The Self-destruction Of Gia (2003)
Abbey Synnott
I wasn't finding people on a dating app and getting to know them before meeting them, I wasn't going on blind dates or finding people through mutual friends. I was going to the bars that people would advise me to avoid and actively looking for a one night stand, the type of one night stand where names were not even exchanged, the type where there were no feelings, no connection, and in many ways the more anonymous and the rougher the encounter the better.
At first I think going out and getting wasted then going home with someone was a distraction, was much easier to ignore my thoughts, ignore the hallucinations, and ignore my life falling apart around me when all my focus was on finding different ways to self-destruct (even if at the time I'm not sure I saw it as self-destruction).
Over time though it changed, the drink and drugs were no longer the focus, the part of the evening in the bar singing, dancing, flirting, appearing to be having fun were just part of the routine, the focus was on finding someone, anyone, to spend the night with.
Casual sex and promiscuity are rarely talked about within our society, these behaviours are judged, looked down on, and heavily criticised (especially in women), it's very rare that anyone will ever ask why people do these things or look beyond the behaviours.
Instead those of us who have had periods of these behaviours feel like we cannot discuss it, we often get made to feel shame and have it made very clear to us that the behaviour is inappropriate, inappropriate to do and certainly inappropriate to speak about.
I think at the time when I was doing this if I had been asked why then I would have gotten defensive, I'd have said I was just having fun, exploring my sexuality, having new experiences, or something else along those lines.
In reality though I think I knew that this wasn't the truth. If it had simply being a case of having some fun (which is a legitimate reason for casual sex) then surely I wouldn't have been going out of my way to artificially make the situations as dangerous as I could.
To an extent I knew what I was doing was dangerous and I think that part of me knew that I wasn't in control, but a larger part of me knew that if I told anyone what I was doing or why I would be judged and I just couldn't handle that. Each morning I already hated myself, each day I would tell myself that no, tonight I would not be offering myself up as someone's sex toy, each evening I would find myself sitting as a different bar with a drink and trying to figure out which person to flirt with first.
For me casual sex was definitely a form of self harm, by acknowledging this, am I perpetuating the myth that people who choose to engage in various forms of sexual activity have deeper emotional issues? I hope not... Just like how not everyone who drinks does so as a form of self destruction, or not everyone who spends time in a gym has an unhealthy view of their body, not everyone who engages in casual sex does so as a way to hurt themselves. What we need to consider is the motivations, feelings and thought processes behind the behaviour, and for me the aim was definitely not a healthy one.
Hazel Cornhill is a mental health campaigner, blogger and podcaster. Hazel can be found on twitter @AnLasair and is the co-host of the Reality Tourists Podcast speaking to people about their experiences of mental illness.
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I was born into a family who failed to really understand me although they truly loved me. I was born to second generations south Asians who had migrated to the UK in 1990s for better opportunities. Whilst growing up I faced a lot of trauma as a child from bullying at school, to childhood abuse, to racism. This later in life had a severe impact on my mental health where I found I difficult to find happiness in life, confide in, trust with people.
The reality though is that my command hallucinations tell me to hurt myself, they tell me that I deserve to be hurt, that by being hurt I am saving others, or sometimes there is no justification they just tell me to hurt myself over and over insistently. Most of the time I can ignore the voices, or sometimes even reason with them, but at times I will give in to them sometimes because I believe them and other times just to shut them up.
Let's be honest here, I am not a warrior and my scars are not beautiful. I am beautiful and I have scars, but I am not beautiful because of them. I would also be beautiful without them too. I am not minimising the role self-harm has had in my life, but it is not some metaphorical battle I am constantly fighting. I live with PTSD and sometimes it makes me suffer; but I am not constantly suffering.
For months I would go to the areas of town where lone women were told not to go. I would purposely go to the places and do the things that I knew were putting me at risk. I fooled myself into thinking I was in control, that it was a calculated risk. I wasn't finding people on a dating app, I wasn't going on blind dates or finding people through mutual friends. I was going to the bars that people would advise me to avoid and actively looking for a one night stand.
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Midlatitude EKE (averaged between 30 and 60 latitude) as a function of longitude, for Ωe, 2Ωe, 4Ωe, and 8Ωe: zonally asymmetrically heated NH (red), zonally symmetrically heated SH (blue), and simulations without added heating (black). Dashed vertical lines demarcate the longitudes of the added heating. The simulations correspond to those in Fig. 2. Downstream of the storm track, EKE is lower in the zonally asymmetrically heated cases than in other cases, demonstrating the self-destruction of the storm track.
Storm track eddies continue to develop downstream of their generation region (Simmons and Hoskins 1979), and they can form coherent wave packets (Lee and Held 1993), within which eddy energy is passed downstream from eddy to eddy (Orlanski and Katzfey 1991; Chang and Orlanski 1993; Chang 1993; Orlanski 1998). This downstream development of eddies appears to be responsible for the fact that the EKE maximum extends downstream of the region of maximum baroclinicity near the coasts. Chang and Orlanski (1993) suggested that as long as there is enough baroclinicity to balance dissipation and barotropic decay (Simmons and Hoskins 1980), downstream development implies that there is no intrinsic limit to the energy propagation and thus storm track length. Analyses of the kinetic energy balance of storm tracks (Lau 1978, 1979) and numerical studies (e.g., Frisius et al. 1998) show that barotropic decay can lead to the termination of storm tracks. Alternatively, it has been suggested that continents with their enhanced surface and orographic drag may reduce the storm track EKE (Chang and Orlanski 1993; Mak and Deng 2007). General circulation model (GCM) simulations with continents but without orography exhibit overall weaker but longitudinally less localized storm tracks (Broccoli and Manabe 1992). This suggests that orographic stationary waves may play a role in the maintenance and termination of storm tracks (Chang et al. 2002), possibly by modifying the barotropic background flow (e.g., Son et al. 2009), which can lead to localization of storm tracks (Lee 1995; Swanson et al. 1997).
On Earth, the Northern Hemisphere storm tracks occupy significant parts of the midlatitudes (Fig. 1b). Therefore, it is difficult to separate observationally the effects that storm tracks have on each other, continental effects, and self-maintained properties of each storm track. To show to what extent storm tracks can maintain themselves and to separate the scale of the storm tracks more clearly from the planetary scale, we conducted simulations in which we varied the planetary rotation rate.
The downstream self-destruction of storm tracks occurs even as the planetary rotation rate is varied. As the rotation rate is increased, some important dynamical length scales such as the energy-containing transient eddy scale (e.g., Schneider and Walker 2006) and the stationary wave scale (e.g., Held et al. 2002) decrease. The storm track also shortens and becomes longitudinally and latitudinally more confined (Fig. 2b). For the high rotation rate cases, although there are multiple jets and baroclinic zones in each hemisphere, the storm tracks still exhibit one main EKE maximum. (However, in a more realistic model with a dynamical ocean and with multiple ocean gyres, the surface heating would change as well.) In addition, as in the Ωe case, the EKE downstream is significantly lower both than in the Southern Hemisphere (without zonal asymmetries in heating) and than in a simulation without added heating (Fig. 2c). The downstream depression in EKE is almost uniform longitudinally, except in the simulations with rotation rates greater than or equivalent to 8Ωe, in which a partial recovery occurs far downstream.
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