Sandhya Colucci ’25
Jaquira Diaz: Self-Erasure Through Relationships, Substances, and Self-Harm
Family has often been seen as the source of one’s might. But for Jaquira Diaz, the struggles that her parents faced made Diaz feel unloved, and ultimately, in her memoir Ordinary Girls, emphasize the difficulty of escaping the cyclical nature of generational trauma. In what ways do kids from broken or unstable homes soothe the subsequent thoughts of being unlovable and unwanted? With her mother suffering from schizophrenia, and her father largely absent, Jaqui feels abandoned to the point where she cannot process what true love and stability feels like. Through her memoir, Diaz illustrates that children of broken homes often cope with trauma through self-erasure, aiming to effectively disappear through relationships, substances, and self harm as a way to cope with the lack of love and care.
Growing up, Diaz saw how love destroyed her parents, and also how she could not get any from her own family. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in her own life, and as she matures she sabotages her romantic relationships, affirming the belief that she is incapable of being fully loved or wanted. One example is when she cheats on her husband, Cheito, who she’d thought was her true love. “I am self-destructing… I have another reckless affair. I destroy my marriage, again, and destroy Cheito, a man who adores me” (286). At this point in the book, Diaz’s parents have recurrent health issues related to illness and drug abuse. Mami and Papi’s declining health prompt a major depressive episode for Jaqui, leading her to try and find escape within other relationships to cope, even though it hurts herself and someone dear to her yet again. Having been physically abused by her Jeanette and emotionally neglected by her father, who she idolized as a child, Diaz never learned how to properly cope with the traumatic events of the past, so she cannot appropriately handle her frustrations in her adulthood.
In middle school, Chris was an older man who took an interest in Jaqui. She did not feel the same way, although she was friends with him. He took care of her and she loved the way he loved her (109). This leads to her reluctantly agreeing to be his girlfriend, a decision she quickly regrets. Diaz writes, “‘You know I really care about you, right?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘I mean like for real. I really care about you. I love you and want you to be my girl.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Ok.’… I could not think of a single thing I liked about him. Not one” (138). Jaqui clearly does not have any real interest in Chris, but her idea of love is warped from seeing the lack of intimacy or stability within her parental figures, as well as the lack of comfort she received from them, so she turned to Chris thinking he was the answer to what love was. It was only after she thought of her friends Devin and Boogie that she realized that Chris was not who she loved, and in time it became clear that he really didn’t care enough about her to stop hurting her when they did get together. He was insensitive to the fact that she was a virgin when they first became intimate, and ignored her pleas for him to stop. Later, Jaqui enters the navy and meets Eliza, who she is very attracted to. Jaqui mentions how she was captivated by her (220) and when she finally gets to be intimate with her, Diaz writes “… for the first time in my life I finally felt like myself, like the woman I was supposed to be” (230). However, while feeling like that, Diaz also writes, “I knew I could’ve loved her, the truth is I never intended to love her in the real world. That’s who I was. A girl who ran” (230). Jacqui loved being with Eliza; it was something she’d dreamt of. But despite the joy, she couldn’t allow herself to have that. A true love like that was too permanent and opposite the instability she was used to her whole life.Having had such an antagonistic relationship with most of the women in her family, such as her racist grandmother Mercy and her mother Jeanette, Jaqui could not understand how to receive love from another woman. Jaqui could not properly handle love or understand it growing up, which caused her to destroy her relationship with Cheito, made her feel pressure to love Chris, and made her run away from Eliza. It wasn’t just relationships that she was hurting, however. She also harmed herself throughout her youth with attempts at suicide, harm, and with drugs and alcohol as well.
Despite Jaqui watching drugs destroy her mother as a child, she herself abused multiple substances, hoping that it would mitigate the constant pain she was feeling, even briefly. Growing up, Jaqui relied heavily on drugs, at one point writing “All I’d done over the past year was drink and smoke and snort coke. I’d done more drugs than homework, barely even made it to classes, spent every night at Society Hill, and then the beach. It was all the same” (211). The substances started to affect her performance at school and became routine for her. Her marriage struggled when Cheito, who had joined the navy first, was stationed in Okinawa, and she couldn’t imagine what the rest of her life could look like. She handled the stress of the future by doing drugs and drinking. This is not the first time readers have seen Diaz avoid her true desires with the help of substances. When talking about her experience with her best friend Shorty drinking on the beach and the men who had taken advantage of them at that time, Diaz admits that the moment was terrifying, and she truly believed that she could lose herself and her friend (190). But still, “It was the same the next summer, and the summer after that: we went right back to drinking, smoking, fighting, dancing dancing dancing, running away.” More than anything, Diaz wanted to feel loved and at home. She couldn’t get that from her family, so she needed to make her own happiness and memories some other way, even if it meant destroying herself and repeating the mistakes her mother made. The trauma that Jaqui experienced made her believe that she was not someone worth missing, and ultimately made her think that drugs and death were the ways to stop feeling so unloved and hurt. Because of the impermanence of drugs and drinking, she constantly returned to them, hoping they would continuously give her feelings of joy in her life. Finally, with her friend Kilo, Diaz explains that when the two of them were together, they would drink and smoke, but Kilo eventually began to worry about her, and how she was handling the substances: “…After the two of us, trying to be those same two kids we’d been, got drunk on the beach on a Saturday night, snorted an eight ball in just a couple hours, after he watched me take one bump of scutter after another and told me to Slow dow, ma… and I told him that that was exactly how I wanted to go and that it would be the best way to die and that nobody would miss me anyway…” (151-152). Her parents couldn’t support her and tell her otherwise, despite being the people she needed to hear that from the most growing up; ultimately she turned to drugs and alcohol to make her feel something else. The drugs seemingly mitigated the pain she felt when she was sober; that was what she loved about them. But sometimes, the substances were not enough to help wash away the agony. Jaqui recalls in her memoir several times when she has also tried to harm herself as a response to her conflicts.
At the lowest points in her life, Diaz tried to kill herself, believing that the final way to end the cyclical nature of pain in her life. Once when talking to her friend Boogie, the two girls agreed on a suicide pact. When talking about how they would die, she writes, “Some girls took sleeping pills and then called 911, or slit their wrists the wrong way and waited to be found in the bathtub. But we didn’t want to be like those ordinary girls. We wanted to be throttled, mangled, thrown. We wanted the violence. We wanted something we could never come back from” (143). This comparison between herself and the “ordinary girls” illustrates the severity of her depression, as she feels disgusted by how other girls hope to die and be found. She wanted to make sure there was no possible way she or Boogie could be saved from it, because Diaz had already accepted at that point this idea that continuing to live would be unbearable for her because of how alone her family made her feel. At one point after Mami accuses Jaqui of stealing her high heels and beats her, Jaqui takes all her mother’s pills and drinks Dawn dish soap. She also mentions that she had heard stories about kids who drank things like Drano, and were poisoned from it, writing, “…but all we had was Dawn. If we’d had any Drano or bleach, I would’ve downed that, too. I was determined to die” (148). At a young age, Jaqui had reached her breaking point, unable to bear that it was her own mother inflicting the emotional and physical harm. Not only that, but she’d learned from her mother’s own attempts how to do it. This was a key moment, when it occurred to her that the woman who was supposed to love her unconditionally couldn’t even do that for her, and it crushed her. Diaz didn’t feel she could move forward. Finally, we see that even though this was in her childhood, she still carries this depression with her through her adult life with Cheito. She details quitting her job, losing sleep, and ruining her marriage, and describes her depression as “crippling” and “major,” to the point where she finds herself on her floor in the kitchen with a knife, hoping to slit her wrists (286). Diaz does not even remember how she got to the point of hoping to kill herself, she just remembers being on the floor; this highlights how reflexive this desire to kill herself is, something that stemmed from the trauma she faced as a child. The only way she knew how to completely fix the pain was by harming herself, suicide almost a knee-jerk reaction because she did not have any other ways to handle her pain. Jaqui thought by erasing herself by suicide she would end her problems because of what she had seen from Jeanette and Papi.
Diaz’s parents and the way they raised her led Jaqui to later make decisions with the hopes of disappearing from the world. But as the book concludes, we begin to see a change in her life for the better. Jaqui makes one of the most important decisions in her life, deciding her concentration in college. This is significant because readers have seen how Jaqui loved to read and write as a kid, and because she felt like that books and literature were a connection with her father (8). By Diaz adding her burgeoning writing life to the memoir, she demonstrates a completely different cycle, one that allows Diaz to find herself and exist differently, after all this time. When she was accepted to the University of Central Florida, Diaz talks about how she chose Creative Writing as her major, and the excitement she felt as she finally knew what it was she wanted to do and how to achieve that dream: “As I walked to my car that afternoon, for the first time in my ilife, I actually felt like a woman, not a girl” (251). It was a moment of victory, when she took new responsibility for making something of different of her life. This shows growth, through her writing career, something she showed little interest in understanding or developing throughout her youth.
Jaquira Diaz’s memoir explores the neglect children feel from parents who cannot love their kids because of their own traumatic circumstances, and more importantly, how their absence can ultimately impact child development, a sense of self-worth, and their future. For Diaz, this led to heartache and unpleasant experiences that stuck with her through her life and stunted her growth in many ways. Though she finds her redemption, Diaz recalls her relationships with lovers, drugs and alcohol, and self harm to highlight the negative ways kids try to cope with such family issues, while also reminding us, through her memoir, that it is never too late to rewrite your ending.
Works Cited
- Diaz, Jaquira, Ordinary Girls: A Memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2018.