Post-Traumatic

by Chantal V. Johnson

She’d rehearsed the rhythmically interesting one-liner before the appointment.

(Vivian grew up in a house where it was important not to say the wrong thing and she’d been editing her thoughts for precision ever since she was a child. Finding the right way to phrase something was as soothing to her then as a stuffed animal was to others, and in fact the closest thing she’d had to a transitional object was a copy of The Must Words, described as “a collection of 6,000 essential words to help you enrich your vocabulary.”)

It was an infuriating explanation. It made Vivian feel like a dumb animal, defenseless and prerational.

Vivian responded with a lecture, arguing that whenever women evaluated each other’s appearance—whether “her ashy elbows,” or “her perfect bikini body”—they were committing moral crimes, participating in the disciplinary project of controlling women’s bodies.

“Competition among women,” Vivian concluded, with a haughty air, “is a dangerous waste of our time. We should opt out of it entirely.”

The only things more oppressive than the eyes of an insecure woman were the eyes of an undesired man.

Ambiguity, though central to aesthetic greatness, was horrifying in real life. When a man inflicted it upon you in a romantic context, it highlighted his cowardice and your abjection. They did it casually, like flinging a toddler into a body of water and walking away, insisting calmly that it will swim. Huey Lewis was right, man—if loss of interest is inevitable, just get it over with and leave me, already.

Vivian so resented men in these moments, lacking in spatial empathy, never having had to learn to lessen themselves,

This is why you can’t hang out with white women,

It seemed emblematic of white opportunism and theft. They even want to colonize our experiences!

Maybe being ugly meant they had nothing to lose. Or maybe the ugly man compensates for his ugliness by being a brute, a counterphobic reaction.

Because some people are selfish, and others are afraid to embarrass themselves, and it’s more likely than not that no one will help you if you are in trouble.

Decades of competition with other women—social, not biological—combined with a desire to maintain, always, a veneer of friendliness toward men, made them perceive Vivian as the enemy. Or maybe it wasn’t jealousy at all, just the resentment bred by a woman who reminds you that you could be raped, or that you have been.

“But it’s political. The ‘joy’ is misogyny.”

their bond allowed them to cast off the shame of being The Only People Talking About Rape, because it wasn’t their shame, it was the shame of the world.

There was nothing more beautiful than a Black woman making a point.

The worst part of child abuse is not empathizing with your abuser, it’s holding on tight to him while he carries you to a secluded area for the first time and then wondering, while he engages in a routine act, whether he has planned some particular form of violence against you with, say, that wrench, or whether he is just going to a job later, whether he intends to kill you via blunt-force trauma to the head or whether he’s, like, a mechanic, and then, decades later, not knowing whether the fear you believe you recall was justified, or whether it’s just a tragic gloss that you are putting on it now, a way to manufacture self-pity.

When the food came, Matthew had the idea of feeding the mussels to Vivian, which played into one of her fantasies where she was serviced by someone and didn’t have to do anything.

The art and the artist can’t be financially separated.”

I’d like to see the people who refuse to watch Manhattan or The Cosby Show or Two and a Half Men reruns actually have their moral construct tested when someone close to them turns out to be an abuser, because we all know someone who is abusive, whether we’re aware of it or not.

I think we fixate on the ethics of aesthetic consumption because it’s easier than dealing with the moral trespasses of real life. It’s easier to denounce an artwork than a family member, right? Or a friend? So ultimately, for me, all this talk about whether we should watch Annie Hall or dance to ‘Ignition Remix’ or whatever is a distraction from the larger problem: How do we prevent the mass rape and abuse of women and children? And what do we do with the offenders?”

“The vibe inside me, formerly known as The Mood, has gotten dark again, so I will leave now but I love you.”

“No. I was moved around a lot. Like a chair.”

She couldn’t generate ideas of what to do in sex, only opinions on what was being done to her.

I wonder if male attention was a comfort for you in that moment, and maybe at other moments.”

It didn’t matter how far-fetched the notion was, she was hijacked by the terror of being recognized on the street, doxxed and threatened with death online for espousing feminist views or having the wrong opinion about something that didn’t matter.

The best writing was like a good friend, in the way that it gave you permission to be yourself. If she could do for others what these writers had done for her, these tiny moments of removing shame, she thought, then these months, then years, of doubt and struggle would be worth it.