Anonymous’ recent article reminded me of an old conflict that haunted me for quite a long time. Like Anonymous, I, too, have had the lingering feeling that something is wrong with me, that I have an inherent problem that impedes my ability to interact with other people. I may not be a hypochondriac – though I confess I do often take medication at the slightest provocation if I have a deadline looming – but, in spite of the stern warnings of my Psychology professor, I ended up looking for myself in the pages of my textbook. (It didn’t help, of course, that all the tests we administered on ourselves during practicals diagnosed me as “highly neurotic”.)

I wrote about this last year on my personal blog and I have reproduced the same [with modifications and annotations] in the hope that it gives a slightly different perspective on the issue.

An Aside on Anxiety

I may have anxiety, I think to myself multiple times a day, but especially when I am faced with a crowd of people and I have to speak. Or in the quieter moments, when an intimate conversation ends abruptly, and I wonder what kind of impression I made on the person. I think this to myself as I involuntarily wring my hands in an attempt to soothe myself.

And then I remember my brief fling with psychology in school, where the cardinal rule I was taught was to exercise caution in self-diagnosis: our ailments are a checklist, and it is one which it is easy to tick items off. I have been through no trauma to trigger this, I think on some days, and on others, I attributed it to [deleted].  I want help, a hug, some “self-care“, but I then recall this article, [1] which laughs at us for being weak wusses, and  suggests we are but children in search of coddling. Everyday Feminism, of course, has a response that is readily available on my newsfeed: you wouldn’t hesitate to accommodate someone with a physical illness, so why should it be any different if your symptoms are invisible?

Foucault [2] then comes to mind, reminding me that madness as an illness is a relatively recent construct, and I find aspie [3] support groups online who unwittingly echo him in their assertion that theirs is just a different way of processing emotions and thoughts. But then the lawyers jump in, pathologizing  yet again, and I suddenly decide that I am perfectly sane.

In my quieter moments, I am aware that the truth, as always, lies somewhere in between – that perhaps we are too quick to de-normalize unorthodox ways of thinking, but some people do genuinely have more difficulty than the rest in adapting to society. And because of our constructs of mental disability as illness, as criminality, as a society we are reluctant to accept that the pool of different-thinking people could be much wider than those whom we believed. Capitalism also has a role to play, of course, wreaking havoc on our persons in yet another  way – through our minds and emotions this time. It is natural for us to be insecure and anxious when our world is crumbling and our worth is precarious – I even believe a lot of social anxiety could possibly be a result of the immense pressure capitalism places on selling yourself, even in matters as intimate as friendship. [4] (Though of course, it is a hunch I cannot really substantiate.)

In the end, however, with counseling failing me, and without access to therapy, all I have is myself, and my view of my issues. And – speaking for myself alone – it has helped me immensely to view anxiety as something transient and circumstantial, so that I am not crippled by a feeling of helplessness in dealing with it, while recognizing that this is hardly universal.

*****

Notes

[*] Please forgive me the unintentional alliteration in my title.

[1] Interestingly, none of this literature is specific to India. We know more about American social phenomena than we do about our own.

[2] M. Foucalt, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964).

[3] Term used by self-advocates with Asperger’s Syndrome to describe themselves.

[4] But here is an article that provides some of the limitations in the sample study used in the previous link. So … I dunno.

A year hence, I do think I am leaning more and more towards capitalism and the collective loss of community as an explanation for wreaking havoc on our relationships, but I still tend to believe that ‘madness’ as a concept is societally constructed. Foucault is especially helpful to understand how particular to the modern era is the construction of madness as a disease – which is premised on the flawed and non-existent idea of an ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’ human. Of course, this must be separated from the disabilities incurred by ‘deviancy of thought’ – those should not ever be ignored and people undergoing such disabilities should be provided every support that they require. This is also not to completely denounce medication, nor does it denounce the impact of trauma on the human mind. It’s the difference between blindly diagnosing (or self-diagnosing) with depression, or making the required and applicable diagnosis with regard to the social circumstances.

For those of you who are shaking their heads and pointing out that mental illnesses often involve a change in your brain chemistry, I’d like to draw your attention to the diathesis-stress model, and the resultant conclusion that the environment has a huge role to play in our symptoms. And I would like to distinguish disorders from neurodiversity, or different ways of thinking and learning that are simply not in line with the ‘right’ way. (As well as the problems associated with this idea. Every idea has problems.)

The solution, I believe, is a mixture of empathy (towards the affected person) and critical thinking (towards the construction of madness in general), and to build a more loving, more just, more empathetic society – but what is the chance of that happening in the brutal gossip mill that is NLS?

(Hereinafter, I will be using male pronouns for assaults and female pronouns for victims, for ease of expression, although both victims and assaulters can be from either gender.)

Dear Author,

This is a public request to take down your article. I will not use your name although most people already know who you are. I do not want to direct more people to your article nor do I want to direct my anger solely towards you. (Ideally, it would be directed at all of the people who thought fit to share and like your article, without thinking of the message this sends to victims and sexual assaulters, it’s also directed to everyone who shares the same beliefs expressed in your article).

Sexual Assaulters are fortunate enough to be able to forget about their ‘victims’, are able to compartmentalize an act as just that, a singular act that has no bearing on the rest of their life. You are fortunate enough to be able to distinguish the part of your friend that assaulted someone and the rest of his personality.

As a survivor, I am not that fortunate.

The first time I was assaulted, the manager told my family that their request to fire the employee was impractical, see they didn’t have enough proof and a legal battle over wrongful termination was too much effort, too complicated. As an employee, he was very good at his job, and they had no valid reason to fire him (except for the whole molestation of a ten-year-old-girl thing).

Its been 12 years, and I still scream when someone touches my neck. I still can’t sleep with the lights turned off. I still burn myself with cigarettes when I’m walking on streets alone, so the fear won’t paralyze me.

He didn’t even have to switch jobs.

The second time I was assaulted, his friends laughed when he said goodbye to me at the bar, it didn’t matter that I was fifteen and he was twenty-six, and it didn’t matter that he had gotten me so incredibly drunk that I wouldn’t have been able to spell cat let alone consent to sex.

It didn’t matter because my version didn’t count, for his friends. His did.

The third time I was assaulted, our friends told me I wanted it. That they were here for me but they were pretty sure I misunderstood. They were sure he didn’t “mean to do it.” My feminist friends assured me that if I spoke to him, he’d be able to clear up everything. I’m not sure there is a way to clear up things like why he slipped drugs into my drinks without my consent or knowledge, why he thought not using protection was absolutely fine, why he kept going when I begged him to stop.

He was my best friend; they had no idea how much I wanted to be wrong about him. They absolved him of guilt and went back to being friends with him within the month. It’s been three years and I still can’t talk about what he did to me. I told my friends it was the drugs that made me lose nine kilos because I couldn’t tell them that putting food in my mouth felt like reliving the assault all over again.

My oldest friend has been dating him for the last two years. After all, “everyone makes mistakes”.

You do not have the right to talk about how hard your month of reconciliation, of the man you thought he was and the error he made, was when I still can’t sleep with the lights off even though it’s been years. You may be unwilling to live in a world where forgiving perpetrators of sexual assault is not acceptable, but I am not willing to live in a world where sexual assault, is so rampant, and society and all its members refuse to recognize the extent of trauma that is inflicted on us. You do not have the right to forgive him for what he did to me.

More importantly you don’t have the right to call yourself a supporter. It discredits actual supporters and allies. To say you are akin to my friends who have left their visiting boyfriends to sit with me on the roof till 4 am because I didn’t have the strength to stop myself from jumping of(f) the roof, or my roommates who try to make peace with the fact that I sleep with all the lights in my room switched on and don’t complain when I wake them up if I have a nightmare, or the people who were unafraid to take on the consequences of hurting my assaulter so he’d stop contacting me, and basically everyone who actually supports people like me is down right insulting.

You cannot cheer for him in a match and expect me to believe you don’t support him. Saying you support me from the convenience of a public article, only makes you feel better about yourself. It does nothing for survivors, The assault affects everything; we do not have the ability to just disconnect it from the rest of our lives. So what gives you the right to disconnect my assault from the rest of the perpetrator’s life and how on earth do you think that is what ‘being supportive’ looks like?

Not forgiving my rapist doesn’t make you an “angry feminist stereotype”, it just makes you a decent human being. Sexual assault is not forgivable and certainly not by you. The worst part is knowing that I wasn’t the first person they assaulted and I highly doubt I’ll be the last. People don’t reform themselves, unless they absolutely have to and reformation is not a quick, overnight process. People like you are the reason, people like him think what he did to me is not that big of a deal.

If you bothered to understand what we go through, you would have the decency to not laud your selective support and compartmentalization, as feminism.

So please take down your article. If not for me, do it for all the other potential rapists and victims who will eventually stumble across your article.

P.S. Putting disclaimers before your pro-rape culture statements don’t make them more acceptable.

Thank you,

Anonymous

(I genuinely don’t want my assault history to go viral. I wish I felt like law school was a place where I could sign my name, a place where my assault wouldn’t become nest week’s gossip column, unfortunately it clearly isn’t. Here’s to hoping that it soon will be.)