You Don’t Know Me
If you’re young, attractive, keep good shape, and don’t look like anything is wrong, you can’t possibly have any problems or struggles behind the scenes. If you open up and tell what it’s like to be you, sometimes you’re believed. Other times, you’re an attention seeking whore of sorts, who just wants validation. If you’re independent and strong and a woman, you can’t possibly deal with anything difficult. In fact, you could fall over, bleeding out with a knife in your chest, and a patriarchal male would glance down and say,
“I think the pain is just in your head.”
People are the kings and queens of aimless assumptions. Lately, I’ve wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, accompanied by my favorite “F” bomb with a really pronounced “ck” at the end:
“You don’t know me.”
Really, truly, you don’t know me. You know the version of me you want to know and no deeper. I am a project to be fixed; a problem to be rationalized.
I had a breaking point last week. I’m not sure if it was the multiple, unsolicited opinions over a recent health crisis, or sheer exhaustion from the stress of life. I’ve realized how unheard young people are when they’re struggling.
If you fix your hair, ink on some liquid eyeliner, smile, and happen to be young and female and good at some things in life, then you have absolutely nothing to complain about and nothing can possibly be eating you alive inside. Let’s not forget that there are problems way worse than yours, forever and always, and constantly something else more devastating and painful to trump whatever you are going through. The wars of your heart and treachorous seasons you’ve walked through don’t matter. If you’re young and independent and look pretty, you have no reason to cry. You have no reason to be anxious or depressed. You should just shut up and keep doing what you do best:
Being independent and young and pretty.
You’re strong, so you can’t possibly be weak. So just shut up and keep facading your inner turmoil in makeup, endless forced energy, and devotion to everyone else, and don’t forget to smile.
There are starving children, natural disasters, war, people bed ridden. How dare you, strong, independent, pretty woman, have the audacity to feel pain when it comes. If you’re young and strong and independent, you are an immortal goddess; a trophy wife incapable of any ounce of human suffering. Nothing can ever be wrong. You must be stainless steel; shiny and and polished and cleanable. You cannot be the red wine spilled on white carpet; blemished and stained and ugly.
You are not allowed to express how you actually feel. People will want so badly for you to open up and trust them and surrender your most vulnerable feelings. And the minute you do, they will try to fix you, like a hair out of place or a flake of dead skin to be picked off your face. You are invincible and deflective to the pressures of the world, strong woman. You have no reason to react the way you do. Even if your labs and clinical diagnostics give clinical evidence to your life skeptics, you’re still fine. Maybe you’d do better to carry a pocket size version of your labs and PDF file of your past trauma with names, dates, grotesque detail, and then you might be taken a bit more seriously.
They have been there, done that, so stop expressing what it’s actually like to be you, strong woman. Nothing you’ve experienced actually matters. None of it could possibly affect who you are today. You have the power to change and be someone new. If you break your leg and fumble around in a cast for a month, surely you should be able to walk with normal gait, no pain, and no altered physiological changes. Surely your open heart surgery wouldn’t require recovery, suture scars, and time to heal.
It’s the same for you, strong woman, who finds herself in a broken, desolate place.
Whatever you’re going through, it doesn’t matter.
Your life stress of trying to wear all the hats, juggle all the things, show up for everyone - including the 20+ unread texts - and do it in good spirits while running on sleep insomnia, doesn’t matter.
Your closeted health issues, collapse in your apartment floor with the worst seizure of your life, cocktail of brain scans and magic pills with a side effect of 3pm depressive numbness and new pile of medical debt, doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter that the weight of the world is on your shoulders.
Suck it up. You’re fine.
You have emotional indebtedness to others to pay off. You’d better show up with limitless capacity, answer every text within 24 hours, reciprocate every good deed done to you, and just get over everything.
Your vivid nightmares and sleep insomnia are clearly a spiritual issue. It has absolutely nothing to do with the chaos and circumstances out of your control, or the fact that your personal space was invaded in a really hostile way. It’s definitely not PTSD. Psychologists and therapists and psychiatrists are evil. You’d better get right with God and figure out what unforgiven sin is causing this. It’s definitely not outside circumstances you had no control over. It’s definitely not someone else’s actions or uncontrollable health issues causing distress and restless nights.
Somehow, it’s your fault for someone else’s harmful actions and it’s all a reflection on your faith. Maybe if you’d gone to church more, prayed more (5x a day?), read the Bible more (an entire chapter and hermeneutics course?) done something more, none of it would have happened.
Your sudden episode of seizures, sleep insomnia, and inescapable nightmares are also a spiritual issue. It’s somehow your fault for that too.
Everyone will unsolicitedly diagnose you by way of their own subjective opinions and judgments.
It really doesn’t matter if you slept until 1:30 PM, moved in with your parents for two weeks to be on night watch, and now have a bottle of anti-seizure medication as your evening routine.
You’re independent and pretty and strong, so you owe your inbox of 20+ people needing a reply, teachers, and everyone else not only an explanation, but 100% of yourself. And if you can’t give 100% right now, you will owe it to everyone later. Or, they will care for 5 minutes and then expect you to function as the independent, strong woman you should be. It doesn’t matter if you quite literally can’t think straight and thought you were having a stroke the night before and feels like something broke inside your head. It doesn’t matter that every episode felt like running a half marathon. You’re young. You’re fine. You’ll bounce back quick enough.
You need to be perfect, strong woman, because that is how you survive in the world.
Others have been more traumatized, experienced more tragedy, look more tragic, and extremities and tragedy are the gateway for more empathy. Remember, pain does not exist for you. No matter what you’ve gone through or are feeling, there is worse happening, and you should probably just shut up and keep being pretty and strong, because that’s what you do best.
The strong, independent, alpha woman is the ultimate passport to surviving life.
I’m sure that’s why Cheslie Kryst jumped a 60 story building.
Or why Norma Jeane became Marilyn Monroe and why Marilyn Monroe’s pills for survival became the pills that dug her own grave.
Maybe we love people for who we want them to be, or who they could be, or the idealized version in our heads.
But we don’t love their broken, shit version.
We know about them…but we don’t know them.
And you don’t know me.