Feral At 46
On a day before my fortieth birthday, I woke up disabled. On a day before my very recent 46th birthday, I woke up feral with very few f***s left.
I’ve had some personality changes over the last several months, in that I seem to have gone feral. I no longer give a ffffffffff about much. A huge amount of anxiety disappeared when my brain broke. Even more evaporated as I went through psychedelic therapies. But I still had an underlying fear of confrontation in my personal life, especially men on the internet. Weird, right? That’s something I’d never have known if the pandemic didn’t happen at the same time my brain broke. Life went online for me and everyone else. (I don’t have such issues when I’m in uniform but that’s a different post for a different day.)
Ages ago, I told my neurologist that I’d turned into a snap show of anger. I started to let safe people know I was angry, instead of swallowing it and cramming it down to the ball of hidden rage in the pit of my stomach. Better the rage destroy my central nervous system in secret, than let anyone know I was angry, right? I started letting myself feel my feelings and they weren’t always good.
He said it was less the MS and more my age. In his opinion and experience, many women eventually reach a point in life where they’ve put up with enough crap, and he supports it. (He very tactfully telling me I was in perimenopause.)
So what I’m hearing is that when I inevitably end up on trial, I’ll get a doctor’s note and an insanity defence.
Recently I’d said something in a discussion with a friend about politics on the book of faces, and of course some ahole young man I didn’t know and hadn’t been in the discussion previously (it was a very calm exchange of post replies until then) decided he had something to say. Because, of course he did. Just a bunch of hostile, rude, and offensive babble in which he offered nothing cogent and nothing even related to my post. This child is younger than the human being I pushed out of my vagina years ago, yet decided to inject himself into a conversation with no understanding AND he thought he was big enough to speak to me like that?
I felt the tiny, stretched thin wire in my brain finally snap with a quiet ‘ting.’
Suddenly I had a moment of clarity and realized that I have absolutely nothing to fear from some dickhead on the interwebz. I also knew I’ve done all the people pleasing I was going to do for the rest of my life. In addition, I realized that I am so fed up with entitled men’s bullshit, all my lifelong conditioning was extinct.
I worked in a male dominated field since I was in my early twenties. That was back in the day where you just went along t0 get along. You didn’t want a ‘bitch’ label or be someone who couldn’t take a joke, so we ladies laughed at stupid, unfunny jokes that were sexual, misogynistic, racist, and/or homophobic.
Away from work, I tolerated every time some man laid his hand on my lower back to ‘just squeeze by’ even though there was a ten foot radius around me, or slid his whole body against mine to get by. I rejected some men politely and they often called me a bitch and said I was ugly anyway, I should be so lucky that he’d paid me any attention at all. I learned, like so many women do, to cajole and defuse or tolerate (or worst case, submit) because an angry man is dangerous and there’s no way of knowing what he’s capable of.
Be nice even in the face of disrespect. Nice is how you stay safe. Any show of emotion labels you as ’emotional,’ so you better be nice.
Have you seen what happens when men get emotional?
Check the stats. The number one cause of death for pregnant women for example, is homicide at the hands of their partners. Where I live, yesterday there was a dangerous person emergency alert, police looking for an armed and dangerous man who’d killed a man in his 70s and a woman. I said to my husband, I bet that’s his wife and her father. Sure enough, he killed his wife and father in law and then himself. When women end up dead, it’s most often a male perpetrator. The victim usually knows the perpetrator, and it’s often an intimate partner. One source for the above statistic here.
I just read about a man convicted of murdering his wife. He beat her to death two days into their Fiji honeymoon. When I hear men say things like:
- Not all men (but every woman, and always a man)
- Females act like every man is out to get them. (Not every man but we don’t know which ones are out to harm us so we’re cautious of all of them.)
- Men are assaulted and murdered too. (Statistically, most often by other men so that’s a BS argument.)
- Women should make better choices. (So should’ve your mother, but here we are.)
- Women have it so much easier than men. (Absolutely true, if by easier, you mean texting a friend a photo of the license plate of our date in case we don’t make it home, covering our drink so we can’t be roofied, wearing only one earbud when walking outside so an attacker can’t sneak up on us, being vigilant every time we leave the house, etc.)
…it makes me angry. Stop being an ignorant ass, Kyle. More men are killed than women so why the focus on women?
I could have easily been one of those statistics in my twenties when my completely insane and abusive partner brought his service weapon home from work (not allowed) and I knew he was planning to kill me. Why did I never report him for the incidents in which he was a scary, manipulative abuser and a threat to me?
Because he was a special constable for the domestic violence court where I live.
That’s right, the area of Canada I live in has such high rates of domestic abuse, our court system has a special court just to deal with all the DV cases. Who was going to believe me, his law enforcement colleagues? The judges in ‘his’ courtroom where we would have likely ended up?
I was able to leave without injury because I was unbelievably lucky. One saving grace? I had irrefutable proof of many of his disgusting shenanigans outside our home and told him if he didn’t let me go and leave me alone, I was happy to send it all to his bosses and his mother. I left because that day I knew as sure as I’m standing here, he was going to kill me if I stayed. The only thing I wasn’t sure of?
If he was going to kill my daughter too before himself, or if he’d just leave my body for her to find when she got home from school.
I can’t even count the men in my lifetime who thought it was just fine to physically hurt me, scream at me and hurl vile insults, threaten, or otherwise. Some of them, I didn’t even know. A couple were intimate partners, like the pos above. Some lost it when I wasn’t interested. Some lost it because I called them out on something. I think my favourite was anytime some male came unglued because I ‘made’ them feel dumb, emasculated, unwanted, didn’t laugh at a gross joke, or insisted I could do something myself without their assistance.
Yet they continue to say women are the emotional ones.
I love when gross men, when called out or made to experience consequences of nasty behaviour towards women, lament that things were ‘better back in the day.’ Do you mean when women couldn’t get credit cards, bank accounts, or loans without the permission and signature of a husband or father? Or do you mean when women couldn’t divorce their shitty, abusive husbands, or when a woman’s only option in life was to incubate babies and raise children while simultaneously managing everything as a wife, including all her husband’s needs and wants?
My husband is an outlier, completely lacking any toxic masculinity.
He doesn’t see me as less than or inferior to him in anyway, and never has. He’s kind to me. I’m not subjected to insults. He’s never tried to ‘put me in my place,’ or expected me to cater to his every whim because he works outside the home year round and I work seasonally. The ‘problem’ is that when you’re not subjected to toxic masculinity in your own space, it becomes glaring when you encounter it in the wild.
He’s been pretty surprised by some of the things I’ve offered him perspective on, that up until I came along he didn’t pay much attention to because he didn’t have to, as a white-passing man. Like, when I told him about the emergency alert and what I thought (knew) had happened, he was slightly taken aback that I turned out to be right when more information was released.
It’s not because I’m a man hater, babe. It’s just statistics.
One thing I’ve come to love my husband for in recent years, he’s in a leadership role at work now and he actually calls out men on their inappropriate behaviour towards women instead of just ignoring it. Men who see sexual harassment or misogyny who think, “Wow, that’s not appropriate,” but don’t hold their fellow men accountable? They’re part of the problem because problem men only listen to other men and there needs to be enough good men calling out bad attitudes that problematic men can’t convince themselves that every other man is a cuck, a simp, a p**sy, a f**, p***y whipped, etc. (Yes, real things I heard over the years when problem men are held accountable or called out by other men.)
Basically, I’ve taken all the shit I’m going to take from entitled men who think they’re exalted because they have a penis. I’m forty-six goddamned years old, and because my life hasn’t been a fun and safe experience, I don’t have a single due left to pay. My new favourite phrase is a bored, “fuck off.”
I’ve taken this excellent advice to heart. Silence is complicit. Ignoring something is tacit approval.
I’m tired of both.
Normally when people want to be obnoxious on the internet, I don’t engage. Now I want to engage, in the right situations. Now I want to aggravate the hell out of obnoxious men. I replied to the previously mentioned post with some questions that he would be able to answer if he was familiar with the topic. Otherwise, I’d conclude he was a kool-aid drinker without critical thinking skills. I told him to explain and ‘show his work.’ Then I waited for him to come back with something so I could pick that apart too and really push his buttons.
It’s been weeks, and that chickenshit never came back.
I went on a bit of an online rampage trolling trolls. Some men I just blocked without a word because they were irrelevant. Some got right into their feelings when I was unbothered by their insults and threats. My personality hasn’t changed completely, I still have no interest in starting conflict. But if someone wanted to start with me without provocation? They found out really quick they’d picked the wrong woman.
I’ve gone feral.
It’s really the entitlement for me, I think. Who do these males think they are? Showing up on the pages of women they don’t know to insult, mock, harass, threaten, cuss at, etc. and expect we’ll just suck it up? Because why? Probably because there’s no consequences to their behaviour but I realized the same went for me. If I told some obnoxious little punk online to fuck off, what’s he going to do about it? Not a damn thing, other than maybe tattle to the mods. I’ve survived some really awful men in real life, so scared of little boys on the internet? Not anymore.
Fun fact about me, I can really take a punch. You know how you find that out? By taking a few punches. So if RedPillAlphaMale8645 wants to, I don’t know, hurt my feelings and make me cry into my pillow all night?
Fuck off.
I really enjoyed seeing how utterly shocked they were to get any push back at all. Like, come on young man. Nobody in your life ever told you you’re a dickhead? That you should have stayed in school because you write at a 4th grade level? I called one guy a Rhodes scholar and I think he went to google it. He never returned to finish telling me why I was a “stoopid ****”
Part of the problem? Too many people of all genders became really comfortable acting however they like behind the security blanket of their screen. They have no power over me anymore because they’re going to do what, call me a bitch? I’ve been called worse by better, my guy.
Mentally, I haven’t cared for awhile but my body cared and that was a lot harder to overcome. Angry men name calling or threatening, even just online from hundreds or even thousands of miles away, still sent my body into fight or flight. That type of man is a potential threat to my safety based on life experience, and my nervous system picks up on that pretty quick.
Our nervous system is designed to keep us alive. It doesn’t care about keeping us happy and chill.
My nervous system is obviously very good at its mission, but it does tend to operate on a hair trigger.
I occasionally know things cognitively. Feeling them, really getting it takes me awhile. Overcoming a nervous system response is tough. It takes a lot of work to overwrite that programming. But the recent day when I realized that I truly had nothing to fear from strangers on the internet? I felt absolutely nothing from my nervous system about it. It was amazing.
I seemed to do pretty well figuring out exactly how to push their buttons. If they needed attention, I happily gave them none. If they needed to be smart, I calmly made them look stupid. It was an entertaining social experiment for a few weeks, and I really enjoyed it.
I decided for my birthday this year I needed to start to focus on protecting my peace and for me, that includes not letting things slide. I haven’t done that enough. I’ve spent a great deal of my life people pleasing. I made sure those around me were content and taken care of. I wanted to be the bestest friend, the greatest partner, and the most valued employee. It took me years to realize my default conditioning was lighting myself on fire to keep everyone else warm. That only attracted users and narcissists and I’m really fed up with people who want to be be bullies on social media because they’ve had people be ‘the bigger person’ their whole lives
