Burn It Down Read online

  I understood we’d made some kind of stand. Once we were alone, my mother revealed the true red of her anger, cursing under her breath about the school administrators as she cut into her pancakes. And beneath it I felt her sadness, too. She had not wanted me to compromise my values in order to save myself from something worse, but this was our reality. She could not be there to take me for breakfast every time I saw how my anger would taint how people perceived me.

  Years later, at a fancy marketing job, I ate a glazed doughnut every morning so I wouldn’t bite through my tongue. I laced my two cups of morning coffee with pure white sugar, coating my mouth and hoping, somehow, I could imitate the artificially sweetened tones of my mother. A good friend, a white woman, had recommended me for the job, and on the first day, as I was introduced to the small but swank office of mostly white people, I knew it was her word and not my credentials or interview that had gotten me the position. She’d vouched for me. Though no one ever said so, I was supposed to be grateful to them for allowing me an opportunity, for letting me among them.

  After just a couple of weeks, it was obvious that the expectations at this job were absolute perfection and therefore impossible to meet consistently. I worked myself to exhaustion to succeed on one project only to make mistakes on the next, which was unacceptable. My supervisor and her boss sat me down one day in a conference room with the blinds open to people walking to the breakroom. To keep the job, they said with folded hands, I was required to do more, because everyone else around me was doing more—dragging their laptops from the office to home and back again, scraping up instant noodles with plastic forks for lunch every day to get back to their desks quickly.

  After a few weeks, I questioned the unhealthy work culture and was put on probation—told I had a month to turn things around. The problem, I thought at first, was me. I’d internalized the messages being conveyed: Everyone else was capable. Everyone else was doing the work. But it wasn’t true. We were all struggling. Still, the anger I felt had to be put aside, I told myself, because I needed the job. I swallowed their messages of being an outsider, and despite my years of office experience, even my experience as a manager—I wondered if I knew anything at all.

  And so, I continued to eat and drink the sweetest things I could find during those hours in front of a screen, ignoring the tingling in my legs and how my vision was blurring, until one day I blinked and blinked and still couldn’t see clearly. My work fell behind and my presentations were riddled with errors. Once again, I was pulled into the conference room. This time, I was fired. And my vision cleared. I know what happened to me was psychosomatic—all that sugar and all that anger made my body send out warnings. My vision blurred because I couldn’t see myself. I couldn’t see that I brought value and expertise to that workplace. I’d missed my chance to take a stand like my mother did all those years ago.

  And yet I know that my hesitation to fully express anger or even to stand up for myself has also saved my life more than once. On the night a man pushed his penis into me, just as I was falling asleep, I opened my eyes to look at him; his round face was settled into the stillness of waiting. It was a moment that could’ve gone on forever it was so incredibly still. We’d left the bar, taken a cab together to his place, and fooled around until, I regretfully assumed, he’d passed out. I’d repeatedly said I’m not going to have sex with you before we’d even left, in a way that was both a flirt and a declarative statement. When I felt his weight on top of me, anger spread through me like red wine across a marble floor, but I did not show it. Anger should’ve been an acceptable emotion to such a violation of the self, and yet I’d had a lifetime of experience that said otherwise.

  Womanhood had taught me I was in danger, twofold. I’d gone to his house of my own free will, had taken off my clothes, which he would use to justify his actions. And though I am not a small woman, he outweighed me by at least twenty pounds as he pressed me hard against the bed, so he could easily overpower me. Even mildly under the influence, I knew the best play was to contain what was rising inside of me. To react with the fury I felt may have incited a violent response. As we looked at each other, I calculated how my face should look to make him believe I was absolving him. What was the expression I could conjure that would not encourage him further but that would remove me from harm’s way? This is a tightrope many women know. Even today I can’t wholly feel the anger his intrusion caused—the unwanted press between my legs, the fear—I think, because if I was angry at anyone it would be myself for being there. And I know that’s not right. I know I didn’t ask for his behavior. I know that I’d made my desires clear. I know. I know.

  White people always want Black women to separate our identities. They want us to choose between our Blackness and our womanhood, as if one is more important than the other. But that night a man violated my body, it didn’t matter that we were both Black. And when I worked at that marketing job, it was both my Blackness and my womanhood combined that made me an outsider. It’s foolish to believe two different containers hold our identities. I exist as both a woman and a Black person at the same time. The world sees me and treats me as both at the same time.

  I was pulled over by a K-9 unit on an empty highway on a cold morning and asked to step out of my vehicle. I can only assume the officer’s dog was supposed to smell proof of my guilt, because why else would a cop force a lone woman from her car on a lonely Oklahoma highway at four a.m. for doing five miles per hour over the speed limit? Why else would he direct me to get into the passenger seat of his SUV, where I could feel the warm huff and whine of the German Shepherd against my neck through the metal cage between us? Maybe when I rolled down the window the officer had been surprised he couldn’t smell my true crime—existing as a Black woman—and so he needed his dog to confirm his hunch. There was no way I could be guilty of nothing more than speeding.

  Sitting there beside him, looking at the pale dome of his head through thinning hair as he ran my license, checked my registration, and questioned why I was driving the car I owned on a public highway, I didn’t let myself feel anger. Outside, the sky was still dark. It was late January and another hour until sunrise. I’d been trained for this moment my whole life, since I’d seen my mother calmly explain to the school administrators that I would not apologize for something I hadn’t done. I knew to be polite, deferential even. Once again I fixed my face, this time into a picture of innocence. I thought of when a white boyfriend of mine had leaned his arms against a cop’s window ledge and “vouched” for my character, getting me out of a much scarier situation with just his word. There was no such help on this day. My indignation, no matter how valid, would not seem like indignation, it would seem like an attitude. And for all I knew, an attitude could be seen as threatening. This was before bodycams. It would be his word against mine. My anger, like a shaken can of soda, sat still inside me until hours later when I was hundreds of miles away driving through the rich green of Appalachia and it could finally release itself with such force I had to pull over for a second time that day.

  When the officer asked why I was driving just outside Oklahoma City so early in the morning, I did not say, “None of your damn business,” which is what I wanted to say. Nor did I tell the truth: I’d packed my car with my possessions, including a black cat, and had left my boyfriend, a man I loved. And that even then, in the middle of leaving, even then sitting next to the cop, I was full of regret, but also too stubborn to go back. Instead, I said, “I’m moving home to live with my mother.” When I’d called the day before, my mother had not asked why I needed to come home. The reason didn’t matter. She’d just wanted me to make the trip from Arizona to North Carolina whole.

  I did not expect sympathy from the police officer, and none was given. I’m not sure what I would do now in the same situation. I don’t know that I would refuse to get out of my car, or tell the cop I felt unsafe or ask for his badge number. It’s easy to look back and see all the missed opportunities to take a stand.
/>   That morning, sitting in that car as that cop’s dog smelled my hair for drugs and he wrote me a warning ticket, I survived, and that’s all that matters to me now. Just as I survived that job and the man who assaulted me and all the other times fear was the preceding emotion. Because, you see, that’s the hook, though it took me a long time to realize it. My anger has always been dismissed or overlooked, because it was superseded by the fear of what I’d lose by expressing it, whether it be my dignity, my safety, or my livelihood.

  Fear, I finally understand, is the one emotion Black women are allowed to freely explore.

  My Body Is a Sickness Called Anger

  LISA MARIE BASILE

  The first time my body rages against itself, it’s 2009. I’m just out of college, and I have awoken to what feels like an explosion inside my skull. Oh god, it’s my eye, I realize. My little studio’s two windows become my enemies, pouring intense white light into the room. The light is a dagger. I can’t open my eyes, I can’t think, I can’t do anything but scream, literally.

  So I hide in the bathroom, where it’s cool and dark and I’m all alone, but the light from the main room streams beneath the door, which is enough to send me into a panic. I get into the bathtub and pull the curtain to further block the light. I try to breathe through and into the pain, but this isn’t just any pain, this is skull-exploding torture.

  Have I finally been turned into a vampire? I joke to myself. Is this it? As someone who’d written a college thesis on vampires and sexuality, that would be a gift. But this? This isn’t my body turning from human to eternal creature. This is a napalm in my eye socket.

  I have about $76 in my bank account. Going to a doctor, or an emergency room, would mean money I don’t have. No parental support, and no more college insurance. Uber or Lyft don’t exist yet, so I can’t take a quick and cheap ride anywhere. I end up getting a pricey yellow cab ($25) to the doctor who prescribed contact lenses a few months ago. I wrap a black sweater around my head and sink into the back seat. My heart is pounding.

  He sees me for free because I slump into his windowless, gray exam room and weep. My eyes look like two swollen, red balloons. One is much more swollen than the other. Somewhere in there is a pupil, maybe some white of the eye. Somewhere in there is the girl I was before.

  “You’ve just got contact irritation, honey,” he says. “That’s all.” He gives me some steroidal drops, which help immediately (but not totally). “Just don’t wear the lenses for a few days.”

  Sitting in that chair, looking up this friendly doctor in his shoddy glasses shop, decorated in pictures of moody, angular models wearing Prada frames, I just shake my head. It can’t be just contact irritation—the deep throb is too intense, the light too painful. And my instincts are leading me. I am a lighthouse to myself. I don’t know it yet, but this is my induction into the society of the chronically ill and chronically silenced. This is my first taste of what it’s like to have my intuition erased because someone has a degree in medicine and I don’t. To be furious with my own body and with the way others look past it.

  I stop wearing the contacts, yet every so often my eyes seem to blow up. By autumn of 2010, I start grad school by going into debt and by using a scholarship. I’m getting an MFA in writing, but the excitement is dimmed by thinking of those halogen-lit rooms. The light!

  The light and I are no longer friends. I become a creature of the night, which may fit my poetry-writing goth-girl persona, but I never wanted it to be literal. Literal darkness is different from artistic darkness. In the dark, creatures go blind. They don’t need their eyesight, so they lose it. I don’t want to learn how to live in the dark, not like this.

  I Google all the reasons my eyes might be doing this to me. None of the reasons look very good (“oh god I am dying of brain cancer” becomes a regular thought), and a lot have to do with autoimmune illnesses, which I don’t have.

  Finally, I see an ophthalmologist, someone who specializes in diseases of the eye. I come in with my right eye exploding out of my goddamned head, sobbing in pain, shaking with sleeplessness and terror.

  The doctor orders blood work because “There’s no reason this should be happening without a greater systemic issue.” “I’m twenty-five, I’m normal,” I keep whispering. “I’m normal.”

  The blood work doesn’t reveal anything, but they’re testing me for sarcoidosis and lymphoma and they’re asking me about family history: Does someone have colitis, Crohn’s? Does anyone have a neurological disease?

  “No,” I say. No, no, no. And yet again they tell me to stop wearing my contacts. “Take these drops immediately if you get inflammation again,” the doctor says. The drops can cause cataracts, but hey, that’s the solution.

  That’s it? I think. That’s the answer? I’m just supposed to wait until something much worse happens to convince the doctor that I’m right about my body—and that I’m not histrionic, lying, or exaggerating? I’ve got some mysterious eye problem that requires drops that only serve to make my eyes worse? And living in daily pain, unable to go to class during flare-ups, and sitting in my house with sunglasses on is my new normal?

  Unacceptable.

  I begin work on a thesis that largely has to do with being sick. I don’t realize it yet, but I’ve become that girl. The one who keeps making excuses because of the way she feels. The one who brings poems about her eyes to class, and keeps her head down.

  I discover that Emily Dickinson likely suffered from inflammation of the eye, too—and I write about it, finding some comfort in this dead femme genius who also suffered like I suffer. And then I remember: Emily Dickinson never left her house. Maybe it wasn’t just some sorrowful, hermetic nature. Maybe it just hurt too much. Maybe we like to call Emily crazy without understanding her. According to the Emily Dickinson Museum, “For Dickinson, who feared blindness, prolongation of this illness was agonizing in ways beyond the physical. Her doctor’s orders for confinement in dim light, no reading. She described this time as ‘prison,’ her ‘eight months in Siberia.’”

  In grad school, I have no one to talk to about my eye pain. I don’t know anyone else with mysterious, chronic symptoms and this makes me lonely. At least I have Emily.

  My aunt with eye cancer suggests Wills Eye Center in Philadelphia. It’s a major hospital with specialists. I tell my doctor I’m going and he scoffs. “You don’t need a specialist,” he says.

  “I want an answer,” I say.

  “You have iritis. It’s caused by an eye injury—probably sticking your finger into your eye too hard when you put contacts in.” Since he can’t figure out the real issue, it must be my fault.

  I gently remind the doctor that I haven’t used a drill to insert my contact lenses, and that feeling like absolute shit with two enlarged assholes for eyes just cannot be normal.

  “Well, you’re not sleeping from the pain,” he suggests. “Try to settle down. Relax.”

  This is the breaking point: I understand now that there are two clearly delineated sides in this war waged against my body. The side that fights for it—me—and the side that doesn’t, that says my pain is par for the course and to take it, because it’s probably not that big of a deal. The side that wants answers, and the side that suggests it’s my fault. The side that wants to be heard, and the side that’s not listening.

  At Wills Eye Center, they diagnose me with uveitis, an inflammatory condition that destroys the eye tissue, and test me for something called HLA-B27, an antigen associated with certain autoimmune or immune-mediated diseases. They think I’ve got ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative, inflammatory spinal disease, which sometimes first presents with uveitis. I test positive, but no radiography can confirm it.

  I’m sick, but no expensive, fancy machinery can find out why. To exist in this liminal space—of being sick and unable to prove it, of being in pain but unable to predict it—is wearing on me. I stay up at night wondering if I’m crazy. What’s that pain? Why am I so tired? I wonder if, when I tell m
y friends I’ve got to go, I’m creating my own prison of sickness. And the pain—it’s always present. Soon enough, a day won’t go by where my hip or my neck or my back is free from pain. I won’t remember a life where the sky is blue and the dinner is delicious and the people are laughing and I’m not standing in the back cracking my back and contorting myself into positions that help relieve the ache. The doctors tell me to come back when the symptoms reappear or worsen. I’m silenced by my doctors and by my own body; it’s not sick enough to prove itself right.

  Then, for a few years, the uveitis stops. This is a dream come true. I can see, I can go to class, I can work on computers, I can function. My face looks like my own again. But by about 2016, my back starts to hurt constantly, I’m always tired, my joints are wildly swollen, I’m always in the bathroom, and I generally start to prefer staying in to going out. I begin to morph, to grow inward, to worry. My friends get used to me canceling plans; they call me “flaky.” I try not to make myself a victim. Am I hypochondriac? I wonder. Am I just a delicate little flower?

  Something is wrong, my gut says.

  During a summer vacation in Italy, I crawl into a silent, candlelit Catholic church atop a small island in the North. I’d been walking all day, through the lush gardens and palaces of Isola Pescatori and Isola Bella, off the coast of Stresa in Lago Maggiore.

  I’m not Catholic anymore, but my bones are hurting, and a part of me takes solace on a pew and in the sacred, echoing rooms. I find the coolness comforting. I’m alone but for one or two tourists standing in the back, applying holy water from a font. I walk over to it, dip my fingers into the water, and smooth it across myself in the shape of a cross. I am so worn down. My back is on fire. My fatigue is my albatross. And it hurts to accept it. How does one go about accepting their own limitation? In a sense, leaving my demise up to fate—cancer, a car accident, choking on a plum’s pit sometime in the future—felt manageable. But to think that I’m thirty, I’m in constant pain and can’t do the things I used to do, and that this may be life? That thought is like a death sentence. A dark, empty hole that lingers above my head.