Jenn Shapland
Two Essays
Google Your Feelings
You Google late at night on your phone in bed next to your sleeping partner because you feel lonely and maybe there are bugs under your skin. You Google restlessness. You Google restless leg syndrome. You clearly have both. You Google neurologists and sleep studies. You Google reviews of sleep doctors. You Google pain in your right shoulder, shoulder blade, side of your neck. You see by the color of the text of the search results that you’ve Googled this before. You don’t explicitly remember Googling this before, but you don’t put it past you.
You know that you’re supposed to fear Google, both the threat of mental laziness it portends and the institution itself: surveillance, the Panopticon. You see these fears, these paranoias, and you raise them the intimacy of the search box. The search box is the unfailing recipient of all your questions, concerns. In Google’s search box you have entered sexual positions and skin conditions. Google knows you better than anyone you’ve dated, better than any friend. Google suggests search terms that you’ve long forgotten.
You Google loneliness. No, you don’t. You go analog. You go to the public library to pick up one book on cruelty and one book on crying that was recommended by a friend, and in the crying aisle the book called Loneliness jumps out at you. Red text on white, or was it black text? It looks just like the book on cruelty. You love this book so much your therapist reads it. You begin to sense that maybe your therapist doesn’t understand. You begin to feel lonely in therapy. Then late at night you Google the hard-to-spell name of your new medication and find someone in the depths of the Internet has experienced your subtlest symptoms. You feel a small zing of connection low in your ribcage—something like alignment, or things that fit together with a comforting sound. A good pen cap, the battery compartment on the remote control, long sought-after jigsaw puzzle pieces. The click.
You Google insomnia. You Google African sleeping sickness. You Google narcolepsy after that time you fall asleep at the bar during the last game of the World Series. You find out that sleep actually rinses your brain, a wash from forebrain to hind, whisking all the things not sticky enough to remember away, down some corporeal drain. You think about this fact every night.
You Google because it makes you feel powerful. And sure. You learn that before artificial light, people had two sleeps. They went to sleep when it was dark and woke in the middle of the night for several hours. Hours that were entirely, sacredly theirs. They lit a candle and read or wrote or prayed or thought or fucked. Then they went back to sleep until morning. You no longer Google insomnia, you Google whatever the hell you want during your precious middle of the night hours that no one can touch. You find answers. You’re not afraid of this new era of searching, finding. You’re not afraid of monitoring, keeping tabs. You’re not afraid of the radical intimacy that exists between a person and her search engine. You’re more afraid of losing it.
Maybe I Just Needed to be Killed
I see myself with the gun raised, at a distance. I see him fall. Maybe I just needed to kill.
That was the caption Eileen Myles used on Instagram for a selfie she posted the day Antonin Scalia was found dead on a ranch near Marfa, TX. It felt good to hear someone say it, to express, even as a joke, the bottomless anger so many people felt about his toxic words, his power. My friends and I have adopted the phrase, finding it oddly expedient in our everyday lives. But of course, hypothetical or fictional violence by women has a long history. Clytemnestra. Lady Macbeth. Buffy Summers.
The vision kept coming back to me. I didn’t see myself shoot. I just saw the seconds right before. At first I thought it was bizarre that the image haunted me, the gun in my hand, a recurring waking dream. I’ve never touched a handgun. Then I realized it’s perfectly normal. It’s terrifyingly normal to see a person channel their rage into violence. Around the time of my nightmare, in 2016, there had been a mass shooting every single day of the year in the US, and then, too, I’d been watching a lot of Buffy.
Fifty years to the day after Charles Whitman’s mass shooting from the tower on the UT campus, eight years after a student opened fire on the sixth floor of the library during my first semester as a graduate student, and two months after the largest mass shooting in US history at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Campus Carry went into effect at the University of Texas at Austin. When UT became an officially gun-happy school, I was long gone, not teaching as I had planned to be. I didn’t act on my gun hallucination, though if I’d stayed the new law would have made it extremely easy to execute. Guns are permitted in classrooms, libraries, and in professors’ offices. Three female professors, two from my former department, filed a lawsuit against the legislation. Women. Heroes.
The night I moved out of Texas, I woke at 3:30 a.m. beside my girlfriend from a dream about the professor getting punched in the face. I didn’t punch him, but I saw him punched. I have never punched anyone, I don’t even think I’ve witnessed a real-life punch, but this violent scenario in all its permutations has followed me here. That day I’d driven fourteen hours away from Austin to a casita owned by a woman who in a footnote to a book about Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party calls herself a “radical lesbian separatist.” These days she’s just an ardent feminist French tapestry weaver. When we came to see the house, she told us—because she said she could tell we were feminists—that she was attacked and raped by a man in our apartment several years ago and has since lost her short-term memory due to the drugs she was given to help her cope. How many years? She tells me, frequently, that we make her feel safe. Women do this.
The women lined up outside the professor’s office to ask for funding. I wanted to take the summer to finish my dissertation, but I was told that I had to go to him to ask. He certainly would have given me the summer. Smirking. I decided, though it didn’t feel like I had another option, to finish my dissertation in six weeks and get out rather than stand in that line. Rather than beg funding from administrators in the department, some of whom are women I once admired for their feminist scholarship, who as far as anyone can tell have been knowingly promoting this guy I consider a predator for years, giving him more power and more one-on-one access to students. Maybe they really don’t know.
He first came on to me (after me?) in an email early in the semester I took his required class, telling me, “You write like a dream.” I was 24, in an increasingly hard relationship of seven years with my first love, a woman. I was wondering if—hoping—the dysfunction was due to my failure to be a lesbian, rather than our failure to connect. Graduate school seemed more and more like a sham, and I wondered what I was doing there, what kind of validation I was seeking, and somewhere deep down I just wanted to be writing. Here was my professor, telling me he was “quite smitten” with an assignment I’d written. Here was a compliment I wanted to take to heart. Here was a way out. Here was an avenue to power.
The emails continued from November to February. So did the fucking. I didn’t come once, but I craved companionship in my new terrible studio apartment where my life was careening toward something unrecognizable to me, and this professor kept asking me to come over. Kept sending me poems. Was that consensual? When I think back over any of it, which I’m doing now to try to understand the gun in my mind, I feel like an idiot. I flash on a moment, waiting outside his office for him to finish an interminable meeting, where in the midst of the heady pseudo romance I was able to see myself for what I was: another young woman, waiting outside his office. He’d just gotten tenure. He was smug as fuck. I told him he was a star. What was wrong with me? Nothing more than the desire to be a special woman, to be that kind of special—straight, young, desired, brilliant, beautiful. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to kill. So I’m blaming the victim, too. And of course, I want to have the last word. I think I will.
I can think of few women students I encountered, graduate or undergraduate, who failed to voice discomfort, unease, or distrust of this professor. His reputation became something like a joke. We talk about these things; we are women, we are a warning system for one another. The only warning system. To be honest, I don’t think the lesbians, or the feminist women, or the women, period, are the ones on campus carrying the guns at UT these days. Just a hunch. Don’t worry: misogynists, sexual predators, rapists, you remain—as ever—protected.
The professor’s harassment, and the systems that support it, are insidious forms of violence against women—as opposed to all the flagrant kinds—because the perpetrators call themselves liberal, feminist. They assume positions of power and authority over women but remain outwardly obsequious to them. In this way they are like any institution, and especially like the institution we call the university. Liberal ideas, but conservative funding and a misogynist, racist heart. Patriarchy at its finest, alive and well in the tenure-track world.
I thought my deranged revenge fantasy had its roots in the circle jerk of contemporary academia, in UT and Texas and conservative policies that make a mockery of human rights, but my rage is more mundane and more omnipresent than even those institutions: it is a rage against men in positions of power over women, but even more fundamentally it is the rage of women who cannot fight back. It is a rage that helps me feel sympathy for others whose pain erupts in public violence—against police in Dallas, for example—a truly disturbing source of compassion. Voiceless. Stifled. Enraged. Maybe we just needed to kill.
I get a sense sometimes from older feminists that this rage I describe is tiresome, is old hat, they’ve already dealt with it and moved on and now they’re just leaning the fuck in. But have they dealt with it? Or has the rage just been suppressed, converted into other forms of aggression—self-loathing, spite? What does it feel like to harbor it for a lifetime, I wonder?
Because I will harbor it. I will live out my non-militant lesbian existence in places more tolerant, less threatening than Texas and its public university. Others will turn their anger into purchasing power, buying guns and using them in public places to find some form of release. The release is the trigger. It’s just pushing a button. Very little effort and no back button, no undo. It’s not at all like Buffy who has to wrestle and kick and struggle, then stake. Just “click.” And there are so many precedents, so many ways to visualize the thing before it happens. Much harder to imagine living with that tacit rage, let alone transmuting it.
Jenn Shapland is a nonfiction writer living in New Mexico. Her work won a 2017 Pushcart Prize and has been published in Tin House, THE Magazine, Pastelegram, The Lifted Brow, and Electric Literature. She teaches in the Creative Writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts and she designs and makes clothing for Agnes.