Medicaleyes
1963, Foucault: “Hence the strange character of the medical gaze; it is caught up in an endless reciprocity.”
I sit in front of the endocrinologist, a man who speaks like a robot so I know he’s smarter than me. “You don’t have any serotonin,” he churns out. He prescribes vitamins that make me throw up my breakfast while I’m driving. My serotonin doesn’t return.
Years later she tells me, matter of factly, about a special medical test they can do for depression. “It’s actually a real thing,” she says, meaning the illness itself. I’ve known this since I was 17 and I would look at my hand and not see my own hand. I reply, “Really?”
I sit across from Dr H as she takes extensive notes. By now I know which answers she’s looking for. She tells me I’m doing much better, and I thank her, and pay her, and feel I’ve achieved something so tangibly productive. I did that, I want to scream in triumph. I got my serotonin back. I don’t say anything at all.
The psychiatrist with the shark eyes looks at me when I’m 24 and tells me I’m drifting. I drift and drift and drift, up, up, up. I get so high I can look down and see her seeing me. This is how I know I’m real.
A year earlier, I watch the pink hair dye swirl down the drain in delight.
“Is this rebelling or acquiescing?”
I ask myself six years later as I feel my hair being bleached so many times, it eventually comes out in chunks.
“I’m tired of being perceived,” I say to my friend in 2019. “mood,” is her reply.
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies?,” Margaret Atwood yells. This makes me more of who I am. I see the irony in this.
I want to go back in time and stand up for myself. I want to tell shark eyes to stop perceiving me.
You’ve heard this story before.
Listen.
“I imagine your mind,” Charles Cooley writes, “and especially what your mind thinks about my mind and what my mind thinks about what your mind thinks about my mind.”
I imagine you imagining me. This is my relief.
You didn’t think you’d have a part to play in this, did you? It isn’t your fault. You’re just an observer.
