Welcome to HYSTERICAL

Thoughts on self-silencing and on being rude

Not to be dramatic . . .

but from 2016 to 2018 I saw 20+ medical professionals for mysterious pain that traveled around my woman’s body — around my neck, my back, my pussy, and my crack (credit: the rapper Khia).

I had what millions of American women had: pain that didn’t make sense to doctors, a body that didn’t make sense to science, a psyche that didn’t make sense to mankind, and a voice that dogs could hear but people couldn’t.

I wrote a book about this. And I’m not done talking about it.

Hysterical was published, and sexism didn’t end. Abortion . . . well, everything actually got worse?

In October, 2023, TIME published “Self-Silencing Is Making Women Sick,” by psychologist Maytal Eyal. Eyal echoes the scariest shit in Hysterical about women, illness, pain, disorders, heart attacks, and death, like:

“Today, women account for almost 80% of autoimmune disease cases. They are at a higher risk of suffering from chronic pain, insomnia, fibromyalgia, long COVID, irritable bowel syndrome, and migraines, and are twice as likely as men to die after a heart attack. Women experience depression, anxiety, and PTSD at twice the rate of men, and face a ninefold higher prevalence of anorexia, the deadliest mental health disorder.”

Eyal says that “studies have connected self-silencing” to much of the above, including HIV in women.

Our bodies speak for us not in words — because no one likes that — but in headaches and poisoned cells.

Actual photo of a woman’s body (by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash)

Silence has many definitions. Eyal defines “self-silence” as “compulsive caretaking, pleasing the other, and inhibition of self-expression in relationships” — to meet everyone’s needs but your own.

Self-silence is always being nice and never getting mad. It’s being fluent in Apology; in Bowing Down; in Saying the Perfect Thing or Else; in If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, Then Don’t Say Anything at All. It’s censoring yourself to protect others from you — from your emotions, your pain, your needs, your opinions, your boundaries, your accusations. It’s compulsively taking responsibility for other people’s needs and disappointments, which women have been trained to do to be “good women.” It’s being so empathetic that disappointing others feels like disappointing yourself. It’s putting some guy’s momentary discontent or potential annoyance above your sanity. It’s trying to please everyone, even your therapist.

Self-silence makes everyone else’s life easier but yours harder.

I may sound crazy, but self-silencing is a form of self-harm.

Often self-silence doesn’t feel like a choice; it feels like the only option. And like we’ll fail as women if we don’t choose it and choose it many times a day, every day, every year of our lives.

WHICH IS REALLY FUCKING ENRAGING.

When will we get mad enough to be angry?

Many interviewers have asked me questions like:

In Hysterical, you write wisely about the physical manifestation of repressed emotions and the impact of society’s expectations on women’s voices. How do you, as the literary version of Taylor Swift, see these issues affecting women today?

To me, this question is another question: Who gets to rage and who must repress their rage and make themselves ill?

Our social evolution has made cancer in women more socially acceptable than rage.

So, we repress, and our unspoken rage eats into our lives and our bodies. Study after study I cite in Hysterical found that women who silence their anger and themselves during fights have a higher risk of heart attack and of cancer and are more likely to die than women who don’t self-silence.

Ditto women who can’t pronounce the two-letter word “no.” Dr. Gabor Maté writes in When the Body Says No: “In important areas of their lives, almost none of my patients with serious disease had ever learned to say no.” People who can’t say no become patients with bodies that say no for them.

Note: getting mad at yourself does not count as “expressing anger.” Nor does not expressing anger and then getting mad at yourself for not expressing your anger. (Isn’t it ironic that we can get more mad at ourselves for not speaking up than anyone could get mad at us for speaking up?)

Silence is the new smoking photo by Heleno Kaizer on Unsplash

Our health depends on saying we’re mad when we feel mad. It depends on screaming and on making a scene. On asking too many questions and on saying no. On voicing our every emotion. On apologizing less. On not being so nice, so sweet, so polite. (Recently I apologized to a man on an airplane when he hit me in the head.)

But it’s not easier said than done when we’ve been raised to be quiet, nice, sweet, polite, sorry, good, and perfect. Eyal confirms:

. . . it can feel counterintuitive for my clients to say ‘no’ — or firmly assert their wants and needs [and boundaries].

How do you say no or firmly assert anything when you’re born with the disease to please?

Personally, I did so much therapy — regular therapy, scream therapy, exposure therapy, massage therapy, EMDR, “expressive writing” — to learn how to stop self-silencing, and I’m still learning. (Please buy 1-10 copies of Hysterical to read what I learned.)

But “learn” is the wrong word.

“The first problem for all of us” Gloria Steinem said, “is not to learn, but to unlearn.”

I had to unlearn my instincts, my programming, and parts of my personality. I had to unlearn the bottomless need to be liked, understood, and praised, and to embody demonized characteristics — to be emotional, sensitive, pissed, dramatic, assertive, loud. Rather than keep my needs and boundaries a secret, I had to communicate and prioritize them (and first figure out that I had them and what they were). Rather than cater or pander or please other people, I had to disappoint them.

In fact, Eyal — a psychologist, a professional — suggests women “Be more disappointing.”

It’s advice that poets and critics have given. Adrienne Rich says to be “disloyal to civilization,” one that has been disloyal to us. Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life, says, “We have to be willing to be experienced as ungrateful, to use this refusal of joy as an exposure of what we have been commanded not to express.”

Whatever you do or say may seem disloyal; you may seem ungrateful — GOOD.

“I didn’t want to be rude, so, here we are . . .” says fictional woman Cyndee Pokorny in the The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt about why she got into a cult leader’s van and got herself kidnapped and held hostage in an underground bunker for 15 years.

“I’m always amazed at what women will do because they are afraid of being rude,” MATT LAURER (playing himself) replied (pre-#MeToo).

Be — and I cannot emphasize this enough — rude.

And what I really mean is risk being perceived as rude (or stubborn or melodramatic, etc.) to friends, lovers, medical professionals, cult leaders, Matt Laurers, et al.

Choose to be rude and alive rather than polite and in an underground bunker.

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What have you done because you were afraid of being rude?

Isn’t it messed up that prioritizing ourselves comes across as hurting others feelings?

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Upcoming newsletters will be about unlearning what we know about emotion, niceness, shaving, and more.

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