Pleasure has always been policed, in some way or another, in cultures across the world. That’s because pleasure is, in a way, a source of resistance.

In her book Vagina, Naomi Wolf argues that women have a special relationship with pleasure in that, when we have the right kind of it, we are feisty, powerful, and strong, and when we don’t, we can lose our will to stand up for ourselves. The way our pelvic nerves translate pleasure from our sexual experiences to our brains boosts the hormones that make us strong and connected and dampen our vulnerability to depression and lethargy.

Wolf argues that dopamine in particular is “the ultimate feminist chemical. If a woman has optimal levels of dopamine, she is difficult to direct against herself. She is hard to drive to self-destruction, to manipulate and control.” On the other hand, when dopamine is too low, which is a known effect of sexual violence, women tend to get depressed, stop fighting back, and become easier to subjugate.

Wolf argues, then, that there is a physiological reason why women have been suppressed for so many generations: the powers that be knew, probably from experience, that if you damage the vagina, essentially, you damage the brain. Mess with our dopamine flow and we’ll stop fighting back. Rape has always gone along with pillaging not (only) because colonizers are assholes, but because when you can quickly and easily shut down half the population, you cut your colonizing hours in half. They didn’t need a scientific study to prove what they could see with their own eyes: rape a woman and she’ll stop resisting.

There’s good news here, too, though, from Wolf’s perspective. The unique vagina-brain connection might also make people with vaginas more powerful. Wolf writes:

I don’t like any kind of feminism that sets one gender above another, so I do not mean this in any way as a value judgment. Neither gender is “better.” But one gender is theoretically able to get more of a certain kind of dopamine and opioid/endorphin activation during sex, which has a very specific effect on the brain and even the personality. We cannot escape what this math implies for female sexuality, in its unmediated, un-messed-up state: nature constructed a profound difference between the sexes, which places women in, potentially, a position of greater biochemical empowerment.

Great sex, Wolf explains, boosts women’s dopamine, endorphins, opioids, and testosterone. It makes us more willing to take creative risks, to give fewer fucks about what other people think of us. It makes us want to take over the world. And have more sex.

Wolf goes on, “So the fear that patriarchy always had—that if you let women have sex and know how to like it, it will make them both increasingly libidinous and increasingly ungovernable—is actually biologically true!” From this perspective, it makes sense that suppressing and policing female sexuality has always been an aspect of patriarchal society. Knowing our sexual bodies and being unafraid to use them might have made us so full of spunk and fire that our subjugation wouldn’t have been possible.

The patriarchal fear of female pleasure was perhaps most salient during the centuries of witch-hunting when mostly women were tortured (often sexually) and killed in brutal ways. The first trials started in the 14th century and hit a fever pitch in the 16th and 17th centuries. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English put the killings in perspective when they write in their book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses:

One writer has estimated the number of executions on an average of 600 a year for certain German cities—or two a day, ‘leaving out Sundays.’ Nine hundred witches were destroyed in a single year in the Wertzberg area, and 1000 were put to death in a day. In the Bishopric of Trier, in 1585, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant each.

Men were sometimes accused of witchcraft too, but the authors point out that “women made up some 85 percent of those executed.” It’s always been so interesting to me that when we hear the phrase “witch hunt” in our cultural lexicon, it’s usually coming from a white man feeling persecuted after he got caught abusing his power. Why don’t we talk more about the witch hunt era as what it was: a large scale, wide-reaching historical campaign of terror against women?

There’s no evidence witchcraft as a specific religion ever really existed, though as a young teen who would light candles and try to cast spells while blasting the angsty strains of Alanis Morissette, I still can’t help but yearn for a ritualistic practice that literally gave women power. Magic wasn’t really what was being hunted, though: it was any form of power that could belong to a woman, especially if it related to her reproductive abilities.

Before the witch hunts, women were bakers, ale-makers, schoolteachers, doctors, and surgeons. Gynecology was a mostly female profession, with c-sections being performed almost exclusively by women in the 14th century, until male-only universities started popping up to certify men and push the midwives and lay healers out of a job.

The lay healers were mostly women who would provide counsel and a few herbs while, by the 1800s, men were getting certified to perform superstitious rituals like bloodletting and treating leprosy with “a broth made of the flesh of a black snake caught in a dry land among stones.” As Ehrenreich and English point out, a patient would be likelier to die by the hands of a certified male doctor’s bravura than with the “undoubtedly safer” gentle attentions of a female lay healer.

Women were especially targeted if they had any medical knowledge about reproduction or contraception. In her book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts were a necessary strategy to transition from feudalism into the capitalist era. Women’s bodies were needed to create more laborers for the new economy, so reproduction had to be carefully monitored.

“The criminalization of women’s control over procreation is a phenomenon whose importance cannot be overemphasized,” Federici writes, “both from the viewpoint of its effects on women and its consequences for the capitalist organization of work.”

If Wolf’s argument that targeting women sexually is an age-old strategy of war, the witch hunts make no exception. “In community after community,” Wolf writes, “the women identified by inquisitors or by their fellow villagers as ‘witches’ were often those who were seen as too sexual, or too free. And forms of torture were focused on their sexuality,” such as with devices placed in the vagina or with vaginal mutilation.

When women were shamed for their sexuality and even tortured at their genital source, the theory goes, they would indeed be willing to step back and relinquish their rights. It is interesting, however, that this subjugation and control of women in the service of capitalism took almost 400 years. We obviously haven’t been that easy to subjugate.  

Echoes of this sexual suppression and torture continue on today in communities where girl’s clitorises are cut out or burned, ostensibly for religious reasons. Clitoridectomies are hardly an invention of some other land, however, lest we think we Westerners are somehow more civilized. In 1858, the English doctor Isaac Baker Brown introduced the practice that, Wolf explains, made him “famous and sought after for his ‘cure,’ which took argumentative, fiery girls, and, after he had excised their clitorises, returned them to their families in a state of docility, meekness, and obedience.” Even Western doctors, it seems, understood that damaging a girl’s clitoris would somehow amputate her will to rebel.

Then, of course, there’s our old buddy Sigmund Freud. The (in)famous founder of psychoanalysis has a hidden story that is, in my reading, about his betrayal of womankind. In the last decades of the 19th century, Freud and his contemporaries were greatly interested in hysteria—which was, basically, a catch-all term for women’s psychological problems vaguely associated with the uterus (hystera in Greek).

In his earnest attempt to understand this common affliction, Freud sat down with women and listened to them. Jean-Martin Charcot and Joseph Breuer, Freud’s contemporaries, were similarly focused on the problem. In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman points out that “For a brief decade men of science listened to women with a devotion and a respect unparalleled before or since.

All this listening bore fruit for Freud, at least at first. He discovered that women suffering from hysteria pretty much always had a history of childhood sexual abuse. Freud wrote a triumphant paper called The Aetiology of Hysteria clearly explaining the root of the problem. Instead of being lauded for his discovery, however, he was met with the academic version of an uncomfortable silence. “Hysteria was so common among women,” Herman explains,

that if his patient’s stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice.

That meant that sexual abuse was a systemic issue, a problem of violence against girl children that defied class. Freud’s society was not ready to consider such an earth-shattering possibility, so his theory was rejected. In order to maintain his prestigious position in society, he recanted. Herman goes on,

By the first decade of the twentieth century, without ever offering any clinical documentation of false complaints, Freud had concluded that his hysterical patients’ accounts of childhood sexual abuse were untrue: ‘I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction has never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.’

Betrayal! Freud’s psychoanalysis went on to create a theory of neurosis that did not match women’s actual experience of reality. He insisted that women lie often and that their fantasies were the source of their problems. He came up with the concept of penis envy, that old canard that little girls hate their mothers forever for not giving them a penis. Not to mention his insulting (and evidence-free) idea that women who can’t achieve orgasms from penetration alone are somehow immature, a concept that caused sexual insecurity and an epidemic of sexually frustrated women that still persists to this day.

Women have inherited quite a history of sexual shame, terror, and torture from our ancestral grandmothers, even if we have no history of it in our own lives. It’s no wonder feeling sexual pleasure is so fraught in our time—not only have we not always felt the right to experience pleasure in the ways that work for us (thanks Freud!), but we have echoes of intergenerational trauma from a history of being tortured, murdered, and violated, at worst, and silenced, at best.

For these reasons and more, feeling pleasure isn’t just a little thing we should try to make more time for in our busy lives because it’s fun. It’s a radical act of resistance against a history of suppression and pain. Taking pleasure, whether by enjoying great sex, going dancing, eating good food, or simply having a hot cup of tea on a cool day, is an act of self-determination and choice. Our pleasure is a tool of resistance against our own oppression and suppression. Our pleasure matters.

Dear you,

It’s April, which means National Poetry Month, which means the weather does who knows, which means we’re out of Pisces season and into the more go-get-em Aries (thank god).

I spent March actively sitting with things that scare me. On a work trip to teach patient advocacy at a university in Las Vegas, I used my free time to confront the ways my brain creates problematic patternings that come from hurt, trauma, loss, and scarcity.

Obviously, changing the way one functions, copes, and metabolizes is not something that is done in just one month. Nor should it be. However, the last six months of my life have been full of grief, endless rain, physical pain, stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness; I was ready to work on the common denominator of myself.

So I approached it the way I approach everything: as a scholarly pursuit.

This decision to start actively sitting with wounds and things that frighten me isn’t an entirely new one; I first felt the need to move into another level of therapy and healing last May, while reading Yosa Buson on a park bench in Los Angeles. I was nearly at the end of my tour, I had lost two friends to unspeakable things (one to an accident, one to a long and painful illness), and my dream of having a book in the world had come true. I was strangely undone by the juxtaposition of those two things.

“Coolness – the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell.”

Reading this poem struck me, much like a large piece of resonant metal would, and I’ve never forgotten it. It is always the poem that starts and ends my meditation as I hear the bell chime. “If you ever find yourself wandering off in your practice,” Tara Brach once said, “Just follow the sound of the bell as long as you can.”

I started sitting with the things that scare me (abandonment, not being good enough, social anxiety, grief) because I had reached a place in my healing where it seemed possible to do so without damaging myself; through somatic therapy, talk therapy, EMDR, writing, books, and community (and yes, sometimes even medication) I’ve built a strong base.

I also started meditating because I wanted to be less afraid of dying.

While the death of my maternal grandmother seemed sudden, comparatively, the death of my paternal grandmother was a long, long goodbye. Visiting her was always a practice in sitting with death and dying. At a point, she had been dying for so long that I stopped seeing her hands as they were when I was a child; I gave manicures to nails brittle and aware of time passing.

I’m currently working on translating a collection of poems by an obscure-even-in-his-time Patagonian poet. Today, translating an epitaph on infancy, I came across this line he wrote:

“It is good to understand that we are made of memory,
that time grows without listening to us.
That there are many things we do not understand.”

I turned to a kind of spirituality known for practicing robust and sacred understandings of the rituals of loss and dying, and this was a wise instinct; despite my relatively young age, I’ve experienced more death than most I know who are in a similar station and generation and citizenship in life. It makes good sense to need something larger than our Western framework can hold — and our Western framework does poor work of containing the complex shadow lives of death, dying, aging, grieving.

The white static that happens for people who can’t bear children after they pass their child-bearing years. The solitude of a person who outlives their friends. What to do in the face of a long illness. What to do when your nicest friend is battling terminal illness way too young.

Things that helped change these confront my damaging patterns, my loss of people I love, my creeping self-doubt and bone-tiredness with grey:

• sound meditation (whatever you like, even music, but binaural beats and Tibetan singing bowls worked best for me) 
• visualization (my favorite included imagining being inside of a dirt devil of all of the things I am obligated to do, and then stepping through it to the other side, where a field — in my case, due to my upbringing, cotton — waited for me) 
• disrupting my thoughts with breath* 
• getting right with taking naps (and understanding just exactly how complicated sleep is — for example, we’re the only animals on the planet who force ourselves to get all of our sleep in one fell swoop) 
• active journaling 
• anything & everything by Tara Brach, who combines psychology with mindfulness better than most anyone I’ve seen (and whose voice sounds exactly like my therapist’s, which is comforting to me)

It’s true that your brain cannot be reprogrammed in a month. However, I just went to the same, massive writing conference I go to every year—I just returned last night. It’s 15,000 people who all extrude their loneliness and observative introversion and careful natures and breakup baggage and book deals into the bowels of convention centers at rotating cities every year. It’s a conference I need to go to for my career, and in the past it has filled me with all of the aforementioned toxins, but has also been a beautiful, overwhelming mix of seeing massive amounts of people I love all crammed into bars and coffee shops and libraries and public halls to hear just a few lines of their favorite authors. To click their tongues and shake their heads and say “damn”.

Going this year endowed with the ability to disrupt my body’s anxiety response with breath was life-saving. I felt like I imagine Kevin does in Home Alone, when he seeing the glowing red face of the furnace in the basement and yells I’M NOT AFRAID OF YOU ANYMORE!

It didn’t hurt that Portland was falling all over itself in magnolias, and the sun shone for three days straight at 70 degrees, that I had champagne in the sun with friends, that I got a few freckles and got my cheeks kissed by beloveds, that I overheard two young poets I’d never met before talking about my book in glowing ways, without knowing I could hear them. It didn’t hurt that I came home laden with books that I immediately dove into, and that this week, though it’s raining, I have Spring Break and I am only one day in and have felt so inspired that I’ve already written four new poems.

It doesn’t hurt that my life has been here, beautiful and shining, the whole time. When I need reminding, I can just follow the sound of the bell, leaving the bell.

I love you,
July

There’s this Old Testament story about a locust plague that I used to think of often, in my early twenties. Israel’s gone polytheistic on her theistic deity, and, by the time His punishment has taken full effect, the food’s gone. Wine’s dry. Lights are out. And, everything is full of dead, insect bodies.

“Yet even now!” a little known prophet by the name of Joel would recount Jah’s word to his wayward countrymen, “return to me with all your heart…and I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten” (Joel 2:25).

The years that PTSD ate up my life like a swarm of angry, green vermin, I used to imagine myself—small, in a blue dress—in Bible school, before the rape and rage and confusion, before the depression and years of drunken, tear-filled debauchery, and wish that I could hang my whole life on that, “even now.”

“The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible,” Ta-Nehisi writes to his son in his book, Between the World and Me. “That is precisely why they are so precious.”

I had been living with PTSD for the better part of 9 years when I started craving bacon and cottage cheese hard enough for my husband to start buying it in bulk. By the time I took a pregnancy test, the doctor said I was 8 weeks along — and showed me my baby like a tiny, kidney bean tucked away in the corner of my yolk sac.

At week 12, I found out that he did, in fact, have working kidneys, and I cried at the three inch, tiny human inside me, with the beating, butterfly heart. For a body that had returned to episodes of violence over and over and over again, it was the first time in my adult life that I was producing something — anything — that might be restorative, and I could feel the change. My breasts softened. My anger subsided. And, I started obsessively googling studies that showed pregnancy could improve PTSD.

Then, at week 26, when my baby was as big as a head of kale, a technician at Mt Sinai hit me — and him — with her blue gel wand, so she could see his stomach chambers. He jumped. And I froze — silent. Like so many times before.

When she left the room, my husband said, “We can tell them it’s not OK to do that without asking.”

“I will,” I said. But I wouldn’t. And I couldn’t.

Maladaptive: that’s what my therapist calls it. In studies with rats — which boast a close neurological match to humans — scientists have found that a pregnant rat will experience an almost complete rewiring of her brain circuitry before giving birth. By the time her babies are born, she’s bolder, sharper and more efficient, capturing her cricket prey at four times the speed of non-mom rats.

Even a rat addicted to cocaine can get straight in order to take care of her young. But put her in a cage with an aggressive, sexually charged older male rat, leave him to have his way with her, and she’ll come out at a loss. Her associative learning will suffer. Her stress hormones will spike. She’ll struggle to express maternal behaviors.

While our society fights for the recognition of a woman’s right to efficacy over her body, Sharon Dekel, principal investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, is developing a deeper understanding of what happens if we don’t give women that recognition. Her focus is on the potential negative consequences for a women in childbirth, and, afterward, on another demographic entirely: her children.

In a 2018 study of 685 postpartum women, her research team found that women who suffer from PTSD can have difficulty bonding with their babies — a symptom with the potential to undermine aspects of child development.  

A pregnant rat will experience an almost complete rewiring of her brain circuitry before giving birth—bolder, sharper and more efficient, she can capture her cricket prey at four times the speed of non-mom rats.
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PTSD was a mystery to us before 1975, when, 479,000 cases showed up, all at once. We’d diagnose it just five years later, in 1980, and, eventually uncover one million lifetime PTSD cases from Vietnam. Later, we’d call it a “growing epidemic.”Almost 40 years later, there are as many estimated rape and assault victims as there are veterans alive in the United States, and 94% of them show signs of PTSD.

These women are at a higher risk of developing further mental disorders as a result of birth, according to Dekel. With nearly 4 million women giving birth each year, and up to 12% of them developing postpartum (PP) PTSD, PP-PTSD may be the most substantial, silent societal cost to the American woman’s loss of efficacy that we’ve ever seen.

There’s a whole lot we can’t control. We can’t go back in time and turn the tide of America’s rape epidemic. We can’t control whether a woman is young, whether there’s real risk to her baby, or whether or not it is her first pregnancy (all factors that also drive increased risk).

But in control itself we may find a solution.

Dekel’s studies show that one deciding factor with the potential to positively or negatively override almost everything else in a woman’s situation is her perception of whether or not she feels that she maintained efficacy over the birth process.

Providers would need to consider all the factors influencing her choices to create an environment where a woman is truly in charge, according to Ruth A. Wittmann-Price, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nursing and Health at DeSales University.

In a 2004 theory entitled, “Emancipation in decision-making in women’s health care,” she purports that a woman is almost always influenced by her own empowerment and personal knowledge in a situation, the social norms that exist around her, whether or not she has opportunity for reflection and if she is operating within a flexible environment.

To develop decision science without discussion of oppression and an emancipation process in the humanistic care of women, Wittmann-Price points out, would be to deny obvious barriers to shared decision-making. And my own emancipation began with the realization that I wasn’t ready to assert myself.

In the weeks that followed, while my nursery sat full of unpacked boxes, my husband and I focused our preparation on my mental well being. In the process, I learned that my experience of assault had taught me everything I needed to know. My requests would not be honored. My consent would be assumed. The power dynamics over me would be strong. I’d feel lesser, possibly even guilty for saying what I needed. It was up to me to change that narrative, even when my brain insisted otherwise.

There are all kinds of pre-existing factors that may influence how you react to a high-stress situation, according to Jim Hopper, PhD, a nationally recognized expert on psychological trauma. It starts with what he calls the hardwired, evolutionary stuff, that can predispose reflexive responses. Then, there’s your prior learning history, your childhood, how you dealt with aggressive and dominant people growing up, socialization and habit based prior learning.

In an environment like birth, they have the power to influence everything. The day I went into labor, they were all there — the reflex, the learning history, the socialization and the knee jerk responses. But in the small, sacred space between my disorder and identity, I found enough dissonance to use my voice. Through it, I developed my three most poignant memories of that day.

The most powerful is when I met my son — perfect, and purple, with a head full of thick, black hair. I had been pushing for three hours when his head and left shoulder finally ripped through my episiotomy, and I pulled the rest of him out of me and into my arms.

I love you. I love you. I love you. And I had never felt a love like that.

The second was labor hour eight, when I called out our epidural safe word: pineapple. My husband I had developed it based on a mutual understanding that in order to try for a non-medicated birth, I’d need to yell for an epidural without actually meaning it. Under no circumstances was he to agree to giving me one, unless I said the word.

We’d tossed around other words: pumpernickel (too long), coffee (too common), and watermelon (too much red puke in my recent past). Ultimately, pineapple it was.

Pineapple: put a needle of ropivacaine hydrochloride in my god damn spine, and do it now.

I’d said my safe word three times, and requested she turn the pitocin off twice, by the time my midwife, buried in the corner in a rousing game of Tetris, slowly said, “I think we’re here to have a baby, and we don’t want to slow things down.” But I knew my brain, and my body. The pain of pitocin-induced contractions was driving me toward a place I couldn’t go again. A place where the world would go dark, and I’d be on my back, in pain, submitting to someone else again.

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By the time she reluctantly, slowly, moved across the room, and did what I asked, I’d involved advocates. My husband and doula, who had spent hours of deep conversation understanding my trauma cues, concerns and triggers, knew when to ensure I got results.

“Get her an epidural, now,” I heard him say.

“Turn the pitocin off — she’s asked you multiple times,” my Doula added.

“She can contract on her own. Let her do it.”

When I heard the beep of the machine turning off behind me, the pain I was feeling, six hours into hard contractions, didn’t improve in the least. Mentally, however, I was back in charge. And somewhere, deep inside me, I felt like the most powerful woman alive.

“But to let the baby out,” writes Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts, “you have to be willing to go to pieces.” And pushing my son out put me past the brink of what I thought was physically possible.

I was told I’d get a second wind — some kind of strength I didn’t expect, especially when I saw the top of his head. But I didn’t feel anything except panic. I was going to pass out. I needed to puke. I couldn’t find the strength to push.

I have had the power siphoned from my body like a balloon blown up and let go. I have spent years picking my way with the gullied parts of me, where it no longer exists.

But I have never been more palpably aware of the power in, and over, my body than on floor 3M at Brooklyn hospital, on my back, minutes before midnight, when my midwife told me to stop breathing.

She said it like I had no other option: breathe, or birth a baby.

You’re not working hard enough (while pulling on the inside of my labia).

It’s been too long (while checking her watch).

You just don’t seem to want this (looking at me).

Poor kid, he’s got such a headache (looking at him).

I argued—on my back—insisting I needed air. Needed more time. Needed help.

Inside, feeling like I’d failed—like I didn’t love him enough to get him out. Like all the other women in the world knew how to give birth, but not me.

Human memory is a sensory experience, writes Bessel van der Kolk, a Boston-based psychiatrist noted for his research in the area of post-traumatic stress. And when a nurse grabbed my foot, I wasn’t in the delivery room anymore.

I was 21. And, someone else had their hand on my foot. Someone else was tucking it under their arm. And, someone else was telling me to be quiet, while they had their way with me, in ways I’d been trying to forget ever since.

Sexual assault is horrific in its own right. But it should be understood in the broader context of what causes long-term trauma in the body, which typically has two things in common: loss of empowerment and loss of human connection—i.e. being treated as an object—according to Hopper.

Inside I felt like I’d failed—like I didn’t love him enough to get him out. Like all the other women in the world knew how to give birth, but not me.
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I felt both, in that moment. But I did what I wished I would have done, the first time. I yelled.

Get away from my foot, get my husband now, kind of yelling.

Don’t fucking touch me. I’ll push when I’m ready.

My bed a bailey, my partner and doula standing citadels, we enforced my requests.

I breathed.

I slept.

When I woke up, I ran my own fingers around my baby’s temporal bone, and noticed there something in my perineum that wouldn’t move — something that had it taunt and hard, like a rock, and not budging.

“Just cut me,” I said.

“You have room.”

“No I don’t. Do it.”

I had no way of seeing that my son’s hand was against his face, blocking his head from coming further than I’d pushed it, but that’s exactly how I would deliver him, an hour later, suckling his knuckles, heartbeat steady, on his path through my birth canal.

“I didn’t realize!” my midwife would call out. But somewhere, in the place that exists only between a woman and her body, I’d know that I did. And that I’d done what I wanted, midwives and naturalists, birth advocates and medical advisors be damned.

While there’s no concrete proof that my assertion of self in my birth kept me—a woman with almost all the risk factors of PP-PTSD—safe, Dekel points out that her studies show that a woman’s positive appraisal of her birth experience may have more to do with her mental health than the experience itself.

She’s encouraged by the fact that woman today are being screened for depression during pregnancy and postpartum, but notes we need to do more.

“Currently I don’t know of any program that focuses on empowering mothers or women prior to giving birth or postpartum,” she says. “There’s nothing routinely implemented to screen women at risk for developing PP-PTSD.”

Her hope is to that alongside others, her team can develop a more holistic approach to obstetrical care that integrates a better kind of team collaboration between psychiatry, psychology and OB department.

I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, mid-flashback of myself like a rat locked in a cage, while someone else has their way with me. I struggle with confusion. I wonder about efficiency. Like many women who have been sexually assaulted, I struggled at first with feeling like breastfeeding was a hostile take-over of my body.

A single sound or stirring from my son can cut through all that. Suddenly, my confusion is gone. And, in its place, a connection that feels as natural as breathing.   

I have another flashback that comes to me, increasingly often, in that place. In it, I see my husband’s teary face, looking at me, looking at my son.

“Look what you did!” he says.

“I’m just going to stitch you up,” the midwife adds, from somewhere beneath me.

I don’t have to close my eyes to feel the warmth of my son breathing on me, after that. Or, to feel the warp and weft of the needle, putting back together parts of me I used to believe were broken for good.

At the long end of 1986, two households emerge and I absorb the remnants of the home that split four people open. After my parents’ separation, I am always looking around for the rest of me, making sure I am still there. I am several parts of one body, holding two homes and four people’s memories.

When the phone rings at my mother’s house, my father’s berating increases to make up for the fact that he can no longer yell at her in person. Instead of embodying different parts of myself with each parent, I begin to present all of me with my mother and a shadow of me with my father. When I am with him, I am a mistake to be corrected. Most of what comes out of my mouth is wrong, so I eventually stop talking.

In my sixth year I learn that I should never have to go to the bathroom away from home. When I need to, it’s very bad and it upsets my father, but I do not know how to stop. He asks me why I don’t go before we leave, but I don’t have to go then or I do and then I have to go again. I do not know why my body works this way, but it must be wrong because he gets very irritated and lectures me for a long time—whether we find a public restroom quickly or not.

Dinners at his house feel like sharp teeth on me. He picks at me for how I eat, how much I eat and the baby fat I gain in adolescence. I come to realize he is using meal time to poke at my brother and me; asking us questions that no kids could answer, only to laugh at us then lash out at us for getting them wrong. Eventually my brother loses patience with the picking and starts to respond back. This results in a Ping-Pong game of verbal confrontations that bounce back and forth between them and latch onto my skin, assaulting me. I want to escape to the basement or the attic but my limbs are stiff against me. My body is still though I am slowly floating away from me.

In my 13th year, my brother begins to taunt me. We are at my mother’s kitchen table when he smiles, insisting I am holding my fork wrong and people will shun me for it. I melt into my plate and realize I am being eaten down to the core of me. When I look for myself in my body, I can barely find a trace of me.

How old were you when your face fell through? Did you hold it in your hands? Did you catch it in your skin? Did you lose track of where they end and you begin?

In my 17th year, I am in my first year of college when I meet Daniela*—the older cousin of one of my best friends. She becomes part of our friend group and we’re envious when she starts dating the cute guy we’re all curious about, until we find out he pulls her hair by the root when he’s angry.

We are parked in front of the house Daniela grew up in when I notice my skin becoming heavy, as though I am falling out of myself. I feel a draft in my body as though a door has opened that cannot be closed. It is on this day that I learn from my friend, that Daniela’s brothers used to throw her down the basement stairs when they were angry. I look up and stare at the house, as if for the first time, and something cracks in my bones.

I am ripped open and that tear becomes the catalyst for my sociology project—women rappers using art to discuss gendered power dynamics and abuse. When I take the risk of telling my brother and father about it, I do not mention the door of the house, the staircase or the hair pulled from Daniela’s head. I do not tell them the focus is on Eve’s Love is Blind. I simply say that I did a presentation on women rappers using music to illuminate social issues. I explain that I worked really hard and I know my professor doesn’t care for hip-hop, but I have the sense that she might be able to look at the genre in a different light after this.

For a moment, neither of them are saying anything, but they’re both smiling and they eventually begin to laugh. They make fun of me for thinking I had an impact on my professor and I begin to disappear into the length of my hair. I sail away to all those nights at the dinner table, the staircase at Daniela’s house, and the distance from the top of that first step to the basement floor.

I imagine the door to my father’s basement, the safety of his attic and the way edges of houses hold some little girls together, but pull other ones apart. When I float back, they’re still laughing. I know how quickly they erupt when disagreement is present, so I draw a smile on my face too.

Were you tangled in your words, when your flesh fell to your ankles? Could you see yourself around? Were you stuck inside your own sound?

In the last week of my 28th year, my agoraphobia and sensory processing disorder spill out on either side of me. Preparing to get on a plane for the first time since high school, I am terrified. I am washing my hands in the airport bathroom when my mother appears, telling me it’s time to board the flight.       

I check my hair and make-up and walk back to where she and my brother are sitting, only to find him exploding at me. I try to figure out what I’ve done, but I am fading down to the seams of me. I am transported back to the ‘90s to the small apartment we shared with my mom. My skin snags on the image of him shouting in my doorway. I remember the shape of the bedroom door, the contour of his mouth, and the screams that shook my skin out. I think back to the day I found my room trashed and the way I held the damage like souvenirs. I recall the string of punches that came after I interfered with his business call; I remember the rhythm of his fists hitting my arm.

When I drift back to the airport he is still yelling, grating me down to my ankles. Apparently, my having to pee was very selfish and those two minutes I took to look myself over meant that the three of us could’ve missed our flight. As the screaming tapers off, I find the edge of my abandoned body, pick it up by the shreds and drag it onto the plane.

In the coming months I begin to wear my silence like armor. It becomes the protector of me. I find that the only way to be around my brother and father is to be a ground down version of me, an acceptable facsimile; it stands in for me as a way to survive. This makes me feel like I am not a real person or they are not real to me. I start to feel like I don’t really have a father or a brother. The two of them are essentially strangers to me, flaming things that mostly know how to rage at me.

Do you live inside the skin of you? Are you the girl behind the face? Did you find yourself in the shadow box? What’s left of you after the chase?

As my twenties begin to evaporate, I begin to part down the length of me. I feel enamored with men, but when they’re standing in front of me, it seems like there’s a wall between us. I think there must be something wrong with me that cannot be fixed or reconciled, so I eventually stop dating them—but the pull towards them remains.

When I tell my therapist about it, she asks if I am more attracted to men’s or women’s bodies. I tell her that is not the right question. I ask a friend for advice and they tell me that if I enjoy having sex with women, then I am queer. I know that is not the right answer. I feel drawn to men inside my bones, but when I get close to them, it feels like the best parts of me drop out of my body. I know there must be a reason why thinking about it makes me feel like I am holding my breath. I know there must be a reason why they light up so many parts of me, then leave me split up in messy piles.

On the raw edge of my 29th year, my long-term partner starts transitioning and something is pulled up and out of me. I begin thinking about the way people both transcend and encompass gender. I think about the way I am absorbing and categorizing gender and I begin to ask what I mean when I say I cannot connect with men. I begin to ask if I mean that I cannot connect with cis men. Like my other relationships at the time, there is unwarranted anger and an inability to show up for difficult conversations. But when I think about all the ways he is different than my recent partners, the most obvious difference on both a superficial and spiritual level is that he isn’t a girl.

I freeze into myself when I think about the way our relationship took shape. We are best friends and it is New Year’s Eve—one week after my 27th birthday.

He’s coming from work as a bartender, but I’m the one who’s been drinking. He starts a violent argument with me in the public hallway of my apartment building and I fall out to the edge of me. His words draw a fence around me, yelling that he can no longer play this “friend role.” I am confused and tired, but I understand he feels I’ve wronged him and now I owe him a right. I am drunk and drowning in this hallway. I just want it to stop. I cannot imagine losing him, so I have sex with him. When I come, it’s the kind of orgasm I wish I could take back.

I know there must be a reason why men light up so many parts of me then leave me split up in messy piles.
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Five years after the waves rush out and over our relationship, I read Jenny Lumet’s letter to Russell Simmons, and I am cut through to the other side of me. Her words are gentle but unapologetic and I am reminded of the intimacy that is having patience with Black men, even after experiencing harm at their hands. I wipe my face with my own hands and count how many years I’ve held on to things for fear that the men who have hurt me, would feel some of the same hurt if I use words to say what they have done to me.

She talks about making a trade—”just keep him calm, and you’ll get home” and I am yanked down to the tightest threads of me. I think about the way silence and sex turn into offerings when men decide you owe them something. My eyes spill out to my formative years and then back to adulthood. I remember the weight of being covered by flesh that never asked.

I think about all the times my eyes stood still while my body stiffened into a “no” because my words couldn’t do it. I’ve been making trades with trauma since I was 14.

Did you make oceans with your eyes, when your legs dropped out from under you? Do you recognize your body, when you split right down the length of you?

In the wake of 4:44, I awoke—30 years after I first swallowed my mouth closed. Three decades after one house became two, I widened out like unfolding fists. When I heard those words, “You had no father, you had the armor,” it felt as if they lived inside my fingers. When Jay Z says, “You got a daughter, gotta get softer,” I am holding both lines in both hands; I am holding the child me and the grown-up me in the skin of my palms.

I consider the way the world conflates hyper-masculinity with Blackness and vulnerability with femininity. I think about the way self-reflection is conceptualized as something men do in honor of daughters—but not wives. I remember my mother’s ability to hold my father’s rage. I think about the length of my emotional intelligence and how little I was when I learned to shut my mouth. I consider the way abuse patterns wrap around us like rope.

Of all the things that tried to split me, it was the juxtaposition of having a white mother and a Black father and the pain of being accepted by her and rejected by him that ultimately severed me in half. It was the confusion of not being Black enough for my father and feeling like I was supposed to partner with men who acted like him in order to prove that rejecting his abuse does not mean rejecting my Blackness. It was the cut of feeling so guilty; I would see his face in other people and believe I could undo what had been done to me by having it done again by them.

Feeling like men were in charge of me made me feel like my body wasn’t mine long before I knew what words like consent meant. So when it came time for me to say yes or no to a man, I would tighten into my mouth and fall out of my skin. I would later attribute it to my Selective Mutism, my Non-Verbal Learning Disability, and a confusion around my sexuality.

But my tendency to lose my words was born out of a trauma that developed from being unable to speak freely in my home as a child. And my difficulties with non-verbal communication were informed by a childhood that left me feeling like I was safer when I didn’t speak.

In my 36th year, I learn about the R Kelly sex cult accusations and several memories converge as if on cue. The idea of a man controlling women so much that he has power over their eating and going to the bathroom makes me fall backwards into my six-year-old self. I realize that I have spent my entire life being unsure if it is ok for me to speak, eat, go to the bathroom or do anything that reveals me as human around men.

You are not a shadow box, an after-thought or a vacant sketch of you.

My father did not get softer, as a result of having me. He simply reproduced what had been done to him as a child. And my brother’s ability to replicate my father’s abuse came from absorbing my parents’ dynamic and being able to identify more with losing yourself to a fit of violence, than being able to identify with the body that holds the scars after the fit.

I know now that people rage when they are disconnected from their person. Having so much rage projected onto me eventually resulted in my belief that I am too much of a person. Men regarded my most basic needs as something to get rid of. So I believed that if I wanted to be with a man, I’d have to get rid of myself.

When I was able to connect with queer and lesbian people, I thought it meant there was something queer about my attraction to masculinity. I started to think there was something inherently queer about me—something internal that exists outside of my attractions. But as my queerness became wider, it felt like the puzzle was being solved outside of me. The more I tried to grow into these understandings, the more I seemed to grow out of me.

When I learned I was dating a man, I simply thought the way in which I was attracted to men had revealed itself as a different shape. I thought my attraction to him could explain why my chemistry with cis men never translated properly. But I left the relationship still feeling like there was something wrong with me.

It is only now after spending years of my life depriving myself from relationships with all men and then cis men specifically as a way to protect myself, that I realize the only relationships I’ve ever had were replications of the abuse that led to the repression.

And most of the sexual experiences I’ve had with men reinforced that my body was theirs. So I became averse to the abuse and called it an aversion to men.

As I thaw out into the larger part of me, I know that the thing standing between myself and other people in relationships is not their gender. It’s the way my body viscerally responds to gender, since my early understandings of masculinity and intimacy were tied up in abuse. It’s about the way my skin translates injury, after years of experiences taught me to anticipate blood instead of love from men.

I am finally starting to ask if I am truly a poor fit for cis men or simply not attracted to men who act like my father and brother.

You are real raw love and gorgeous flesh. You deserve to be held like the entire shape of you.

In the aftermath of the home that broke open, I know that girls like Daniela* and I will have a steeper climb towards finding home in the arms of a man, because of what happened at the hands of men in our homes. I know that relationships aren’t about breaking somebody down or taking away their person, as a way to regain yours. I know that intimacy doesn’t feel like being trapped inside a house. I know that love doesn’t feel like the wrong side of the basement door.

When I look at the place inside me that split, I can see the wound and feel it closing. I know that people are neither good nor bad, but in a constant state of becoming. When they engage in harmful behaviors it’s because they’ve been profoundly hurt and they’re perpetuating that learning. I know unlearning is a process. I know I’ve survived both my child and adulthood due to my ability to read people who were so checked out from their person, they didn’t care if what happened next froze me out of my person.

I know that brain structure, systemic and familial post-trauma can complicate the ability to say or hear a no. I know that doesn’t make it a yes. I know the thing that causes people to control and rage is the same thing that allows them to keep going during a sexual act, after a face has gone blank. And I know I don’t owe it to anyone to be an emotional punching bag while they work through their trauma superficially through me.

On the long end of my 36th year, I figured out why that complex, primal, physical and emotional longing for men never went away. It is part of me, but it is no longer a gash on me. I am learning how to stop the blood. In the wake of my healing, I know that trying to love people in similar pain as me was an attempt to grow the skin over the cuts that once divided me.

I am not broken, but I have existed in pieces and I know that being deeply harmed during childhood is a particular kind of bruise. I have a higher level of empathy because of it and I know that empathy will translate into the highest level of love for myself as I continue to learn that I cannot love the rage out of a person. And if you are navigating that kind of trauma, you deserve to learn it too.

You deserve to be loved like survival, like the spelling of your name, like the softest whisper and the loudest yell that sounds like the entire length of you. And you deserve to hear it over and over again until you know it’s true.

The goodbyes have overturned the horizon and lay bare their seed on fertile ground; there is a pale face receding, framed by a curtained windowpane. He’ll rise, forgetting, but as he slides the curtains open and hears the tinny metal slide of the rings suspending them, he will be flooded with misery, a desire to lay back down in bed.

The light filters through the trees—strange blocks of shadows dance on the wall. Some leaves are bright, mantis-green, backlit by the sun—others are fern-green, muted and shadowed. They tremble on their branches; the burgundy maple tree in the background reminds him of rust or blood. He turns and fingers the sheets where they used to lay, obsessed for many weeks with one another’s bodies.

Her period was intense—thick and streaming out of her. She was afraid of taking anything with hormones, so the copper IUD had rendered one day of every month a kind of horror scene, but in truth he thrilled at the intimacy of it, even as he was repulsed by it. It was hot to the touch, he could almost see steam rise from the rivulets running down her legs. He thinks of a dead rabbit sighing its life into the sky.

The stains of her blood trace their bodies and he can’t bear to throw them out. He decides that the next time he brings someone home he’ll say he’d cut his foot—or his hand. If he decides in the moment it will sound more true.

How do you imagine the future? I often conceive of it in vignettes like this. Although conceive is the wrong word because in truth they come to me—the visions are full-bodied, screaming or sashaying into my consciousness—I don’t have the sensation of creating them.

But why are the imaginings so cruel? Why do I imagine his dread at my recent departure when that departure is not coming. That kind of sadness—those sickening final goodbyes that coat your days in thick grey ash—is currently coiled sleeping, docile as a sun-drunk cat.

I remember reading that you often dream of horrible things so you can psychologically prepare for the very worst things if and when they happen. Like circuit training for your nervous system.

I recently wrote about another one of my morbid fantasies, which involves my brother’s tweed coat and my mother’s grave. My mother was disturbed; she told me she didn’t like experiencing the “shadow of her own death.” I said I understood. But I also knew I’d keep imagining it.

Sometimes the casket is open. Sometimes I sing Celine Dion, choke-laughing at how saccharine and awful the lyrics are, but goddamn they feel good to belt out on the highway. Sometimes my father is crying, unshaven. Rattled and terrified. Sometimes it’s spring and the brightness of the daffodils silhouetted against the late March frost is spectacular; I pick as many as I can hold; I fill her whole casket with them.

It’s one of the hardest days I’ll ever have and I think my mind is trying to help me pre-cope with my own inevitable unraveling. Perhaps if I imagine it 100 different ways, one of them will be close to the truth and when the daffodils rear their rippled yellow heads, I won’t scream into the snow; I will have been here before.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the dialogue between imagining and forgetting. In truth, both feel predicated on possibility. Imagining lances all kinds of psychological blisters. Adults happily pretend they can forge the future. Self-help books insist that the Universe sees your pining and just might bend to your will.

So go ahead, conjure that piano, that Porsche, that perky-titted blonde; try things on! Change the furniture, the rage, the loss; try pesto instead of that alfredo sauce. Imagine the world being kinder, more just.

Imagine a world that feels less like purgatory—filled with indiscriminate killings, venomous spiders, leaking sphincters, inexplicable rashes, impossible cruelties to children and the environment—and more like a fraught family reunion! We’re all gathered here together for a few days…sort of by our own will! We should all do our best to take care of one another while we’re here and have a good time before heading our separate ways again.

But isn’t forgetting also a kind of imagining?

I’ve been reading a lot about amnesia recently. The Mayo Clinic breaks it down into three types: The first is retrograde amnesia (difficulty remembering the past, things that were once so familiar), and the second is anterograde, which is difficulty learning new information. These two are caused, of course, by a delectable variety of absolutely terrible things from brain swelling and alcohol abuse to seizures and tumors—you get the idea, the human body is nothing if not fragile as a paper mache egg…but the kind of amnesia I’m interested in is the more rare, dissociative, or psychogenic amnesia, induced by trauma.

The brain protects itself from remembering something awful. And in this void, in this once-was-pain space, we find another kind of imagining. A place where that thing never happened. You can imagine a life that isn’t marred by the inky edges of darkness; violence, death, depression. The mind, knowing what it does to your poor heart, to your central nervous system, to your bowels which run with ice when you remember—tidily blurs those edges until the memory is gauze.

It helps you imagine a better past. It is, of course, often not much more than a fleeting parlor trick—the memories course back and crush you—but it’s a lovely respite.

Isn’t forgetting a kind of imagining?
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My fascinating if mildly morbid research started because I couldn’t remember having sex with my ex boyfriend. I realize this is a trivial thing in many ways, but it started to eat at me. It was a small, but potent and disconcerting void. It was as though someone had come in with kindergarten scissors and started sloppily snipping those memories away. Like that very sad, very wonderful movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Did I bring the scissors? Did I wear a stocking on my head—my features mashed against the silk mesh—and start lopping out our love making?

…and then I realized I was relieved. In part. It is both the cruelest and most lovely of gifts. To forget his face and hands and feet. It’s like losing time—the minutes that made hours which made days and weeks—simply vanished.

I started looking at the few photographs I had of his naked body. I’ve always wondered if post break-up one is even allowed to do that…but I suppose if you remember their body in your mind it’s tantamount to the same thing, but I didn’t anymore. So was it a violation?

I started to scroll—that eerily familiar sensation of thumb-sliding, a gesture once awkward and unimaginable now ubiquitous—and stare at his limbs, trying to conjure what once felt like an extension of my own body.

I suppose my mind is willfully forgetting so I can move on. His whole body is a scar that’s blistered and ran and is just a bumpy ridge I run my fingers over in the dark; I can’t really feel or see it, there’s just a shape where he once was.

And now? I’m busy imagining more goodbyes; I’m imagining the void that my absence will bring to another person’s life. We’ve only just begun and I already need to forget.

To those who think, ‘Who cares?’ I say Emily’s truth matters.

flickr/Gresham College

I picture her writing by oil lamp in the dead of night, dressed in white, seated at a tiny desk. A wisp of red hair falls across her face, but she is lost in a world of words while the rest of the household, in fact all of Amherst, sleeps. Over 150 years later I am burning my own midnight oil with these words — her words — and the secret messages I think they encode won’t let me sleep.

“The Myth,” she was called; a “partially cracked poetess;” “Queen Recluse.” Even today, the adjectives “reclusive” and “eccentric” are frequently found near her name, along with admissions of bafflement. “No one knows why Emily Dickinson…lived reclusively at her family’s Homestead,” states the website for the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst. “No one knows just when or why Dickinson began to wear white,” Jane Wald, the museum’s executive director, writes on the New York Botanical Garden blog. “Emily’s refusal to publish work under her own name is a decision that has never been fully explained,” writes Helen Tope for Artsculture.

Agoraphobia, social phobia, lupus, epilepsy, and a vaguely defined eye ailment are several of the explanations offered today for Emily’s withdrawal from society. Many point to the numerous losses of loved ones she suffered as a possible cause of pain. As a physician, I submit that something besides grief also afflicted her, and that poetry was her way to “Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant.” I believe an explanation accounts for the myriad questions her life and work have generated: trauma.

As a physician I submit that something besides grief afflicted Emily Dickinson.

There has already been some scholarship exploring the idea of Emily as a trauma survivor. A research study published in Military Medicine noted evidence that she, along with other notable historical figures, “developed symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of repeated potentially traumatizing events.” A paper from the journal PsyArt finds in her poetry “a psychologically acute description of trauma as a distinctive emotional and cognitive state.”

In 1862, Emily herself wrote to mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.” The Emily Dickinson Museum website avers, “The cause of that terror is unknown”; one biographer suggests it was fear of blindness from her eye ailment.

But the beginning of this poem, written in the same year as this letter and invoking a similar image of singing to ward off fear, makes me doubt this explanation:

The first Day’s Night had come —

And grateful that a thing

So terrible — had been endured —

I told my Soul to sing —

She said her Strings were snapt —

Her Bow — to Atoms blown…

I read this poem with a sense of worry. A secret terror traumatic enough to destroy her “Soul?” I searched for signs of trauma in her writings, reading through a collection of her almost 1,800 poems, examining letters and biographies. I found dozens of trauma poems that appear to encode experiences of being violated, and I felt compelled to consider that she might have endured sexual assault and been silenced not only in her own time but also by generations of scholars afterward who could not or would not recognize such a possibility. I Googled “Emily Dickinson and trauma / sexual assault / PTSD.” I found scholarly works by other doctors with similar suspicions and by authors who saw what many readers seem unwilling to see.

I felt compelled to consider that Dickinson might have endured sexual assault and been silenced.

Emily explicitly describes a menacing situation in “In Winter in my Room,” a poem containing tell-tale phallic worm and snake imagery. She appears to have eluded the leering intruder at first, but in one of her “goblin poems” she relates:

– suddenly — my Riches shrank –

A Goblin — drank my Dew –

My Palaces — dropped tenantless –

Myself — was beggared — too –

Maybe it’s this incident that inspired the lines, “‘Twas here my summer paused… my sentence had begun…Go manacle your icicle / Against your Tropic Bride.”

More than once she refers to her trauma as a kind of “sentence,” and the perpetrator’s possession of her as a “claim.” She repeatedly explores images of entrapment and escape. She compares her home to a prison and an unnamed “kinsman” to a “dungeon.” Emily once welcomed her niece into her bedroom, gestured with an imaginary key to lock the door behind them, and said, paradoxically, “Mattie — Here’s freedom!” Was she thinking of this dreaded kinsman with that gesture?

What fortitude the Soul contains

That it can so endure

The accent of a coming Foot –

The opening of a Door –

Her brother’s paramour, Mabel Loomis Todd, was convinced the poem containing the above verse was meant for her, but might it refer instead to the approach of some menacing presence in Emily’s family? Who was the “the spoiler of our Home” whose footfall Emily dreaded, who committed a “Larceny of time and mind,” and of whom she writes, “He put the Belt around my life?”

Of all the poems that support the possibility that she might have suffered sexual assault, and possibly at home, “Rearrange a ‘Wife’s’ affection” is perhaps the most telling and disturbing, filled with notions of violence and self-harm in the first stanza; devastating shame in the second; “Trust entrenched in narrow pain,” “Anguish — bare of anodyne” in the third; and two recurring tropes in her poetry, the “crown” of wifely duty and an image from Calvary, in the fourth:

Burden — borne so far triumphant –

None suspect me of the crown,

For I wear the “Thorns” till Sunset –

Then — my Diadem put on.

She opens the last verse with, “Big my Secret but it’s bandaged — ”; it is both a wound and something to hide. In “A great Hope fell” she confesses of this wound that “The Ruin was within” and that there was “A not admitting of the wound / Until it grew so wide / That all my Life had entered it.”

Many poems — “She rose to His Requirement,” “Title divine is Mine,” “I live with Him — I see His face,” and “It would never be Common” — suggest ongoing trauma, specifically the trauma of being expected to be someone’s sexual partner against her will; they express despair at having to fulfill the obligations of a bride without the legitimacy and joy of real marriage. “But where my moment of Brocade?” she asks, and exclaims in outrage,

The Wife — without the Sign!

Acute Degree — conferred on me –

Empress of Calvary!

Royal — all but the Crown!

Betrothed — without the swoon..

Born — Bridalled — Shrouded –

In a Day –

The motif of the bridal dress as shroud is a clue to her choice to wear white. “A solemn thing — it was — I said — / A woman — white — to be –.” More than a practical convenience for a life spent at home, the legendary white dress was, I believe, Emily’s silent protest. If she was going to be forced to play the role of bride, she would dress as one, and reclaim symbolically the purity represented in the dress’s whiteness while expressing the sorrow of a death shroud worn forever.

That she had frequent fantasies of death, no reader could deny. Survivors of sexual assault often experience suicidal ideation, unspeakable pain, guilt, shame, self-loathing, grief, depression, feelings of impurity, and ongoing fear. All these permeate Emily’s oeuvre. So many of her poems are imbued with shame, guilt, secrecy, dread, and unbearable memory that one could almost open her complete works to any page to find mention of them. “I’m ashamed — I hide — / What right have I to be a bride.” “I am afraid to own a Body — / I am afraid to own a Soul.” “Savior! I’ve no one else to tell — / And so I trouble thee.” “There is a pain — so utter — / It swallows substance up — / Then covers the Abyss with Trance — / So Memory can step Around — across — upon it.”

The Stories We Tell About Sexual Assault — And The Stories We Don’t

In “Remembrance has a rear and front,” Emily depicts memory as a house with many rooms, including a deep Cellar, then cries out in the chilling last lines, “Leave me not ever there alone / Oh thou Almighty God!” In a manuscript at Harvard’s Houghton Library, she appears to have crossed out these lines and replaced them with ones more vague, changing the character of the verse entirely. I believe the original outcry reflects her state of mind more faithfully.

Is it just coincidence that in 1862 she wrote 366 poems compared to only 52 in 1858, or that in the 1860s her seclusion became permanent? It seems quite likely that something terrible happened to Emily Dickinson. In a world where she would have had no recourse to therapy, medication, or even to validation, she wrote incessantly, I believe, in an effort to save her own soul, like a drowning person treading water desperately trying to stay afloat.

It seems quite likely that something terrible happened to Emily Dickinson.

I recently went on a literary pilgrimage to the Dickinson Homestead. I saw Emily’s room and a replica of her white dress, held facsimiles of her poems, visited her grave. Emily was presented by the museum as a romantic figure, the reclusive genius with a strong will and intense passions, writing transcendent, groundbreaking poetry about beautiful things while living an anonymous life, tending plants in her conservatory and baking in the kitchen. I had the sense that visitors and staff alike were content with this summation of her life and disinclined to disturb its surface.

Many readers don’t want the idealized Emily of their imaginations marred by ugly possibilities. They accept the poet who wrote that “hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul” but aren’t comfortable with the woman who feared that hope “might intrude upon… blaspheme the place / Ordained to Suffering.” I agree she was a deep-feeling poet writing in seclusion about flowers and birds, but some of those nature poems, like “A Bee his burnished Carriage,” are less idyllic than they seem.

The Many Faces Of Trauma

I asked one staff member what she thought of Terence Davies’ recent biopic on Dickinson, A Quiet Passion. “It was too dark,” she said. “Our Emily was happy.” I guess the party line at the museum is to focus on the Emily who baked cakes for the neighborhood kids and wrote about sunsets and daisies, but I strongly feel this denial continues the miscarriage of justice her self-imposed reclusiveness forced her to endure during her lifetime.

I shall not murmur if at last

The ones I loved below

Permission have to understand

For what I shunned them so –

Divulging it would rest my Heart

But it would ravage theirs…

She wanted death to bring redemption, justice, and answers. She looked for the crown of forced wifely duty to be transformed into “such a crown / As Gabriel — never capered at — / …Sufficient Royalty!” For all her refusal to partake of any earthly institutions of faith, she had a relationship with Christ that allowed her to believe:

I shall know why — when Time is over –

And I have ceased to wonder why –

Christ will explain each separate anguish

In the fair schoolroom of the sky –

We do have some answers, because she gave them to us, hiding the truth in plain sight. Unlike scholar Robert Weisbuch, who warns against the so-called “biographical fallacy,” I believe what poet Adrienne Rich articulated in her classic essay on Dickinson: “It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment, that explodes in poetry.” Emily herself wrote, “Split the Lark, and you’ll find the Music.” As I read Emily’s poetry I see circumstantial evidence that explains to my mind why she withdrew, why her white dress was important, why she wrote so much, why she would not publish in her own name during her lifetime, and perhaps even who hurt her so deeply. Unspeakable trauma could explain it all — possibly even her mysterious eye ailment, for which her Harvard specialist documented no physical findings.

Absent the discovery of a secret drawer or floor board stuffed with confessional prose by Emily Dickinson, we will likely never know the exact source of possible trauma. Viewed through the lens of medicine, however, her known writings provide compelling evidence that this trauma arose from sexual assault, and I believe it’s important to consider this possibility not only as a matter of medical and historical honesty, but also for the sake of justice and human connection. Openness to such a tragic consideration potentially allows her poems to function as a salve and source of hope for survivors of such abuse.

We do have some answers, because Dickinson gave them to us, hiding the truth in plain sight.

To those who think, “Who cares?” I say Emily’s truth matters. Today, over 130 years after her death, women and the atrocities they suffer are still dismissed, diminished, disbelieved, denied, silenced, or scoffed at. The lasting power of Emily’s writing is power taken back, albeit in cipher and secrecy, transforming the poet into a prophet — a mouthpiece — for women across time, even if she felt silenced in her own time.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain,” she wrote. That her foreshortened, pained life was not lived in vain, we can be absolutely sure.

Read the first lines of the selected trauma poems of Emily Dickinson here.

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Traumatized And Trans: We Are Allowed To Be All Versions Of Ourselves At Once

I’m willing to fight for a world that honors all traumas, all bodies, and all stories. Are you?

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By xoài phạm

I want to start this by noting that I am by no means an expert on the study of trauma. I am, however, an expert of my own lived experiences. I am taking this opportunity to shed light on a topic that is rarely highlighted.

I don’t believe there is a “right” or “wrong” answer when it comes to trauma. There are power dynamics that are complex; fitting things neatly into a binary never serves us. This dialogue between trauma and our gender and sexuality is unique for every individual, relationship, and cultural context.

Here’s What We Know

Here’s what we know about trauma: It almost always changes us.

As all of our experiences mold us into who we are, so does trauma. Some people live with the psychological impacts of this trauma through PTSD, for example. Most people deal with their trauma in ways that can’t be categorized. I witness this within my family, as people who emerged from American imperialism and civil war in Vietnam.

Through trauma, our relationship to the world changes.

Much of the trauma that I experienced as a feminine child assigned male at birth led me to build a guardedness and vigilance when it came to my surroundings.

Much of the trauma that I experienced as a feminine child assigned male at birth led me to build a guardedness and vigilance when it came to my surroundings.

Just as that trauma shaped who I was on a fundamental level, it shaped the parts of me that are relational to my world.

My gender identity and expression is in flux as it relates to my history, my culture, the language I have available to me, and the worlds I live in. But this idea isn’t represented in most understandings of gender that are presented in mass media.

Lady Gaga has made the phrase “born this way” famous; it has led to the idea that all LGBTQIA+ people experience their identities the same, despite the fact that gender and sexuality are two related, but completely different things. Most trans people are represented as being in the “wrong” body, as being born with a discrepancy. This narrative is certainly true for many trans people, but it is not the only narrative. The way it has become the dominant narrative has led to the idea that all people were born into their gender identity.

As A Trans Woman, I’ve Seen Nerd Culture’s Misogyny From Both Sides

I am an advocate for people owning their story, but I have questions.

How is one born into an identity that they can’t articulate? How can one be born into an identity without knowing what exactly they’re identifying with?

What I’m getting at is that people like to simplify trans narratives to the point where they feel disingenuous and even dangerous. It reduces us to more tropes that nourish feel-good liberals.

The Problem with Singular Narratives

I surely was not born trans. I was born into a world that punished me for acting the way I acted.

I moved through the labels — straight, then gay, then trans — because I was figuring shit out. It took me almost two decades to begin to understand and resolve my feelings with a world that wanted to attack me constantly.

I wasn’t born with gender dysphoria. But I certainly developed it over the years as I reconciled my body with white-washed, traditional ideas of femininity. And on top of that, I had to cling to what could provide even the smallest amount of safety as a trans girl.

There were a lot of traumas — from sexual violence and from enacting masculinity for years — that took me down to road to trans womanhood.

There were a lot of traumas — from sexual violence and from enacting masculinity for years — that took me down to road to trans womanhood. It was not a cut-and-dry process. It was not a M-to-F 60 Minutes special.

Saying that I always knew who I was would be dishonest, but I think sometimes we have to be strategically dishonest to get what we need — just as when trans people have had to prove that they have dysphoria to a cis doctor by spitting out a story of suffering that was delicious and easy to consume.

I think the move to say that our transness comes natural to us, something outside of our control, is strategic for some. The state of trans people’s lives is no joke. We are attacked in health care, education, and the workplace. We are under attack by law enforcement, civilians, politicians, and those who are meant to nurture us.

It’s a wonder how trans people trust anyone.

Support Diverse Journalism — Become A Member Of The Establishment

It’s logical that so many trans people attempt to take our lives. This is especially true for transfeminine people and even more so for Black transfeminine folks.

Jamie Lee Wounded Arrow, 28. Mesha Caldwell, 41. JoJo Striker, 23. Jaquarrius Holland, 18. Tiara Richmond, 24. Chyna Doll Dupree, 31. Ciara McElveen, 26. Alphonza Watson, 38. Chay Reed, 28. Brenda Bostick, 59. Sherrell Faulkner, 46. Kenne McFadden, 27. Kendra Marie Adams, 28. Ava Le’Ray Barrin, 17.

Take a moment to read these names. They were people who had dreams, aspirations, families, loved ones, fears, and hopes. If you search up the cause of death, most of them were murdered by gunshot or stab wounds. The viciousness of trans deaths symbolizes exactly how deliberate and malicious these killings are.

And these are just the reported murders. There are possible unreported deaths due to the body not being identified or the body being reported with the wrong name and gender. I am certain some trans deaths simply go unnoticed.

With the level of danger that many trans people endure every day, coupled with the seductive ‘American Dream’ that so many marginalized groups desire, the ‘born this way’ narrative could be about safety.

With the level of danger that many trans people endure every day, coupled with the seductive “American Dream” that so many marginalized groups desire, the “born this way” narrative could be about safety.

The logic goes: If we talk about ourselves in a way that makes us easier to understand — ultimately less human — maybe people will be comfortable enough to give us the dignity we should have had in the first place. If we neatly package ourselves in ways that don’t leave any room for scrutiny, we can be the perfect models of oppressed peoples.

So when people pull out the trauma from the formation of identity that people go through, it’s so that there’s little room for pathology.

Prior to the passing of Obamacare, health care providers could refuse services to trans people because they considered transness a pre-existing condition.

There’s a relationship between trans people and trauma that makes sense — denying it is strategic because trans people are pathologized simply for being trans in the first place.

What We Should Strive For

I wish we lived in a world where all trans people’s narratives held equal weight. But the reality is that some trans narratives are simply more appealing — even among trans people.

There is so much trauma among trans people that ignoring it is not just dangerous, it’s also self-defeating.

There is so much trauma among trans people that ignoring it is not just dangerous, it’s also self-defeating.

Dissociating ourselves from pathology may be strategic in the short-term, but it only reinforces ableism — the idea that only certain bodies are worth respect and dignity. Trans justice should be unconditional, and should be tied with all liberatory movements, including the fight against ableism.

Just as so many trans people live with trauma, many trans people live with mental illness. Trauma and mental illness need to be included in trans narratives. We shouldn’t be striving to be respectable. We should be striving to be as honestly human as possible. The “crazy” trans person is just as important to me as the cookie-cutter Barbie doll trans person.

Trans people are allowed to be more than just trans.

Trans people are also racialized people who experience trauma from slavery, colonialism, and other forms of state terrorism. Trans people are also low-income people who navigate alternative economies. They’re also parents and artists and athletes and all the things that people don’t imagine trans people doing.

We are not just what people see on TV or magazines.

The reason I’m compelled to argue for our right to claim our traumas is because dissociating our traumas from our identities can be a way to dehumanize us in a world that needs no help doing so.

The reason I’m compelled to argue for our right to claim our traumas is because dissociating our traumas from our identities can be a way to dehumanize us in a world that needs no help doing so.

I learned so much about other people when I gave myself permission to be all versions of myself at all times.

What I hope for, what I’m willing to fight for, is a world that honors all bodies, and all stories. Including those of trans people who are supposedly hard to love because they dare to be human. I love us.

This article originally appeared on Everyday Feminism. Republished here with permission.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/i-changed-my-name-after-i-was-raped-97dcd7dd70a6/ Sun, 13 Aug 2017 11:43:46 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3416 Read more]]> After a serious trauma, some survivors find comfort and empowerment by creating a new identity.

By Alaina Leary

Content Note: Rape, Sexual Assault

This story originally appeared on Narratively, a digital publication and creative studio focused on ordinary people with extraordinary stories — get thee to more amazing tales on the new face of adoptive parents, a series on paperless people, and clandestine love.

A s I heard my bank’s customer service representative repeat my first name over and over while trying to help me solve my minor issue, I hated the way the two syllables sounded. It almost hurt my ears.

“I’m going to put you on hold for a minute, okay, Lisa?” the representative asked me in a cheerful voice, hoping to reassure me that they were handling the situation. “I’m just going to speak to my supervisor and see what we can do about resolving this for you Lisa.”

“Yes, okay,” I said through gritted teeth, holding my cell away from my face and turning on the speaker function so I could grab a glass of milk and breathe a few times before she returned, hopefully with news that she could waive the newly implemented monthly checking fee. I wanted to call through the phone, “Can you stop using my name, please?”

People generally love having their first name used when they’re in a conversation, but I flinched when mine came up. When I hung up the phone, I opened up a Facebook tab and changed my first name from “Lisa” to “Alaina,” a name I’d recently joked to my girlfriend about taking as my own.

Once the change was finalized, I panicked. No one would understand what I’d done. How would they find me? Should I think about this first? Facebook’s policy wouldn’t allow me to change my name back to the old one, so I was stuck writing an explanatory post letting everyone in my life know that I’d be socially and legally changing my first name.

This wasn’t the first time I’d considered changing my name. I brought it up to my mom when I was around seven years old, and I explained to her that I didn’t like my first name and I wanted her to let me change it. I never ended up doing that. It wasn’t until I was a freshman in college, when I survived a rape at an on-campus college party, that the change felt necessary. It was no longer about feeling like my name didn’t fit or not liking the sound of its pronunciation — this was about survival.

It was no longer about feeling like my name didn’t fit or not liking the sound of its pronunciation — this was about survival.
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Even though I was only semi-conscious during the assault, I remembered distinct parts of being raped: My rapist’s hands around my throat, looking up at the ceiling above her twin XL bed, the sound of “Save Tonight” by Eagle-Eye Cherry playing faintly in the background, the empty bottles of UV Blue and Captain Morgan on my rapist’s dresser, and her voice as she repeated my name in a low rumble, almost like she was trying to lull me into complacency.

After the rape, my name felt like a reminder of the assault, particularly when it was used in romantic and sexual contexts. Even professors calling on me in class and customer service representatives verifying my information sometimes made me dissociate; it felt almost like I’d left my own body and was watching myself through a camera lens or from underwater or in a hazy dream. I was never officially diagnosed, but my therapist in college and I talked about the possibility that I have PTSD from the assault. I had a panic attack at the first college house party I went to after it happened, because seeing my female friends drunk off cheap liquor in red cups with guys touching their butts without asking made me wish the world would open up and swallow me whole.

When someone who looked like my rapist, all freckles and red hair, bumped into me on a city bus, I almost started crying. And I’d be in the midst of making love with my partner when the sound of her sensual voice crying out my name would leave me shaking, gripping her back tightly with my nails and trying to pretend I could fight the instinct to hide. We’d always been into role playing in bed, but I requested acting as someone else more times than I can count after my assault just because I didn’t want to hear my name said during sex.

Just over two years after I was raped, changing my name felt like a logical next step in overcoming my trauma. I’d made the conscious decision to work on my reactions to sensory impressions like sounds, noises, and imagery that I associated with the assault, and I could now blast “Save Tonight” in my 1998 dark green Buick Century to drown out the sound of Western Massachusetts potholes scraping my tires without even a brief nod to the March night when I was assaulted.

I could drink UV Blue and Captain Morgan at any college party I went to without hesitation. I still wasn’t exactly comfortable with someone else’s hands on my neck, but that was a trigger I wasn’t eager to break. My name was the final frontier. No matter how much practice I had enjoying consensual romance with my girlfriend, who was respectful and looked to me for guidance, I couldn’t shake the feeling of dread that hearing my name brought.

Rachel Kazez, therapist and founder of All Along — a Chicago-based organization that helps patients find appropriate mental health care — says that a name change, whether legal or social or both, can be a powerful tool for survivors. “During a trauma, someone’s agency is very quickly taken from them. Getting that sense of control back is really important,” she says. “If there’s a trauma that occurs where the perpetrator was using the person’s name, they might want to go by a nickname or use a middle name instead.”

Kazez explains that survivors need to remember that a name change or another quick and dramatic change won’t fix the trauma or erase what happened. As long as the survivor is working on healing long-term, however, a name change can be an aspect of that process. “Our name is one of the first things we use to introduce ourselves to people,” she says. “It’s about control, choice, and reclaiming yourself.” Kazez also believes that the drastic shift involved in a name change — suddenly going by a new name — can mirror the suddenness of experiencing trauma, and might be particularly cathartic for some survivors.

When I first made the change, part of me hoped that adopting a new name would erase the night I was raped, and the memories associated with my rapist.
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When I first made the change, part of me hoped that adopting a new name would erase the night I was raped, and the memories associated with my rapist. “I think on some level I hoped the perfect name would unlock something for me, open a door away from myself into a safer place,” says Isobel O’Hare, a poet and essayist who changed her full name, first, middle, and last, during the middle of her MFA program after she survived childhood sexual abuse and adult abusive relationships. “I wondered what it would do to me to have this second name, whether I’d simply chosen another form of dissociation rather than dealing head-on with reality. Now I feel differently. I think choosing a name for myself gave me enough distance from the past to heal without becoming untethered. It was me claiming my own space and choosing my creative self over addiction and stagnation.”

Every time I did have to remind someone to call me Alaina, it was like asserting my consent in small daily situations: This is my name, and you’re going to call me by it. When my cousin and her husband visited from Texas, he struggled to get my name right at a family party at my aunt and uncle’s house. The first few times, I made eye contact and gently reminded him, “It’s Alaina.” He’d correct himself, use Alaina, and then a sentence later, make the mistake again. I started to teeter on the edge of panic, like I often did when people dead named me — used my former name without my consent — multiple times in a row.

So I focused on the grandfather clock in the corner of the room and made minimal eye contact, nodding and saying, “Mhm” instead of further the conversation. For the first year or so after the change, I wore a bracelet with my name on it every single day. That was my reminder that, no matter what other people said, my name was my choice. I looked at that bracelet every time he slipped up. I wasn’t rude, but I didn’t give him any open opportunities to use the wrong name.

The next time he saw me, several months later, he started the conversation by calling me Alaina and didn’t make a single mistake.

The first few weeks and months of my social name change were the rockiest. As resolute as I felt — I sent in the required legal paperwork within a week of making the choice — it felt impossible to get people I’d known for years to break their habits. I was exhausted by constantly reminding people, “It’s Alaina now,” and re-introducing myself every time I ran into a former classmate, old friend of the family, or distant relative. My short explanation felt paltry in comparison to the magnitude of this decision: “I guess it’s been awhile since I’ve seen you, but just to let you know, I made the decision to change my name to Alaina in June of this year. I’ve never felt comfortable with my old name, and I would really appreciate it if you can call me Alaina going forward. I’m happy to remind you politely if you’d prefer.”

Sana Chandran, a licensed clinical psychologist in the Bay Area of California, changed her last name after surviving family trauma when her father stole her identity and had an affair outside of his marriage. “I needed to emotionally and legally distance myself,” she says. She took her mother’s maiden name. “Even though it broke my father’s heart, I had to remain true to myself and carry a name that I was most proud of. I feel good about my choice.”

I was lucky that none of my friends or family members objected to my name change. It took my dad a few days to adjust, but after we had a discussion about how hearing my name was difficult for me, he was willing to try his best.

I Am Not A ‘Rape Victim’ — I Contain Multitudes

“I was worried that my classmates would think I was pretty self-absorbed to expect them to start calling me something completely different,” O’Hare says. “I was surprised when they not only adopted the new name, but did so with great joy like they were traveling with me on an important voyage.”

One of my best friends, Krista, is a soft-spoken introvert whose life is often defined by habits, such as how she leaves her house at exactly the same time every day in order to be “the right amount of early” to her obligations. “I’ve been practicing your name,” was one of the first things she told me when she saw me after my announcement. “If I slip up, I’m really sorry. I’ve been repeating it to myself for weeks.” She didn’t make a mistake once.

As the years passed, fewer and fewer people referred to me by the wrong name, and when it did happen, it was so occasional that it didn’t ignite a floodgate of panic exploding inside me, it didn’t make me dissociate to escape painful memories of my assault. Watching my friends and family get it right — and seeing them correct others, like when one of my best friends, Desiree, a future attorney who respected my legal decision the moment I announced it, would assertively remind her forgetful Portuguese mother that she can’t call me “Lisa” anymore because that’s not my name — made my heart sing.

After a period of adjustment, my name no longer feels like a proclamation of reclaiming my consent or my identity, it just feels like who I am.
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Initially, I worried that my name change wouldn’t change my life, and in many ways, it didn’t. After a period of adjustment, my name no longer feels like a proclamation of reclaiming my consent or my identity, it just feels like who I am. And hearing my former name doesn’t often fill me with dread; instead, I’ll stare blankly and forget to respond because I hear “Lisa,” and think, “Who are they talking to?”

Read more great tales over at Narratively.

Unexamined bias and privilege play massive roles in not only who gets to diagnose mental health disorders, but who defines their criteria.

I grew up in a household full of people who were emotionally volatile and abusive. At any time, for no particular reason, I could be screamed at, guilted, shamed, or bullied — sometimes all four at once. I survived this by adapting, as humans do, to my environment, becoming hyper-vigilant, avoidant, and very anxious. I walked on eggshells at all times, constantly analyzing every slight change in a person’s facial expression, body language, and tone of voice. My alert level was always at orange.

Now, in adulthood—and generally surrounded by people who are not terrible—these habits and impulses still interfere with my attempts to build a happy life. Unfortunately, they’re very hard to break, and my alert level can’t just be turned down. I am, officially, mentally ill.

If this all sounds familiar to you, I’m not surprised. I’ve met many people who have had very similar experiences and now suffer from anxiety and/or depressive disorders. It’s to the point that the people in my life who don’t struggle with mental illness are out of the norm.

Speaking of “out of the norm”… Donald Trump is president of the United States.

For the past few months, nothing has seemed normal. He breaks well-established political norms on a regular basis. He says terrible and blatantly cruel things. He lies all the time. He puts completely incompetent people into positions of power.

In short, he’s not behaving at all like he should.

Speaking of “out of the norm”… Donald Trump is president of the United States.
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And as a result, since his rise to leading Republican presidential candidate, the thinkpieces and compulsive conjecturing on his mental health have been published with increasing frequency and alarm. Paul Krugman has called Trump “obviously mentally ill” on Twitter, #DiagnoseTrump campaigns and petitions have gone viral, and last month California congressman Ted Lieu made news when he pushed for legislation requiring a psychiatrist in the White House.

In attempts to make sense of Trump’s abnormal behavior, journalists and assorted other media figures have scrambled to ask any and every person with any kind of background in psychology what they thought about Trump’s mental state. Such inquiries and articles have only intensified since Trump took over the country’s helm.

To a point, I get it. The United States appears to be in chaos and human beings have a need to make sense of things. Further, mental illness has a long history of being used as a handy scapegoat to explain Bad Things. In particular, it’s been increasingly used to explain away the mass shootings committed overwhelmingly by white men. Before that, it was routinely used to describe anybody who committed a heinous enough violent act to get in the news.

The president is behaving in a way that lies far outside the boundaries of what we conceive of as “normal,” particularly for a person holding the highest office in the land. His actions are scary, and collectively as a society we are attempting to make sense of something that seems to make little recognizable sense.

Some Arguments Against Calling Trump ‘Crazy’ Do Added Harm

Around Inauguration Day, speculation that Trump has Narcissistic Personality Disorder seemed to reach a fever pitch. But Dr. Allen Frances, M.D.—who contributed to developing the criteria for the disorder in the the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — weighed in, tweeting that Trump does not fit the criteria for the illness as he is not impaired. Highlighting his expertise in this area, Frances claimed that Trump was “bad, not mad.”

Indeed, it is difficult to say that someone is impaired when they can reach one of the greatest achievements in the world.

This got me thinking. What is mental illness in a society where someone like Donald Trump could become the U.S. president? How can someone who behaves so badly—so consistently inappropriately and erratically—be considered mentally healthy, or at least mentally competent enough to become the leader of the world’s biggest superpower?

It is difficult to say that someone is impaired when they can reach one of the greatest achievements in the world.
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I posed these questions to Dr. Allen Frances himself over email. His response smacked me right out of the bad path I was going down of framing Trump’s behavior in terms of mental health.

“It is a great, and frequently made, error to equate bad behavior with mental illness. The mentally ill only rarely behave badly and people who behave badly are rarely mentally ill. And as many people have pointed out, talking about bad behavior as though it’s an inevitable quality of the mentally ill does us a lot of harm.”

This was certainly true in my experience. As a kid and as a teen, I was so terrified of getting in trouble that I never so much as shoplifted a candy bar, I didn’t try weed or alcohol until I was in college, and I drove myself into the ground to get nearly all A’s throughout middle and high school.

Still, concerning Trump, my initial question hadn’t been answered. What does “mental illness” even mean in a society that elected Donald Trump to the presidency? What is it in a society that’s sick enough to have put an administration into power that ticked off most of the hallmarks of fascism off in less than a month?

New research into stress and trauma is leading a number of psychologists to believe that many incidents of mental illness are the result of behaviors and stress responses learned during traumatic incidents and/or abusive or highly stressful environments that are maladaptive in one’s larger society.

Again, this resonates with my own experience. I now work in a place where I have never been treated badly or screamed at or even scolded, yet I still feel like I have to walk on eggshells. Despite all evidence that it’s a safe place, I have trouble asking for help or admitting to making any kind of mistake, which impedes my ability to work.

The role of trauma and stress in mental illness formation was further explored by psychology professors Bruce J. Ellis and Marco Del Giudice in the 2013 paper “Beyond allostatic load: Rethinking the role of stress in human development.” In it, they argue that the standard idea that the intense stress responses learned in a volatile childhood environment result in toxic and maladaptive behavior patterns in adulthood is too simplified. They explore the idea that what are considered to be “maladaptations” could instead be viewed as differences in skill types—and at times even represent advantages:

“…maltreated children score lower than comparison groups on standard tests of intelligence and executive functions. Yet such children may show enhanced ability to detect, learn, and remember stimuli that are ecologically relevant to them. This includes enhanced perceptual sensitivity to angry facial clues, increased anticipatory monitoring of the environment in the context of interpersonal hostility, greater accuracy in identifying facial expressions of anger based on degraded visual information, greater speed in accurately labeling fearful faces, enhanced recall of distracting aggressive stimuli, and greater accuracy in identifying an adult in a photo line-up with whom they previously had a stressful interaction.”

Sounds like me.

But, of course, not all stress is caused by family. What if all of society is a highly stressful environment for someone? What about, to name just a few groups, black Americans, trans people, and Latinx immigrants? Could they ever be considered “truly” mentally ill while living in a society that openly treats them far worse than my family treated me? If members of various marginalized populations are highly anxious, stressed, suspicious, or even hostile all the time, is that not a normal, adaptive response to the threats they’re under just by existing?

Why I’m Done Being A ‘Good’ Mentally Ill Person

To glean more insight on the matter, I spoke with sociologist Dr. Nancy Heitzeg, author of The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Education, Discipline, and Racialized Double Standards, on how white privilege interacts with the diagnosis of mental illness. In her text, she demonstrates how white people tend to be “medicalized,” or diagnosed with some kind of illness that renders them not responsible for their actions — let us not forget the infamous case of “affluenza” in which a wealthy teen was sentenced to rehab after killing four people on a drunken joy ride — while people of color, particularly black individuals, are “criminalized.”

In the introduction of her book, she says:

“This trend toward criminalization for people of color and medicalization for whites provides the larger socio-political context for the school-to-prison pipeline as youth of color, particularly Black males, are increasingly ‘criminalized’ within the context of schools, while their white counterparts are ‘medicalized’ for the same disruptive behaviors.”

Dr. Heitzeg expanded on this in our conversation, explaining how even when black and other marginalized children are diagnosed with illnesses rather than being immediately funneled into the juvenile justice system, a diagnosis is more likely to function as a stigma than as a way to excuse behavior.

“When you look at black children, there’s a tendency to label them with learning disabilities and behavior disorders or disturbances,” she said. This kind of diagnosis only serves to label them as ‘problem children’ who should be given up on, rather than sick kids who just need some extra help. “The medical model is helpful for some but can be a double whammy for others.”

This further complicates things. If there’s so much bias in how people are diagnosed, how can we know who is ill and who is not? What about the fact that many of the people who do the diagnosing are privileged white people? How much privilege do the people writing the criteria for diagnosis have?

Dr. Heitzeg’s response to that question told me enough: “Don’t get me started.”

If there’s so much bias in how people are diagnosed, how can we know who is ill and who is not?
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It’s not just about race, either. Women, for instance, are often misdiagnosed with personality disorders for being “overdramatic” (thanks to a generous dose of medical misogyny from the historically male-dominated field of psychiatry) and autistic kids are often initially misdiagnosed with mental illness. And it’s important to keep in mind that higher level mental illnesses such as personality disorders and schizophrenia are significantly more stigmatized than my mood disorders.

In the broader social justice community, talk of mental illness still seems to be fairly surface level, rarely taking these many nuances into account. Mental illness is considered to be an axis of oppression, and neurotypicals — people without mental illnesses, autism, or any kind of “intellectual” disability — are the oppressors. But I feel a bit weird talking about “those neurotypicals” because who actually is neurotypical when our system of diagnosing mental illness is so imprecise and so subject to prejudice?

Not only can you not tell if someone has a mental illness by looking at them or how they behave, they themselves may be mentally ill and not know it. And some of us who have been labeled with an illness may in fact not have one, either because we were misdiagnosed for being female and upset, because we’re actually autistic but present differently because we’re not white boys, or even because we’ve fully recovered but can’t shake the stigma.

So is Donald Trump mentally ill? That’s not the conversation we should be having.

We should be talking about his white-supremacist-backed bigot horror machine administration and how his policies threaten the lives and livelihood of millions of people globally. And while we’re at it, we also need to have a deeper conversation about what mental illness is, including how it’s defined, who gets to define it, and how that definition changes with privilege — or a lack thereof. It needs to be a lot more than just “don’t use words like cr*zy” and “don’t compare us to Donald Trump.”

Although seriously, please, stop doing that.

Content warning: suicidal ideation

Last week, I did something I hadn’t done since coming out of my last mental health crisis: I took all the sharp knives, razors, and scissors in sight and hid them in a plastic bag under the sink. Out of sight, out of mind, or so my magical thinking goes. I have bipolar disorder and struggle with complex-PTSD. Often I want to die; last week and this week were not unlike many others.

Like many, I have found the American elections triggering and excruciating. I have sat for days fixated on a feed of pain and terror scrolling before my eyes. I see the flood of calls for action and organized resistance: the ever-growing lists of numbers to call and email (senators, governors, mayors, the media, etc.) and organizations to donate to; the petitions to call out family members and friends; the protests and rallies to attend; and everything else presented with the same level of urgency. My mind fragments with information overload: the guides, the think pieces, the memes, the latest reports of fuckduggery.

But how can I be of any help to any cause when I’m truly mentally sick? When a good portion of my time and energy has been focused on resisting the desire to kill myself? How do I resist feelings of worthlessness and despair when I feel worthless in supporting the cause right now?

As someone who often battles with suicidal ideation, I’m a bit “old hat” when it comes to strategizing new ways to resist self-destructive thought patterns. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had to navigate a storm of emotions and combat feelings that have threatened to pull me under while still finding ways to contribute where and when I can.

For those who contend with suicidal ideation as a lived, perhaps daily, reality, below is a guide to engagement and self-care, as well as a few approaches to activism.

Have Empathy For Yourself

I have, first and foremost, forced myself to acknowledge this fact: I am sick. I am limited. Even when I’m feeling mentally well, my health is so precarious that I’m one triggering phone call or email away from plunging back into suicidal ideation. It is imperative that I prioritize my mental health, even when the drum calls are banging otherwise.

But when you are mentally ill, prioritizing one’s mental health in the face of calamity can feel like the ultimate form of selfishness, leading to a shame spiral marked by feelings of worthlessness, particularly in times of great need for social action.

I have to ask myself, do I extend the same judgmental attitudes toward others working in the cause whom I admire? Is it reasonable for me to expect others to put their mental health so at risk by being on all the time? And if not, why do I apply this judgement to myself? Would I really want any of my activist friends to drive themselves to suicide? Can I not work on extending the same love and empathy I have for others towards myself?

I have to ask myself, do I extend the same judgmental attitudes toward others working in the cause whom I admire?
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Realize that active compassion for your illness is a form of resistance.

Resist Internalized Ableism

Understand that not all calls to action are directed at you, and resist descending into shame over not being in a position to do specific activities. When we see calls that are beyond our ability and means, rather than allow those messages to contribute to feelings of abject worthlessness, perhaps we need to allow that those calls are meant for those with the means to take action, who have been so far complacent.

There is a difference between those who haven’t called out racist/misogynistic/trans and homophobic family members because it is hard, awkward, and uncomfortable, and refusing to speak to abusive family members who are the source of trauma in which any conversation might trigger suicidal thoughts.

If using the phone sends you into a panic, understand that calling congress is not for you. Likewise if you are agoraphobic and can’t attend protests and rallies. When you are struggling with suicidal ideation, making room for these nuances and allowances for yourself can be the difference between life and death.

When battling fragmented identity, trauma, feelings of worthlessness, and suicidal ideation, it can be all too easy to project ableism inward (and outward as well). Resist the poisonous capitalistic concept that your value depends on productivity. Acknowledge that this often leads to counterproductive fronting and “good allyship” performativity even at the best of times.

Try reflecting on your intrinsic value. Keep reminding yourself: My life has value outside a lack of productivity. And this applies even when thinking about activist activities.

Keep reminding yourself: My life has value outside a lack of productivity.
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Reflect instead on how your struggles with mental illness bring perspectives and skills to the table that are unique. Do not underestimate the value of your empathy even at times when you cannot afford to act on it. The mentally-sick are well acquainted with having to contend with an overwhelming storm of emotions, which might be new terrain for many. Don’t discount your experience with your struggles. Even catastrophizing, kept in check, can be a positive skill, as it can help others imagine worst-case scenarios and plan contingencies for resistance.

Separate The Fragility Of Your Mental State From White Fragility

Having a mental illness does not give you a free pass on white fragility. Last week, at a time when I was feeling mentally fraught, a friend made a post calling out white people, and I have to admit I did feel hurt about being indirectly called out regarding some of my own recent behaviors (no, it was not safety pins). I also had to acknowledge that I was too sick in that moment to contend with those feelings of knee-jerk defensiveness, and had to resist taking up the space to act on how the post made me feel.

My mental health requires attention; my white tears do not. There is a difference between ignoring your problematic behaviors and persisting in them, and acknowledging that you might be too sick to address call-outs in this moment. At these times, it might be better to tap out for a little while to come back and reflect on how you can make transformative changes, and do better, when your mental health is a little less fragile. And while calls for succor to help alleviate anguish stemming from mental health issues are always appropriate, taking up the space of others, particularly people of color, to validate hurt feelings around your own problematic behaviors separate from your mental illness are not.

Map What You Can And Cannot Do

When simple tasks such as brushing my teeth or cracking open a Babybel cheese become unsurmountable, I have to acknowledge I can do very little, whether it is one of my worst days, worst weeks, or worst months. In those moments, even self-care looks like doing my best not to give into feelings of shame about crying in bed all day in the fetal position.

But not every day is my worst day. Some days, all I can do to offer support is to signal boost activist writers online. If the only thing you can do is retweet when you are too unwell to do otherwise, you have taken part. On better days, I can manage to write something. On good days, I can attend a protest, knowing I have to pace myself, I cannot go the distance, and I will have to bow out after an hour or two.

Sometimes it is easier to learn not to compare ourselves to others than to learn not to compare our most unwell self with our most well self. Map out a staggered checklist of things you can and can’t do based on the spectrum of your mental health. Celebrate even the tiniest of victories, like remembering to take your meds on bad days, assuring yourself that when you are well enough you can and will do more, no matter how insignificant that contribution might feel at the time.

What To Do When There Are No Good Days

There might be an endless stream of worst days. During the height of my last mental crisis, it felt particularly cruel to be called upon to stay on this earth because I was “needed” when I was battling the worst psychic pain.

Instead, I try to resist ideation around suicide as an act of martyrdom for the cause. It has been reported that a Neo-Nazi site has been encouraging its readers to troll targeted people into suicide. Resist adopting a strategy endorsed by the enemy by turning projections of their violence inwards.

Drawing upon all the resources you need is a form of activism in combatting ableism.
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Do not give into feelings of being too much of a burden when you are in deep despair and psychic pain because you imagine resources are better spent elsewhere with world conditions as they are. Reach out (I know how fucking hard this is, I know, I know). Make the calls to suicide hotlines. Or reach out to text or chat support if phone calls are too overwhelming. Understand that drawing upon all the resources you need is a form of activism in combatting ableism. Issues around mental health and suicide have value. YOU HAVE VALUE.

You have value today, you have value tomorrow, and you have value all the days to come.

Resources:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1–800–273–8255
Crisis Text Line