Unicorns

“When I was growing up, my best friend was a unicorn..”

Actually, I think my best friend was the stars. Or the books I tried to busy myself reading. Or the fried potatoes my parents only made on special occasions.

When I was growing up, actually, my best friend was a horse. A series of horses. Motherly mares who had no one to mother because their owners controlled every aspect of their lives. I could relate to that. We comforted each other. I cried into their manes and I dreamed of a home that never existed.

I dreamed of Israel, but Israel was not home. He was.

When I was growing up, I dreamed of him. I watched those Disney movies and they brainwashed my brain just like everyone else from my generation. I learned that when I met him, I would know intuitively what to do. And that until then, I lived in a dystopian world, the fractures reflected in the relationships between the genders. I don’t remember when I started fearing boys. Not just because they would grow up to be men. But because they hated me for being born a girl.

There were a few exceptions. I wish I had dated them, now. I wish I had let them come close. I wish I had let them touch me. I was waiting for my soulmate, my beshert. That was really freaking stupid.

When I was growing up, I didn’t even have an imaginary friend. I was too numb and exhausted and hungry and traumatized for something like that. I don’t think I had much of an imagination. I mean, I wrote my first novella at 8 years old but I don’t think I had much of an imagination. I couldn’t play imaginary games. I was too busy playing the game of life in real time.

Children play games of imagination and learn to play games in real life. “Oh of course we live in a meritocracy.” “Democracy is absolutely a functional political system.” “I’m sure that bitch is lying, of course she wasn’t raped.” Games.

When I was growing up, I spent most of my time with C because her mother accommodated my mother’s work schedule. I was her rent-a-sister. I probably would have liked her better if I wasn’t so embarrassed to be me. Her house was huge. The plastic castle in the corner of the living room represented the entire place, in my child’s eyes. I met my other best friend, Christina, once at a party at Carly’s house. We locked eyes and giggled like hyenas and just like that, we were inseparable. For a night. And then the hills were on fire, so we had to go home early. I never saw her again.

Any of them. The friends I really wanted to make. I never saw them again. Roads I did not have the chance to take. Destinies erased. Love, real love, as real as anything romantic ever was. Dead on arrival because my life killed things. Not because I did. But the people controlling my life, different story.

K was my favorite best friend because she fed me. I chose K over C even though she treated me pretty badly. She was rich and beautiful and a dancer and talented and her parents treated her just like a princess. Her brother had a horse. She had a life. I wanted one of those, but I was not sure how to get it. I suppose that would have required my parents asking me what I wanted to do with my life. They never did. I suppose that’s why when people ask me that now, I say things that make no sense. I don’t really understand the question.

I got used to being treated pretty badly, in order to eat. My parents both grew up fat so they were determined I would not be fat, but sure I would be. My mother measured my food in front of my friends. I started eating whatever I could away from home, where my mother’s prying eyes could not shame me. I recall childhood as one unfed hunger after another. I recall watching my friends interact with their mothers with tenderness, with concern, with caring. I recall going over to their houses and being fed things like chips, from pantries that were not locked. My mother has not eaten sugar in 40 years because she is afraid she might binge. Try baking cookies with a mother who does not eat sugar. Who looks at you like you’re a demon child when you try to lick the bottom of the bowl.

Everything I did in those days was pathology. Cry in the back of the car one time too many, you wind up on a therapist’s couch. Act too tired when you are not safe enough to sleep, you wind up on antidepressants. Eat the salad dressing at the bottom of the bowl, you must have binge eating disorder — couldn’t be that your parents’ fat-free lifestyle doesn’t work for an active kid. Fight with your sister, you are a bully. Express anger about anything that happens to you, ever, and you are an ungrateful selfish bitch.

I became a robot. I became an A-grade machine making A grades but I wanted to take photographs. I wanted to sing. I wanted to write stories.

I wanted to be loved. But you give up on such things. When trying breaks your heart and gets you nowhere. You just give up.

I am a lonely person, as lonely as any guy ever was. I am filled with sayings and metaphors with stories behind them that I don’t know how to explain. I am writing about my life like a testament for the person who comes after me. I am teaching my next incarnation how to have compassion, in hopes she has a better start than me.

It’s true what they say. If you don’t grow up with love, you grow up with nothing. You grow up with resources you can’t use, with ideas and thoughts you have learned not to value because no one else values you. You learn to let everyone in your life go, and they let you go. Because you are a sad person. You cannot help being a sad person. Your life is a graveyard haunted by the ghosts of the relationships you did not have and the love you did not give.

When I met him, I was a graveyard. With no idea how to talk to straight cis men. Men never learn how to talk to women. Women read books about building healthy relationships. Men build the same shitty relationship over and over again until they can manipulate or bully some woman without self-respect into accepting their model. Women try to learn how to be good partners. Men try to learn how to get good partners. No one ever tells men they are worth nothing, which is I suppose a good thing. But also no one ever tells men their worth is reliant on their ability to care or love or express tenderness or affection. No one ever tells men these things, and not codependence, should be the basis for a relationship. No one ever tells men anything important, figuring men are too important to bother with reality.

Men are all children living in fantasies. They are children telling stories of unicorns and knights in shining armor. They want to save women, but not from sexual violence or from rape culture. They want to be good partners, but not if that means giving up their right to casual domestic violence, to manipulate or threaten, to coerce or bully. All of them — and I thought if I ever met the right one, he wouldn’t be like that. See, I am just as prone to magical thinking.

I am a graveyard and he is a statue. I suppose he thought if he ever met me I would have precisely the right tools to chip away his stony external face, without ever hurting him. I suppose he saw toxic masculinity as greyscale and me as the only person in the world who knew how to heal it. In a sense, he’s right. The solution is the same as it is for women healing toxic femininity and getting back in touch with our bodies and our hearts. Figure out what candles and teas and essential oil scents and pillows and comforting things you like, and buy them. Incorporate herbs and spices and herbal supplements into your diet. Cook your own food, and pay attention to the ingredients. Cultivate mindfulness. Remind your brain that you are also a body, and stop treating your body like a dog whose owner abandoned it with you but they’ll be back any day now. They’re not coming back. The dog is yours. Enjoy it.

But men would rather hate women I suppose, for not having all the answers. My father used to play this song, “my best friend was a unicorn.” He looked so sad. Now that song makes me cry. I’m not sure whether I am crying for him or for me. But I know that boy when I finally met him was wrong. In a certain sense, he has grown up to be my father. Sad but largely incapable of crying. Emotionally repressed and convinced that is the right way for a man to be. Prone to unexplained fits of anger that he expects the women around him to just stand there and silently take. Capable of breaking things, objects or relationships, because of feelings he cannot express and pretends do not exist. Tends to mock anything overtly feminine, glittery or sweet. Hypermasculine to make up for being despised by other boys for his sensitivity. Willing to manipulate women however necessary to keep his weaknesses hidden. Convinced if he just insists his ‘weaknesses’ are not there, everyone will believe. Playing a game with women, for all his life. A game of hide the vulnerability. A game of nice guy, only to lose his temper entirely the instant the other person acts anything less than his fantasy come to life.

Maybe every boy becomes a man incapable of recognizing that women are people, independent creatures who exist outside his own fantasies.

Maybe every boy believes girls are like unicorns, there only for his pleasure. Sometimes, there to take his beating. Whether he prefers to deliver it physically or verbally.

Maybe every girl grows up to be Oleanna. Insisting over and over again, ‘there’s something there, some violence, some cruelty,’ over and over. To a man who smiles smugly and crosses his arms over his chest and tells her, ‘you’re wrong.’ Until the day he starts beating her with a chair.

Maybe. Hard to say. But somehow men don’t realize that the violence they do to their inner girl-selves is the violence they do externally to women. And somehow men avoid noticing this themselves by denying or ignoring the violence they do to women. Running away from any woman who gets too close. Putting on a show and when that does not convince her, fleeing.

Disney lied. We all know this. Love is not enough to bridge the miscommunication divide? Maybe. But the miscommunication myth is a lie, writes Kate Harding. Men know exactly how badly they are mistreating women. They simply choose not to care. And there are countless relationship books now that teach women how to not care, or how to ‘reinterpret’ men’s disrespect as somehow a good thing. Or how to set boundaries and walk away from men who mistreat us. Or how to manipulate men into wanting us by acting like their aggressive predation has succeeded, and they’ve won us by virtue of their successful embodiment of hypermasculinity. There are countless relationship books, in other words, that teach women how to adjust to a patriarchal society filled with men who are weapons aimed at women’s throats. There are very few books that teach men how not to be a weapon.

Those books, that entire train of thought, is like the male birth control pill. It was discontinued because of lack of interest. Men have never been particularly invested in a feminism that requires them to give up their power. They don’t want to give themselves up to other men’s cruelty, okay. But they would rather direct that cruelty towards women instead. They would rather endanger every woman they know, to avoid being bullied or mocked by other men. And that is the saddest thing in the world.

When I was growing up, my best friend was a unicorn. In some ways the boy is a unicorn. Somehow he reached adulthood still sensitive and warm, still caring and empathetic. I thought those things mattered more than the fact that he reached adulthood hating women. Hating me.

I was wrong.