Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

by Anna Marie Tendler

It was not as if my anxiety completely dissipated, but the cyclical thinking, the inclination to bore into a thought or decision until it subsumed all rationality, stopped. I felt lighter, happier. My only regret was not doing this years earlier.

I so want, in this moment, to be able to get my words out without being sidelined by my overwhelming emotions, something that has been difficult lately.

I have never felt truly good at any of the things I started, so I abandon them when the weight of mediocrity—or worse, inability—becomes too overwhelming.

When you feel you might fail at something, or like you’ve let someone down, your anxiety becomes so overwhelming that you shut down.”

This feeling—that I have fucked up, that I have disappointed someone, that I might be on the verge of getting screamed at—is the one most likely to send me into a state of panic,

What are you apologizing for? You aren’t actually sorry for anything; you simply recognize this as the path of least resistance to ending the conversation.

I could feel myself becoming more and more exasperated. A state that once entered, no woman can win. It is the hysterical state. The angry state. The state that men cannot tolerate and therefore twist back in your direction as evidence of your unfounded lunacy.

My feelings of mutuality are obscured by those of rejection.

Women displaying anger—even acknowledging anger—are deemed pathological. As a woman I know this and have acted accordingly. I have hidden my anger, buried it, for fear of being judged or persecuted—only to have it explode out of me later, after being pushed and pushed and pushed past my limits.

Anger becomes a quality of shame rather than a workable emotion, one that can spark creativity, realizations, and transformation.