Levelling Up

Wounding/Wanting Diary #1

A collage made by Margeaux featuring Diane Arbus’s black and white photograph Two girls on the beach, Coney Island, N.Y., 1958, in which two femmes in bathing suits stare at the camera defiantly; the photograph sits atop of a black pieces of paper covered in a variety of different wavy lines of shapes and sizes, in white, gold, and light blue ink, made by my partner; just underneath the torsos of the two femmes is a photocopy of an underlined quote from the book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz that reads “we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds”

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Hello dear ones,

This is the first entry for my “Wounding/Wanting Diary” series for paid subscribers. If you can’t afford the $5/month for a paid subscription, you can email me at hello@margeauxfeldman.com. I never want money to be an access barrier, and I need to set some boundaries with this writing. Thank you for your understanding.

I also want to acknowledge that for folks who are already paid subscribers, you might not want access to this writing. I celebrate you in your choice to click delete when you see these emails come through.

The title for this writing comes from my MFA thesis Wounding/Wanting: An Archive, in which I explore the ways in which wounding and wanting became synonymous with each other. It’s very likely that I’ll be sharing some of that writing here. But more than anything, this is a space for the very raw, post therapy feels that I’ll be moving through as I start weekly sessions to address the impact that sexual trauma has had on my life.

I’ve found so much healing in processing my trauma through writing, and so I start this project in the hopes that it will help bring clarity to this work, as well as support my integration of what I’ll be learning. I also know that I’m not alone. And it is my hope that sharing this writing can help support you too. I’d ask that you keep this writing confidential to this space, and not share it with folks who aren’t subscribers. In this way, you help keep me, and my process, safe.

Because of the nature of what I’m writing about, I want to offer a content note here that will serve for all of this writing. In these entries, you will likely find details of sexual trauma, including rape, sexual assault, sex that occurred while drunk or high or both, intimate partner violence, and physical assault during sex. Please take care yourself after reading this writing.

With gratitude,
Margeaux

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April 20, 2024

I wake up this morning with pain coursing all through my body. When I try to open my eyes, it feels as though I am awakening from the worst hangover — except I had nothing to drink the night before. My shoulder bones, wrists, elbows, hips, knees, ankles are screaming at me. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been in the longest sustained pain flare up since 2018 — when the pain first began.