Amethyst
DESCRIPTION:
Purple quartz, which attains its color through the presence of iron and other trace elements
COMPOSITION:
Silicon dioxide (SiO2)
METAPHYSICAL PROPERTIES:
Encourages balance and moderation in one’s behavior. A stone of peace and calm.
Freelancing takes you to weird places. When I was a freelancer (and I write this as someone who currently isn’t but will, in all likelihood, find myself doing it again) I was often asked what my “beat” was, and my joking answer was “whatever I’m paid for.” I say joking because delivering the line with a smile diffused the tension with people who had salaries or built careers step-by-step. But for most, freelancing is about staying afloat. If I was gaining new skills or making new connections, it was usually an afterthought. I’d write for most publications about most subjects, as long as you paid me. This is how I agreed, on assignment, to go to a senior center in Queens, New York, to interview its patrons about their superhero fantasies while they had their portraits taken. I started the day doing the same thing at a center on the Upper East Side, interviewing around twenty people about their lives, their heroes, and the things they wanted in their wildest dreams. But their dreams weren’t so wild anymore. Most just wanted to be young again, to be able to walk around without pain, to have their memories back. Nothing so extreme as turning invisible or having superstrength. Regular strength was good enough.
By the time I got to Queens I was exhausted, having tried to keep up cheery, inquisitive tone for longer than I can typically manage. It was probably obvious that I was developing an attitude. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, in the middle of asking one eighty-year-old woman what kind of superhero she’d be, she cut me off and asked (or declared), in a thick Cuban accent, “You’re a water sign, aren’t you?”
Was it that obvious I was emotional and increasingly miffed? I said yes, I’m a Scorpio. Most people forget Scorpio is a water sign. Scorpions don’t live in the water, and Scorpios, so the stereotype goes, don’t revel in their emotions—they weaponize them. A brown, shiny sting when you least expect it. Water, sure, but as a sharp blade of ice.
“What you need is an amethyst,” she said. “For protection.”
My Didu has told me the same thing over the years. Though she is a PhD who had a long career as a biology and zoology professor, she still puts her faith in the stars sometimes, reminding me that my birth chart predicted my digestion problems and imploring me to eat more yogurt. She’s a Capricorn and prefers her birthstone, garnet. I was born in October; shouldn’t I be wearing more opals? No, she said, an amethyst; preferably a ring.
The word amethyst comes from the Greek for “not to intoxicate” and was said to protect wearers from becoming drunk. Ancient Greeks wore amethyst talismans and drank wine from amethyst cups, hoping the trick would work and they could indulge themselves without consequence, though I’m sure it didn’t. But maybe telling ourselves we’re protected, balanced, that we’re in control—even as we slosh and scream and bask in amethyst’s violet—is almost as good as the real thing.
There’s more than one way to feel intoxicated. The amethyst is not just a talisman to ward against chemical intoxication; it’s also meant to keep you from getting drunk on emotions. Soldiers wore these stones to keep a clear head. Bishops put amethysts in their rings to signify their sober spirits, dedicated and steady. These were not people who were supposed to lose themselves. Did their amethysts represent protection or a promise? Would their bodies have been a hospitable home for drunkenness without the stones? Either way, the potential of amethyst is control at all costs, and for those who buy into amethyst’s powers, emotions are barriers to truth, rather than harbingers of it.
A few years ago, my partner, my cousin, and I took mushrooms and headed to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, skipping with anticipation, mistaking every breeze or goose bump for the beginning of the trip. We lay in a field and felt the sun warm our faces. We talked about our relationships and dreams. We marveled at a red-tailed hawk that landed by a nearby stream, that now we all insist was the size of a man. I felt sun-dazed and happy, but nothing near high.
Then, chaos. There was a cannabis festival in the park planned for that day (we forgot to check the calendar, and if we had, we would have seen 4/20 looking back at us and known what was up), and hundreds of people began filing in as a DJ played bad reggae. My companions, well into their trips, panicked, and I grabbed their hands and did my best New Yorker weave through the throngs until we were safely out. I was a clear-headed warrior, and if the psilocybin was ever going to take hold, it wasn’t now. If I didn’t move, I don’t know whether either of them would have taken the lead. How lucky, I thought to myself, that I was responsible and sober enough to act. That I was in control of myself.
Later that afternoon, after the drugs wore off and we all decided we needed a nap, my partner recalled how good it had felt—like you could close your eyes and feel the trees breathe. At the time I was working across the street from Central Park, and during my lunch hours I would take last night’s leftovers to a bench and eat while overlooking the pond, then take my heels off, walk through the grass to an even, dry spot, and lie in the sun, taking care to tuck my shift dress so it wouldn’t get too wrinkled. I would close my eyes and, without any effort, find my breath in time with the wind, my cells swaying with everything, eyes tearing as they opened, some half hour later, to a bleached-out landscape as the sounds of tourists and other lunch breakers filtered back in. But that’s always how it feels, I thought as my partner recounted what sounded like the happiest moment of their life thus far. That’s just what it’s like to be outside. I felt superiority and loss, like I already knew this but somehow missed the epiphany that makes the knowledge mean something. I stared at the ceiling, furious that the drugs seemingly hadn’t worked and even more furious that I was mostly feeling relief that I was never at risk of being out of control of myself. If I wasn’t going to feel out of control, what was the point? Why couldn’t I just let myself enjoy this? I fell asleep crying.
I’m not trying to brag about not needing substances to feel transcendence, only noting that my emotions are taut behind my face like a meniscus curve. In this way I am rarely sober. Small feelings turn into obsessions, moods into Moods, thoughts into crying fits. In high school, I wasn’t cool enough to be invited to parties where there would be drugs or alcohol, so I told everyone I was straight-edge anyway, that I didn’t even want to be there. My white lie made unpopularity feel like a statement, but it was also a convenient excuse. I didn’t want to use most of the substances that were making the rounds; I was afraid of what they’d let out. I didn’t need any more help to find the edge of control.
There are certain people who relish telling you their drinking stories, or relish in hearing them. I began to drink in college, the sort of binge drinking that makes for a good laugh if you still enjoy stories where the climax is always someone puking, passing out, or being so out of control that they very nearly do something irreversibly dangerous, but are saved last-minute before the comedy turns into a tragedy. In one, I am naked and blacked out and staggering to my door, saved by my roommate who, still awake and studying, argues me down from my insistence that I’m heading back to the bar, and that, not to worry, they have shirts at the bar. In another, I’ve drank so much artificially colored wine that I climbed over the gate to the college pool at four a.m., ripping my skirt in the process, to go skinny-dipping. In another, I’m wandering through a national park on a weed brownie, halfway hallucinating and sadly resolved that this is my new reality, so I just have to get used to perceiving everything like this from now on. These stories are only compelling, and even then not very, because they are not the norm.
My telling of these stories has changed, to “thank god I’m not like that anymore” from “oh my god let’s do it again.” But it doesn’t take much for me to tell them. Staying balanced is a virtue, but at some point it changes from desire to command. Go too far, warn the voices, and you’ll never come back. You can’t be too much, or you’ll lose yourself. When I tell these stories, I’m testing the waters. I’m trying to prove to myself I can unhinge and survive.
On the Cartoon Network show Steven Universe, Amethyst, one of Steven’s otherworldly guardians, is unhinged. She is short for her kind due to having remained underground for an extra five hundred years while the rest of her kin were born, permanent proof that she is off-balance. At the beginning of the series, she’s just the wacky one. She eats gross things grossly, pulls pranks, changes shapes, and is strong but impulsive. Her behavior looks a lot like comic relief, and it is, because it’s a cartoon.
Things are bad enough. There’s no logic in choosing to be more vulnerable. There is so much of oneself to lose. The goal, then, becomes to find stability without sacrificing the thrill of emotion, letting the unhinging happen without setting up camp on that planet.
But later, we learn Amethyst is just trying to right herself, as if there is an objective center she is desperate to reach. She was born on Earth, so she lacks a connection to the culture and history of her people. She feels jealous and inadequate about anything and everything. She cares too much and not enough about the wrong things in turn, and when that’s pointed out to her, she lashes out, because everything she does is an attempt to just be the thing she’s supposed to be. The deep sadness of Amethyst is that it never quite works. Even when she decides to embrace that she is not who she should be, she does so out of spite. It takes the entire series for her to realize who she is.
After shopping for crystals one day, my partner asked me if the magical properties assigned to crystals had anything to do with the characters’ personalities in Steven Universe. In general, they line up pretty well. Rose quartz is full of unconditional love. Pearl is gentle and pure. Garnet is useful to have in a crisis. But amethyst made me think this was a fluke. If Amethyst the character is anything, she is perpetually intoxicated, swinging between flagrant confidence and deep insecurity, like she is just one more tequila shot away from passing out. She isn’t even-keeled. She is mania.
Before Steven Universe there was another myth about amethyst, and she was innocent, no matter how the story goes. Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine and fertility and celebration and madness and carnality, lusts after a maiden named Amethyst. She refuses him and prays to Artemis to remain chaste. In a different version of the story, Dionysus has just been insulted by a mortal, and drunk, whether on wine or his ego, vows to set tigers against the next mortal his caravan bumps into, who, again, is Amethyst on her way to pray to Artemis. In both versions, Amethyst calls out to Artemis for help, who sadly concluds that the girl has to die one way or another and turns her into a luminous white stone. Better than being raped or mauled by tigers.
Regret is easier to face when there is no one left to ask follow-up questions, and after seeing what he’d caused, Dionysus repented. In one version, he pours his wine over her stone form as an offering, dyeing her purple. In another, he cries so hard his tears form a stream around her and her stone body soaks up the water, which has mixed with the wine in the dirt. Both Dionysus and Artemis move on with their lives, duty-bound to the ideals they represent. Amethyst remains frozen in time, a sober pillar for others to look up to, or to carry with them as her body inevitably crumbls and embeds itself in the ground.
The amethyst is a common stone, caused by the abundance of silica and quartz that’s present at every stage of rock formation. Its purple color comes from radiation from iron impurities, but the color is unstable and can be changed easily through heat. Apply enough heat and it turns into a yellow-brown citrine, a stone not of balance but of abundance. It can even fade in the sun. Its changeable qualities might be why Pliny the Elder was skeptical of the Greek claims about amethyst, writing in his Natural History, “The falsehoods of the magicians would persuade us that these stones are preventive of inebriety, and that it is from this that they have derived their name.” But it’s not just the Greeks that have named the amethyst the stone of calm and balance. In the Chinese feng shui tradition, it’s meant to calm excessive emotions, to cool the head and leave you clear to receive bigger, better blessings (namely, wealth). In the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, the stone had associations with “domestication of wild things from the desert margins, the harnessing of ambiguous powers for good, the safe traversal of dangerous liminal states, the establishment and maintenance of Maat, fertility, and the nurture of young children,” writes Laurel Darcy Hackley in “Amethyst, Apotropaia, and the Eye of Re.” The stone was mined in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, where, in the story of the Eye of Ra, the feminine Eye wandered after leaving the masculine sun god Ra, angry and needing to be tamed. The “odd color of the material suggested a strange origin, between worlds,” the place in the desert where the day met the night. Eventually, the Eye is tamed and returned.
All these myths have made amethyst the modern stone of substance regulation, of protecting its wearer from Dionysus-like destruction. The Amethyst Initiative is a movement to combat drunk driving by lowering the drinking age in the U.S., and to promote moderation and responsibility, which the amethyst symbolizes. Amethystics are the class of substances that can block the absorption of ethanol, helping the user to sober up or not get so drunk in the first place. The stones were worn by women worried their drunken husbands would beat them, and by those who feared becoming “overly passionate” in their love, still under the impression that abuse was a matter of too much love. In all these associations, the amethyst represents a restoration of order. Everything will be fine, as long as we can meet in the middle.
Maybe it’s as simple as the way colors relate to each other on a color wheel, purple lying between passion-sparking red and cooling blue, not too much of one or the other. A hue defined by its lack of extremes.
I spend a lot of time reading stories of drug use online. I search Reddit for tales of mixing substances gone awry, someone taking DMT and acid and having the psychedelic waves interfering at the wrong amplitudes. I read through message boards of junkies giving each other advice on the long-term effects of amphetamine use, on how to shoot heroin between your toes instead of in your arm, all the tips and tricks to stave off the comedown, confessions of regret about ever trying the benzos that made so great. I read and reread the parts of memoirs where people hit rock bottom. I know Cat Marnell was fifteen the first time she tried cocaine and that the song that was playing was “Fame” by David Bowie. I know Drew Barrymore poured Baileys over her ice cream when she was seven. I know Robert Downey Jr. smoked pot with his dad at six.
But on the rare occasions when I’ve been offered harder drugs (and sometimes just when a joint is being passed around at a party) I feel my cheekbones tense with forthcoming tears, the tension of curiosity and fear not knowing how to express itself in any other way. Fear has always won, which is a deeply uncool thing about me. I can pretend it’s disinterest or moral objection, and sometimes those are in the mix, but when a friend casually offers me a bump at a bar, or tells me about a lovely romp on molly, or when the room fills with sour smoke, all I want to do is run.
The most I have let myself enjoy is a painkiller, and that was only to let it do its job, and only after a hard fight. I had lopped off a piece of my thumb at a party while using a mandoline to slice delicate petals of apple for a tart. “It’s easy,” I told the host, who would be taking over the duties any second, “and there’s a guard, but you don’t need to use it.” A minor god of mischief was summoned by those words, and as they left my mouth I felt the cool air brush over a part of me that should have been on the inside. A trip to urgent care and a chemical cauterization later, I was back at the party, laughing with adrenaline and waiting for the inevitable crash when the lidocaine shot wore off and I had to figure out what to do next.
It was excruciating. Beats of electric pain shot up my arm. I could barely form sentences, and although the doctor had said to take Tylenol, it was clear that wouldn’t be enough, so my partner presented me with Percocet left over from their collarbone surgery a year before. But I only cried harder, that familiar fear slicing through my delirium like coffee in an empty stomach. I refused—the doctor hadn’t said it was okay, I’d been drinking that night, and what if I get addicted? We’re in the middle of an opioid crisis, for fuck’s sake! “You’re in pain. This is what you’re supposed to take these for,” they insisted. A logical, balanced suggestion. I swallowed half a pill between deep sobs.
I spent the next week on the couch popping pills and watching Bollywood movies, embarrassed that a cut so small could lay me flat. But between the guilt of not being able to work and that of having allowed myself to become infirm in the first place (guilts that need to be examined but not now, surely there are better things to do), I tried to enjoy my daily high. I let the tabla soundtrack course through my body, let myself become hypnotized by the high synthesizer strings. I wondered whether I had hallucinated a plot in which a dog is possessed by the spirit of Krishna but nope, that was in the movie. And mostly I relished in the moments when I stood up from the couch, feeling like I was on moon gravity. It was fun, and the second I let that thought streak through my head it was chased down and carted off by shame. How dare I enjoy this unnatural state. I’m too vulnerable, I’m out of control. In this compromised position, I need to be taken care of, and that way lies danger.
When Greeks drank wine from amethyst cups, it was to reveal the truth that drunkenness is said to bring without revealing its twin weakness. A loss of control means a vulnerability to attack, and when enjoying yourself means putting yourself in danger, any precaution is worth a shot. After my week on the couch, I’ve relaxed a little about the pills, occasionally taking one to sleep after I’ve thrown out my back or wrenched my neck out of place. But each time, the guilt of willingly becoming so vulnerable for such a brief pleasure crawls back. Would an amethyst protect me from the fear of losing control? Would it let me breathe and accept that balance is sometimes not a state of perpetual calm, but an averaging out of large emotions and experiences? Or would it just sober me up and tell me that maybe I’m right to be afraid? For my experience to be enjoyable, I would have to trust myself and my surroundings, trust that nobody is out to get me. I’m still working on that.
Alcohol appears to be the only substance I can handle, letting myself feel the loosening and tingling of intoxication while staying in control, for the most part, until the bartender offers me a shot for the road. But everyone I know is giving up drinking. After all, it is terrible for you. If someone is reading this book in twenty years, I wonder where this trend will be, if it was just a phase or if alcohol is to a new generation what chewing tobacco is to mine—a deep signifier of time and place that nobody is interested in picking back up, even for nostalgia’s sake. The state of affairs at the dawn of the 2020s is leaving everyone feeling raw already. Things are bad enough. There’s no logic in choosing to be more vulnerable. There is so much of oneself to lose.
The goal, then, becomes to find stability without sacrificing the thrill of emotion, letting the unhinging happen without setting up camp on that planet. The options so often seem diametrically opposed: calm or chaos, sobriety or an irretrievable loss of self. And for some people, yes, addiction changes what “balance” means in that realm, where abstinence needs to be the tool. But there are so many other places where moderation just means the death of two beautiful extremes instead of one.
Balance, moderation, calm—these are the things we are warned we should want, that we are told are the paths to success. No one is selling meditation apps trying to make us more agitated, more emotional. Peace is supposed to come through control. Feeling the right things at the right times, in the right amounts. Never tipping the scales. But it has only recently occurred to me that balance is not a fixed state. I’m sure even the bishops in their amethyst rings lost themselves on occasion. What would their faith look like if they didn’t let a spirit take over once in a while? What would soldiers in amethyst breastplates do in battle if not for will and pride? These are not places for measured behavior.
Drugs or not, I am not good at keeping my feelings in. Sometimes I can hold them tight, but more often they race out of me like pus from a pierced blister, formless and gross and impossible to accurately name. I am so bad at judging what needs to happen when. When I should be more judicious, I burst. When I should be open, I find myself breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth in that way that heats the back of my throat and makes a noise like a radiator, so my partner has to ask me what’s going on and why I won’t just tell them what’s wrong. Where others have scales, I have a pendulum, and it’s taken all my energy to make its trajectory smaller and smaller, the recovery shorter, until you can barely see it move.
I never asked my grandmother, or the old woman in Queens, what the amethyst should be protecting me from.
I also never questioned why balance is something to aspire to. Maybe it’s one of those things that, as a woman, I just accepted was an accurate judgment of my behavior—too emotional, too quick to panic, hysterical. It’s not true of all women, but for me, sure. I know what control looks like, and I cultivate it at every turn. But there is a mood I get in when the air is right, sometimes sober and sometimes not, when I let myself burst, and any reaction to it is more fuel for my flame. I race down streets and hug with force and sing in the faces of my friends, my laugh ricocheting off buildings. I rise to dares and fizz with charisma. I thrive on some unseen energy. I bring the party with me, and not even the occasional side glance, not even the sense that this would be insufferable behavior if I indulged in it all the time, can invite the shame in. It’s a mood that is worth protecting. I would never want to replace it with whatever a more moderated version looks like.
Maybe these women simply saw my Scorpio shell; the ice crystallizing in my veins; the way I stop and smile and keep everything back even while my eyes shoot fire. Balance by force. Control by desire. They knew that true balance is not always a midpoint between two extremes, but the ability to visit each with the confidence of knowing you’ll return. The amethyst can remind me that no matter how far from myself I seem to be, I’m not lost. It will protect me from the curse of moderation. Maybe this rock will be what I need because it’ll show me how to crack open and let the pendulum swing.