Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

by Anna Marie Tendler

five foot two, eighty-one pounds in clothes.

Still you are spiraling. Still you are living your life in a near-constant state of stress. At a certain point you need to decide whether the effects of stress outweigh the potential side effects of medication.

I returned to New York after lockdown to finish my final year of school, which would be held remotely over Zoom. My dog, Petunia, was suffering through a bout of pneumonia and a flare-up of a degenerative spinal disorder. My marriage was falling apart, and the more I tried to hold on, the faster it seemed to slip away.

I leaned into how different I appeared, knowingly instigating my own ostracism. If I could not be accepted, fuck it, I wanted to be hated.

“Just be friendly enough to not make anyone mad, but don’t ever give anyone more information. Try to end the interaction as quickly as possible.”

I cemented my role in relationships as a pleaser, a convincer, a girl who, well into adulthood, would contort and conform to the desires of a man, overlooking his easy dismissal, and dampening her self-worth, all to be loved. Soon I would discover I only had to look outside high school to find boys who would pay attention to me.

A woman was thought by many to have contracted consumption due to some moral failing, so while her beauty was fetishized, her character was denigrated. Fucking men.

Symmetry is important to me. It keeps everything else in line and contained, even when I do not know what “everything else” is.

Parents can be our greatest allies, they can fiercely love us, but they can also be the cause of our trauma.

I’m ashamed that my ovaries can bring me to my knees in pain and I’m ashamed that I’m ashamed of that. Why are women so fucking ashamed of ourselves? I blame men.

Here is the thing about men lying to women while telling them they are crazy or overreacting. The lying, the underplaying on their side, makes us doubt our intuition and intelligence, so eventually when suspicions are confirmed, when we find out we have been correct all along, we do go batshit fucking crazy. And it is warranted.

I watched as all my friends built careers they appeared to love. I felt life was passing me by.

Sometimes the best we can do is good enough.”

Years of my own experiences with men have taught me they struggle to see women as autonomous creatures with complicated, interesting, rich inner lives. Usually, they see us only in relation to themselves.

“I don’t believe in bringing larger social issues into personal relationships,” he once said to me. “That’s an impossible way to live unless you are a financially stable, straight, white man,” I said back. “For most of us, social issues are inextricable from the individual experience.”

that’s the paradox of being a woman: no matter what path you choose, chances are you’ll feel invisible.

Though blood work indicated no cause for concern, I knew my dog, and I knew she was sick.

Petunia dies as she lived, defiantly and on her own terms. She clings to life just as she had all the other times it was nearly lost. Later I will learn Petunia required the amount of life-ending medication reserved for a full-sized Labrador retriever.

My anger toward male privilege is not confused or surface-level. It is cellular. I feel it in my body every day. It torments my thoughts. It has, for most of my life, dictated how I move through the world.

Women displaying anger—even acknowledging anger—are deemed pathological.

Men have judged me and men have called me crazy, trusting in their own neutrality. But when neutrality is only accepted by the one who has created it, it is an illusion.

I won’t live my life only to make someone else happy.