Illustration by Ana Mouriño
Natalya is a beautiful 31-year-old woman from Belarus. Her youth was innocent — she grew up picking berries in the forest — but her teenage years and early adulthood were embattled by undiagnosed bipolar, an eating disorder, and self-mutilation. In this excerpt from the forthcoming book The Eccentrics, we hear about Natalya’s passion for electronic music and dancing.
Music is God to her. Literally.
“My music is my higher power,” says Natalya, a 31-year-old blonde bombshell with Soviet heritage. “It saves me. Because I have trouble connecting to God. For me, music helps me breathe.”
In the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, us alcoholics are supposed to pick a “higher power greater than ourselves” that will “restore us to sanity.” A higher power can be God, nature, the program itself or anything of importance to the individual.
For Natalya, it’s electronic music. “When I hear a beat, a bassline, a way a synthesizer is used, a way the spacing out of the four-by-four beats, I don’t know why but that’s what I connect to,” Natalya says. “I connect to house music. Electronic music is what touches my soul.”
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To gain control of her eating disorder, Natalya turned to cutting. The first time, “It just kind of felt like I was going to explode from within and everything was just coming at me at once and my thoughts weren’t making sense,” she says. “It was kind of like an energized anxiety attack. So I couldn’t catch my breath, and I just kind of reached for whatever and I never even knew about self-mutilation, I didn’t really know anybody who did it. And I had a pair of nail clippers and I just started slicing my arms… I didn’t feel any pain at all.”
“I was in a parking lot and my mind was spinning so fast, I reached for scissors and started cutting myself,” she says. “My mind would race so much. I literally would have to cut myself to stop my thoughts from racing.”
One time she took a butcher knife and sliced her leg open. “I didn’t tell anyone for days, ‘cause I was drunk all the time,” she says. “And the blood would just ooze into my sock.”
Do you relate to Natalya’s story? Leave a comment below.
Thought I was the only one. Thank you.