“Do not give what is holy to the dogs…” | Ava Miner

The first time I watched P.S. I Love You my cousin had just been diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer. I’d heard all about the movie before then of course. I remembered walking in on my Mom watching the bar karaoke scene when I was around 7 or 8. The tightness of her face when she would cry, the way her eyes got so blue. I never forget that look on my Mom. She had helped babysit my cousin, Mykey Ann since she was in diapers. Sometime after hearing about her diagnosis, I felt a sudden urge to watch it. Within the first five minutes, I noticed that my Mom was standing behind the couch watching it with me. After the first quarter of the film, the karaoke scene cast itself across the screen. Hillary Swank stands in a striking silver dress, her chin quivers and her eyes are locked on the designated spot her late husband Gerry used to sit in. Singing so softly, so pointedly towards the ghost of him “I know you want to hear me catch my breath, I love you 'til the end.” My face contorted into a similar shape my Mom’s had when I’d seen her watching it years before. I cried from a place deeper than my chest, maybe even a place deeper than my heart. I cried for my Aunt Jean, Grandma Ophelia, Uncle Mike, and my beautiful cousin Mykey Ann. There was an honesty to that scene, to that entire film that I don’t think is given to audiences as much in modern cancer love story adaptations. The authenticity of it helped me capture the process of grief in a way that was lucrative and essential to my comprehension of love surpassing death. I never really saw Gerry across that karaoke bar. I always saw Mykey. I still do.

That experience has played a role in the way I view relationships, death, and it helped me process the loss of a close family member when I was very young. I tried to share the film with one of my friends a few years after my initial experience. I was stunned and devastated when I looked at her at the end of the karaoke scene for some kind of satisfactory validation and all she said to me was, “I don’t know Ava, it’s really not that sad.” It was like having my bleeding heart resting in her palms, and resisting the urge to tell her how to handle it. You do what you can to connect, to be courageous in the pursuit of letting someone see you. It didn’t work. I couldn’t make her empathize with me. What a waste it was to sit in a dark room haunted by the difference between someone who knows and someone who can never know. My silence stained the memory in my own blame because I couldn’t explain it to her. I didn’t want to.

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This was not a new feeling. Countless vulnerable mishaps have created a vortex in which I have since found myself fleeing to once I have been misunderstood, or undervalued. This is what people like to call gatekeeping.

In the bible, God calls the genitles Swine. “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine," In other words, don’t waste the precious gospel on people who essentially have no use for it. I do not bring this up to cast my belief on you, I wouldn’t do that even if I was religious. This is about something more important. I am writing to you to discuss the inclusion of my own swine. The dogs, pigs, and Gentilles of my world. By no means am I disclosing my Savior complex; I am not here to save you. I am not trying to convince you of my credibility. Still one thing remains true, to dismiss what we love as common would be to destroy the purpose in its creation.

Pain is central to my gatekeeping tendencies. I know that there is not much of a choice when it comes to the shitty things life throws us. There has never been a stick pull, or a wishbone, and certainly no guarantees. I’ve been my father’s long lost daughter. My mother’s codependent counterpart. My lovers’ forgotten dream. I’ve been more, and I’ve certainly been less. I don’t make this point to appear like a decrepit abandoned animal lying in the road, and I don’t make it so that I can finally find peace with a traumatic childhood. This is not about picking my brain, but trying to make sense of what happened to it. What has been beyond my control cost me pieces of myself that I don’t feel comfortable living without. Comfort is a sensation I value, but it is not something that stirs me to sleep at night. The lack of peace and the acute awareness of being alone activates a central desire to withhold information. Dad stops texting, Mom won’t stop calling, and the night is reminiscent of new forms of neglect. Neglect in a form unrelated to childhood. I am being forgotten. What has defined me throughout my early adult life has also made me aware of my conditions as a pawn. I can be the doting motherly figure, filling the void of conversation with genuine concern and self-inflicted wounds. Or the opinionated yet voiceless stranger known through pictures and whatever shreds of me remain stuck in my father’s teeth, the prolonged scratching feeling in the back of his throat when he knows I am going to say something that makes him uncomfortable.

Gatekeeping can mean something different for everyone. It is handled by our discernment. To define it from the media, gatekeeping is intentional withholding to establish who has access to certain opinions or identity in a community. I fear it is rarely that simple. It is not easy to distinguish where this impulse comes from. There are many immediate defenses that block connection designed to protect me, to protect all of us. I find myself often tangled between opposing desires. I want to share the art that moves me, and meet people who value these sacred artifacts. Yet, I cannot provide a method to free myself from the reality that it will never be exactly what I want it to be. The thought that I might have the same issues, instincts, passions, as another person is unexceptional. It causes me to reject the human connection I could obtain through art. It seems borderline sociopathic, maybe even conceited. Consciously, I try to avoid my instant response to conceal what I love. But the impulse is still there. I am still feeding whatever delusion exists between what matters and what does not.

What is it about protecting this music and these films so sacred? Most people don’t give a fuck what I do or don’t want them to pass their time with, but that is the issue for me. Time is everything. I do not want passivity connected to the work created by artists who exercised their passion and conviction with every second they were offered. If there is no reaction and no urgency, don’t touch work that deserves to be utterly consumed. I don’t want people to touch what does not belong to them. I am not authorized to change anyone's mind or prohibit them from watching FKA Twigs new Eusexua music video, but I’d never recommend it out of a kindness to someone. Not because I have anything against them personally, but because there is a part of me linked to that music that I cannot transfer to them. Her contemporary style as a dancer, her selection of choreographers, and her commentary on feminine sexuality through movement are all elements of her work that cannot be explained to someone who doesn’t know what that feels like. I grew up dancing. For years of my life I was beneath stage lights and layers of hairspray due to my mother’s insistent fear that something would fall out of place. My hair was always perfect, thanks Mom. The rest of my performing lifespan was messy, but I loved it. I loved when my improv instructor would turn the lights off and we all got a turn in the middle of the circle on the studio floor. The first time the woman that had taught me technique since childhood told me she was brought to tears because my facial expressions matched my motion on the floor. Even after dealing with a wicked drill coach throughout highschool, I remember how it felt to walk off that floor with a swelling heart, hand-in-hand with the women I grew up with. Twigs gave me that feeling again. Ultimately, you could say it is not my business what kind of people are consuming this visualization. But it is. It is personal because it has resonated with me before I could articulate the effect it had. Who we are decides what we do, what we value, and what we understand. This is simple minded, yes. It is not the way to network as an artist or a writer. However, it is senseless that I should be required to share that sort of involvement with someone who couldn’t care less.

People often wonder where the love goes once you’ve lost someone. Where do you put it? The music I’ve shared, the stories about my peccadillos as a baby, and all of the memories associated with the people in my life who find value in my presence. This information is strikingly personal. My identity in my past relationships has been wrapped into those tiny moments of me slipping out of bed to fill up a Dragon Ball-stickered water bottle. It is there in the words written on Valentines Day cards. It lives in the clothing I bought these strangers, the endless bean and cheese burritos spilled on my car seat. It was there when I asked love not to walk away. It is still there. The love you’ve known, the one that has escaped you at some point, this is your story too. There is evidence of you somewhere being too much of who you are. There is no definitive way to decide who gets custody of what. Once it is out there, it is impossible to get it back. I opened the door to receive such brutal condemnation. Because I loved and lost, a piece of me is logged in someone's mind somewhere and will be stored there through the passage of time. There is nothing I can do about that. I cannot save those pieces, I have no way of gathering that information and taking it back. It is not mine to take anymore.

I got on dating apps recently to try and gauge what hope still exists for a partnership. To see if there was a reason to be open-minded. Maybe I’d be less closed off if I had a reason not to be. I was perplexed by the caption choices and the 6 slide photos you pick for your profile. How do you sell your best qualities in 3 seconds or less? The idea that a split decision would be made about who I am and what I could provide in a relationship because the edits of my photos or the level of wit in the answers to my select choices of “get to know you questions”. What the fuck is an unemployed 19 year old gonna learn about me through an instagram post or a link to my Spotify? In its own way dating has become a game of kill or be killed. Post the cleavage shot first, get likes and message requests. Make a comment box about how you’re weirdly attracted to the creature in The Shape of Water, not so many reactions. I found myself beginning to do a similar thing. I don’t think I read a single caption after swiping through the first five people. So how was I to sit there and demand that a man pay attention to more than just my image? There is nothing fascinating about being unwanted. I know that better than anyone. If there is mystery, there is a possibility of mystery. Men love mystery, women do too. It is sexy to lose count of the people you’ve slept with. It turns men on when you forget to call, because maybe they like being treated a little shitty. Women are enthralled by a man's ability to avoid her for months, and then suddenly turn up like Prince Charming. Some fucking fairytale. It is not fair for me to rule these men out based on their blurred snapchat selfies and their 2 comments about “being an ass man” when I could be repelling them with my contorted smile and dishonest engagement. I do it anyway, and so do you. We are gatekeeping ourselves every moment of everyday, I am just simply bringing it to your attention.

In small town functions, people stand in crowded rooms breathing the same air and touching each other. They throw up in strangers' bathrooms, hook up with the most attractive person they can find at a house they’ve never been to, and they don’t mind that they are leaving traces of themselves everywhere. Their saliva on the rarely washed pillowcase is no more an embarrassment than it is an overlooked detail. Waking up in sheets that are unrecognizable and feeling that hunger that only comes when you’ve made yourself too comfortable in a bed that does not belong to you. It is no longer obscene. It is not shocking, it isn’t even compelling. In scattering your existence around every neighborhood, your affect starts to wear off. There is no story there. You’ve become unremarkable. Is that what we are becoming? Stories not worth telling? The first party I went to I had asked my partner at the time not to smoke pot in front of me. I had never been around substances before, and my Dad abandoned me for the stuff. But I was in love, I didn’t want to miss being in love. So I let him. I carried him to his smoke shed on the side of the house and sat there while he violated one of the only boundaries I ever made with him. I sat in a marijuana filled shed with men I’d never seen before, and I carried the future gas station attendant back to his bed. He’d later tell me drugs were not a vice he’d give up, and if we didn’t have sex soon he’d be leaving me for good. I thought he’d be the love of my life. You might have thought otherwise, or maybe you were just as confused as I was. 

Don’t cry for me, Argentina. This was no real tragedy. When I spoke with my therapist over the summer she had urged me to constrict my presence on socials. She thought that my attention belonged elsewhere, somewhere that it might mean something. The day I archived all my posts, and story uploads was the first time in months I felt free. No one knew how I was doing my makeup for concerts, or what song was stuck in my head, and no one had access to my vulnerability. My digital erasure disguised me as a mystery. I wanted to grieve in peace the person I had become in association with lovers and comrades, and I never again wanted a person to be able to search my name and know everything about me. No ex-boyfriend could get updates on my latest posts, no childhood friend could see the way my face has shaped itself to soft and round over the last decade, and no relatives on my fathers side could tell him I was posting liberal quotes and taking a political stance that he would be ashamed about. I will be honest, that is the only thing I really miss about the media. I miss feeling a part of the conversations. Now making a difference takes on a more physical form. I have to actually get off my ass and participate in the real world. Maybe that is the way it should have been from the beginning. Politics and abolition aside, the point is this. Media has decided for you and I that without it we are disingenuous. Without having a platform you can post influential mood boards on, you do not exist. Let us not, then. Let us be invisible if meaning nothing means being free.

I tell you now, though I don’t really want to, about a TV series that morphed me in many ways as an artist. Fleabag, written and directed by Phoebe Waller Bridge, to date is one of the most spectacular exploits of the female mind. From the explicit jokes at the expense of the protagonist, to the intense sadness in monologues riddled throughout the show, it is utterly transfixing. Fleabag narrates to her audience through both seasons. You are literally thrown into the plot because she wants you to be there. I felt like she wanted me to be there. She allows the vulnerability to sit next to you on your couch or lay close to you in your bed. She lets you feel ugly, unwanted, and undesired with her. However, she also wraps you into love. Whether that is through a hot priest, or a sister with a haircut that makes her look like a pencil, it is there for you just as much as it is there for her. Upon finding it, I was aware that it was known on several social media platforms for the famous “It’ll pass” bus stop scene. Once I actually spent time watching it I realized that that isn’t even the most moving line for me. And I also realized they cut out the part where the priest tells her that he loves her too. What my favorite scene is does not matter, and I might keep it to myself in hopes that you don’t find it and unravel the messiness of your own heart. I am going to be selfish for this one. The ending is about so much more than a failed love story.

Here I am, hoping to be the same thing. To mean something much more important than a TV series, film, or music video. More than an abandoned daughter and a difficult to please significant other. I wish I could have written something to you that might inspire you to share yourself with the world and smear your beauty onto every canvas you can find, but I can do no such thing. Not while I am hiding in fear of becoming a project or a woman that left saying too much. My pearls are wrapped in silk pillowcases and delicately shelved somewhere most people cannot find them. Somewhere the swine and the dogs are not permitted entrance. A home where we are safe and protected from a world that cannot see what it meant to hurt a young girl that just wanted to be loved.

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Ava Miner was born in Cedar City, Utah and is currently attending school at the local college. She has achieved her Associates degree in the Arts, and is working her way to her Bachelor’s in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing.

She is an expert on all things 90’s. From Julia Roberts lip shades, to Drew Barrymore's “Ever After” movie premier gown, she collects makeup and vintage clothing to replicate in her day-to-day style. She writes lyrical essays regarding relationships and sexuality. Find her at facadeofimplicity on Instagram.