Read an Excerpt
Self-Inflicted Wounds
By Aisha Tyler HarperCollins Publishers
Copyright © 2013 Aisha Tyler
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-222377-7
( 1 )
The Time I Cut Myself in Half
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”—RUMI
“This is gonna need ointment.”—AI SHA TYLER
When I was about five years old, I stabbed myself in the chest.
Well, not exactly stabbed. More like sliced. Yes. I sliced myself nose
to navel, as if conducting a frog dissection in science class. Only with-
out the relatively sanitary tools, face protection, or pursuit of scientific
truth.
And, also, on myself.
I could say it wasn't my fault. I could protest that it was an accident—
unforeseen, unpredictable, unkind, unfair. None of that would be true.
I did this on purpose. I knew exactly what I was getting into. The
entire debacle was calculated, focused, and gleefully headlong.
Before you gasp in horror and thinly disguised pity, this was no
suicide attempt.1 I was not trying to gut myself. At the same time, I can
blame no one else for the bloody vertical striping that occurred.
I courted that stabbing, poked at it with a metaphorical stick,
1 People have called me a lot of things, but one word they have never used is depressed. I
am, fortunately or not, depending on your perspective, nauseatingly upbeat, disgustingly
cheery. Please, withhold your disdain. This is a genetic condition. Much like synesthetes or
people who love musical theater, this is just how I was born.
2 AISHA TYLER
taunted it like a rangy pit bull behind a wobbly storm fence, mocking
and laughing as it slavered in captivity—right up to the moment the
dog leapt, snarling against the wire, knocking the fence to the ground
like a structure of drinking straws and me face-first into the dirt. Or,
more accurately, face-first into the hot, abrasive summer pavement.
Some might call such behavior stupid. They would be one hundred
percent right.
Here's the thing. I am uniquely, and occasionally quite stupidly,
fearless. I have never been afraid. Well, not truly afraid. I have had
moments of trepidation, acted tentatively on occasion. Tiptoed toward
my fate timorously, doubts creeping, internal alarms blaring. Occa-
sionally, I exercise a bit of caution. But more often, and to my sustained
chagrin, I run sprinting toward my own demise, without consideration
or forethought. I like to shoot first and ask questions about why there
is a bullet lodged deeply in my own foot much, much later.
So on this golden August day in my fifth year, I had been playing
outside in my Oakland neighborhood with a dusty scrum of local kids
in a completely unsupervised group, the way we used to in the good
old days, before the Internet told parents that this was a terrible idea2
and likely to result in your child being abducted by aliens or devoured
by wolves. We were all in various states of typically dirty late-summer
disarray: faces sticky with rivulets of many-hours-dried melted Popsi-
cle and festooned liberally with dirt, most shoeless and many shirtless,
including (inappropriately I suppose in hindsight) me.
Yes, I was running around a city neighborhood unchaperoned, on
hot pavement with bare feet, and worse still, a bare chest.3 Now, before
you jump into your time machine and call Child Protective Services,
get over your prissy self. It was the seventies. Kids ran around unsuper-
vised. This is before people felt the need to meticulously curate every
2 Along with kids riding the bus, doing their homework without parental “assistance” (read:
“doing it for them”), using a kitchen knife or an open flame before the age of seventeen, or
anything else that builds character, instills mental toughness or makes kids into actual people.
3 I was a five-year-old girl. I still had a “chest.” If you think it was inappropriate, you need
therapy. Also, you may need to look out your front window and see if Chris Hansen from To
Catch a Predator is lurking in your bushes waiting to strike.
THE TIME I CUT MYSELF IN HALF 3
minute of their child's day. In the morning during the summer, par-
ents opened the front door and forcibly ejected their children into the
street with five dollars and a firm admonition to come home when the
streetlights came on and not to run into oncoming traffic. This is just
how things were done. I suppose if we were rich, the nanny could have
followed behind us in the family's second minivan, but we weren't, and
she didn't, and that, my dear friends, is that.
So we were running around barefoot, narrowly avoiding puncture
wounds from the abundance of rusted nails and broken bottles strewn
liberally about the streets, fleeing rabid dogs and hissing cats and the
occasional loitering ne'er-do-well, and having the time of our fucking
lives. We climbed some trees, chased an ice cream truck, terrorized a
squirrel, picked up dried dog poop, threw rocks at things that break
when they are hit with rocks, and were generally on raging kindergar-
ten fire, when we found an alley. Sweet.
Naturally, it being an absolutely terrifying place, and me being
feckless and wild,4 I decided to go into that alley. And why the hell not?
After you've touched dried dog feces with your bare hands, nothing
much else troubles you. And in that alley, among empty fruit crates and
mosquito-infested puddles, we found . . . an abandoned hobbyhorse.
Abandoned! Who the hell leaves a perfectly good hobbyhorse just
lying around? I announced to the group. Heathens! Profligates! God-
less people, that's who!
I was a dramatic child.
We dragged this hobbyhorse from its dank hiding place and into
the street, the better to surround it with hard surfaces that might em-
brace a small person's tumble. We surveyed it briefly from all sides to
confirm that it was, indeed, in functioning order. And then, in turn,
we each hopped on board and rode that thing like a Hapsburg prince
on a Lipizzaner stallion. Springs have never clung to life so dearly, nor
groaned in protest
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Self-Inflicted Wounds by Aisha Tyler. Copyright © 2013 Aisha Tyler. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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