On Friday night, Cassandra Williams ended her life. I don't think this was an accident. She was at Rock and Ride, where both Ryley and Lincoln were, and she took 6 ecstasy pills. Each pill was triple the normal dosage. She collapsed in a crowd of people on a sticky concrete floor - the music blaring as she went down. I wonder how many people didn't even notice. By the time they got her to the hospital, she was in full cardiac arrest. Twenty hours later her mother made the decision to remove her life support when it was clear that there was no way that Cassie was coming back. There are no words for this kind of agony so I will stop here.
I want to clarify my meaning when I say that this was no accident. That is not to say that I believe that Cassie deliberately ended her life - far from it - I imagine that what she was going for was more life, not less. What I think is no accident, is how she got into the situation in the first place. This is far more complicated because it forces us as women to ask ourselves some difficult questions and raises some accountability issues. When it comes to smoking, drinking and drug use, girls are far outstripping the boys. Their abuse of prescription drugs is also on the rise. The reasons for this, of course, are familiar: to be cool, to be emo, to be daring, to be skinny, to be popular, peer pressure, and on and on and on. One blog I was reading had a comment from a 12 year old girl who said that the thrill of hiding something, of doing something she knew was 'bad', thrilled her. She liked the idea of 'getting away with it.'
That is when it clicked with me that this is about control, or more specifically, the lack thereof. In a world where young women have so very little control, the one thing that they can control is their bodies and what they do with them. It's primal. It says "I have dominion over this body, how it feels, how it looks, how it is perceived, how it moves, its pleasure, its pain, because dammit, it is mine and somehow, somewhere, something is going to begin and end with me. I can even place my body in situations where it loses control, because that is how in control I am." So, my question, the first of many, is: how do we give our girls more control? And, perhaps more importantly, what are doing or not doing that is taking this control away?
When I was a teenager I read The Great Gatsby for the first time. There was something so beautiful and tragic about Daisy. I loved the part where she said to Nick that if she was to ever have a daughter, she hoped that she would be a beautiful fool. Something about that line really resonated with me at age 14. Although I could not have articulated it at the time, I intimately understood the truth of that logic. Beauty was to be wished for because obviously it is currency, and foolishness so that you never had to understand that beauty was the only currency available to you as a woman. Something in me glimpsed at our lack of control and made foolishness seem so much more preferable than the Herculian task of changing it. I look at the young women of today and feel a similar deep despair. The media that indoctrinates them, their continued inequality of representation in government, religion, and commerce, the legal fights that continue to surround their bodies (abortion, rape), the 76 cents they will earn to every male dollar, the marketing departments targeting them, the entertainment industry targeting them, the drug dealers targeting them - they are, quite literally, being hunted. Today, being a beautiful fool will get you killed...
I apologize for the emotional rant. I just can't imagine what was going through the mind of a 14 year old girl who thought it would be a good idea to take 6 of anything - much less a drug with a rising death toll. There is something achingly familiar about her; it's as if at one time I was her.
One thing is clear to me: I know who I am fighting for. What is less clear, is what needs to be done...
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