. Immedietly, I’m sure I compared myself to all of them and lost. The other babies probably seemed pretty chill about being on earth. They shit their diapers like no big deal. They just sort of effortlessly knew how to do existence. I, on the other hand, was deinitely a wreck about being alive. Why was I here? What did it all mean? Things weren’t looking good. My irst day on earth and I know I was

already thinking about death enough to negate every future accomplishment, relationship, and thing that I might come to love with thoughts like what’s the point? and why bother? At the same time, I still can’t come to terms with the fact that I am actually, deinitely going to die one day, as this might lead to the realization that I might as well enjoy my one brief life, and who wants that.

The situation only got worse when my mother announced that she couldn’t

breastfeed. More precisely, she told me later, I was “killing her.” Killing your mother as an infant is proof of one’s too-muchness.

In the context of food and consumption, too-muchness translates into not-enoughness: your appetites are too big for the planet, and therefore, you probably shouldn’t be here.

I was “killing” my mother, because I was sucking too hard. Less than twenty-four hours on the planet and I was already trying to ill my many insatiable internal holes with external

stuff. I was trying to sate the existential fear of what the fuck is going on here with milk. I was sucking and sucking, but there wasn’t enough milk. There would never be enough milk. One titty is too many and a thousand are never enough.

What I really sought was a cosmic titty. I sought a titty so omniscient it could sate all of my holes. The world was already not enough, and I, of course, was not enough either. They gave me a bottle.

As a result of all my sucking, I ended up in a higher weight percentile than my height percentile. This was problematic, because my mother had obese parents. She needed an object upon which to project her own anxieties. I was perfect for that! The religion of the household quickly became food: me not being allowed to have it and me sneaking it.

One of my favorite foods to sneak was me. In an attempt to be enough, I began to consume my own body parts. I ate my ingernails and toenails. I ate every single one. I liked to bite them off and play with them in my mouth, slide the delicious, calcium-rich half moons between me teeth until my gums bled. I tried to enjoy my own earwax, but earwax is an acquired taste. Later in life I became a connoisseur of my own vaginal secretions. The depth of range was astonishing. The vagina is always marinating something.

What I loved the most, though, was to pick my nose and eat it. During story hour at school I created a “shield” with my left hand to cover my nose, so I could enjoy some private refreshment. Then I’d really get in there with the right hand.

Some of my happiest childhood days were

spent behind that handshield. I felt self-contained, satisied, full on myself. The other kids knew what was up and they made fun of me, but I didn’t care. The bliss was too profound.

Unfortunately, the bliss was not going to last forever. Let’s be honest, the bliss was going to last four minutes or until my nose ran out of snot. But parents, if your kid is eating herself, you have to let her. Let your child devour herself whole. Even if she disappears completely, encourage her to vanish. Let your child eat the shit out of herself and then shit herself out. Let her eat that.

There aren’t that many ways to ind comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to ill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to ill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the irst place.

-An excerpt from So Sad Today

“

Don’t make me think

I just want to feel

SANCTUARY

by Jean Valentine

You who I don’t know I don’t know how to talk to you. What is it like for you there?

Here … well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship he uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear. Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes. But they will not be mine; to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices

What are you afraid of?

What will happen. All this leaving. And meetings, yes. But death. What happens when you die?

“… not scatter the voices,”

Drown out. Not make a house, out of my own words. To be quiet in another throat; other eyes; listen for what it is like there. What word. What silence. Allowing. Uncertain: to drit, in the restlessness … Repose. To run like water

What is it like there, right now?

Listen: the crowding of the street; the room. Everyone hunches in against the crowding; holding their breath: against dread.

What do you dread?

What happens when you die?

What do you dread, in this room, now?

Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin. To die, not having listened. Not having asked … To have scattered life.

Yes I know: the thread you have to keep inding, over again, to follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.

L N N L no sS e E i

While loneliness strikes us to seek instant gratiication from those who cannot provide it to us, it also illuminates the needs that we are often taught to neglect. Why do so many of us feel so lonely? We seem to be equally afraid of closeness and loneliness because they both require us to movewith deep non-performative honesty. Loneliness challenges my addictions to validation, asking me to question the unnerving bursts of “pleasure” I get from a life of feeling unsafe, consumed and surveiled. Loneliness is a guide that can bring me closer to me and you.

by

M

zH Hu i im

please stop stealing piecesof me

an excerpt from

Difficult Girl

by Lena Dunham

Iam eight, and I am afraid of everything. The list of things that keep me up at night includes but is not limited to: appendicitis, typhoid, leprosy, unclean meat, foods I haven’t seen emerge from their packaging, foods my mother hasn’t tasted irst so that if we die we die together, homeless people, headaches, kidnapping, milk, the subway, sleep.

An assistant teacher comes to school with a cold sore. I am convinced he’s infected with MRSA, a skin-eating staph infection. I wait for my own lesh to erode. I stop touching my shoelaces (too ilthy) or hugging adults outside my family. In school, we are learning about Hiroshima, so I read “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes,” and I know instantly

that I have leukemia. A symptom of leukemia is dizziness, and I have that, when I sit up too fast or spin around in circles. So I quietly prepare to die in the next year or so, depending on how fast the disease progresses.

My parents are getting worried. It’s hard enough to have a child, much less a child who demands to inspect our groceries and medicines

for evidence that their protective seals have been tampered with. I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up, there is one blissful second before I look around the room and remember my many terrors.

I wonder if this is what it will always be like, forever, and I try to remember moments I felt safe: In bed next to my mother one Sunday morning.

Playing with my friend Isabel’s puppy. Getting picked up from a sleepover just before bedtime.

One night, my father becomes so frustrated by my behavior that he takes a walk and doesn’t come back for three hours. While he’s gone, I start to plan our life without him.

My fourth-grade teacher, Kathy, is my best friend at school. She’s a plump, pretty woman with hair like yellow pipe cleaners. Her clothes resemble the sheets at my grandma’s house, loral but threadbare, and with mismatched buttons. She says I can ask her as many questions as I want: about tidal waves, about my sinuses, about nuclear war. She offers vague, reassuring answers. In hindsight, they were tinged with religion, implied a faith in a distinctly Christian God. She can tell when I’m getting squirrelly, and she shoots me a look across the room that says, It’s O.K., Lena, just give it a second. When I’m not with Kathy, I’m with Chris Conta, our school nurse, who has a perm and wears holiday sweaters all year round. She has a no-nonsense approach to health that comforts me. She presents me with hard facts (very few children develop Reye’s syndrome in response to aspirin) and tells me that polio has been eradicated in America. She takes me seriously when I explain that I’ve been exposed to scarlet fever by a kid on the subway with a red face. Sometimes she lets me lie on the top bunk in the back room, dark and cool. I rest my cheek against

the plastic mattress cover and listen as she dispenses medication and condoms to high-school kids. If I’m lucky, she doesn’t send me back to class.

No one likes the way things are going, so at some point therapy is suggested. I am used to appointments: allergist, chiropractor, tutor. All I want is to feel better, and that overrides the fear of something new, something reserved for people who are crazy. Plus, both my parents have therapists, and I feel more like my parents than like anybody else. My father’s therapist is named Ruth. I’ve never met her, but I once asked him to describe her to me. He said she was older, but not as old as Grandma, with longish gray hair. In my head, her ofice has no windows; it’s just a box with two chairs. I wonder what Ruth thinks of me. He has to have said something.

“Can’t I just see Ruth?” I ask. He explains that it doesn’t work that way, that I need my own place to have my own private thoughts. So I take the train uptown with him to meet someone of my own. For some reason, when we go to appointments to help my mind, it’s always my father who comes. My mother comes to the ones for my body.

The irst doctor, a violet-haired grandmaage woman with a German surname, asks me a few simple questions and then invites me to play with the toys scattered across her loor. She sits in a chair above me, pad in hand. I have the sense she will gather all kinds of information from this, so I put on a show

that I’m sure will demonstrate my loneliness and introspection: bootleg Barbie crashes her convertible with off-brand Ken riding shotgun. Tiny Lego men are killed in a war against their own kind. After a long period of observation, she asks me to share my three greatest wishes. “A river, where I can be alone,” I tell her, impressed with my poeticism. From this answer, she will know that I am not like other nine-year-olds.

“And what else?” she asks.

“That’s all.”

I leave feeling worse than when I went in, and my father says that’s O.K., we can see as many doctors as we need to until I’m better. Next, we visit a different woman, even older than the irst, but she’s named Anni, which is not an old person’s name. We walk up four lights to her ofice. My father sits with me this time and helps me explain the things that worry me. Anni is sympathetic, with a funny high laugh, and, when we walk out into the night, I tell my father she is the one. But we are here just to get a referral, my father tells me. Anni isn’t accepting new patients.

And so my third session is with Lisa. Lisa’s ofice is down the block from our apartment, and my mother, sensing some trepidation, pulls me aside and says to think

of it like a playdate. If I like playing with her, I can go back. If not, we’ll ind someone else for me to play with. I nod, but I’m well aware that most playdates don’t revolve around someone trying to igure out whether you’re crazy or not.

In our irst session, Lisa sits on the loor with me, her legs tucked under her like she’s just a friend who has come by to hang out. She looks like the mom on a television show, with big curly hair and a silky blouse. She asks me how old I am, and I respond

vaguest

by asking her how old she is—after all, we’re sitting on the loor together. “Thirty-four,” she says. My mother was thirty-six when I was born. Lisa is different from my mother in lots of ways, starting with her clothes: a suit, sheer tights, and black high heels. Different from my mother, who looks like her normal self when she dresses as a witch for Halloween.

Lisa lets me ask her whatever I want. She has two daughters. She lives uptown. She’s Jewish. Her middle name is Robin, and her favorite food is cereal. By the time I leave, I think that she can ix me.

The germophobia morphs into hypochondria morphs into sexual anxiety morphs into the pain and angst that accompany entry into middle school.

“I have only the

memory of a life before fear”

Over time, Lisa and I develop a shorthand for things I’m too embarrassed to say: “masturbation” becomes “M,” “sexuality” becomes “ooality,” and my crushes become “him.” I don’t like the term “gray area,” as in “the gray area between being scared and aroused,” so Lisa coins “the pink area.” We eventually move into her adult ofice but stay sitting on the loor. We’ll often share a box of Special K or a croissant.

She teaches me how to needlepoint, with a focus on abstract geometric designs in autumnal threads. When I turn thirteen, she throws me a private atheistic bat mitzvah—just us two. We eat half a pound of prosciutto.

One evening, I see her on the subway, and our interaction, warm but disorienting, inspires a poem, the last lines of which are “I guess you are not my mother. You will never be my mother.” I make her a painting, a girl with big Keane eyes crying violet tears, and she tells me that she’s hung it in her bathroom, along with a free-form nude I did using gouache. I bring my disposable camera and take pictures of us hanging out and drawing, just like pals do.

The work we’re doing together helps, but even three mornings a week isn’t enough to stop the terrible thoughts, the fear of sleep and of life in general.

Sitting with my mother in the beauty salon one afternoon, I come across an article about obsessive-compulsive disorder. A woman describes her life, so burdened with obsessions that she has to lick art in museums and crawl on the sidewalk. Her symptoms aren’t much worse than mine: the magazine’s description of her most horrible day parallels my average one. I tear the article out and bring it to Lisa, whose face crumples sympathetically, as though the moment she’d been dreading had inally arrived. It makes me want to throw my needlepoint supplies in her face. Do I have to do everything myself?

When I’m ifteen, I stop working with Lisa. I’m ready to stop talking about my problems all the time, I tell her, and she doesn’t ight me.

I feel good. My O.C.D. isn’t completely gone, but maybe it never will be. Maybe it’s part of who I am, part of what I have to manage, the challenge of my life. And for now that seems O.K.

Our last session is full of laughter, fancy snacks, talk of the future. I admit how much it hurt me when she reacted with disgust to my belly-button ring, and she says she’s sorry she displayed her personal bias. I thank her for having let me bring my cat to a session.

I miss her the way I missed our loft after we moved in seventh grade: sharply, and then not at all. There is too much unpacking to do.

“I feel good. My O.C.D. isn’t completely gone, but maybe it never will be. Maybe it’s part of who I am, part of what I have to manage, the challenge of my life.

And for now that seems O.K.”

“It

whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, loods it.” -Sylvia

is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: and

joyous positive joyous positive despairing negative despairing negative

Plathh

Betw een the Lin es

a poem by Sophie Diener

I won’t send you Christmas cards.

I won’t look you up on the internet or write to ask you how you are and we won’t catch up like old friends.

I won’t be invited to your sister’s wedding.

You won’t be a place I can stay in the city or an ICE contact or character reference.

But in my mind, for a split second, you’ll still drive every little black car I see

And when that song comes on the radio I’ll see a ghost in my passenger seat

You’ll stay smiling in the pictures that I print out just to hide and I’ll make up stories to write my poems

I won’t call you

But slip you there in the spaces between the lines

how can fate tether two halves together when each is a stranger to the other

these arethe treasure

moments onesIwill themost

just you and I just you

just you and I you and I

deadheading flowers

A zine about personal growth through the adolescent and adult years.

writings by Georgia Pritchett, Melissa Broder, Jean Valentine, Mimi Zhu, Lena Dunham, Sylvia Plath, Sophie Diener, and Jordan Dyess.

photographs by Jordan Dyess

special thanks to

My family, friends, Lydia, and Connor for their support and believing in me even when I did not believe in myself.