Kelly Madera (she/her) is an emerging creative with a decade of experience copywriting for brands like Levi Strauss & Co. and Postmates by Uber. Her work, which has appeared in Ms. Magazine, seeks to dismantle curated exteriors to reveal the internal landscapes beneath. She holds an MA in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design and a BA in Communications from Loyola Marymount University. Kelly is currently focused on reclaiming her narrative through radical self-accountability and the study of identity erasure.

Glimmers and Ghosts

I always imagined having a deep, past-life-like connection with my Dad. A gentle understanding that could traverse any agony.

I felt my longing for this whenever I made what I deemed a particularly witty comment about a magazine covered with the face of a billionaire who claimed he could save the world. I’d be standing across the island in a terracotta-filled kitchen, searching his eyes for a glimmer of understanding, a flash of connection. I expected power. I wanted a hurricane. Instead, a light drizzle. The kind you don’t even notice until after it’s over. Like when someone says they’ve heard of your hometown, but can only describe it in the adjectives “nice,” “cute,” “beautiful,” and you realize they’ve recognized the name in passing but they’ve never actually been there. I was feeding on their liquid sugar—sticky, processed, and boiling hot.

I misunderstood brief interludes of superficial recognition as deep, desirable, worthwhile intimate moments and used them as evidence that we were, in fact, meant to be.

At twenty-nine I walked into my dentist’s ardent space lounge of an office with zero cavities, and left with six.

Sometimes people come in delightfully colorful packaging—smooth and seamless and designed to be held. In my naiveté, I believed I could convince men with shiny rainbow outsides and decomposing insides to love me. If only I was witty enough. If only I was pretty enough. If only I could keep that depressive, self doubting side hidden. My own flavor of sticky saccharine was an over exuberance of toxic positivity and apocryphal joy. In that form, that I’ve now shed like a snake’s skin, it was my unshakeable belief that I could manipulate a man into loving me.

I feigned helplessness when I was capable. I made myself smaller. I swallowed Adderall that caught on the dry walls of my throat. I waged a war on the inside and smiled on the outside. I stripped myself of needs until I faded away. I gave up a 500-square-foot apartment on 81st Street. I gave up styling models in Brooklyn. I gave up the city I’d dreamed of since I was seventeen. I became a ghost in my own life.