Been single for a while now due to avoidance of drama but I’m ready to put myself back out there for the right girl. My finger presses into a flattened mouth to pull it left or right. The last few years have been like this: a cord of twined images of white boys with plastic glasses and plaid shirts and bad posture and two-thirds-full pints on outdoor bar tables. The book says the collected memories are like pixels in a digital image we store of the only person we believe can close the wound. The self-help book says the brain turns all that has happened to us into points. I have a highlighter, a composition book, and a pen. Harville Hendrix’s self-help book for wounded singles says there is a riddle wrapped around my heart. The bookstore self-help section, though, said something different: nobody will love me until I engage in sequential self-exploration exercises. I told myself, “I love you,” but I was thinking, You’re the worst. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life-Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham-to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.The internet says nobody will love me until I learn to love myself, but the internet never gives instructions.
In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch.
Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic.
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