TO BE IN A TIME OF GASLIGHTING

(CW: mentions of sexual assault)

To sip from a soggy paper straw. To dump the foamy dregs before recycling the cup. To sit and work at a round, sticky wooden table. To peek at her screen and ask, what of? To gaze blankly at the huge portraits of white men all around us while reading. To read about white men, written by white men. To walk out the big room together. To shed how they loom over us — like (a) brittle exoskeleton(s).

To chat around the kitchen isle. To have a white male roommate. To have a guy over on a Saturday night. To get the text: “can you make him leave?” To reconvene the next day over the kitchen isle. To feel gross for having a guy over on a Saturday night. To remember, your roommate doesn’t have people over, he sleeps by midnight every night (except when he doesn’t), he lives what I should already know to be an ideal lifestyle (except when he doesn’t). To establish better ground rules, boundaries, for next time. To apologize for making your roommate feel “not seen.” To feel worse after, for it. 

To skinny dip in the lake with friends. To keep your underwear on because you have a boyfriend now. To wish he were here. To smoke weed from a small glass pipe with the curious design of rainbow marble ribbons. To feel your youth come alive with the vapors in your throat. To feel his head rest on your lap as he stretches out on the couch. To realize — he is not your boyfriend — he owns this house, where your friends are staying for the night. To feel his hand creep under your shirt. To arrive too slow at it; to prevent it from groping your breast. To stand. To fall over onto the soggy carpet. To say nothing, because he said to chill, it was no big deal, nothing even happened. To drive back home with your friends. To have a head that aches. 

To shake the orange pill bottle because it is new and makes new sounds. To push down the orange tab. To shake out a capsule. To look up at your roommate who has just woken up (it’s noon, except when it isn’t). To tell him, it’s my anti-depressant, Prozac, when he asks what of. To admit it’s new, you just started this week. To nod when he says I seem more anxious than depressed. To swallow when he starts talking of how the snow will be slushy, today.

PROCESS NOTES

Gaslighting in the modern day has taken on an entirely different form because of what is considered okay or “politically correct” to say about women. The way people get around overtly gaslighting others is much more subtle but just as nefarious in the allostatic load it takes on one’s perception of their own sanity. The looming latency of modern gaslighting is represented by the first paragraph, involving the room full of portraits of white men. There is very little said, but everything felt, and much needed to be cleansed of despite an objectively uneventful experience. The following paragraph about the roommate is drawn from both personal experience and the experiences of those around me, who have been similarly oppressed by the idea of a “healthy lifestyle” or the “right way to do things.” Subtle slutshaming, in conjunction with the irony of a man not feeling seen (despite the undeniable female experience of constantly being othered) are expressed in the “acceptable” channel of a roommate — a snake literally living in the garden. The third paragraph discusses an experience with sexual assault that so many women grapple with in retrospect — specifically, when the sexual assault has no physical proof and is brushed off / minimized by the aggressor, leaving the victim questioning their own reaction to the assault and making it more difficult for them to process what happened. The final paragraph embodies a modern form of gaslighting — in which a woman’s experience is not only exposed and picked apart, but invalidated by external observations / opinions, specifically from those who feel obliged to having a say. The pain of having one’s experience bulldozed so nonchalantly, both figuratively and literally having to swallow the pill of this microaggression, is meant to communicate through the last stanza.