Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit

by Eliese Colette Goldbach

None of us mentioned my mental health as our forks clicked on our plates. I had tried to kill myself several times before, and my bipolar disorder was barely contained. Any gun in my possession would greatly increase my risk of committing suicide, but my parents wanted me to complete the course anyway.

If I didn’t remain vigilant, someone would take away the rights I never knew I cared about.

each other. We had let down our guard. We had closed our eyes. Now the weavers of shrouds and fantasies had come along, recognizing our self-imposed darkness. They believed that we were too blind to know better, so they covered our eyes carefully, hoping that none of us—both steelworkers and lawyers alike—would ever see clearly again.

couldn’t help but notice that we were heading straight toward the voices, but I didn’t say anything. After all, Ben had more experience in these kinds of matters, so we kept walking until the woods opened into a field.

but I told myself to keep it together. I had to muscle through. I had to be stronger than my ailing mind.

“You can’t tell anyone about this,” they said again and again as they led me slowly through the night.

everything inside me suddenly shifted. My mind broke away from the rest of me. I was looking at myself from above. I noticed, quite calmly, that my body was crying, but the tears belonged to someone else. I was no longer connected to this vulnerable, pink skin. I had been removed from its pains and its problems, and now I was floating outside time, plucked from the carcass that had carried me for so long. I felt like a tiny diamond loosened from the earth. Safe. Precious. Unencumbered. For a moment I wondered if I was dying. Maybe I had gotten caught in the limbo between living and dead, but the feeling didn’t last. Just as quickly as I had been whisked away from my body, I was thrown back into it. I didn’t understand why I had felt so fractured, so unreal. It would be many months until I learned that dissociation—this severing of the self—is often a symptom of trauma.

“If you really had sex with two guys in one night, then I think you need to go to confession.”

My stomach dropped in the way it does after a sudden fall, and it felt like every breath contained less oxygen than the one before it.

As the story tumbled out of me, my mind kept jumping out of my body, just as it had in the shower. It didn’t feel like I was confessing to a priest—it felt like I was watching myself in slow motion on a screen.

“When we don’t love ourselves,” he told me, “we end up in situations that are contrary to God’s law. We use alcohol and marijuana to fill the void that’s left by a lack of self-love. Sexual immorality, in particular, occurs when we don’t honor our bodies. It shows that we haven’t accepted God’s love into our lives.”

You can’t tell anyone about this, the men had warned as they dragged me home. Maybe they were looking out for my own good. They didn’t want everyone to know that I was a broken, immodest woman who had done something so horrific that she could barely breathe through her tears.

For all I know, he should be. One lapse in judgment doesn’t negate the good we do, and even the saints among us have sinned. I do, however, know that women have carried the burdens of men for far too long. For generations, we have been painted as temptresses with flawed natures. We’re the intemperate ones who beckon men into sin. Adam only ate the apple because Eve ate it first. Aaron and Ben took advantage of me because I didn’t love myself enough, and the priest who absolved me of my rape might one day be revered as a saint. Eve did eat that apple first. It held within it the knowledge of good and evil. Maybe she already knew that Adam couldn’t be trusted to tell her the difference between the two.

This loving God had granted the trivial wish of a little boy who probably didn’t even appreciate the gesture, and yet he had taken the world away from me. He saved the sandcastle, but he didn’t spare my body. He changed the tides for the sake of a child, but he let my dream of the religious life fall at the feet of two men who didn’t blink twice at my pain.

To cope, I filled every moment of my time with some activity or another.

told myself that I was handling the situation well, even though I had stopped eating and sleeping.

I wanted the adrenaline, which was the only substance that seemed to quiet my mind for a moment.

I wanted to tackle the doe with my bare hands. I wanted to pounce, like something hungry and wild, and I wanted to rip into her rigid body as she struggled beneath me.

Doctors still don’t know exactly what causes bipolar disorder, but they believe that three main factors contribute to its onset: a genetic predisposition, a biological predisposition, and environmental circumstances.

More than a decade after the rape, I learned that Franciscan University continued to mishandle cases of sexual violence. There were other women, like me, who were told that they were responsible for injustices done to them.

My generation was raised to believe that we had the power to make a difference—if you dream it, you can do it—but our idealism got swallowed up in a country ravaged by abuse and inertia. The ambitions of our childhoods no longer seemed feasible. All of our best intentions had nowhere to go, so they burrowed inward and turned sour, giving birth to a deeply rooted egotism that was as delicate as glass. In the end, the very same children who wanted to save the world awoke to find that they had gotten lost in a world where they didn’t know how to save themselves.

I valued what the hat represented—I felt a deep affection for the mill and its people, and I knew that I was lucky to be a member of a union—but I was also afraid of what the hard hat meant in my own life. Not only had I fallen short of what my younger self had set out to do, I had also lost the will to keep striving after the ideals that had been so important to me as a child. My hopes of changing the world had morphed into hopes of a bigger salary. My faith in my own potential had withered. Even the hatchback I had purchased at a killer price from the sleazy salesman suggested that I’d lost myself. The girl I used to be would have paid a higher price out of principle, but that girl was hiding somewhere. She had disappeared from view, and I was worried that the long hours in the mill would keep me too distracted to find her again.

It was a trick I had learned after years with bipolar disorder. Whatever neurotransmitters my body released in response to pain had the ability to calm my mind long enough for me to function,

For the first time in my life, I looked at my fellow Americans with suspicion and disdain. I eyed up the people in the produce section. I wanted to know which ones were my enemies.

“all of that environmental stuff is just a big conspiracy meant to line someone’s pockets.” “Whose pockets are being lined, though?” I asked. “The elites,” my father told me.

God really gave people dominion over the Earth, then we should do everything in our power to protect it.

The locker-room banter that my father defended felt reminiscent of the judgment I had received at Franciscan University.

For months I had been so caught up in everything that was wrong with my life that I had lost the will to make it right again.

When I told the psychiatrist that I hated my country—that I felt trapped within it—I was giving voice to a thought that had been rising within me for years. I did feel lost and ineffective. My dreams of change appeared vain and fruitless. America was a gear that crushed the vulnerable with its force, but the psychiatrist was right to scold me. From his seat, he saw the country with different eyes. In his America, an immigrant could rise to the rank of physician. This was a place of refuge and opportunity. A grand experiment. The best country on Earth. It had its flaws, many of them severe, but despair solved nothing.

This man, whom I so loved and admired, had never forgiven the universe for dealing him a shitty hand, and yet he hadn’t done much to turn his hand around.

He latched onto right-wing politics, which told him that he was entitled to a good hand. He deserved the right cards. He shouldn’t have to work for the jackpot, which meant that it was someone else’s responsibility to turn his jokers into aces.

Bubbling beneath the surface of my father’s sense of entitlement was the very human delusion that we are each the center of the universe. My perspective matters most. My problems deserve to be solved. I am the spotless protagonist in the epic poem of my life, and I want a distraction from my pain. If you can step away from that delusion, even if only for a moment, you start to see the mess that connects us, even in places we’re reluctant to look.

We were the products of an unexpected recession. The rug had been pulled out from under us on the eve of our long-awaited adulthoods, so we humbled ourselves, we carried on, we made do. We had to serve sandwiches before we could plate policies. We had to pour lattes before we could make an impact.

After years of minimum-wage jobs, underemployment, and a wealth of frustration, my generation was finally coming into its own.