Pistil Whip by Annie Bragdon
OVULE
OVULE
Artist's Statement
I have been living with invisible, chronic illnesses since I was eighteen months old, and at twenty years old now, my relationship with them is very different than it used to be. Part of what is difficult about my chronic illnesses is that people can't see them---I look fine. There's a constant dissonance between how I feel and how I look that makes it easy for people to forget about my illnesses, but I can never do that myself. People always emphasize the importance of hope when dealing with illness, and I found that forcing hope when it's not realistic can feel like self-destruction masquerading as self-care. It's a reality that reminds me of a Neal Brennan quote: "if you're looking for a magic bullet, occasionally you're gonna get shot." I conceptualize my illnesses as wildflowers and have spent a lot of time and energy figuring out how to accept them. Wildflowers will bloom wherever they find space and a home. You can pick them, but you can't truly control them. Wildflowers are part of my body and part of my life. There are wildflowers in my endometrial tissue, wildflowers on my skin and organs, wildflowers in my joints, wildflowers in my bones, wildflowers in my heart. There are wildflowers everywhere. They are part of me, and they will be part of me forever, at least very likely. I'm learning to live with them.
​
The five "// 1" pieces are created wholly from the same image of a floral arrangement I made. I then applied them to pictures of my body in the five "// 2" pieces. I began floral design while dealing with chronic illnesses that got in the way of my hobbies and activities.
Excerpt:
“I did not ask for this hope to come; I did not even want it, for it trailed disappointment in its wake. Yet there it was, hovering within me — hope that my illness had vanished with the night and my health had returned magically with daybreak. But that moment always passed, my eyes opened, and reality flooded in; nothing had changed at all.”
— Elizabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Snail Eating.
​
The flower has a name: phlox, which means “flame.” If you look up why, various dictionaries will cite their vibrance or showiness, and I understand that. They are long-stemmed and each blossom is made up of a cluster of small bright pink flowers. They look like a high definition version of the clover in Horton Hears a Who! Phloxes can burn things down — burn through them.
​
I spent months building the garden that phloxes seized in moments. Their variegated pink crowns were more regal than mine. As the days grew longer, the green stems grew taller, casting shadows on the picked-over strawberries I had planted before. I don’t know where I went wrong, but somewhere in the hours I spent hunched over garden beds, soil accumulating under my nails, I lost my way. Wildflowers were springing up everywhere with no warning and no regard for their surroundings. It was just like that saying: man plans, God sends wildflowers.
​
My path to plants was twisted, coiling around me like a vine around a trellis. I am not green-thumbed by any means; I have always been the type to pull handfuls of grass out of the ground or a leaf off a tree as I walk past it, not to grow anything. I watched the garden beds in my backyard tangle together and never thought to intervene, I was the bystander I’ve been taught not to be. I only found myself tending to the garden after I learned to tend to my health. I didn’t expect a learning curve, I thought gardening was simple. Plant the seeds, wait for them to grow, and maybe, harvest them. Nothing natural is simple, though; it’s uncontrolled and unpolished. I was flustered by the insurgent phloxes and their secrecy. I burrowed into these mysteries of nature. As a mystery of nature myself, it felt organic.
​
I examine their ruffled petals like doctors examine me. The doctor changes but the question never does: well, aren’t you just a medical mystery? I find this mundane and routine dejá vu tiring. Yes, I am a medical mystery; no, that is not all I am, even though sometimes it feels like it is. Mystery is a beloved genre, but a bad identity. It’s turned me into a novelty, a puzzle that everyone wants to be the one to solve. I don’t figure many people just walked past the excalibur set in stone. In all fairness, I wouldn’t either. I would disregard the fact that I cannot do a single push-up and that there is a bottle of iced tea in my fridge I can’t open. I would pull on the sword, because what if I was the one? The term “medical mystery” is imbued with some sort of magic — it turns “you” into “it.” You are no longer a person, you are a problem that must be fixed. Your pain is a clue, not something that hurts you — how could something hurt you when you don’t really exist? Empathy loses out to intrigue; “I’m sorrys” lose out to “how interestings”; you lose out to some dissociated version of yourself — a detached set of symptoms. I am not myself, I am the mystery, with doctors staring at me — or past me or through me or into me — the same way I now stare at those unpredictable wildflowers.
​
​