Time - USA (2021-03-15)

68 Time March 15/March 22, 2021

SPECIAL REPORT

WOMEN and the PANDEMIC

“I’m not crazy,” I insisted. I was afraid
I was going to be hospitalized, or medi-
cated against my will, which had hap-
pened to my mother many times.
The doctor reassured me. “Everyone
here wants the best for you. Right now,
we’re just trying to understand.” I glared
at him, then at my father, who looked
miserable, tears welling. My stepmother
took my hand, and there was such kind-
ness in her eyes that in that moment she
seemed like an angel.
And suddenly it clicked. Some-
thing happened in my brain, like a fog
had lifted, and I could see clearly: my
stepmother was an angel. I took in all
my surroundings. The hospital bed, the
curtain half open, my parents waiting.
The angel was there to help me cross
over. I had died. They had been keep-
ing this from me.
“Am I alive?” I asked my parents. “Or
did I die?”
They both burst into tears and
wrapped their arms around me while
I asked again and again, “Am I alive?
Please tell me the truth. Am I alive?”
I felt the heat of them on my body, their
tears on my skin, and I doubted any of
it was real.
I pulled away, and didn’t like what I
saw on their faces. “I’m not crazy,” I said
again. I remembered my mother, who’d
spent so much time in mental hospitals,
psychiatric wards, her whole life cycling
between being overmedicated, under-
medicated, ignored, treated like a hys-
terical woman who couldn’t care for her-
self. How many times had she told me,
“All these doctors, and for what? They
don’t ever listen to me.”
There was movement on the other
side of the curtain, nurses calling out
to one another, someone wheeling a
cart down the hallway. And then, out of
the corner of my eye, the psychiatrist,
his guide dog at his side, and another
fog lifted. He was no doctor. He was a
demon, come to take me to hell, along
with his hellhound.
I started screaming.
More nurses burst through the cur-
tain. Someone took my wrists. The

psychiatrist, the nurses, everyone

stopped speaking to me, and spoke only

to my father. “Her heart is racing,” some-

one explained. “Dangerously high. She

could have a heart attack.”

“Do it,” my father said. He left the

room as they held me down.

My stepmom pulled back the cur-

tain. It was time now. There was a nee-

dle, then an IV. The demon and his hell-

hound stood at the edge of the bed.

Above me, the overhead lights were

bright, so bright.

I started Ordinary Girls, my first

book, shortly after that first episode of

had started as a small 10-city tour, and

grew into a several-months-long affair

with over 40 readings, speaking engage-

ments and lectures all over the country.

Then overnight, at the start of the pan-

demic, everything stopped.

We didn’t know it yet, but my fi-

ancé and I would be separated for

five months. I was in Miami, and be-

cause of the COVID-19 travel bans in-

stituted by the Trump Administration,

they were forced to travel back home

to the U.K. One day I was sharing my

life and work with my partner, spend-

ing time with family and friends, talk-

ing to my mother every day, traveling

three times a week to talk about work

I loved, planning our wedding. And

then, suddenly, I was living alone, sep-

arated from my partner, from my fam-

ily, from my friends. All of my remain-

ing book-tour events were canceled, so

I lost most of my income for the year.

We had to cancel our wedding. My

partner’s interview with U.S. Immigra-

tion was postponed again and again,

and then finally canceled—they had to

remain in the U.K. until the travel bans

were lifted. And then my mother got

sick, spending months in the ICU in a

South Miami hospital after a terrible

year of recurrent pneumonia. The doc-

tors advised us to make plans, to say

our goodbyes.

Like so many other women have

over the past year, I was struggling with

almost every aspect of my life. The re-

cession caused by the COVID-19 pan-

demic is disproportionately affecting

women, and while women in the U.S.

appear to be impacted most, this is a

global problem: according to the McK-

insey Global Institute, during the pan-

demic, women have lost their jobs at

1.8 times the rate of men. A January

2021 report by the National Women’s

Law Center has found that in the U.S.,

women’s labor- force participation rate

is 57%, on par with the rate in 1988.

Approximately 40% of women over

20 have been without work for six

months or longer, with white wom-

en’s unemployment rate at 5.1%, while

I was

STRUGGLING

with almost

every aspect

of my life

psychosis —in October 2007. I was in

treatment, getting better, and work-

ing was helping me find a way back

to myself, even though I was writing

about surviving sexual violence, about

my mother’s mental illness and about

my own struggles with depression and

suicidal ideation. I couldn’t really get

my head around what I was doing—

I was just trying to make sense of my

life. I was trying to figure out how to

keep living.

More than a decade later, when the

book was released, I was happy for the

first time. I was still struggling with

anxiety and depression, but I had never

been this happy. I was engaged to the

love of my life, and we shared homes in

Miami Beach and Montreal. I was doing

what I loved, writing and teaching. I was

in the middle of my book tour, which