The Barbie craze has long wrapped up and think pieces are few and far between. Most people waxed and waned as to how Barbie was or wasn't a perfect feminist piece of media, allowing an introductory point to topics far more complex than the movie could provide, while perhaps making a laughing stock of actual movements and not being serious enough.
I just can't say one way or another, I actually can't say the politicized points resonated with me as someone with a more historical understanding of Barbie - I mean I grew up thumbing through old vintage Barbie books and could tell you way more about the lore than I'd ever hope to.
What I haven't actually seen beyond the memificiation of the scene is discussion around the iconic line where Barbie stops mid dance scene and proclaims:
Do you guys ever think about dying?
What we come to find out is that out there in the real world, America Ferrera is kind of depressed and it's translating over into this magical Barbie dreamland.
Which brings up the question, isn't this fantasy space built on our childhood imaginations a pretty eloquent analogy for being chronically ill and housebound?
As much as sick people have to put up with strangers pontificating on our day to day lives, inserting themselves with grand proclamations about how they'd just kill themselves if they found themselves in that situation. Or the wider, less obvious societal stance that we should gently move ourselves back towards the Ugly Laws of the past, locking obviously disabled people away from society, because we shouldn't be seen. And as some even say quite loudly, often with a deep amount of pride for their own assumed health and wellness, perhaps we were going to die anyway and it's not really a loss.
The problem with the reality of all of this is, I think a lot of us think about dying a lot.
I read an article once entitled "I Am Not Always Very Attached To Being Alive" which provided an excellent summation as to what many would call living with passive suicidal ideation. I would really recommend reading it before reading the rest of my piece - just so you have a little more familiarization with the concept beyond death being bad and scary and ideas of not being alive being inseparable from any kind of action or need for actual concern.
I think a lot of people are very familiar with simply wishing we weren't HERE anymore. That we were not present in the circumstances we find ourselves in. That we could just bleep out of existence for a moment and find peace, or in a lot of our specific cases - relief from pain.
These feelings are often accompanied by a sense that we can't actually control our circumstances.
I wish. I WISH. That these topics weren't taboo and that honest discussion around the deep complexities that exist miles and miles away from any intent to harm, could be had more often.
The problem probably comes from a mix of personal shame, familial shame, religious indoctrination, and the carceral systems that are built between help lines, mental institutes, forced hospitalizations and holds, police intervention, and the large variety of therapeutic intervention that included mandatory reporting. But of course, if we look at these exact same systems, we have to acknowledge the large overlap that many of them are built upon the foundation that we as people of society will and only can by ourselves pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and fix our problems.
There's a burden on every single individual that says we actually can control all of our outside circumstances and the painful reality is that most people believe that, even if it's an unconscious belief.
It is perhaps why they would "kill themselves" if they were in my position.
And on a far more serious, community based note: being disabled and wanting to die even in the most hyperbolic sense of things goes against the very pointed efforts of the community at large fighting against issues like Canada's MAID policy and similar assisted death policies popping up all over the world that approve and encourage disabled folks who aren't getting supports that they need to simply die. On a systemic level, this is tied back to the previous point. But on a personal level of disabled people's personal autonomy and right's to life, well a lot of disabled people live very lovely lives and would be very content to live even while sick if they could just have a few more material needs met.
This point of community advocacy however, also makes it something we can't even discuss within our very own spaces. Because a right to live is also a right to die. That is what autonomy is. That choice. And acknowledging that we may empathize with that path being chosen seems to set the advocacy back.
But, back to Barbie on the dance floor posing the question of the century... do you?
I find myself laying on the couch listening to the echoes of an argument, another angry moment that I'm not apart of that I can't escape. I just want to nap. I haven't been able to nap for quite a long time. But I pretend to nap. I find myself surrounded by people who are really angry all the time, and I wonder why I'm even here.
I find myself walking back to bed, it's the middle of the night and my head is throbbing. It'll only worsen when I lay down. It's been weeks of this. It's infrequently something I can treat. And I wonder, how did this become my life, what am I doing here? Is this all I get?
I find myself in my own Barbie dreamhouse. I can't say I really complain about the actual dreamhouse, it's the location and the utter lack of other people that's the real problem. My dreamhouse isn't with all the other Barbie's, no I'm up on the hill where no one dares to venture. But I've built my dreamhouse, filled it with beautiful things and spend my time doing all that I can to have any amount of joy. Painting. Listening to records. Putzing with my houseplants. Cooking elaborate meals when I'm up to it, trying out semi simpler dishes that offer me flavors of the world when I'm not.
I have steady income. I live rent free. I scoff at the grocery prices, but it doesn't prevent me from getting the food I need. I have extra to invest in art I enjoy and pass along to friends who need it.
But that's where the fantasy land begins and ends.
Because I may physically be in my Barbie dreamhouse, but the severity of my chronic migraine has never improved. The meds have only worked less and less. And there is no America Ferrera out there in the real world participating in real life on my behalf, who's feelings are creeping into my brain as I remember that none of these tangible things are really real. Sure they are real in the sense that they exist. I exist. I can touch them.
But, is this even existing?
I think about death.
I mostly think about not being here.
And that is, quite frequently very, very literal, that I think about being someplace warm, someplace where I am close to others my age and can exist out in the world even just a little bit. Because that's not a thing I do here. It's April 19th, it snowed today.
So in the very literal sense my detachment from being alive, is totally tied to just not being where I physically am located.
But then I come back to the other side of that coin, the circumstances everyone thinks are within our control.
I can't actually afford property where I want to live. I look and I look and I look.
My entire instagram feed is old houses that are for sale usually under $100,000. I admire them all deeply. I know I can fix one. I can save one. One day I will save one. But you see, the ones I can afford keep landing in places that are just too damn cold!
So I wait.
And I know with every year that I wait, I'll have further I can stretch my budget, if an inheritance ever arrives it'll stretch beyond that. But that's where the daydreaming ends. Because my parents are stubborn in their old age, and unlike all of my peers and likely all of their parents, they aren't waiting around for their parents to die that's a horrible thought. Those people however are also living and working and have lives and don't spend all their time in some liminal space where they don't actually exist anymore.
So how long do I wait, how long before I simply can't take it?
Well, when I think about the old house I can buy I also think about dying. Because more often than not, I find myself far more afraid that I will die here and that none of it will have mattered and no one will notice because I disappeared a long time ago.
And so the world gets a little quieter, the skies a little grey, and I find myself sitting on the edge of my couch ready to go to bed and I wonder how I do this every night.
I find myself in my kitchen, stewing over a long empty plate glancing at the dishes I'll be up to do any moment now, wondering.
Because this is actually a fantasy just like Barbieland.
This liminal space where I follow a set routine, a decade of my life coming close to flying by with no real update to be had in any area of my life.
I did just buy some gold glittery roller skates and a pink helmet - gosh this Barbie analogy isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
I am a Barbie. I am playing house.
I am playing house in my house.
I just made a monthly chore chart - unrelated to playing house - and now even more so, as I wipe down my bathroom sink long before it starts to look dirty, and have developed a new morning habit of wiping the space where my reusable coffee ground thing for my coffee maker dries next to the sink rests because goodness did that get kinda dirty - I feel like a wind up doll going through the motions.
Perhaps in the theme of the movie, my job isn't really as impressive as all the Barbie's, perhaps in this scenario I am Ken and my job is House. I'd rather be Ken who's job is Beach.
I am Ken, my job is House, and America Ferrera is really the one who is in the fantasy land.
Now this is starting to sound right.
At night, and on the bad days where I feel completely disassociated from the world I lean into another world, a world where I am home and surrounded by new versions of people I used to know. We're friends as adults now. I live in their world. I fit into their lives. We moved past some of our differences if we had them.
Maybe we're out at a bar singing karaoke. Maybe we're out on the dancefloor. Maybe we've settled outside on the patio in a quieter moment talking about life. Sometimes we're home, and we're sharing food. Maybe in this world we're all roommates and we watch movies together and other friends come and go. A parade of liveliness all around.
Even in that world, I don't stop being sick - though some part of me must be a little better that's a lot of things to do that are awfully loud for my migrainey brain.
This fantasy land, it's just that. A fantasy land.
An illusion of what life could be if I was someone else. If I wasn't living the life I'm living now. It's really not all that different from the imagination of little kids playing with their Barbie's.
Yes. For people who's lives look like mine, and probably a lot of people who's lives look nothing like mine but maybe do think about dying, who maybe aren't always so attached to this physical realm, for us Barbieland is backwards. America Ferrera is our fantasy land.
We are Ken. Our Job is House. And this is a dreamland.
But nightmares are dreams too.
A.
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