The “cultural discourse” has found a way to talk about the harms—the violence—of dismissal. The automatic way certain voices are elevated and others are automatically disbelieved. We’ve found ways to talk about it, but I’ve noticed, like many things in this supposedly social justice forward-era, they are weirdly rigid and shallow, so limited in scope they almost negate the value of talking about it in the first place. As though the only way to combat automatic dismissal of one voice is to find a way to automatically dismiss others, as loudly and persistently as possible, until the voice that you’re trying to elevate gets lost in your vociferous defense of their right to speak.
I’m thinking about this because like many black women, I’ve lived my life staggering under the blows of this silent violence—disbelieved, ignored and belittled for simply seeking help. For telling the truth. For admitting that it hurt. I have spent my life mired in shame for what happened to me, and yet I have never stopped believing myself, because—as I texted my sister the other day—my survival instinct is a feral rat.
I needed my feral rat as the old year turned into the new. I went to Mexico City in the hope of finally being believed, of having someone help. I hate going to the doctor because of how much old shit it always dredges up. That sick mixture of terror and hope, that feeling that maybe this time someone will hear me and understand and see everything that’s in front of them and at last do something. I remind myself that I am an adult now, that I don’t need a doctor to get me out of a bad situation, but the fact remains that doctors, as guardians of privileged but necessary knowledge, are in unique positions with respect to my body and my happiness: if they withhold their knowledge and their help, then I am essentially trapped inside of myself, in need of help but denied it. This mirrors my childhood too closely for the overactive metaphor engine that takes up most of my brain to leave it alone. So my feral rat, hunting cockroaches down my brainstem, just makes another appointment. She doesn’t care about my lakes of burning acid shame. She doesn’t care that a rheumatologist brought me to Mexico City after a fifteen hour road trip only to ghost on me, leaving me to the tender mercies of her nephrologist cousin ineptly playing Dr. House. Feral rat shrugs when he kicks me out of his office on new years eve with the sun going down over the city after assuring me that “nothing is wrong with me” while I can hardly walk up a flight of steps. The rheumatologist —the doctor I am actually consulting— never gets back to me after I send her my test results.
Eight days later, I still haven’t heard a word from her (I’m on the hunt for another, of course. The feral rat might tear her throat out if she sees her again.) I’m still tired as fuck all the time. But I’m writing again. Maybe it’s the feral rat. Maybe it’s the overactive metaphor engine. Maybe they’re all me, discovering that my mojo is still there, unhindered by exhaustion and slowness and being exceptionally broke and pissed as hell.
How do you talk about being silenced?
You pull the hand off your mouth.
How do you enumerate the harms of dismissal?
You pull yourself out of the trash.
How do you make people listen?
I don’t know.
How do you make people care?
I don’t know.
How do you make it fucking stop?
I don’t know, but I know for a fact it isn’t scoldy fingers and slogans like “believe victims” or “listen to black women” which work precisely until it is no longer convenient for white people.
Because it’s not about individuals at all, is it? It’s about systems. And some people are happy to posture that they are against those systems while still benefiting from them. They focus everything on saying the right words and using the right codes and signaling the right team while often in practice suppressing the very people they claim they want to help. Certainly they do so whenever they can get away with it, when the power dynamics (what some people call “oppression olympics”) sway momentarily to their side.
It’s systems that made this man with his bloated ego so sure he could take over his cousin’s patient despite not being a rheumatologist and proceed to dismiss a month of painful symptoms and strange test results with a paternalistic smile that only quivers slightly when I look him straight in the eye and explain the level of exhaustion that I’ve been experiencing.
“Get some rest,” he tells me. “Take your iron pills. Call me in a month.”
I spend the next night in the emergency room, in hard withdrawal from a drug that he told me to stop cold turkey without consulting my neurologist, and which he ought to have known is notoriously difficult to stop without tapering down. The side effects, coupled with dramatic blood loss from a runaway period, have led me here: one a.m. in a windowless room with fifty other miserables, half of whom cough like they have covid, blood spatter on the floor, and my nearest neighbors trading a puke bucket, old comrades in the war. The nurses at the station behind me are laughing as though I don’t understand them.
“But nothing is wrong with her! What is she doing here?”
“She had a high blood pressure reading in gynecology. They probably faked it to get rid of her.”
“So why is she here?”
“Thinks she’s anemic.”
I am so dizzy that I can’t walk without help.
It turns out I’m only slightly anemic. The intake nurse comes in personally to wave my results in my face. Apparently being insistent about one’s symptoms is not endearing. I thank her. I’m still blanking like a faulty light switch. Isma and I get out at five in the morning.
It’s my sister who figures it out, in a text the next morning: When did he tell you to start taking that drug again? Why not do it now? I start and over the course of the next day the dizziness slowly disappears. It’s replaced by fury. The only silver lining to this situation is that I had national health insurance so I didn’t have to pay for the emergency room. But that was still two days of hell for no reason but a white Mexican doctor’s overconfident incompetence. He should have known better than to second guess a neurologist, but el malinchismo1 is alive and well and he’s clearly been drinking from that poisoned flower all of his life.
If I ever figure out what’s going on I could send him my diagnosis, but I’m sure it wouldn’t make much of a dent. It would hardly inspire him to more caution and humility. Why not? Because he is a man who lives without consequences. Hurting me certainly isn’t one as far as he’s concerned. He never developed enough empathy for him to care on its own merits and society doesn’t impose any external penalties either. Systems, not individuals, matter here. It’s been easy and weirdly satisfying to focus my rage on this incompetent Dr. House cosplayer, but I know that what matters are the toxic legacies of imperialism and the mechanisms of capitalism. To me, the connection between the easiness of my rage at him, but the necessity of my understanding of malinchismo, of family dynamics (it is not irrelevant that this was my previously great rheumatologist’s male cousin), and capitalist incentives, directly parallels my frustration with facile discourses and easy slogans in liberal circles.
“Listen to black women”? No, screw you, don’t listen to us, join collective movements to dismantle the systems that profit from our dismissal2 . Don’t believe victims, abolish the police that are responsible for vast amounts of abuse and repeat victimization. Start with the systems, then if you’ve got time worry about individual responsibility.
Our endless focus on the individual, on deciding if each scrap of culture produced by the already marginalized meets some arbitrary standard is simply feeding the exact same machine that maintains our marginalization. And even though this superficial justice sometimes catches bad actors and putting them in the pillory can feel quite satisfying, it doesn’t actually solve any problems. My feral rat doesn’t know shit about The Discourse and you’d never have followed her even on Old Twitter, but I’m beginning to think she’s smarter than I ever gave her credit for. My feral rat doesn’t waste her emotional energy on this dysfunctional pair of empathy-deficient medical cousins. My feral rat wants to survive. Hurt her once and she gets away. Hurt her twice and you should watch your jugular. My feral rat doesn’t want the dubious benediction of some white person listening.
She means to be free.
Thank you so much for reading A stranger comes home! I’m still here, still doing my thing, and grateful for it. Kind of (very) broke, kind of (still a little) pissed, and yet still (oddly) happy. Consider subscribing because you are kind, because you like my writing, because you have the money, because it is a day of the week. Success isn’t about money, but if you can’t pay your bills you can’t do much of anything else. Art in capitalist hellscapes will always be twisted by the demands of capital, and yet art by its very nature will find something beautiful in the twisting. Maybe what I’m doing here is worth it, maybe not. But here I am.
In what is almost certainly a gross disservice to La Malinche herself, a woman with very few choices in a very complicated situation, this term derived from her Hispanicized name refers to that phenomenon of over-valuing everything white. It’s particularly true in the realm of romance (hunting for a light-skinned man or woman to “mejorar la raza/improve the race” is a common manifestation) but it pops its ugly-ass head out all over the place. For example, in the doctor’s office.
Short list: The prison industrial complex, the war on drugs (especially child custody rules), anti-union interests, the fossil fuel industry, the for-profit healthcare industry.