The Essay I Actually Wanted to Write

I. A Swiss Army Knife

During the spring semester of my sophomore year at West Point, I kept a pocketknife in my desk drawer. It was a red Swiss Army knife that someone had gifted me for Christmas, and a few times per week I’d take it out of my drawer and carve lines in my forearms.

I don’t remember the first day I did this – or why. Only that, at some point that semester, there were many lines on my forearms.

Sometimes I’d carve new lines, but mostly I’d carve over existing lines — fresh lines, scarred-over lines, and almost-scarred-over-lines — over and over until drops of blood speckled my skin. Then I’d put the knife away and continue my homework.

That semester, I remember sitting in rooms and listening to instructors lecture to me. I stared out windows and at the floor.

I also remember doing sit-ups on a blue mat in Arvin Gym beside a female friend with bulimia.

“I’m cutting myself,” I told her matter-of-factly. She examined my forearms with her enormous aquamarine eyes and didn’t judge me. She told me about vomiting so hard that the vomit came out of her nose.

We kept doing sit-ups.

***

That spring, I dated a cadet who hated that his girlfriend’s forearms were crisscrossed with lines. It was one of the reasons he broke up with me. After that, I had a hard time getting out of bed, and I went to see a counselor.

The counselor was a lieutenant colonel who worked out of an old barracks near Arvin Gym. The room had a battered couch and a box of tissues, and when she asked me why I’d come, I told her about my ex-boyfriend and the pocketknife.

I told her about my parents, too. About my intuitive, emotional, housewife mother and my analytical, unemotional, engineer father. I admitted that for many years, my father’s world (e.g., his international business trips) had seemed more glamorous than my mother’s.

“You’ve grown up believing that the ‘masculine’ traits of your father are superior to the ‘feminine’ trails of your mother,” the lieutenant colonel concluded at last. “And West Point has only added to that belief; you seek out relationships with people who have — and who value — ‘masculine’ qualities.”

Then the lieutenant colonel told me that West Point was not exactly like the Army. West Point was a small cluster of high-achieving alpha males at the upper end of the bell curve. Out in the Army, a more normal bell curve would resume.

The lieutenant colonel spoke in a gentle, whispery way. She told about her husband, about their decision not to have children. “There are no rules to the game of life,” she said.

She yelled only once: “You’re giving B. too much power! He’s not perfect! He’s not the authority on things!”

***

Sometime after I visited the lieutenant colonel, I stopped cutting. And for years, whenever I looked back on that semester, I couldn’t articulate why I cut to begin with.

I’ve read that people self-injure for a number of reasons: to distract themselves from emotions; to reduce anxiety and provide themselves relief; to feel something – anything — even if it’s physical pain, when they’re emotionally empty; to exert control over their body or situation. But when I, a 20-year-old sophomore at West Point, examined these lists of reasons on the Internet, I couldn’t identify with them.

It’s only now, 13 years later, that I have a theory why I self-injured: I was too ashamed to write essays like this.

 

II. The Rule

I was 18 the day I arrived at West Point and learned a rule that dictated the next 15+ years of my life.

The rule was unspoken, unwritten, yet as clear to me as the crew cuts and camouflage clothes and West Point’s Gothic architecture and panoramic Hudson River Valley views, the smell of the bar soap they issued cadets (a smell that still makes me melancholy, years later): Don’t draw attention to your femininity.

The rule applied to male and female cadets, but disproportionately to females. For while males were encouraged to flaunt their masculinity (and downplay their femininity), females were encouraged to downplay their femininity (and flaunt their masculinity).

We were all complicit in upholding “the rule.” And “the rule” was largely unconscious and habitual and historical. Throughout history, we’ve so often seen “warrior” as synonymous with “masculine” that I think it’s sometimes hard to imagine a menstruating woman with a high-pitched voice and lacquered fingernails wielding an AK-47. Or a women in a crew cut and camouflage clothes wielding an AK-47, for that matter.

Here are manifestations of “the rule:”

• When giving commands, don’t speak normally; instead, lower the pitch of your voice so it’s less “feminine.”
• Don’t wear noticeable makeup. Don’t wear clothes that are too short, tight, or revealing.
• Don’t complain that your physiology makes it more difficult to run, ruck, climb up ropes, climb over walls, or carry radios, weapons, supplies, or people.
• More broadly, don’t complain that anything related to your physiology makes it more difficult — menstrual cramps, pregnancy scares, birth control side effects, or ill-fitting sports bras. Your inability to pee while standing.
• And this, too: Don’t get “emotional” if you’re sick or tired. Or if you’ve sprained an ankle or broken up with a man or flunked a test or seen a sad movie or watched your mother get hospitalized. Don’t get “emotional” over sexist jokes, either. Laugh at them.

For four years at West Point, for five years as an active-duty Army officer, and for several years after the military, I subscribed to “the rule.” I avoided speaking in a high-pitched voice. I wore minimal makeup and modest clothes. I rarely complained or got “emotional.” Instead, I ignored my gender and tried to perform my job to the best of my ability.

Interestingly, it worked.

I’m grateful for West Point’s unspoken, unwritten rule. Because of it, I got great officer evaluation reports. I was awarded a Bronze Star. And, after the military, I transitioned into a second career and, later, into my dream job as a public health writer. I’ve been told many times, by military commanders, enlisted soldiers, and civilians, that I’m a positive female role model, a positive human role model.

I attribute these successes to “the rule,” to the fact that it taught me not to focus on negativity or disadvantages and reduced the probability that I might come across as controversial or adversarial. Instead, I focused on performing to the best of my ability.

But on another level, it was a failure. Because, when I was 20-years-old, I was carving lines in my forearms for reasons I couldn’t articulate …

***

In addition to self-injury, another repercussion of “the rule” was the men I dated.

For almost a decade, from my late teens to late twenties, I dated men who were logical and unemotional and decisive and unapologetic and all the other traits I associated, at the time, with masculinity. Looking back, I think I chose these men unconsciously, because I was hoping to absorb their traits.

One of these men was the boyfriend who broke up with me because I was carving lines in my forearms. He was a tall, blue-eyed man from West Virginia, a man with a knack for math and science, a future pilot who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions in combat in Iraq.

B. was a staunch conservative and a member of the West Point pistol team. The year I dated him, he was one of America’s top-ranked pistol shooters. B.’s other hobby was hunting animals for sport.

Even though B. smoked, dipped, and ate mostly hamburger, he could still keep up with me on most of my runs.

One day, I confessed to B. that I’d love to get married outside, in autumn, in a scarlet-colored wedding dress, and possibly keep my last name, which is a weird last name but suits me.

“My wife and I will marry in a church,” B. replied, frowning. “She’ll wear white. And she will take my last name.”

Like many men I dated during my late teens to late twenties, B. and I didn’t have a thing in common except for West Point and our admiration for “masculine” things. Still, the breaking ups gutted me.

***

Recently, I was reminded of “the rule” when I read a 2013 Vogue article about Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO.

In the piece, Mayer revealed that once, at Stanford, The Stanford Daily wrote a piece about “campus icons,” students whose appearance or behavior made them stand out. The article listed “the blonde woman in the upper-division computer-science classes” as an icon, and it took Mayer a moment to recognize herself.

“I’m a woman in the upper-division computer-science classes — I should know this person!” she recalls thinking. “I really had been blind to gender. And I still am.”

Later, when the interviewer asked Mayer what it felt like to be employee number 20 at Google, often the only woman on Google’s engineering teams, Mayer responded similarly: she hadn’t noticed.

Unlike Mayer, I’ve always been aware of my gender. Like Mayer, I’ve acted blind to it.

***

In 2014, I realized that I was still subscribing to “the rule” 13 years after I was introduced to it, after I got into a fight about Trayvon Martin with A., my then-boyfriend. I’d since stopped dating “ultra-masculine” men, and A. was slender, sensitive, literary, and liberal – so much more similar to me than men like B.

The fight happened on a winter morning, immediately after A. and I awoke in my queen-sized bed. A. had turned on his IPad, read the news, and announced that the Trayvon Martin case was a travesty. I then announced that I wasn’t in the pro-Trayvon Martin camp.

To be clear, I wasn’t in the pro-George Zimmerman camp, either. With no eyewitnesses present, I simply didn’t think there was enough evidence to determine who was guilty.

Guilt aside, the thing that alienated me from the Trayvon Martin camp were the rioters — the ones who wielded signs, who yelled and chanted and threatened violence. The ones, I explained to A., who used words, not work or academic performance, for example, to try to solve a real racial inequality.

A.’s face turned red. He replied that racial inequality was rampant, and that I was a fool if I couldn’t see that it had played a role in this case — if I couldn’t see that George Zimmerman was guilty. He expressed concern that I was too conservative. And then he stormed out of my apartment.

He took off so quickly that he left his belt on my bureau.

For six months afterward, I analyzed my reaction to Trayvon. It was “the rule” I ultimately realized, that had dictated my reaction — the fact that I’d lived, for over a decade, in a predominantly “masculine” environment, in an environment where I’d been acutely aware of gender and gender inequality, but where I’d learned that verbalizing it was counterproductive. (In fact, had I verbalized gender and gender inequality, I believe I would have lost all respect and legitimacy.)

I was coming at Trayvon Martin with my experience – however flawed — that the best way to reduce inequality was to underscore it, to act unaware of it (like Marissa Mayer is unaware of it). To jump in and try your best. To let your performance speak for itself.

 

III. On Writing

Another repercussion of “the rule” is this: I gravitate to writing about “masculine” topics like war, sex, and travel.

And furthermore — a decade after I graduated from West Point and five years after I left the active duty Army — I still hear in my head as I write this essay (and other essays that deviate from the war/sex/travel theme), the condemnation – some of it real, some of it imagined — of all the men I’ve ever known. For breaking “the rule,” for drawing attention to my femininity and my distinctly “feminine” experiences.

Many of these men are ex-boyfriends and, as I lean over the keyboard, they address me by my nicknames:

You’re being emotional, Lori Michelle

Why are you wasting your time on this essay, Lo Mich?

I like your war/sex/travel essays better, Lo.

I like your war/sex/travel essays better, too, Lor.

Write more war/sex/travel essays, OK?

Their voices made me feel a little crazy until I read a line in Claire Vaye Watkins’ essay “On Pandering” in Tin House:

“Myself, I have been writing to impress old white men,” Watkins confessed. “Countless decisions I’ve made about what to write and how to write it have been in acquiescence to the opinions of the white male literati … I am trying to understand a phenomenon that happens in my head, and maybe in yours too, whereby the white supremacist patriarchy determines what I write.”

I cried with recognition – and relief — when I read this.

 ***

Unfortunately, my experiences in academia have further dissuaded me from deviating from the war/sex/travel writing circuit.

A few scenarios from a master’s degree in creative writing:

During my final semester in graduate school, my instructor E. complimented me on an essay I’d written about Afghanistan, about crying during a phone conversation with my mentally ill mother.

As to one reason why he liked it: “I didn’t realize that the soldier narrator was female until the very end,” E. explained (the “her” in my second-to-last paragraph had clued him in, been intriguing, a surprise).

E. was an achingly beautiful essayist and poet. A square-jawed man who’d also been a Golden Gloves boxer, a longshoreman, and the lead singer in a band. I admired E., and his comments held power.

So, I admit that, after E.’s comment, I sometimes still use this metric to gauge whether I’ve written a good essay: if my essay is gender neutral, if as many men like my essay as women, if a reader can’t tell that a female has written my essay, then the essay has succeeded.

Shortly after I graduated — shortly before E. died (a detail I include to point out, I think, that even the voices of the dead can have power in our heads) — E. and I met to discuss a portfolio of essays I’d written for his class.

It was an overcast, humid day in mid-June, and we sat at the bar of a dimly-lit restaurant, my red-penned essays sprawled in front of us. We drank red wine served by a busty cocktail waitress, and E. and I discussed his daughter, the then-U.S. Poet Laureate. And also one of E’s old students who reminded him of me — a guy who’d traipsed around the world writing war/sex/travel essays for a few years, before finally settling down.

Then, “Why don’t you write more war essays?” E. besieged me, gesturing to several red-penned essays in which I hadn’t.

***

Recently I wrote an essay about PTSD. About how I didn’t think I had PTSD from responding to the deaths of three soldiers from a suicide bomber in Afghanistan – the soldiers’ blood and brains and the suicide bomber’s feet splattered in front of me. But about how, years after Afghanistan, two incidents proved me wrong.

The first incident occurred in 2013, while I was in graduate school in Virginia. One day, while sitting in a nonfiction writer seminar, my instructor, crumpled to the floor.

He was having a seizure, and while I called 911, another classmate — also an Army veteran — administered first aid. I gave the emergency dispatcher directions to our classroom, and then I enlisted several classmates to help me move furniture so that paramedics could navigate in and out of the room.

For a good seventy-two hours after my instructor was taken to the hospital, I felt soul-crushingly anxious. I felt like I’d consumed several cups of coffee. I felt like I couldn’t inhale enough oxygen. I felt like all the strength in me was gone. I felt like I could never do anything like that ever again.

A year after my instructor’s stroke, I became unhinged again when I was running around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was a still night with a big moon, and I heard yelling coming from the center of the lake, and I thought that someone was drowning.

But once I peeled off my headphones, I realized that the yelling was just a group of teenagers in a canoe, relishing the way their voice could echo. I began shaking with relief on the shore of the lake; I didn’t have to be an emergency responder, again! And then I continued running.

After I wrote my PTSD essay, I sent it to off to an acquaintance — a journalist who writes about veterans and wars and spent several years in Afghanistan.

“I came away from the piece wanting to know more about the lingering effects [of the war] and how you’ve come to terms with those reactions and memories,” he wrote me, “how you’ve learned to ‘manage’ them, so to speak, and what you’ve maybe even learned from them … While I don’t know if you feel those experiences and memories have made you stronger or more resilient in any way, it would seem you may have insight into that sort of evolution.”

For some reason, his well-intentioned words irked me.

And months later, I realize that it’s because, in my writing life, people are always trying to get me to delve deeper into “masculine” topics like Afghanistan and PTSD – while never asking for or even desiring that same level of detail in essays I’ve written about less “masculine” topics like family or relationships.

As a result, I feel like I’ve been prodded, again and again, to expand upon experiences that don’t feel authentic.

By that I mean that I’m OK with acknowledging that, after Afghanistan, teachers-who’re-having-strokes and people-in-a-canoe-who-might-be-drowning make me skittish. But I don’t desire to write a book or an expanded essay about these topics.

These experiences did happen to me, but they’re not my authentic truth.

 

IV. Menstruation

The past year, I’ve written half a dozen essays that I’ve scrapped because, in my head, I’ve continued to hear voices telling me that they were too “feminine,” that they weren’t gender neutral, that men wouldn’t like them, that they weren’t worth the effort.

The essay I spent the longest writing was as an essay about menstruation.

Since 14, menstrual cramps have been a foreboding presence in my life, but, in late 2014, they turned unbearable.

One day, I spent the night in the fetal position, trying not to vomit. Another day, I sat in my workplace restroom for half an hour, shaking and sweating as I waited for my Ibuprofen to take effect. On still another day, I become so incapacitated while running around Cedar Lake in Minneapolis that I hobbled back to my car, afraid I might faint.

“Let’s rule everything out,” said Carrie, my nurse practitioner, when I came in for a check-up. And I felt massively grateful that Carrie, with her blonde hair and Bohemian clothes and bangled arms, was taking my pain seriously.

Carrie ordered blood work and a pelvic ultrasound and told me she’d be in touch in a few days. If the results were normal, she said she could prescribe me hormonal birth control for the pain.

Later that day, after I got my blood drawn, I underwent the pelvic ultrasound. First I was instructed to drink enough water to fill my bladder. Then an Asian ultrasound technician inserted a cylindrical device into my vagina. She pressed buttons on a keyboard, prompting the device to take images of my reproductive tract from different angles.

“Does it look OK?” I asked nervously, my legs in stirrups.

“The radiologist will let you know,” the ultrasound tech deflected. “For now, rest assured that I’m taking great pictures.”

The results were normal and, when I rejected hormonal birth control, Carrie asked me if I’d ever tried acupuncture. I shook my head, and she handed me the business card of a practitioner who might be covered under health insurance.

Then Carrie walked me to the clinic hallway and embraced me. “Be well,” she instructed.

***

At my first acupuncture session, Pat grasped my wrist and felt my pulse. Next, she studied my tongue, announcing that it was “red,” “cracked,” and “pointed.” And then, she peppered me with questions. Was I generally hot or cold? Were my bowel movements hard or soft? How long did my periods last? Was my menstrual blood light or dark? Was it clotted?

The revealing felt intimate, like bearing my body to a lover: cold, soft, 5 days, dark, sometimes.

After a few minutes, Pat diagnosed me with “liver Qi stagnation” and “kidney yang deficiency,” and then she instructed me to unbutton my jeans, roll up my jeans bottoms, remove my socks, and lie on her exam table.

The 17 acupuncture needles she inserted in my ears, arms, legs, and abdomen weren’t painless, but they hurt less than an immunization. After the last needle was in place, Pat covered me in blankets and turned on a boombox that emitted the sounds of water, wind, and waves. Then she departed.

Afterwards, I studied the needles. They were so thin and bendable that they swayed when I moved my appendages.

Forty-five minutes later, there was a rap on the door and Pat swished inside.

“I couldn’t relax,” I told her.

“That’s normal,” Pat said. “Sometimes the body doesn’t know what to make of acupuncture the first few times.”

The next day, when I started my period, it was less painful than normal.

***

The day after my first appointment, I read that acupuncture is based on the premise that the body contains energy pathways called meridians. When energy in the meridians becomes misdirected, stagnant, or deficient, symptoms like menstrual cramps ensue.

Interestingly, one reason why energy becomes imbalanced is because of emotions. Emotions are energetic. And when a person internalizes his or her emotions too much, instead of expressing them, energy flow is disrupted.

My whole life (even before “the rule”) I’ve been internalizing emotions — my emotions, the emotions of B., a suicide bomber, Marissa Mayer, A., Trayvon Martin, voices, E., Carrie, and Pat, coworkers’ and neighbors’ emotions, the emotions of random people at random parties. Internalize, retreat, internalize. And whenever I felt compelled to write about these emotions there was “the rule”: Don’t complain. Don’t get “emotional.” Don’t write this essay.

Recently, a writer I admire wrote that her goal is to, at least once in a lifetime, write a story that encapsulates a universal human truth.

But my goal is different: at least once in a lifetime, I’d like to write a story that encapsulates my truth, some truth I’ve been too ashamed to tell.

***

I’ve now been receiving acupuncture for 18 months, and my periods are less painful than before. Since starting acupuncture, I haven’t spent the night in the fetal position, trying not to vomit. Nor have I sat in restrooms, shaking and sweating as I waited for my Ibuprofen to take effect. I haven’t become so incapacitated that I needed to stop my activities, afraid I might faint.

I rarely use Ibuprofen anymore.

These days, after the needles are inserted, I often envision the lifetime of emotions I’ve absorbed but have been too ashamed to articulate. They’re like small bullets embedded all over my body. But when I acknowledge them — instead of retreating from them — they grow smaller. Softer.

During acupuncture, I also envision my energy – the energy that the acupuncture needles is releasing — straining at these bullets until their small, soft masses rise to the surface of my skin like pus and wood slivers and other objects that the body expels when it can. They are liquid when they reach my skin and they disappear into the air as vapors.

In my envisioning, my energy then drifts down the hallway and out the door of the clinic. It drifts into the street and into houses. It drifts everywhere until it’s part of everything, until it encircles the globe.

And when my energy is inside B., a suicide bomber, Marissa Mayer, A., Trayvon Martin, E., Carrie, and Pat, coworkers’ and neighbors’ and random people at random parties, I am able, finally, to attempt to make good on that at-least-once-in-a-lifetime goal to tell my truth, the truth that’s ashamed me.