In Bed With... Kenzie and Rosa

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In Bed With: Kenzie and Rosa

By Anna Morrissey

 

This series, ‘In Bed With,’ is based on the concept of a friend coming and getting into bed with you, as an act of solidarity, when you’re not feeling up to facing the outside world. Judgement free, safe space full of love and acceptance. 

“The idea that there are 16,000 other girls that feel the same way we do is a fucking relief, it’s a relief that I don’t live in this insanity alone.”

#Telluswhereithurts – The Instagram account @sadsickgirlz is amplifying a cacophony of sick, sad voices that are hard to ignore, subverting stereotypes by showcasing the stories of strong, powerful, defiant, sick sad girls around the world. Founders Rosa and Kenzie talk to Tummy Ache about the importance of community, the superpowers of the sad and the sick, and finding a balance between saying “fuck you, I’m gonna do it anyway” and “forcing yourself to chill out.”

Female community networks have historically acted as the backbone of defiant feminist movements. Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook described how, “networks of love and support are crucial to our ability as women to work in a hostile world where we are not in fact expected to survive.” Co-founder of @sicksadgirlz, Rosa Mercuriadis, who suffers from Lupus and describes herself as a “physically, mentally and spiritually ill person,” realised that one of the greatest “luxuries” of her life  is  “having a group of womxn…who get my shit in a real way.” In 2019 Rosa looked at the insipid “compare and despair” culture of Instagram and realised she needed to make a space on the “internet about feeling, rather than façade.”

There was a clear chasm between the comparative culture emboldened by Instagram algorithms and the “crucial” networks of love and support that women create in real life. “I sort of cornered Ken,” she says, referring to her co-founder of the platform, Kenzie, “and was like ‘Hello, we should tell the internet how to be friends with each other instead of how to be mean to each other.’” Rosa acknowledges that Instagram “doesn’t necessarily track as a safe space,” but exists more as an online distillation of patriarchal structures, encouraging jealousy and self-hatred by endorsing a rhetoric of “look how great I am.” Aligning with Wiesen’s emphasis on the critical nature of female networks for feminist advancement, Rosa argues that the hostile environment of Instagram façade meant there was a greater need for “safe spaces,” such as the one she and Kenzie created in 2019. Kenzie and Rosa are defiantly subverting the intended use of the platform towards a fostering of female voices and feelings, “a big fuck you to the systematic oppression of womxn.”

 
 
 
 

The honesty of each story that @sicksadgirlz posts, profiling each girl as the star of her own narrative and celebrating the bravery of sharing, is what makes the page a safe and nurturing environment. No woman is made to feel too sad or too sick, the cumulative effect of each story building on a foundation of strength and pride. While both Rosa and Kenzie appear to be the epitome of raw, unapologetic Sick, Sad Girlz, this didn’t come naturally to both of them. Rosa intones that she has always been “unapologetically me.” She laughingly explains, “I was so fucking annoyed about explaining my shit over and over again… for me I live my life in a real form of radical transparency.” She believes that as a sick person, “you spend so much time being so uncomfortable,” that by being completely transparent about the way she lives to accommodate for her mental and physical sickness, she can immediately make the world around her a little more comfortable, “why not tell everybody?!”

“I was so fucking annoyed about explaining my shit over and over again… for me I live my life in a real form of radical transparency.”

Kenzie confides that it took her a little bit longer to become comfortable with this idea of transparency. “I’m a singer songwriter,” she explains, “so it’s like, cool I have my outlet…And I think it took me a while to actually be able to talk about my feelings in a way which was like, I don’t need to cloud this in metaphors.” Kenzie explains that talking to Rosa, and other sick sad girls in her personal life, allowed her to accept and see her sickness as something that didn’t need to be “subtle.” “Rosa’s always been someone I can have conversations with about how I feel.” The building of the @sicksadgirlz platform, and the response it garnered, allowed her to realise how much of a positive impact it can have to openly “talk about what’s going on.” Kenzie had the realisation that she wasn’t being as “obnoxiously me” as she thought. The influx of thousands of sick sad girls being honest about their diagnoses, struggles and triumphs allowed her, and many other girls, to see that they “don’t need to be quiet about it.” “I can be as loud as I want to,” Kenzie says, “and still be accepted and still feel worthy and loved.”

 
 
 
 

“I can be as loud as I want to, and still be accepted and still feel worthy and loved.” - Kenzie

 
 

The @sicksadgirlz community reached 6,000 members within just four months, and now has a following of 18,300 people. The hunger for this type of space, in which womxn are able to share their stories and virtually support each other, was immediately evident. Beginning with a high-profile set of sick sad girlz, namely actress and writer Lena Dunham, the page went on to envelope a growing body of womxn around the world. Suddenly being sick and sad wasn’t shameful or taboo, but to be a Sick Sad Girl was to be in with the cool girls, part of a “club”, a community of womxn who are open, honest, and strong. “It’s not surprising,” Rosa states, “I’ve never met a woman whose never been sick, whose never been sad, or made to feel like a little girl.”

Rosa and Kenzie run community meetings every week. “Before anyone shares, they say their name and they identify as a SSG, because for us a big part of it is identifying that we’re all coming at it from different directions but we’re all the same girl together.” Kenzie follows up on this, explaining that while the page is named @sicksadgirlz the community isn’t restricted to women, “If you can understand the identifiers of our community and you respect them and identify with them, then cool, ‘I’m a sick sad girl and I use he/him pronouns,’ yeah, sick.” “We’ve always focussed on womxn because that’s our experience.” Says Rosa, “but it’s not to be exclusionary,” Kenzie explains, “if anything it’s supposed to be a community.”

 
 
 
 

 

“I don’t think I’ve ever known somebody, even the men in my life, who don’t identify with part of the experience.” -Rosa

 

This past year of isolation has seen the @sicksadgirlz platform expand, a lot of sick sad girlz losing their IRL networks of support and joining the virtual club of supportive girlz. However, this isolated existence and threat of sickness is one that is very familiar to this community; “whether it’s being bed bound because of illness, or bed or homebound because my brain can’t handle it, isolation has always been part of my existence,” explains Rosa. “I do think that it’s one of our superpowers,” she goes on to theorise, “that ability to live with myself from a pretty young age on a mental and physical health side, to be in conversation with myself about what it looks like and what it feels like, it’s a fucking luxury.” The rarity of the ability to be “self-sufficient,” that many of the sick, sad community possess, has become increasingly clear as the rest of the world has struggled to spend time with themselves during the pandemic in a way only isolated communities, such as people who are either physically or mentally unwell, have previously experienced. As a sick person, Kenzie explains, “I have the ability to sit with myself and live within myself, and I’ve done so much work with just being ok with the way things are and letting things be, despite not having control of the situation,” while the majority of the population are only now having to “face their own shit and their own demons.” The virtual community Rosa and Kenzie have created allows room for the stories of those who are sick and sad, but also celebrates the superpowers that being unwell can bestow, such as the “ability to be self-sufficient.”

 

“I know how to live with me.” – Rosa

 

The space Rosa and Kenzie have created is a defiant arena for the personal narratives of womxn to slowly infiltrate the  harmful zone of social media. It is a platform of womxn sharing, and people listening, gaining strength from each other’s stories. The idea that the personal is political, that the narratives of individual female experience can change the structures of patriarchy is not a new concept, coined during the second wave of feminism, yet the proliferation of modern narratives on social media is a modern articulation of the consciousness raising needed to identify and change the way society sees sick and sad people, and these sick, sad people see themselves. 

 The defiance that Kenzie and Rosa emit is one full of resilience, strength, acceptance and love. They both give off a warmth with a ‘take no shit’ undertone. They are leading a movement of girlz who are being open and honest about sickness and pain – amplifying feelings, real experiences and emotions that don’t mirror the commonly anticipated perfection of social media, yet are extremely beautiful.

“I think truly, existence is defiant in a lot of ways,” Rosa states, “every day is tough, every day is an act of rebellion.”

@Sadsickgirlz encompasses this idea that you are a beacon of defiance, and by being true to yourself and honest about your experiences, you are rebelling against a world that attempts to fit us into boxes. The culture we live in dictates such a “prescriptive nature of existence that we’ve defined the boxes in which a person with X, Y and Z can sit, rather than letting people be like, this is what feels right.” Kenzie agrees with this, disclosing that she is “in the middle of figuring out a new diagnosis where [she has'] a form of muscular dystrophy called myofibrillar myopathy.” This process of discovering how to live with this new diagnosis has really highlighted the importance, and defiant nature of listening to your body. “So much of it is really figuring it out for yourself, or for myself at least, and not getting too tied up in the WebMD of it all.” Rosa continues with this strain of defiant thought, “I think that the truest radical rebellion of all, is being like, does it resonate with me?” She recounts a period in her life when a “series of doctors strongly suggested [she] take a year off of life.” She instinctively knew this wouldn’t be right for her, “if we stripped me of all the things I knew I was good at, and I knew I was capable of, and I put me in a bed for a year, I’d die. I’d literally shrivel up and die I think.”

 
 
 
 
CULTUREAnna MorrisseyComment