Misstique Magazine

Misstique Magazine

By Women, For the World Winter 2019 Volume I Issue I Cover art by Ashley Wang ‘19

Anna Ely ‘19: Editor-in-Chief Leila Cohen ‘19: Senior Editor Medina Purefoy-Craig ‘20: Editor Kate Spencer ‘20: Editor Krystal McCook ‘20: Communications Officer

WHAM! was founded in 1989 as repsonse to a U.S. Supreme Court decision to restrict access to safe abortions in some states.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Misstique prints this mini issue on behalf of all Choate students and young women who have gone without the validation and/or care of their mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, sexual, etc. health. Although the ideas of mental health and the destigmatization of mental illness are rising in wider topics of conversation, it is important to integrate them into our vernacular and place emphasis on deep self-awareness concerning these topics.

This article hopes to see every young woman and the various health issues she may be struggling against in a way that we have not been seen historically. This article aims to recognize the validity and sanity of women as they move through the day-to-day. For so long, women’s health issues have been pushed aside, written off as hysteria, insanity, or a number of other patronizing, sexist “diagnoses.” From childhood, women are socialized to believe that “health” issynonymous with “thin” and “pretty.” And so begins a cycle of seeking beauty via self-harm and punishment under the false pretenses of health -- a cycle that we all contribute to.

But it’s not only women’s health that has been underserved by a toxic veil of mistreatment, largely determined by gender roles. For many men, hyper-masculinity has taught them to hide all pain and suffering (especially emotional) in the name of “manliness,” dissuading them from seeking help or support in serious situations. Within the transgender and gender queer communities, health of any kind is often not even seen as a priority, especially by onlookers and those making judgments. Transgender women of color have one of the lowest life expectancy in the United States.

Those communities are underrepresiesnted in the medical field and severely under-cared-for. They are cast aside and “expected” to survive, but are given few tools or resources to care for themselves. These systems are set up to fail us. The ignoring of health, namely peripheral health concerns such as emotional and spiritual health -- those kinds that are not immediately visible -- fails human beings and places little value on human life. This is not the world we want to live and develop in.

In this issue, Misstique will attempt to call greater attention to issues of health on our campus, placing a particular emphasis on the personal healing strategies of our writers. Let this letter also serve as a trigger warning as issues of consent and coercion will be raised in this magazine.

We include this piece because it is pertinent to the ongoing conversation around student wellness and healthy relationships that we aim to nurture on this campus. We urge all of our readers to consider their own care as well as help us break down toxic stereotypes regarding the health care of any gender.

- Anna Ely

Letter to a Young Woman To My God Sister,

I write this because you have knowledge in your bloodstream and breath in your kidneys and love in your liver. You have vision in your fingertips and touch in your voice. (So you’re a little jumbled up; who cares??) I believe in disjunction like I believe in strength. I think that you have yet to realize the disjointed power in your body.

In this letter, you will find the steps to strength and all the knowledge I wish to impart on you as the very sage 18-year-old I am.

I must start by saying that I am sorry for all the sadness you have had to feel, but also that I have faith you will make it.

Your journey is not over and neither is your pain, even though you have had more than your fair share. You have seen your own family turned inside out, guts and love scraped from the sides and dumped onto the linoleum of your laundry room floor. Pain has stood before you, breathing heavy alcohol breath into your sweet little girl face and it has asked you to forget yourself. It has begged you to abandon your innocence and your sweetness. I’m so proud to know that you have yet to give in to pain.

I know that you have seen your people change before your eyes and that you might not understand why. I hope to help you understand why people flip a switch sometimes. It’s not really by any fault of their own. Mental illness is a tricky thing to understand or treat. You’ll understand this more and more as you endure life.

When your mom had her brain aneurysm, it was a longshot that she would live, let alone recover to the degree she did. I know you are grateful for her everyday, but I hope that you will be willing to protect her the way she would you. Your mom is still your mom. She is the same woman who would cut a swatch of her own skin just to stop the bleeding from yours. Remember this.

You might wonder why your mom has to cry on the kitchen floor some days. It’s because she’s trying to survive and sometimes the kitchen floor is the best place to start to survive. It’s the best

place to map out each day in bloody, tired tears. You can try out the kitchen floor one day if you’d like. It will welcome you and your wet eyes when you need it. I can tell you that you will need it one day.

We all do.

You might wonder why we need the kitchen floor. This is a good question. I believe it’s because we are fragile. Human beings are made out to be the ultimate conquerors, the superior beings, the hunters and fighters and thinkers.

But we are fragile. We have no insulating blubber to protect us from cold or bodily armor to keep out the 6’2” predators with light eyes and pretty skin, or night vision adaptations to keep us safe walking to our parked cars at night. Our skin breaks like glass and often, our own brains are the shards that do the cutting. Our minds turn us from happy boys to scared and violent men, from adventurous girls to flesh eating bacteria and self-destruct buttons. Remember, flesh and brains are soft like pudding. People will take scoops out of you in order to supplement themselves. They will fill you in with yogurt and spray cheese and try to convince you you’re still whole, and then you will need the kitchen floor.

I know the culture you’re growing within. It is a culture that will attempt to beat down your voice with heavy metal words and dirty entitled hands and mock your power because it is afraid.

So many people, girls included, will never understand the fight because they have not been shown their voices and have not yet discovered them alone.

These days, consent is practically a vocabulary word and news reels reels of women’s marches are permanently etched into our brains. But just because some are finally being brought to justice and sisterhood is finally being found does not mean that the fight is over. And in this fight, you have a voice.

You have a voice of wisdom and youth. These are two things that incredibly valued in society, you will soon see, but are hard to find within one entity. Embody this strength, this “other-ness” that you possess. Soon, it will be the envy of all those who surround you.

So, as promised, here are your steps to strength: 1. Remember the pain, but let it go one day 3. Protect your mother and all the women in your life, yourself included 4. Find the kitchen floor 5. Invite someone else to your kitchen floor 6. Grow and nurture your voice from house mouse to woman-in-training 8. Take a women’s studies class 9. Great music heals; find yours and I’ll show you mine when you want 10. Fall in love with yourself 11. Learn the word “no” and use it when you want to, raise it into your consciousness and agency Be strong,

Your god sister

Model: Ashley Wang,’19, artist of the cover

Photographer: Kathryn Phillips ‘20

Mental Health: Write Him a Letter Dear You, I can understand why you are the way you are You had no control over the society that shaped you The society that taught you to prioritize your phallus over the people in your family The society that made you conform to its predator vs prey ideals The society that suppresses you to your peak emotional demise Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. (Ephesians 5:22-24) Even inscribed in the most sacred of texts Reinforcing man’s power and disregarding that of the woman from the start

I am not surprised you are like this Simply disappointed How men in your life conquer others, animals, races, women, in order to satiate their chauvinism is detrimental and although it may seem impossible you didn’t have to conform to them submit to this cookie cutter wasteland Adam and Eve did not have to be your forever but you did You pulled into conventionality becoming

The man who tore through my sister’s virginity with his teeth, abandonment in mind The man who makes my mother feel helpless, but in order to remain “stable” she sits in silence The man who endlessly tortured my helpless aunt in order to justify his threatened masculinity The man who uses constant manipulation making my underage cousins feel isolated and incapable The man who unloaded his built-up shame into jacketed, lead bullets ending my best friend’s life The man who sexualizes younger women to shame my abuela for her innate characteristics The man who taught me to silence my voice

in order to let a superior man speak louder The same story they repeat on a seemingly endless loop: These monsters, they grip your body Turning you, an island river stream, into a frigid arctic mountain The flesh they know they deserve They are a certain type of species you cannot particularly understand The suppression of your voice will catalyze your insanity Intoxicated with the demand for the end of this ongoing agony eating up your soul until nothing is left

Inside of an exitless box where your shouts fill your head, your heart, your lungs Instead of fighting against this intensifying sensation he will tell you to Give Into the inevitable Into the vulnerability Into the exposure Into the inexorable The stories of these women who raised me prove nothing but demise because of you The men in my life do not represent anything more than a series of unfortunate events Unfortunately, now you are one of them Sincerely, women who you have hurt

By Anonymous

Darcy RodriA Letter for Healing By guez-Ovalles ‘21

Dear Autumn,

I disabled time from doing its job by attempting to rush it by any means. The more I hurt my organs, the less I feel the hurt.

Time will never make me forget what it felt like to kiss the birthmarks on your forehead and the scars on your body just the same.

Time made me forget who I was while being so deeply intertwined with you. Time will also put stitches on my wounds and bring the light back. I know this because time brought you. I still wonder how time will heal me, when it’ll stop being painful or if I am ever going to heal completely, but much as there is a method to the madness, there’s a beauty to the destruction. I have a little bit of hope in me. You would have been so proud of me.

Because of you, I got to see that love, in fact, was not a concept or an idea but simply an endless well. People can decide how deep they want to climb down, but there is not a limit on how far they can go. I have never climbed down that well as far as I did for you. The deeper you love, the more memories you make, the more you make someone apart of your life, the harder it is to return to the surface but, even as I am drowning, I do not regret a single step of it. Because I knew you, I got to experience the ways in which loss can make you unrecognizable

I eventually learned to like sweltering heat of summers that so strongly reminded me of you, even the colder days where I remember your birthday or our plans for mine. I have a newfound appreciation of those days. The thought of you is omnipresent and unrelenting because I don’t need to cry anymore. All of the sleepless nights that I spent praying to a god I don’t believe in to take my pain away instilled a different kind of faith. A faith that holds you as an experience rather than a memory: the realest experience of my short life.

I am on my way to see you. I finally picked up all of the ashes and I am keeping them somewhere safe. We will always share this incredibly inexplicable connection that no one understood, making me frustrated at first. That was because I tried to explain it all to them, my pain, our bond, your death. I did not have to, though. That’s for us to keep. You’ve had your battles with a monstrous fire as have I. I emerge from my fire a new person, new flowers growing out of my skin like the aftermath of a forest devastation. I thank you endlessly and eternally, Autumn, for being the best thing that’s happened to me. Know that you will rest in peace having meant the world to someone.

Signed sincerely, Your 2-in-1

By Women

For the World