OUR ZINES

SHOP

I love you I said // Gemma Abbott

I love you I said // Gemma Abbott

by | Aug 2, 2023

journal
I love you I said // Gemma Abbott

I love you I said
And he said nothing
And I know this about myself
That I have so much love
That where I see a vacuum of it
I can always find some to pour in and fill the space.
But this singularity that has opened up

inside of him is yawning wide

I love you I said
And he said nothing
As I tried to fill that

hollowness with that love

As I filled it with tears
After all these years
I still love you I said

And he said Nothing

He just sat there like a stone
With no cracks
To help to try and prize him open
With no breath inside
No oxygen to ignite
Not even a tiny spark
And begin to light up

what was there before

 Because it was

There

Before

I love you I said
Even as this stone might seem a stranger

I could still see him in there
And I could see him

searching my eyes

To try
To try and see himself

I love you I said

And he said

Well he did say

I love you too

But he sat there so silent
That he might as well have said

Nothing.

Written by Gemma Abbott for Magical Women

Photograph by Polly Alexandra

Making friends with Miss Havisham // Gemma Abbott

Making friends with Miss Havisham // Gemma Abbott

by | Aug 2, 2023

journal
Making friends with Miss Havisham // Gemma Abbott

Imposters and loss

Laid low by my former love

We promised ‘til death and

Very nearly etched it into our beings

But his well ran dry early

Perhaps being as

The beginning of this end has

Felt like a hundred excruciating deaths

He is no oath breaker after all

And this impostor of a man

Who wears my husband’s skin

Now holds another in those “other” arms

While the wife in me

Lays starved to death in the corner

Photograph by Christina Rivers

A hollow vessel I must now give up

Miss Havisham raises a dusty glass

And we sit there together

This corpse bride and I

In the blazing remains of what we once

Might have called home.

I lost him some time around Lisbon, if not before. He reckons later but I can see he is still deceiving himself in many ways. He tells me off for trying to see into his soul but I am not any more. I don’t like what it is that I find there, this impostor in the shape of my husband.

The impostor in his arms already.

I can only stare at him with wide sad eyes, like looking at a photograph on the front of a funeral programme. I am excruciatingly aware of what he has cast aside.

And he has killed twice this year. He has killed the man that was my husband inside of him, a sudden and selfish death. He has also killed the wife in me, without my consent and much to my anguish. I loved being a wife. I loved being his wife. The space on my finger where the ring should still sit feels numb, pining for that little golden symbol that once made it shine like a star.

Written by Gemma Abbott

Photograph by Polly Alexandra

We honour Daisy Gatson Bates, complex and unconventional #blacklivesmatter // Elinor Rowlands

We honour Daisy Gatson Bates, complex and unconventional #blacklivesmatter // Elinor Rowlands

by | Aug 2, 2023

journal
We honour Daisy Gatson Bates, complex and unconventional #blacklivesmatter // Elinor Rowlands
Magical Women honours survivor Daisy Gatson Bates. Bates was a complex, unconventional and largely forgotten Driving Force of the civil rights movement.

A Survivor from Birth

Bates was born Daisy Gatson in Huttig, Arkansas, in 1914. When she was an infant, her mother, Millie Riley, was killed by three white men. Terrified, her father, John Gatson, fled town and left her in the care of their friends Orlee and Susie Smith. Nee Gatson, Bates attended the local segregated schools in her youth.

An activist who broke racial and gender/sexual orientation barriers Bates would spearhead one of the most significant moments in the Civil Rights Movement. Bates played a central role leading the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School. Her actions and persistence shattered barriers forcing a ripple to grow into a metaphorical earthquake that would shake Little Rock and the rest of the USA. 

Bates is a Magical Woman because she confounds the expectations of femininity where society prefer their heroines to be modest or in shape, form and reflection that they can accept, agree with and understand as a “change-maker” because of the way they look and should behave.

Bates was challenging as a woman

Like many Neurodivergent females, she was criticised as being ‘pushy,’ ‘ambitious,’ ‘aggressive,’ “challenging” – qualities for which men in leadership roles are praised; traits that make men powerful.

Yet, by possessing these precise qualities, Bates was able to have a significant impact on her community and wider afield.

 

 

In 1968, Bates moved to Mitchellville, Arkansas, a majority black town that was also impoverished and lacked economic resources. When Bates arrived, she used her organisational skills to pull together residents and improve the community.

 

But Her Speech Was Written by a Man

She was the only woman permitted to speak, though not for long, and not in her own words. After being introduced by march organiser Bayard Rustin, who was a Gay Civil rights leader, Bates delivered the 142-word “Tribute to Women.” 

Whilst her statement was brief – women in this day were timed as well as censored it seems – as the speech she read out was written by a male staffer.

However, Bates’ writing shows she was far from unable to speak up for herself and others. A powerful orator and writer, she put her words to print in the newspaper she owned with her husband.

She created empowering spaces for herself where she could write uncensored and her words could be read. She was a journalist who persisted and it was those very traits that make men powerful and are so often used to silence, exclude and so often fire women, that drove her to create a (metaphorical) earthquake across the country to force change in the law.

How she became a Tour De Force

When the Supreme Court ruled segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954. When the national NAACP office started to focus on Arkansas’ schools, they chose Bates to plan the strategy and she became the driving force in enrolling black students into all white schools.

She organised the Little Rock Nine: choosing nine students in 1957 to integrate Central High School in Little Rock. She worked tirelessly to ensure they were protected from violent crowds. She also advised the group becoming their mentor and even joined the school’s parent organisation.

She picked them up in the mornings and drove them to school and picked them up from school at the end of each day.

She refused to accept the all white schools attempts to deny them and other blacks entry. Bates used her newspaper to publicise the schools who didn’t follow the federal mandate and highlighted their prejudices.

Violence Against Women

Bates and her family were often a target for intimidation. Rocks were often thrown at and into her home several times and she received bullet shells in the post. These threats forced the Bates family to shut down their newspaper.

Bates’ Legacy

After the success of the Little Rock Nine, Bates worked on improving the status of African Americans in the South of the USA. Her influential work with school integration brought her national recognition.

She published her memoirs, The Long Shadow of Little Rock in 1962. Eventually, the book would win an American Book Award. 

Bates died on 4th November in 1999. Her work was recognised by the state of Arkansas who proclaimed the 3rd Monday in February, Daisy Gatson Bates Day. In 1999, she was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom.

We hope that our sharing of Daisy Bates’ legacy, offers Magical Women readers and participants, contributors and allies hope, that you can grow here, you can find empowering and relaxed spaces to speak, to share and to grow, where you can attend to your art and writing practice without fear of being silenced, excluded, corrected or shut down.

Here, you are offered an environment where you can think for yourself as yourself.

Magical Women’s mission is to remove the risk found in mainstream systems, structures and neurotypical understanding around “equality and diversity” offering instead an empowering space because you are empowering it, and we are empowered by you.

We need more Daisy Bates’ and more black Magical Women.

Please go to ‘About Womoon’ on our website to read about our paid call outs for poetry and opinion pieces that centre around the themes “Rage” and “Persist”.

We need your voices. We need to grow. Please contact us. (info [at] magicalwomen.co.uk)

The Consequences of Chasing Acceptance // Emma Fox

The Consequences of Chasing Acceptance // Emma Fox

by | Aug 2, 2023

The Consequences of Chasing Acceptance // Emma Fox

A rich and honest account from Emma Fox (The Autisphere), who shares with us her story to diagnosis: how backing off from fighting to exist the “neurotypical” way is one of the most important things we can do as autistic women. It saves lives.

Grit, tenacity, perseverance. These are things I used to wear as a badge of honour. I prided myself on something I called my ‘bouncebackability’. Things always seemed harder for me than my peers. Yet an outsider looking in would see I was always achieving.

Do you know why I always achieved? Because in my mind there was no other option. I had to keep striving, and nothing less than perfection would be good enough.

Anxiety was with me all the time. And I used to tell myself this was a good thing. “It means you care about this” I would tell myself. “It would be worrying if you didn’t feel this way”. And so, this became my normal state of being.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but my primary motivators in life were anxiety and fear. I based my self-worth on other people’s opinions. Their opinions of my success, of my character. But what they saw wasn’t genuine.

Photograph by Serena Wong

You see, to be accepted in the world I learned to mask at an early age. To blend in and appear like other people. I instinctively knew I was different. And when it showed, others made me feel like this wasn’t a good thing. I didn’t know I was autistic. I had no one telling me these differences were OK. So, I overcompensated to prove my worth to others.

No one gives you any credit for this by the way. Do you know how completely draining it is to act in a never-ending play? And this is without any additional life stressors. You may try to explain to others, and they might dismiss you with “well we all feel like that sometimes”. And so, the message is reinforced – just keep going.

Then in my mid-twenties my physical health started to deteriorate. I’d always experienced various physical ailments on and off. But it became constant almost overnight. I had just started a Master’s degree. And as was my usual approach, I wasn’t letting anything get in the way. So, whilst going to endless medical appointments, I just struggled on. My work placement told me I wasn’t entitled to support for a “suspected” disability.

Then after 18 months came the first diagnosis – Fibromyalgia. And coming to terms with this took a huge toll on my mental health. There isn’t really any treatment as such – the advice given is to pace your activities. Well that wasn’t how I’d ever lived my life. And I wasn’t about to start.

I finished my Master’s degree and started work. A chance encounter with some training on autism in women changed my world and led me down the path of pursuing an assessment. The more I read, the more I really saw and understood myself for the first time. I was formally diagnosed as autistic at age 30.

By this point, I was hanging by a thread. The person diagnosing me said something which has always stuck with me. ‘I’m not questioning your Fibromyalgia diagnosis, but have you ever considered it might be the impact of living in a world not designed for autistic people?” I was sceptical at first. Surely, I can’t have become that unwell just from existing?

In the year following my diagnosis I told myself to keep going. I’d figure all this out but, in the meantime, I had to keep up appearances. I really tried. But it was taken out of my hands. My physical health deteriorated quickly. I was way beyond people’s perceptions of ‘exhausted’. And my sensory sensitivities became so heightened that I was even getting motion sickness from the sensation of driving my own car.

I started to become frightened after that. I was losing speech, losing memory, losing basic skills. One night I became unable to feed myself, unable to speak. My husband kept asking me to explain what was happening, but I couldn’t talk. I had retreated inside myself and just needed to be alone. My GP ordered an urgent brain scan. I carried on. After all, my Manager had told me that I was managing to hold it together in the day, so it wasn’t really impacting on work she said.

And then I collapsed.

I’ve not been back to work since that day. I’m unemployed now, and people are often asking me what I’ll be doing next. The truth is, it’s taken me the last year to get back to some form of myself. But I know I won’t be the same. I’ve lost confidence I’ll never regain. But perhaps that’s for the best? Where did it get me?

I now realise I had experienced autistic burnout. Something widely discussed amongst the autistic community, but rarely among specialists that aren’t autistic themselves. My experiences were typical. Raymaker et al (2020) state “Autistic burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic life stress and a mismatch of expectations and abilities without adequate supports.” What I hadn’t realised in my naivety is that eventually, I would break.

My mind and body shut down, and I lost count of the hours I spent staring at the wall. I needed the nothingness. Surely, after all this time, I had earned that. I fear the Welfare State would not have seen it that way, denying me any financial aid. My husband’s financial support made this work-break possible. I genuinely believe that without this I would have been forced back out into the world of work. I don’t like to dwell on the impact that could have had on my mental health.

Photograph by Priscilla Du Preez

Recovery is not as simple as it might seem. I’ve heard it said that if you experience burnout once, it can happen quicker and from less next time around. My old coping mechanisms just don’t work anymore. Instead, I’m learning to listen to my body and my mind, to slow down, and to be kinder to myself. I’m not great at it, but I’m getting better.

“I must learn to exist in a different way. ”

I must learn to exist in a different way. I can no longer use fear and anxiety as my drivers. Those qualities I’d always prided myself on became my downfall. I never even realised I was setting myself up to fail.

Autistic people have shared what helped them to recover from burnout, including social support, reduced expectations, and unmasking. These are helping me over time. But I’m still battling the expectations of others and myself. You see, society doesn’t understand fluctuating conditions. If you did something yesterday, there should be no excuse for not being able to do it today. I felt this acutely as my neighbour remarked “you’re not even trying to find another job, are you?”

One thing I am doing, is trying. I’m trying every day. And this is what I pride myself on now.

The fight to exist as we are is so important. But sometimes, you have to stop fighting. Just for a little while. It might be the most important thing you ever do.


References

Raymaker, D.M. et al. 2020. Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood. 2(2): p132-143. Available online here.

[Accessed 26/06/2020]

My name is sparky // sparky

My name is sparky // sparky

by | Aug 2, 2023

artists
My name is sparky // sparky

Sparky writes about their identity as an artist in Magical Women

My name is sparky. 

My name is also Iain, but that’s mainly for official documents and my family.  I have considered myself in the context of many labels throughout my life, some more helpful than others, though, whether through my cognitive reasoning or lack of a wider cultural and social awareness, hadn’t until the last few years began to take ownership of my gender fluidity and accept myself as a non-binary person.   

I have identified as “queer”, and have come to understand this as a broad umbrella term that encapsulates so many identities outside the realm of CIS heteronormativity.  I wanted to discuss my experiences and relationship with gender as I feel something of a kinship and solidarity with the fine folk of Magical Women.

For those not already in the know, “non-binary” gender identities relate to anyone who doesn’t rigidly adhere to exclusivities of masculinity or femininity.

Activist Riki Anne Wilchins is regularly associated with the term “genderqueer”, and claims to have created it, having utilised it in an essay published in the first issue of In Your Face (1995).  Very often, genderqueer and non-binary people prefer to be addressed with gender-neutral pronouns, i.e. “they”, “their”.  Some prefer the familiar binaries of “he” and “she”, while some simply wish to be addressed by their name.  Additionally, titles such as Mx have been used, instead of Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms etc.

I personally prefer “they/them” as a pronoun, though accept that “he/him” will continue to be used to refer to me, as I haven’t made it widely known of my identity and preferences.  Equally, I have found myself increasingly using Mx as a title for applications, deliveries and the like, though have found that many businesses have yet to embrace this form of title, which is all very well except when they insist on one selected from their existing options – which is rather too regularly.  But it’s OK – call me sparky.  Or Iain.  Preferably sparky.

As with anyone in living existence, whatever their background, circumstances, obstacles, strengths and foibles, my experiences are purely unique to myself, but I feel there are a lot of relatable experiences that are rarely voiced, and equally mine may be far more common than I care to mention.  The examples of masculinity and male-ness in my family didn’t exactly fill me with awe and inspiration, given that there was a lot of anger and tension growing up, traits I have consciously strived to reject.  Growing up, feeling I didn’t naturally gravitate to archetypal “male” pursuits, I found it hard to put my finger on why this was, or whether it was even an issue.  At school I was a sensitive and reflective child, not to mention easy to upset – the fact I cried and expressed emotion other than physical violence meant I clearly did not belong with the alpha-dogs (or “ladz ladz ladz” (aka Project Jacamo).  

There were exceptions – I was, and still am, obsessed with football, though the gateway to this was due to my fascination with numbers, facts and figures. But my early icons were Sunni, the yellow Gummi Bear, and Funshine, the yellow Care Bear.  Shiny yellow bears were my jam! My sister, two years older than I, did ballet for  a short while at a community centre in town, which I was envious enough of, to want to even briefly become a ballerina myself, until I realised that there were also boy-ballet-dancers, which I didn’t want to be – I wanted a tutu, and tights, and quite possibly a magic wand.  This interest didn’t stretch as far as playing with dolls – Cindy and Barbie had terrifying faces, I viewed unnatural hair with suspicion, and the small accessories such as shoes were terrifying to unexpectedly come across.  There’s a wee insight into my sensory triggers.  

Growing up around mostly male friends, it was a refreshing change to hang out with female mates – it helped that one such friend played football and was generally into most sports, though I didn’t really have anyone encouraging experimentation either way, other than my sister, who had goth friends and regularly frequented the “alternative” pubs and music venues in town, though would simultaneously encourage and put me off entering that circle – I was a whiny indie kid, who hadn’t found my bearings on the spectrum. 

I think that leaving my relative bubble and heading to uni in mid Wales made me all the more keen to find people “like myself”, whatever this might present.   The problem was that I didn’t believe that there were any – I was quick to (internally) point out people’s foibles, why we couldn’t possibly be compatible as friends.  I think that meeting more LGBTQ people made me, in turn, question whether it was sexual orientation that made me feel different.  As it is, society was still focused heavily on who people were fucking rather than any intrinsic aspects of their personality, and I wondered whether my university’s LGBT (as it was termed then, Q-awareness being something of an afterthought) society were necessarily my “tribe”. 

The fact I was questioning with I identified as anything other than heterosexual was not backed up with romantic pursuits (or much in the way of same-sex snogging), which, perish the thought, made me fear I would be exposed as some sort of straight-boy sell-out.   But therein lay both my naivety, my clear obstacles in self-confidence, and my papering over the cracks in simply understanding the essence of myself.   Indeed, as I have grown, a clearer image of what I would like from a relationship dynamic would necessitate a far less rigid concept of gender identity.   Being more personally aware and willing to share my queerness over the past few years has opened up the topic of where that leaves on me the sex and relationships spectrum.  I would love it if the world didn’t purely think in terms of who we might fuck, and how closely this would measure on the heteronormativity spirit level.  Indeed it does frustrate me that such basic binary thinking is still very much of the essence, particularly the way that toxic masculinity lumps “femininity”, “gayness” and anything else which appears to fall outside their narrow bounds of meat-eating, motor-loving, casually-racist and lecherous behaviours.