It’s funny how a shift in frame or narrative can change everything.
By: Rivka Wolf
Tags: Institutionalized Sexism, Power, Women, Privilege, Mental Health

It’s funny how a shift in frame or narrative can change everything.

A girl can be on the autism spectrum, or she can be terrified into silence.

She can be lazy, or she can be sick all the time.

She can be ungrateful, or she can be the kind of child who needs things, just like every child who was ever born.

She can be crazy, or she can have a really good memory.

She can be depressed, or she can be exhausted from not sleeping through the night, for years and years.

She can hate her body, or she can live in a society and family and subculture that tells her countless ways that skinny blonde girls matter more than she.

She can despise him, or maybe she loves him.

She can be crazy, or she can be sleep-deprived, and hungry, and scared of other men.

She can be the kind of girl who hooks up with lots of guys, or she can be the kind of girls who guys say they have hooked up with because that’s less embarrassing to them than admitting she rejected them.

She can be crazy, or she can be passionate.

She can be crazy, or she can be a writer who spent the past two years saying the unsayable to rooms filled with people who thought it wasn’t really so crazy for a nonfiction writer to want to tell her own story.

She can be crazy, or she can be a queer person who does not want to stand real still quaking like a terrified rabbit while she lets a man ‘catch’ her so he can feel like a man about it.

She can be crazy, or she can be different.

She can be crazy, or she can be healthy in a way the women in her culture are not supposed to be.

She can be crazy, or she can be someone who spent years getting un-addicted to white supremacist norms.

She can be crazy, depending on who is doing the looking. And what they are hoping to see.

She can be crazy. When they need her to be. To make themselves feel better, at the expense of her happy ending.

She can be crazy, or she can be the girl her parents starved and ignored and hurt and put on medication when she was 11 so the effects would show less. She can be crazy, or she can be the girl her parents raised to total dependency. She can be crazy, or she can be sick for 6 months out of the past two years with a chronic illness that her fatness means her doctors are not all that interested in treating. She can be crazy, or she can be exhausted from the sheer energy required to stay alive in this life she was born into.

She can be crazy, or she can be up late writing a treatise to no one.

When you are sick with what is probably the cumulative impact of a life spent taking everyone else’ abuse. Sometimes, your own perspective shifts. You do things. You say things. You keep trying to say them. Even past the point it is clear no one is listening. Because yours is the only testament you will ever have. Your testimony is the only one ever offered in your own defense.

Your crimes are the ones that people remember. The men who violated you are fine. The people who left you and the people who told you that your suffering was too much for them to handle. The people who tell you that you are turning your wounds into a spectacle when you remind them that you have wounds at all. The way therapy or yoga or macrobiotic nutrition or veganism or slippery elm or screaming or punching pillows or a good hard fuck or the right dating app are all supposed to cure you of the reality you already lived through.

You are a girl, and you really did go crazy. Once. After being homeless and assaulted. You really did. It was not very interesting. You moved back in with your parents, which was the crazy part. You immediately began vomiting and you continued every day for a year, no lie. Till you wound up in the hospital. And they said, lose weight. Because if you are a fat woman, the cure for everything from a sprained ankle to a head cold is to lose weight.

Sometimes you think, there has got to be a better place. But you’re like Moses, except you knew that from the beginning. You’re fighting for a better world for tomorrow’s children. You’re never going to catch up with yourself. You’re never going to find the magic again. The music he made you hear, it’s fading now. And so are you.

But you can write, and so you are writing your testimony. About your own life. Maybe he will read it one day, and know. Whatever it is you wanted him to know. Back then. When it counted.

Maybe you are crazy. Certainly you are no less crazy than the girls who get thrown into eating disorder ‘rehab’ or psych facilities or court-ordered therapy with creepy pedo doctors because certainly, you live in a society that likes to punish girls for having too much sex or getting too angry or being too sad. For being too much.

And certainly if these girls are too much, then so are you.

To be called crazy if you are a white man, you have to shoot up a room full of strangers. To be called crazy if you are a woman, especially a woman with intersecting marginalized identities, all you have to do is cry in front of the wrong person. Or get mad at something the other person says you shouldn’t. Or dance or fuck or storytell or write or use language or not use language differently from how the people around you do.

All you have to do is upset someone with more power than you.

She can be crazy, but really, if you are a man, and you say she’s crazy? You don’t have to worry whether or not it’s true, in any meaningful sense. You can already be sure that everyone is going to believe you.