Burn It Down Read online

  But I did get better.

  For the past fifteen-plus years—through talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, getting on and staying on a mood stabilizer, developing a spiritual connection, yoga, meditation, finding a center for myself in Judaism, Reiki, and, most importantly, unflinching honesty—I’ve deciphered what I’m really angry about. That anger was born in my bedroom at the hands of a furious adolescent boy who took his anger and spread it into me through sex and violence. That anger was cultivated because it was unseen by the people I thought would protect me. That anger was nurtured every time it was labeled as inappropriate, an overreaction, as crazy. That anger bloomed every time a man robbed me of agency, by using authority, by using the power of physical force over me. That anger, for so long, had nowhere to go but in.

  I have learned to walk through my anger. It hasn’t killed me. It isn’t madness. There are still times when I have thrown my anger around at the wrong targets, when I have slammed the door, screamed “I hate you,” thrown the phone, said things I wished I could shove back in my mouth and down my throat into my diaphragm as soon as they came out. But those moments come less and less.

  When those moments do come now, when I feel that old heat rise to the surface of my skin, threatening to burn me, I’ve learned to expel it through simple actions. I get outside and walk west to the edge of the Hudson River or down and around Washington Square Park—taking in the people, the smells, and the sounds of the city, and that fury lifts, one hot molecule at a time.

  And I write. I write my way through anger. I use its energy to motivate myself to speak the truth. And the truth is, I made mistakes. And the truth is, I got back up again. I can take that anger and be a voice for others who might be angry, too. When I do that—when I take all that fuel that rage brings and finally push it out through writing and speaking the truth—then, I am free. And the truth is, I have a right to be angry.

  Hangry Women

  ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN

  Many years ago, I watched my mother arrange a bite of chicken, a spoonful of rice, and a curling green leaf on a small plate. It was not for me, or my brother, or my grandmother, or even for her. It was for the ancestors. My Sesame Street–themed chopsticks were not to be touched until she’d arranged their meal.

  I’m hungry, I said.

  Wait, she replied.

  Why? I asked.

  The relatives eat first, she said.

  My mother explained that after they die, our family members hover around us, protecting us and keeping away bad spirits. But an unfed spirit becomes a hungry ghost. And a hungry ghost is an angry ghost. It brings bad luck. My stomach hurt. My head hurt. I was getting grumpy. It was easy to imagine ghosts whooshing around the apartment, unable to feed themselves, bellies heavy with ache.

  I’ve always been a hungry person and a hangry person. My friends and family joke about it. When I ask when we’re eating lunch, they pretend to fear for their lives. It’s not that I eat a lot. But I eat often. Always breakfast, snack at eleven, lunch at midday, snack in the afternoon, early dinner. Writing this, I feel the twitches of hunger, the desire to grab an apple or to make coffee softened with soymilk. I hate late dinners. If someone suggests we grab dinner at eight, I’ll text back, Oh wonderful! All the while knowing that the hours before will be noisy with rage and stomach scrabbling.

  The word hangry, a mash-up of hungry and angry, entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018. It’s a goofy word, one that lends itself to jokes. Buzzfeed hosts articles like “The 25 All-Too-Real Stages of Going from Hungry to Hangry” and “21 Things Every Hangry Person Has Secretly Done.” And “When You’re a Girl Who Loves Food.”

  At a wedding, I overheard two men talk about how the women in their families become monsters when hangry. It would have been easy to join in. I was raised by a hangry woman. A woman whose hanger built and built until she refused to eat, said she didn’t even want dinner, threw her portion of noodles on our plates, or stormed out of the kitchen. I went through a phase of keeping a small chocolate in my bag to offer her, just in case. She’d laugh as I handed over the morsel, and I felt like I’d discovered a grand new medicine.

  But listening to the men, I realized it was always women I heard described as hangry. I put “hangry girlfriend” into Google and got 8,740 results. I put in “hangry boyfriend” and got 271. I tried with sister and brother, wife and husband, women and men, girl and boy. The results always skewed female. So, are women hangrier than men?

  I live in a bubble. It’s a left-leaning, book-loving bubble—the sort of bubble in which it is taken for granted that you believe in evolution, global warming, and the equality of the sexes. I wondered whether in such a bubble the numbers would skew the same way. I ran a poll on Twitter, asking, Do you get hangry? I received 139 responses: 81 percent of the women said they do, and only 63 percent of the men. Why the disparity? I was puzzled.

  In a 2018 interview with the BBC, Sophie Medlin, lecturer in nutrition and dietetics at Kings College London, explained that both hunger and anger release cortisol and adrenaline. This is why hunger and anger may create similar or overlapping mental responses. But she said there was no reliable evidence that women were hangrier than men. In fact, “biochemically, in terms of neurology, men are much more likely to experience it than women.” That makes it even more puzzling that women seem more likely to be perceived as hangry, and even to see themselves that way.

  It could be that female emotion is often ascribed to biology rather than rationality. If you can blame a woman’s critiques of you on PMS, it’s easy to ignore her point of view. The line of thinking that equates ovaries with excessive emotion goes back a long way. The Greeks thought the womb wandered around the body, making women hysterical. Is hanger just another dismissive label for women’s rage? A modern-day hysteria, another way to say, “Silly little person, you think with your body and not with you brain?”

  Or perhaps we over-encourage men to believe their own rationalizations for negative feelings. In our society, a man’s rage is often perceived as a sign of power, while a woman’s is a sign of unlikability and irrationality. Maybe men are hangry, but society sees their anger as objectively justified. I don’t offer my father a chocolate bar when his eyebrows go down and he gets gruff. Maybe I should try.

  Or maybe there are more hangry women because there are more hungry women. Growing up, every girl I knew wanted to be thin. One day, the girls in my year lay on their backs to compare stomach bump height. Did you slope in or out? Were your hip bones sharp peaks or foothills to the mountain of your belly? I imagine us now—our school shirts rolled up, our skin intermittently pimpled, our bodies still growing and sprouting. It would be easy to think this scene ridiculous. But we weren’t simply silly girls. Just as good school grades meant good universities meant good jobs, being thin meant being pretty meant being loved. To not eat was a sensible effort toward the goal of quieting the ache for affection.

  Magazines were passed around with their top tips. Don’t eat carbs. Don’t eat fat. Don’t eat in the evening. Worst of all—Stop eating before you’re full. I don’t know how many girls in that school were hungry. I don’t know how many of you reading this essay are hungry. If you are, does it make it harder to concentrate? Does it make it harder to smile? Where do you hold that tension in your body?

  Back in school, I wished I didn’t have to eat. But if I didn’t eat, I wanted to break faces with bricks. I wanted to throw my laptop on the floor. I wanted to bite down on my own arm until I tasted blood. I got spacey and fractious. It was hard to concentrate on homework or make polite conversation.

  I tried to figure out a way around the hanger. I realized that when you sleep, no one complains about your mood. It wouldn’t matter if I was angry. When you sleep, no one calls you a bitch. And so, I took to going to bed hungry. I figured that in the dark my hanger would not matter. I, with my easy access to food, had been given so much, but I curled up around a ball of ache.

  And yes, I got
thinner. I woke up early, feeling lighter. I also had nightmares. But there are many reasons for shapes to come from the dark, so I kept going to bed hungry and kept losing weight. I never got as thin as I longed to, because I needed to eat during the day. It took years, but sitting down to write this essay, I am finally grateful for the teenage hanger that forced me to eat.

  I have a friend who was an activist. She grew up in a family of immigrants. She was always arguing for the rights of those with less than herself. She was studying global health, but these days she has to leave marches early, her body collapses under the strain. She loved food. Beautiful meals appeared on her social media. She helped organize dumpling parties, made kimchi and chicken. And yet I found myself beside her hospital bed. The papery gown revealed the jut of bone under skin. By not eating, she was destroying her body. She loved food, but she wouldn’t let herself consume it.

  According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, every sixty-two minutes at least one person dies as a direct result of an eating disorder. More women than men suffer from anorexia, although male anorexia may be underreported and underdiagnosed. After all, we associate the illness with women. Starving is apparently a female art.

  There is so much famine in the world, while food rots on shelves in wealthy suburbs. If even women under nice cotton sheets cannot be full, it speaks of sickness. If these women are tired, strung out, and collapsing, then the potential they had to do good and useful things slips away. And if we hold up these bone-thin women as the ideal of even a prosperous country, then what future are we selling?

  I think of the hangry ghosts. I think of the dead with no family to feed them. Of an eternal hunger, as they watch the living stuff their faces. When I imagine these ghosts, they have the same pained expression I have seen so many women give the bread basket hovering in the middle of the table. Unlike my friend, hunger never carried me to the hospital. Sometimes, at my worst and most foolish, most self-loathing moments, I envy her self-control. Then I realize that that is nonsense and I am filled with another rage. A rage that I know so few women at peace with their bodies. A rage that we tell little girls the door to love is so narrow that they must starve to fit through.

  We put only the thinnest women on our brochures, magazines, movies, book covers. This might not seem like that big a deal, but when we put someone in a movie or a magazine we are asking viewers or readers to empathize with that person. We are asking them to feel for her. When we put only thin women in those places, we are saying that only thin women deserve empathy. Not all women feel the media pressure in the same way. Some ignore it. Some feel it and learn to hate their bodies but still succeed in eating. And sometimes, if a woman is feeling vulnerable and scared and unsure of herself, if part of her longs for empathy, then it becomes easy to believe that she must whittle herself away.

  I am angry, too, when those starving women, with their calcium-deprived bones, are mocked as vapid. These women are not bimbos or bunny rabbits. They live in a world which tells them that to succeed they must erase themselves. Many of the women who don’t eat still want to be seen as smart and as serious. They think that to tell anyone they care about thinness would mark them as superficial. These hungry women pretend to love burgers—but just not today. They pretend they ate earlier. I know one woman who took up veganism only so that she could eat less. I know another who orders huge meals and moves them around her plate.

  A few years ago, a doctor found out that I had a condition associated with poor insulin regulation. In a way, it was soothing that something simple was responsible for how upset I got when hungry. Still, I struggle to explain my need to eat. When I say I’m hungry and my partner pets my stomach, something in me clenches—ashamed. There is some part of my brain that tells me that this hunger is weak or sloppy. It takes great effort to push away the thought.

  When I think of our collective hunger, I am filled with rage. I am hangry to my heart.

  I don’t want brilliant, beloved friends to die hungry. Whatever gets me in the end, be it asteroid or global warming or the humble bus—I want to be full. I want to live a full life in the most literal sense. I want that to be okay.

  Enojada

  RIOS DE LA LUZ

  Ghost stories are common in my family. We call each other about any suspected paranormal phenomena in our personal lives. We cleanse our homes and rush into cathedrals looking for signs if we suspect an unusual entity is attaching itself to our children. Some of us pray, others cast spells. We protect ourselves from the invisible monsters in order to face the flesh-and-blood monsters we’ve encountered.

  One of the first ghost stories I heard was about La Llorona, the weeping woman. There are various versions of her story. Sometimes, she’s a pregnant teenage girl who is so ashamed she would rather face death than her father. Other times, she’s a young woman who promises her firstborn to the church in order to marry the man she loves, but when it comes time to give up the baby, she can’t. She runs away with him and soothes him to sleep before she drowns him. There’s also a version where she’s a beautiful young woman who was born into poverty. She meets a nobleman, who becomes infatuated with her, but they cannot marry because of her class. She becomes his mistress and they have two children together. As time passes, he visits less and less. When she confronts him, it turns out he is to be married to another woman. In her rage, she drags the children to the river and drowns them. Once she realizes what she’s done, in desperation, she reaches for her children and treks the water following their limp bodies down the river. She wails for them. Her spirit is said to cry out for them near bodies of water. Children are warned to stay out of the dark water at night so she doesn’t confuse them for her own and carry them away.

  When I was seven, my chosen body of water was the bath. My heartbeat thudded into the small tub as my head stayed under. Often, I became flooded with anxiety. It crept under my fingernails, so I bit them. It sat on my head, so I scratched at dandruff with my nubby fingers and pulled at my hair, inspecting the curves of the waves. I thought that if I stopped speaking, then none of the secrets I was holding in could spill out.

  I was being molested by my mother’s boyfriend. He found silent moments in the apartment to creep into my room and wake me. This was my reality for several years. I stayed under the tub water until I couldn’t breathe. In the stale water, I held my hands around my neck, asking god or any spirits in the vicinity what I needed to do to get rid of the bad man. As I lifted my body out of the water, I held in my crying, to the point of gagging. I didn’t want anyone in the apartment to hear how loud my rage could be.

  I don’t know what my mother was running from, but she moved us from apartment to apartment when I was a child. I attended over ten elementary schools from the ages of six to nine. The bad man followed us to each new place, much like a demon attaching itself. One afternoon, someone banged on our door with fury. It didn’t stop until my mother clicked the door ajar. A woman with a fluffy perm screamed at my mother. The woman claimed the bad man as her husband. She tried to shove herself into the apartment looking for him. My mom blocked her from getting in and the woman spat in her face. Questions flew at my mother. How could you do this to our family? How could you not know he was married? At this point, my mother and the bad man had two children together. I felt nothing but warmth toward my younger siblings, but I felt sorry for my mom and this woman. I became enraged with them both. They didn’t know the monster I knew. They were consumed with this man, as though he were someone holy or special.

  There’s another ghost story I heard women tell one another on Sundays when they weren’t sure where their partners were. It was usually a conversation between my mother and the friends she met at different vaquero nightclubs, about a ghost who preys on men. On nights of the new moon, in a tight white dress with a long V down her back, she sits by bodies of water turned away from any man who happens to see her. Her hair is long and dark, and sometimes she combs it with a golden brush, ot
her times she just sits and waits. She lures unfaithful men in with the beauty of her figure. As the unfaithful man approaches and asks her for her name, or interrupts her while she’s combing through her hair, she turns around and reveals that she has the head of a horse. Men become so petrified, they die on the spot of a heart attack or they have mental breakdowns. The women sipped coffee and giggled at the thought of unfaithful men getting what they deserved.

  When the anxiety attacks came, I hid in closets and cried in silence until I could feel the embrace of hanging shirts and the smell of sweaty shoes. I imagined myself in a cave scavenging for ancient insects, following them into cracks of the earth. I calmed myself through my imagination. I made up a world full of animals and plants that communicated with me until I could catch onto my breath and feel where my feet began and where my head seemed to be floating off to. I created different rooms where I was safe.

  My dreams shoved me into dim rooms with water trickling in the background. I could hear the ocean outside, but there were never windows to escape out of. My anxiety filled me with dread. I had fantasies where I threw the bad man from the second story into the pool in the center of the apartment complex, or I kicked him so hard I could hear his bones break. Anger continued to cycle through me in my anxiety attacks. The crying I held in shook my entire body. I never spoke the truth because the bad man warned me to stay quiet. He said my mother would become upset with us, as though I was a willing participant.

  Common stories I heard as a kid were about the devil. As a way to scare us into behaving, we were told the devil lurked in corners and in darkness. The devil grabbed the feet of children who never listened to their parents and dragged them into the soil. The devil left scratches on children as a warning. The devil shook beds like little earthquakes to wake kids up and make them think about the consequences of their actions.