don't encourage her
Hospitals, histrionics, the True Crime Industrial Complex, and thinking you’re about to die
I had been in the emergency department of Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City for about two hours before they raised the prospect that something might be wrong on my ECG. One of the markers, they said, looked like something could have happened to my heart in the past, but it didn’t necessarily mean anything serious, and they would have to run some more tests to be sure. I’d had no sleep and was enjoying the hospital bed and blanket they’d given me; Sam, my partner, was giving the doctor a thorough grilling while I remained relatively sedate about it all. About twelve hours beforehand, I had been on a first-leg flight from London to Melbourne via the UAE, where I developed chest pains so excruciatingly painful that I could do nothing except sit on the floor in the cabin crew kitchen area and wail. My ribs felt as if they were caving in on my lungs, and the pain was radiating all the way down my back and through my kidneys, where I suspected I had a raging UTI infection that had made its way up there anyway. They put me on oxygen, made me chew an aspirin, and then gave me a magic blue anti-anxiety pill that made me finally fall asleep by the emergency exit. One of the flight attendants kept stroking my forehead while saying that I was going to be fine, that I was beautiful, and I thought she might be an angel. I really believed I was having a heart attack. I really thought I was going to die there on that plane, somewhere 39,000 feet above Germany.
For someone who hates New Year anyway, I can see the humour in it starting out this badly. I’m not a party girl, but the incessant rumble of time makes me so sad that I usually spend it blackout drunk in a bathroom at one of my friends’ houses, a welcome distraction from the fact that I am getting older with not a whole lot to show for it. In 2020 I sobbed hysterically after getting home from the party and realising that a piece of cake I had put in a serviette in my bag had crumbled all over my belongings, and in my fugue state the only logical conclusion was to throw away all the possessions inside, including my house keys and passport, which I fished out of the bin the next morning. In 2021 I passed out while Sam started frying chicken in our wok at 2am. 2022 was a rare year off but last year I sank three drinks within an hour of arrival, and was generously topped up with bottomless Pornstar Martini by my friends thereafter. This time around I spent it with my parents, sat downstairs in my childhood home while trying to ignore my bad back, and as I sat in the cabin crew kitchen area with my oxygen mask strapped to my face I cycled through each of these people who I had spent countless New Years with, who I would miss if I died.
The doctor brought my blood results back to my cubicle. He was soft-spoken, Aussie, from a suburb of Melbourne just down the road from us, and said all the right things: sounds very painful; that must have been really scary for you; we’ll do a full investigation. He told me I had an elevated level of D-Dimer, which needs no explanation if you’re a chemical biologist, like Sam, or neurotic, like me, or have ever had a pulmonary embolism before. A good portion of my life choices have revolved around avoiding this very scenario: I haven’t touched the combined contraceptive pill since 2018 for this reason; have never smoked; have always tried to move about on long flights. It almost felt like a sick joke, that he had presented me with one of my worst fears, thousands of miles away from my home. All I could do was laugh about being glad I remembered to take out travel insurance the day before we flew. The doctor said that if it was something life threatening, it was either that or an aortic dissection. If not, I’d be free to go.
I have never had a fear of hospitals - quite the opposite, in fact. I love them. My grandpa and his three brothers were all doctors, and so was their father. I probably would have become one too, but despite my aptitude for science and my encyclopaedic knowledge of niche medical conditions, I was never any good with numbers, and I nearly passed out during a first aid lesson in year nine on chest compressions, where our PE teacher told us that we would probably crack a few ribs and puncture a lung. The reason I love hospitals is because there’s no requirement to be stoic about anything. I can be wounded and vulnerable, because the expectation is that I am wounded and vulnerable, and nobody will take advantage of this or think I am weak. I don’t have to do the backbreaking work of keeping myself safe and cared for, because someone is always there, doing it for me. Most of all, people will believe me when I say it hurts. I remember when I was 19, my therapist asked whether we should stop our sessions because my questionnaire scores weren’t decreasing, and questioned whether this form of psychotherapy was effective. I told her that if my scores decreased - if there was no concrete, numerical evidence to say I was suffering - who would believe me when I said so? Who would think my outward reaction to my own pain was anything other than baseless histrionics? I cried for the first time in the ten hours we had spent together when she promised me that she did. I had the best sleep of my life in the hospital bed while nurses flitted in and out, poking at me like a human pin cushion and wheeling me off to the X-ray machine, taking me at my word, and still I slept, and slept, and slept.
What leads us to assume someone is overstating the hurt they experience? We’re all human; we all know profound pain, whether it happens passively to us or whether we actively do it to each other. It’s something Sarah Schulman explores in her controversial work, Conflict is not Abuse (2016), albeit through a more interpersonal lens. The central premise is explained fairly succinctly in the title, but the text implores us to take a closer look at situations in which we experienced pain and suffering at the hands of someone else and re-evaluate whether there truly was an abusive dynamic at play, or whether the term ‘conflict’ would be more conducive to personal growth and accountability. I’m somewhat sympathetic to this idea in specific situations: we see repeatedly how certain minority communities - notably Black people, trans women, and as seen especially recently, Palestinians - have inflated accusations of abuse or aggression levelled at them by those who possess vastly more institutional power to leverage over them. These accusations can be and are fatal. But in intimate relationships, the entire modus operandi of someone who abuses is to instil doubt and deception to maintain this leverage. When we assume someone who discloses harm is automatically suspicious and should be approached with scepticism, we not only undermine their capacity to express their past and present pain, but also write off the seriousness of any underlying motivation to lie, which may be just as indicative of psychological distress, as well as any future testimony of suffering. Being a teacher teaches you that all behaviour communicates a need - that even if a child is pretending to be sick or sad or anxious, there is a real person who needs something in the middle of all the bravado, and we rely on the good grace and patience of the people around us to translate what that need really is. To dismiss this right to need, this right to receive attention, is to dismiss someone as inherently untrustworthy, unable to feel pain, unable to be human.
And what about the distrust we instil in ourselves, of ourselves? With the halcyon days of 2010s Tumblr posting and the heights of #MeToo receding ever further into the past, garden-variety misogyny feels passé and gauche to talk about these days, but anyone with any sort of feminist politics worth their salt is aware of the tendency to dismiss women’s pain, both physical and emotional. It feels like a foregone conclusion that neurodivergent women in particular, with our reduced capacity for gritting our teeth and respecting social niceties, will be on the receiving end of this. My entire life, I have absorbed the message that I am a complainer: I moan, I whinge, I whine and kvetch. At best, I am melodramatic and wear my heart on my sleeve; at worst, I am pathetic and manipulative and a liar. I have grown myself around the premise that when I feel something, I am probably distorting it in severity by several orders of magnitude. As a child, an expression of discomfort was usually met with a shifty, knowing look between the adults in the room - oh my god, she’s doing it again, don’t encourage her. Receiving a diagnosis of ADHD, which then opened the door to the possibility of being autistic, provided some answers as to why I was so perpetually uncomfortable and unable to keep it inside like I was supposed to. But by that point, the damage was done. By my teenage years, I had become surly and brooding, tearful but uncommunicative, shoving it all down until I couldn’t anymore. I was sobbing and screaming in the cabin crew kitchen area of the plane because I thought I was going to die, and the first words that came out of my mouth when I could speak again were ‘I’m so sorry. God this is so embarrassing.’
Recently I’ve had the distinct sensation that not only are my life and death out of my own hands, but so too is my image - something so intangible and predicated on vanity that, in comparison to the former two things, it shouldn't merit thinking about, until I have the realisation that the edges of the online bleed so much into real life now and we cannot ever go back. Relying on the internet to alleviate the loneliness of moving to a big city far away, where I am unknown to everyone but my partner and my colleagues, is a convenient stopgap. It also gives you ideas about yourself that are at a considerable remove from the person you are in reality. During the tail end of last year, I experienced multiple particularly unhinged and nasty spates of online harassment, a number of persistent, non-consensual, sexually violating messages, and a social media stalker who became increasingly obsessed with my every movement. In every case, it feels like it all revolves around some sort of bad faith assumption that I am not to be taken at face value: that I could only have bad intentions; that I could never be a human with my own whims and desires that do not include being told in precise detail how a stranger is masturbating to my pictures; that my unwillingness to engage with a man old enough to be my grandfather is just me being a tease, and to please continue. The assumption that there is always hidden subtext makes me incandescent with rage: in as plain words as I can make them, I don’t have the capacity for subtext, and there isn’t any. Is this all I am? Am I solely the versions of myself that exist in other people’s imaginations? Am I only here to ridicule, to harangue, to satiate, to indulge fantasy?
In an attempt to take back some of the selfhood I felt I’d lost, I embarked on a solo project of stalking my stalker in return. I figured that if I had some information as leverage over him, the way he had information as leverage over me, we’d be even and I could just forget this episode of my life ever happened. I’ve always had a bit of a talent for knowing how and where to track people down on the internet - it’s now a big part of my day job - so it was good entertainment while we were stuck in Abu Dhabi waiting for our flight out. I’d be sat sideways in the armchair in our hotel for hours at a time, legs dangling lazily over the arm as the call to prayer rang out, muffled and dreamlike, from under our window, while I scrolled five years deep into a barrage of insanely horny replies to a local weather reporter. From a Twitter account under a pseudonym, I was able to find a full name, a precise location narrowed down to parish council, and a whole family tree.
I thought it would be reassuring to know I could ruin his life if it continued, or to have details of a significant other I could contact to say that he had been sending me numerous messages professing his undying love, but the more time I spent inserting words into the ‘Search Tweets - from:user’ function that I thought would bear fruit, and cross-referencing these with posts that had been carelessly left public on Facebook, I started to feel sorry for him. Which, I guess, is the same reason I allowed it to go on for four years before doing something about it. My friends and family balk when I tell them this. God, there are marriages that collapse before the four year point, why did you not just block him? It was partly out of pity, but also because these kinds of men are like wasps, in that they are scary when they are threatening you in plain sight and you are perfectly still and unreactive, but scarier when you’ve swatted them away, and they are angry, and you know they are there but can’t see them. Either way you’re paralysed with fear.
Noting the backlash to the proliferation of murder documentaries and podcasts which often drive a very public paranoia in young women, I became wary of developing a case of True Crime Brain - but I couldn’t help feeling like if I ended up dead in a ditch somewhere in a crime of passion, he would be responsible. This sort of content is rife on TikTok and Instagram, with middle class white women like myself bearing the reputation for producing and consuming it. One of the more recent iterations I’ve seen featured a woman demonstrating how she keeps herself safe on a cruise: by fixing a portable lock from Amazon on the inside of her door; dead bolting it with a coat hanger; wedging towels under the handle; using a door stop alarm and installing a discreet hidden security camera. If there’s a fire in the middle of the night, she’s as good as dead, but somehow that is preferable to the prospect of an unknown man breaking in and killing her by brute force. This degree of risk aversion is no way to live, but I can’t say I blame her. Many of the reactions to this sort of content churned out by the True Crime Industrial Complex, including the invention of the phrase True Crime Brain in itself, is wrapped up in the idea that things could never be that bad, and that if you stick ‘white’ in front of ‘woman’, you can downplay the violent misogyny which ultimately drives this ‘paranoid’ behaviour (and which also disproportionately affects women who are not white or middle class). I can’t help thinking, too, of the spate of incidents of spiking-by-injection in UK nightclubs a few years ago now, where men were all too prepared to log on and debunk ‘awareness-raising’ initiatives by reminding us all how difficult this would be to do in practice, and put the fear down to some mass female psychogenic hysteria. I remember how my alarm bells were ringing like the call to prayer outside the window, stifled, in the distance, and how easy it was to ignore them. Why would I have believed them? How could I?
I became obsessed with finding bits and pieces of information to stitch together a patchwork narrative, and the fixation became so great that I forgot why I was doing it. Instead of seeking empowerment or revenge, I became hell-bent on compiling evidence that this had happened to me, and that I was not just being dramatic and unreasonable about it; that this person may have been lonely or yearning or pitiful, but they really were going out of their way to make me feel viscerally uncomfortable and unsafe, and the two things can be true at the same time. It is hard for me to remember this. During my search, I found public tweets which I would consider sexual harassment to other girls my age or younger, one barely nineteen at the time, hidden behind the plausible deniability of tweeting at them multiple times a day about banal inoffensive things too. Considering the private messages I was sent in both an identifiable and anonymous capacity - comments about my body; talking about my family and my location with disturbing overfamiliarity; asking if I would start an OnlyFans; telling me he was quite literally in love with me despite me not even acknowledging his replies, and in his corniest move, sending me the lyrics to All of Me by John Legend - I really hate to think what else was going on behind the scenes. I keep oscillating between anger and vengefulness, and vague, empty nausea.
The Australian doctor sent me for my first CT scan to get a look at my chest. At least ask me out to dinner first, I thought. I started to cry as they explained what was about to happen to me, about how they were ruling out a problem with my blood vessels, remembering the time my nan had to go for a painful procedure where they injected dye directly into her heart and thinking that this would be the same. He pointed to the catheter in my arm and said I would just have a regular injection of contrast agent, and I felt daft. After a few more hours, I was given the all clear and let go - the vessels were fine, good even, and they didn’t find an embolism. The final diagnosis was oesophageal spasms. Is this it? I was screaming on a flight for six hours for this? The embarrassment was palpable. Though he reassured me that it was a very painful affliction to have, and that it was best for me to be fully checked out than to ignore a potentially fatal condition, I felt like I had wasted everyone’s time and everyone’s concern. A pantomime actress, performing and re-performing a pain I distort by several orders of magnitude.
I haven’t slept well in days, partly because of jet lag, but partly because I still haven’t processed everything. I truly, genuinely believed I was being faced with my own mortality, and now it’s over I’m supposed to just move on and pretend it never happened. I keep clamming up and having heart palpitations out of nowhere. And part of me can’t quite believe that I wasn’t just making the whole thing up.
Feels a bit like a hollow compliment but this was deeply relatable in such an intense, visceral way. The experience on the plane and after sounds so scary, glad you are ok, and thank you for writing this. I know exactly what you mean abt feeling like you made it up…… sending love.