I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This [But I'm Going to Anyway]

by Chelsea Devantez

At one point the other cop asked me if we’d ever had sex, and I began crying, feeling humiliated. █████asked why that question was necessary. Apparently, it was to find out if they should classify it as domestic violence or something they should take more seriously, you know, like regular violence.

I remember waiting three hours in line to see an Upright Citizens Brigade improv show called Assssscat in a basement black-box theater, because it was a free event I’d read about in Time Out magazine.

Though, sometimes I’m like a female-slash-monster, and monsters, as we know, have no gender. Just kidding, they’re all men.

I had written a ballad titled “I Cry Every Day,” and each lyric was a joke set up for something that I cried about. Look at her, a woman on the rise, capitalizing on that depression!

I wore knee length conservative skirts and got invited to all the hottest scrapbooking parties, ice cream socials, and the graveyard baptisms—which is where the youth group would visit graveyards and baptize themselves over the headstones of Catholics, Jews, and atheists, believing this freed up their tormented souls in purgatory so that they could become Mormon in the afterlife and float on up to Mormon heaven.

Bubba was not a wealthy businessman, Bubba was a man with one ball hanging out of his shorts when he crossed his legs.

I began stewing about how unfair it was that men always seemed to hold all the power.

So it was shocking to this inner genius narrative to learn the actual truth: many of us were told our donors were medical students, I guess as a popular story for would-be parents. Some of these medical students were in fact future doctors, but some were other types of students...or not even students at all. Some of these donors were homeless men supporting themselves through donating. Some were mentally ill and living in institutions. Some of them were the very doctors running these studies themselves, who should have been in institutions.

donor kids are more than twice as likely to struggle with addiction, depression, anxiety, and criminal activity (wow, stop bragging, Chels).

When I was in my first year of high school, I remember a girl on student council explaining an SNL sketch she’d seen—something about cheerleaders and a Tostito, burrito! chant. Again, we did not have TV, so going off her description, I rewrote the words to fit details about our high school and subsequently performed it during a pep rally. It would be years before I saw a clip of Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri performing the original sketch themselves.

When I was twenty-five, I started dating a man who was thirteen years older than me. Perhaps that makes you think he was a mature businessman of some sort, but no...he was a magician. Can it get any worse? Yes, because he wasn’t a successful magician, he was an aspiring magician. It was his side hustle. His main career was much more respectable: improv!

Around this time I was reading Rachel Dratch’s memoir, Girl Walks into a Bar...

And the stakes for celebrity women to share were so high—they had shaped our culture and were often then destroyed by our culture. Their lives and sometimes their paychecks hung in the balance of whatever narrative the male paparazzi or tabloids wanted to spin. Then, when they took the time to tell their own story, it had healed them, and society oh so conveniently branded the books as trash literature so that we would ignore their power.

We are all taught to be sweet, be polite, be normal, don’t rock the boat, so that those at the top can hold on to the power that doesn’t belong to them in the first place. We grow up siloed in our fucked-up memories, and we walk around feeling helpless and alone in our pain. And as long as we feel alone, then we’ll never realize how many of us there are. That there’s more of us than them, should we want to fight back.

When I began seeing Sophie, I told her that █████████████████████wasn’t that bad, my dad stuff was stupid, and that I was mostly over all of it, but I did need help with some flashbacks, nightmares, panic-inducing intrusive thoughts, and the constant, ever-nagging feeling that I shouldn’t be here. You know, small stuff!

no longer wanted to believe things could only get done with a man around; in fact, I never wanted to wait for another stupid man ever again in my life.

Resilience meant you were to show up and keep working with the bad man who is always bad to you, and you do it smiling, because good women kept their mouths shut.

I had never told people about ████████████████████, but my rage at any patriarchal injustice had been slowly eking out of me ever since.