Shouldn't Hurt

Love Shouldn’t Hurt            12/5/2016

Mariah Cronin

I remember when I was 13 (an unlucky number) and spent the day on the Cape with my best friend and her dad, who was my dad’s best friend. Before we got on the road I needed to go to the bathroom. I left the Port-A-Potty and walked down the parking lot towards them, me and my lanky barely-hit-puberty body in a creamsicle-orange floral Hollister bathing suit because that was the style of suburban Boston and it was on sale. We got in the car and my best friend (who’s mom is now dead from liver failure because she drank too much and The Government would not let her on the list for a new one) told me that her dad had ogled me from afar and asked, “who’s that?”, to which my dad replied, “that’s Mariah, you pervert”. But he didn’t really say the last part, although I wish he had. An embarrassing fumble for my friend’s dad, sure, but that was the end of the story for him, no questions asked. Hold your horses though, because the same cannot be said for me, the girl that was treated like the cliché piece of meat, a steak dangling before a stray dog’s eyes. Men are dogs, as I say.

Thus began the first of an unbearable number of occasions when I feel the nausea that begins where my shoulders meet my neck and rolls through my torso until I feel like I am going to vomit in an attempt to escape something that is inescapable.

(My friend’s dad is but the first of many who have tried to claim a stake on my body like a flag on the moon. Ethan led me into the back of his car when I was 15 and drunk for the second time. Bernardo’s epithet is my friend who raped me; one minute we were watching Eight Mile and the next he was on top of me. Matt, when I was 17 and already in Hell. The guy on Tinder who said, “One night with me and I’ll have you screaming like a harpooned whale”, as if equating sex with killing is supposed to turn me on. The man in Delhi who groped your friend, the boys in the truck who followed me around the block twice in suburban Boston, the men who drove next to me and my friend as we walked down the street in Minneapolis, the man in the liquor store in Vermont. The guy who groped me while I was walking down the street alone in France and made fun of my tone when I yelled “arrête”. The boy who tried to lock me in the coat room on New Year’s Eve until I kissed him. I blacked out before midnight.)

That day was also the beginning of an infinite loop of questions I asked myself, questions that are very similar to what police officers ask rape victims. Did I really have the right to feel offended? Wasn’t I wearing a string bikini to get men’s attention? Shouldn’t I take it as a complement? Wasn’t I asking for it?

I thought of dark solutions to these doubts. I could stop eating until I have no fat left to be spared for a great chest or a nice ass, or I could eat so much that I’d repel all men. But if my body is the only thing that matters, I thought, I might as well give the boys what they want. The numbness is not from trauma, it’s due to being a worthless piece of shit. I am nothing. I take up too much space.

Buddhists will tell you my chakras had been offset, psychologists will say that the same happened to the second rung of my hierarchy of needs. Nothing a little meditation or CBT couldn’t fix. I’m sure there are other theories but none can explain away the fact that my body, my arms and my legs and my face and my chest and my vagina, has been pulled apart and chewed up and spit out by other people, oftentimes by people that I trusted. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me more times than I can count on my hands… Shame on me.  

And so, to be scared out of your skin is not just an idiom for me. When you are driving on the highway for so long you lose track of who you are and where you are and what time it is and where you are going and where you are coming from, and although you stayed in your lane, you realize that you have not been paying attention for the last ten miles-- that is how I lived, but so much worse. My reality was so terrifying that my brain simply could not tolerate it, the only thing it could do was disconnect my mind from my body. Such is a survival mechanism. Either watch life happen to me from three feet above or want to kill myself.

While the dizziness that preempts dissociation still arises from time to time, I have not had a full-blown IamgoingcrazyIamgoingtodieIneedtogotoMcLeanrightnow hyperventalating-while-sobbing panic attack in months. My thanks go to self-help books, my therapist, and WebMD for teaching me grounding exercises that help tether myself to reality. Focus on the feeling of my feet on the floor, my ass in the chair. Run my fingers over something soft or clutch ice cubes until the frigid cold curbs the compulsion to glide a pocketknife over my wrist just to feel something. A side effect of not being treated like a person is, unsurprisingly, depersonalisation.