‘Getting Nowhere Fast’: Girlhood, Illness, and a Strange Predilection for Beauty in Contagion
via @girlsofisolation
We're not looking forward and we are not looking back
We've lost the warranty, we'll never get our money back
My baby's buying me another life, getting nowhere fast.
– “Getting Nowhere Fast” by Girls at Our Best!
Earlier this week, I went through the tedious work of scrolling through my Instagram feed. I have not had a personal Instagram account for six-months, but I recently cracked and created a small account to follow a subset of bloggers, therapists, artists, and writers as a pool of (meticulously curated) inspiration. As I scrolled in my typical glassy-eyed fashion, I happened upon an account titled @GirlsofIsolation. My interest was instantly piqued at the somber black-and-white photographs that were carefully laid out on the account’s feed. I went through each image diligently in that sort of hungry way that consumes me when I feel a spark of connectivity in the mass of social media panic. @GirlsofIsolation brands itself as an archival project which showcases the self portraits of girls and women during their self-isolation and quarantine. The creator of the account, Isabella (@isabella_fldw), wrote the following caption on a post from April 2nd:
“I’ve always been in awe of the ways girls decorate their bedrooms. What we put on our walls is a continuous reflection of whatever it is we are obsessed with at the moment, whoever we’ve decided we want to be. But beyond that, a girl’s bedroom is often one of the few places where she is the one in control. So these are the girls of isolation, or self-portrait of a lady in quarantine. Or quaranteen girls.”
via @girlsofisolation
During times like these, most things that I have ever found beautiful or purposeful feel immensely trivial. There is a certain seductive quality to romantic mundanity – baking, taking an afternoon stroll (in a socially distant fashion), breathing in deeply and feeling thankful for that life that has been granted to this mortal coil. It’s seductive… and difficult to maintain without feeling like it is a performance. For me, trauma, performance, and fear go hand-in-hand. That frantic urge to bake decorated focaccia, diligently clean and scrub the floors, take a mile-long walk at exactly 5:00 PM each day. There is the necessity to maintain your vitality, your viviality, I know. But as someone who has lived to perform femininity, womanhood, and beauty in the most perfect of measures for the better part of twenty-three years, I know this anxiety all too well. I know this frantic energy all too well. And I know the crash even better. Surviving these days of quarantine feels an awful lot like the quivering, brittle edge of an uncertainty that has become my strangest and closest bedfellow. What is this strange predilection for beauty in contagion?
In the 1892 short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, our unnamed narrator slowly descends into madness after she is forbidden from working in order to treat her “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency.” As her decline begins, our narrator begins to notice the strange olfactory qualities of the wallpaper in her room:
“... It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.
It gets into my hair”
When I look through “Girls of Isolation,” I see the kind of ennui and subtle restlessness that settles in the bones, carries itself in the eyes, waits for you and gets into your hair. It is the heavy kind that wraps itself around your shoulders, allowing you to do nothing else but surrender to its cause. There is a paucity of performance in these photographs; honest displays of girlhoods suspended by the onset of pandemic. The images are displayed in the format of a collage. Each photograph and selfie is carefully organized as if they were behind the clear plastic pocket of your mother’s college photo album. The camera’s gaze on each photograph has the distinct intimacy and nuance of imagery that is controlled, selected, and delicately submitted by the individuals in the photo themselves. Girls surrounded by the ephemera of their lives, strings of fairy lights and sports bras and vanity mirrors. Tender photos of their beauty processes collapsing the visage of constant construction. Girls taking photos at angles where their bodies bend, roll, slump, lay. This is not tucked and cinched imagery. It is not a commandeering or performative lens. It is simply girls at their best. And also, perhaps, their worst.
The toll of self-isolation in this context is not a topic I wish to broach callously. As I write this, I am swaddled under five pounds of polyester cotton sheets and the weight of the world. Yes, it is dramatic. Yes, it is heavy-handed. But the moment through which we are living is one that lends itself to a bit of maudlin sulking. The other option is a grim despair that takes me to the edge of that which I cannot, or refuse to, touch. So I am swaddled in my drama and my grief for a world teetering on the brink of a certain collapse- perhaps not total collapse, but a certain one nonetheless.
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has chipped apart the facade of a system that had already lost its glimmer for many of us. Though there is mass effort to collectively mitigate the global trauma that we are experiencing, the breadth of this trauma may not be parsed until after the contagion has reached its zenith. As a girl in isolation, a girl whose early womanhood is shaped by the consequences of quarantine, I give myself time to pause. These nights, I cannot sleep in the dark any more. My apartment is too quiet at the midnight hour. I’ve taken to turning on my honey-colored lamp and watching seasons of “Bob’s Burgers” on Hulu until I am too exhausted to keep my eyes open. The fear that grips once the sun sets is entirely irrational, but it seems that if I let my eyes close one moment too soon, the world as I know it will be gone by the time they open once again. It is dramatic, I know. But it is a fear that I know I do not struggle with alone.
Milka is a Kenyan-American writer interested in the intersections of beauty and power. As an English Literature student, they primarily centered their research on marginalized bodies and the interiority of black women in postmodern literature. Currently, they focus their writing on creative non-fiction narrative that explores desirability politics, beauty labor in the Internet age, and the tender magic of body liberation. You can find their work in Turnpike Zine, Undertone Magazine, and in little Twitter musings.