Toxic Immobility: an essay
Then fear banishes all wisdom from my heart.
– Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes (45 BC)
Fight-or-Flight
When I was a young girl, I believed that I would be a fighter. If I could wrestle my two brothers, then surely, I could defeat the faceless man lurking under the streetlight. After all, isn’t that how adrenaline works – a stranger leaps from the bushes to attack, for which you shed your school dress to reveal a blue and red aerodynamic suit attached to a cap? At least that’s what television taught me.
Around those pubescent years I noticed that an undercurrent of timidness had swept away my once resilient disposition. On every birthday I was programmed and updated with the latest chapter on how girls should behave.
My mother taught me how to communicate. ‘Aim for the groin and run,’ she used to say. I rolled my eyes, sick of hearing this whenever I was to take the dog for a walk.
‘You know what I said to a man who exposed himself to me on the street?’
‘What, mum?’
‘In a firm voice I said, “Put your toy away or I’ll chop it off for you.” And he quickly pulled up his pants and ran off.’
I couldn’t help but laugh, admiring her enthusiasm.
Staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror I’d practice my own response. ‘Go away,’ I’d say in a deep voice, sounding like a mixture of Bane and Bacall. I was surprised at the lines forming on my brow and the assertion in my eyes. It was somewhat… exhilarating. I’m a fighter.
My school teachers taught me how to defend myself. Self-defence classes became an annual end of year activity for us girls in high school. How lucky we all felt to be throwing punches at foam mats, giggling in comradery, while the boys played footy on the oval. Despite forgetting a majority of the moves, there’s one that has stuck with me over the years, the “high kick to the face”, which is basically as it reads. I’m yet to utilise such a powerful manoeuvre on the streets.
And my favourite teen magazines taught me how to repel unwanted attention. The number one rule these toxic articles preached was to never dress like a “slut” on a night out. Remember, this was the noughties where the shorter the skirt and the brighter the slogan tee somehow meant the more you were asking for it.
It didn’t occur to me until later in life the correlation that all these lessons had. That it was ultimately me who had to change my actions in order to prevent someone else from misbehaving.
*
Seventeen-years-old, crouching on grimy tiles, rummaging through my backpack on a train station platform in Beijing. A yellow cord curled around my hand, and as I lifted it to my eyes, I saw that it was my brother’s coaching whistle. My cheeks flushed red. I stuffed it down into my backpack. I had specifically told my mum that I was not taking something so ridiculous with me. ‘Yes, but it makes me feel better knowing that you’ve got it on you,’ she’d say.
I guess I was hardly surprised six years later when I moved to Los Angeles and once again discovered that yellow, well, now a dirty brown, cord hidden in my handbag. Yet, no matter how close I came to tossing the whistle out, there was this mind-pinching feeling that perhaps it could be of use someday.
‘Is it safe to walk to the supermarket?’ I asked my new housemate. His expression was blasé, a look you become accustomed to seeing on millions of faces in this city.
‘Well, you are a girl, do you have pepper spray?’
Pepper spray. $12. Amazon. Delivered in 6 days.
For that first year in Los Angeles I hardly slept. My bedroom was a prison cell secured by steel bars on the outside of a tiny window, the second-hand mattress was a minefield of holes caused by cigarettes, and the constant hum of LAPD helicopters hovering above sent my tinnitus into a thumping all-night rager. In the hours before bed I’d walk the pristine corridors of the Beverly Center. Palms red from carrying Target bags, coat hangers poking out of the plastic. On one particular night, instead of taking the usual Uber home, I decided to save a few dollars by catching the bus. The bus ride was a 25-minute trip down La Cienega Boulevard, followed by a brisk 10-minute walk to my apartment.
As I stepped off the bus and headed away from the flashing headlights, I heard the quick shuffling of steps behind me. I turned. 5’8, stained t-shirt, bald head, brown pants falling from hips, broken shoes. Is he following me? I crossed the street to be sure and a shot of cold water rushed through me as he too crossed the street.
‘I followed a girl home… girl called police… I follow this girl.’ His voice rang louder than the Hebrew chants from neighbouring synagogues.
My pace sped up, the Target bags knocking against my shins. In my head I scanned the items I had on me: phone in front pocket; pepper spray in back pocket; whistle, somewhere tangled between gum and loose pennies in handbag.
I caught sight of a block of units and in an instant, I slipped away from the street and hurried towards them. But my plan to lose the man failed and I now found myself cornered on the porch of an empty ‘for sale’ unit.
Freeze
The North American Opossum was far from the cute and cuddly brushtail possums I had come to adore in Australian children’s books. What I saw on the internet, were images of frightening rat-like creatures with mouths full of sharp fangs, eyes that were dark and alert, brown-hued coats that resembled fine spikes, and on the tip of their long snouts sat pink noses like that of an old man with a winter’s cold.
What intrigued me most about the opossum was their inability to control its body when under threat. When the opossum’s defence fails, they enter a state of tonic immobility, falling to the ground and staring into nothingness. Saliva foams at the mouth, and a carrion odour is secreted from their anal glands, misleading the predator into thinking they’re just a festering carcass, thus losing interest.
*
I stood paralysed on the porch. My nervous system shut down, and my muscle memory didn’t take over like it was supposed to. Aim for the groin and run. High kick to the face. Use the whistle. Call the police. Don’t be a hero. Scream. Don’t provoke a stranger. Use the pepper spray, but don’t use the pepper spray if you think it’ll provoke him.
Where was this magical release of adrenaline that would transform me into a second-rate Bruce Lee? Adrenaline should have diverted my blood flow towards the major muscle groups, the heart and lungs, increasing strength and stamina, activating my ability to fight back or at least run away.
Instead, my legs were fifty-kilogram weights sinking into the pavement beneath my feet. I couldn’t move my hands, let alone pull out any of the cheap weapons that I had on me. All logical thinking ceased. At least my senses were heightened. I heard the drip drip drip of water onto cobblestone. There was an odour of wet socks and urine in the warm air. And the distant sound of a crowd applauding from what I can now only assume was Saturday Night Live on the neighbour’s television.
The man’s eyes were penetrating, tiny pools of oil, that watched me as he spoke in tongues. After a while of waving his hands in the air and swaying side to side, it became clear to me that he probably meant no harm. Just a homeless man with a drug problem.
‘Please fuck off,’ I said.
Neither of us moved. Two very different people, numb and entranced in our own state of minds. I was very much a part of his psychedelic trip, as he were a part of this nightmare. A surge of energy between us; the gravitational pull of a black hole, warping both space and time.
Then suddenly, he turned and walked away.
I watched the sweat soak into the back of his shirt, until he finally disappeared around the block. When I could no longer hear him yelling, I sprinted home.
For an hour I sat on the edge of my mattress, transfixed on the finite details of what had just occurred. There had to be a reason why I, a woman over six foot, a fighter, couldn’t take on a stranger half my size. I travelled back to the moment of when I exited the bus. How did I hold myself? Was I too confident? Did my clothes look expensive? Why hadn’t I pulled out the pepper spray or held my phone in my hand? – habits I should have executed on the bus before stepping off onto a dark street.
Nothing life-threatening happened to me that night. I wasn’t mugged. I wasn’t stabbed. I wasn’t sexually assaulted. Instead, I was awakened by the thought that if I were ever to be stuck in a situation worse than what I had just experienced – a situation where I needed my mind and body to respond in unison, a situation that could result in death – that ultimately I wouldn’t be able to defend myself. Once again, mind and body would shrivel up like a packet of frozen peas.
Taser. $9. Amazon. Express shipping $10. Delivered in 2 days.
*
The freeze response is an in-built coping mechanism that allows us to block out traumatic events. Endorphins are released, acting as pain relievers which help calm the body, reducing the intensity of what is happening around us. Although, the fight-or-flight response has been widely researched since psychoanalyst, Walter Bradford Cannon coined the term in 1915, the freeze response is still much less understood.
A study undertaken by Swedish researchers found that 70 per cent of the 298 women who visited a rape clinic one month after being sexually assaulted experienced this form of involuntary paralysis. Involuntary – that is people cannot choose to switch it on and off like a smile.
Women who experience tonic immobility are afraid of speaking out because of the overwhelming guilt surrounding the question of ‘why didn’t you fight back?’ Thus, doubling their chances of having PTSD within six months after the assault, as well as increasing their chances of developing severe depression.
Is this, as women, how we must continue to live our lives, overshadowed by the crippling anxiety of preconceived fear and the psychological trauma after experiencing such fear? A state of constant emotional turmoil that is just as much, perhaps even more, societally ingrained into us than it is biologically. As second nature to us as eating, breathing, and sleeping, so too are glancing over ones shoulder when walking through a park, or sending that text to a friend with the address and contact number of the Hinge date you’re yet to meet, or holding your keys between your knuckles when walking through a carpark late at night.
If I had grown up like my two brothers, where the only fear I had was whether or not I’d be benched during a football match, would my psychological response have changed when followed by the stranger that night in Los Angeles? Was all that I had learnt growing up what deterred me from fighting back? Or was it all just as simple as my biological makeup? I was the prey.