mirror system
content 18+
“There’s a joke about white women calling themselves ‘empaths’,” I began, “but this is real for me. Mirror neurons, visceral empathy, a frequency in my fascia.” I was telling my best friend this in the car; we were running an errand.
I never would’ve believed a body could sense rain coming, that it could detect atmospheric pressure shifts, until the day I heard a loud cracking in my head, setting off an intense screaming airplane headache that lasted continuously for a month without relief: the worst physical pain, impossibly sustained. (“I lived,” I eventually told a doctor, shrugging, “so I think it was a CSF leak.” “I think so, too,” he said.) Since then, the stabbing pain will start in the bridge of my nose, or in my teeth, eventually moving to my cheekbone or right eye.
“There’s an atmospheric shift,” I told the Gen Z’er recently. I was massaging my orbital bone.
“It’s going to rain tomorrow,” she said. I raised my eyebrows. One of the teens experiences it in his knees. “Old man knees,” I regularly tease him.
I’m convinced that having an overwired nervous system, plus jelly for skin, contributes to not just venous insufficiency and temperature intolerance, not just flushing cheeks and blue fingertips, not just swelling and bone-deep pain and sharp stabbing nerve pain, not just continuous ringing in the ears or a sensitivity to bright light, but a debilitating environmental awareness, physiological, a perpetual, tenuous situation where it’s difficult to tease apart projection and reflection, a chicken and its egg: a feedback loop of feeling.
“And I can feel exactly what people are feeling, but not why,” I continued. “So if someone seems resentful, but they’re unwilling to say—”
“That would throw you really off-kilter over time,” my best friend interrupted. I fell silent and nodded. It would, wouldn’t it.
And it makes a simple no very difficult for me, and that difficulty is easy to take advantage of, because if you’re that acutely attuned to everything the other person is feeling as if it were your own feeling, feeling their discomfort or rage as if your own, it makes saying your no, instead of their yes, feel physiologically dissonant.
Now we were walking through the parking lot, and I was recounting the elevator story.
It was last July. We were in the elevator, leaving a club. Three men boarded after us, high spirits. I recognized the accent as specifically Melbourne. They noticed that my L.A. friend and I were silent, so they quieted down and tried to look gentlemanly.
Two of them were taller, brunet. The blond man was smaller, the runt of the litter.
“Good evening, ladies,” one of the taller men said. I nodded. Next to me, just out of eyesight, I felt my L.A. friend stiffen.
I glanced across all of them, and I accidentally held eye contact with the blond man, just a moment overlong. Oh, he was twerpy. There was a glint in his eye. Now I looked at nothing, trying to appear impassive, but I was deeply amused. It was too late; he’d already seen it.
“What are you ladies getting up to tonight?” he asked me, and only me. I inhaled sharply, fighting myself to not play along.
“We just saw a movie,” I said, deliberately misinterpreting his question.
He looked down, smiling—girl, stop playing hard-to-get—and back up again. “I mean,” he said coyly, “where are you headed now?”
Oh, my God. This was exactly my shit. I could feel my L.A. friend becoming agitated.
“Home and straight to bed,” I said to him. This was an accidental tell, because the only people who say “home and straight to bed” are the ones who recognize going home and straight to bed on a Friday night is a complete joke.
“That’s probably the right idea, honestly,” said the man nearest me, attempting to ally with me. I tried to not glare at him. Oh, don’t play both sides; you’re the obvious ringleader, no one is dragging you out tonight. Leonardo throwing Michelangelo under the bus, here.
A distinct flicker of disappointment had passed across the blond man’s face. Now he visibly gathered all his strength in his body, preparing a third try, this time using direct, vulnerable, unplayful communication:
“Wouldn’t you like to come out with us?”
I would. More than anything, I would. I desperately wanted to tell him that I was getting a divorce, that I love drinking, that I have friends in Melbourne. Oh, have you visited? Yes, once. With the very last of my inheritance. Where did you visit? Oh my God, I don’t know. The grocery store, the beach, the bus, the zoo.
I didn’t hesitate. “Can’t. I’m sorry.” My mouth was already moving against my will.
The blond man hung his head. It wasn’t a put-on; it was real. It was a gut punch.
“Excuse him,” the friend nearest to me said, “he’s got no radar.”
“His radar is fine,” I murmured.
I’ve come to appreciate that it takes a special type of man to understand that I really, really like men, love men, enjoy them, care about them, understand them perfectly well, relate to them. Women seem to understand this without issue. But most men—not all of them straight, white, or cis—glance over me and just assume I’ve either already declared war on men or lost interest in them altogether.
The three men exited the elevator and then out of the reception area, into the parking garage, their friend still a soggy little raincloud. We hung back, sitting down on an undersized, overstuffed plush couch near the front desk so that we wouldn’t accidentally intercept them on our way out.
“That was,” my L.A. friend said, “way more interaction than I wanted.”
I sighed wearily. “I wanted to say more. I wanted to apologize. I feel really terrible.” Then I told her my monstrous secret. I have three great loves: drinking, drinking with complete strangers, and drinking with Australians. All three of these together was my dream come true, which is to say, a nightmare.
I didn’t need to elaborate; she already looked shocked.
I think any of my closest, dearest friends would be shocked, although my less-close friends have an inkling by now, since the last they will see of me is me trailing after a stranger into the night, ducking into a car I haven’t paid for. I’m always so confident I’ll be safe, too, while doing absolutely nothing to prevent my death-by-misadventure.
For a while the night would be gay. But after the first hour or two, the blond man and I will have shifted away from the other two, him fucking with me, me fucking with him, world-building, developing a common vocabulary. The two friends have put a little physical distance between themselves and our stupidity; their blood is boiling. Now he is on his feet, gesturing me toward the bar, trying to get me to do a shot, and I resist because shots always make me puke, but finally I relent and ask the bartender for Malibu, as if I were a kid with a fake ID.
The two friends try to separate us but it’s impossible. Their fuckup friend has found a new fuckup friend, forming a momentary Yoko alliance that will threaten the fabric of the Melbourne friend group for months to come. At some point they might even leave ahead of us, tapping him on the shoulder and going “Mate, we’re out,” and he just nods and turns back to whatever he’s doing.
He and I slide into the backseat of our own Uber and I’m the one who ultimately latches the door behind us.
The next morning, 2pm say, his friends will rib him. The blond man will clam up, embarrassed and ashamed, until he finally says, “You know big girls, always eager to please,” which will make them roar with approval and try to get details, but his arms are folded and he shakes his head.
The reality is too painful; she isn’t “eager to please,” she’s done all the work. Behind closed doors he reverts to his teenage self, uncertain, because handsy, grabby men always grab onto you and then never know what to do with you once they’ve got you. Instead, you have to move their hands for them, doing the work of fooling around all by yourself. You never kiss and you only uncover parts of yourself, never all of you at once, the same way you only uncover bits and pieces to your doctor, or your priest, or on Instagram or a blog or even to your closest friends or yourself.
Later he might start to talk about his father or what happened to his brother, and you touch his arm and whisper you don’t have to do that, and he benignly asks do what, and you answer act like you want to tell me about yourself. Men who pretend to be vulnerable as aftercare are revealing that this is, to them, a transaction, and they’re trying to pay their tab with a story, a performance of emotion or of sharing, when it was never like that for you at all. Now you feel deeply misunderstood, because there’s a reason you’ve never given him your full name or your WhatsApp.
He doesn’t know how to ask you to leave, of course; he just closes his eyes and tries to look like he’s fallen asleep, like a child trying to trick a parent. You get up and put yourself together, and he doesn’t stir at all, performing a stage death, and you unlatch the door and slip out.
That isn’t what happened. And anyway, it’s a composite—an assemblage of half-remembered details, a dream, a fiction—and it’s much more likely, almost a guarantee, I’d fall asleep somewhere long before getting to the lurid part.
Once, in a young man’s home, which was a large, glamorous warehouse in Brooklyn, I’d spent an extra minute in the bathroom, taking in my surroundings. I was younger than he was and, more crucially, inexperienced, although I was rapidly being educated.
I returned, sat down cross-legged on the bed.
“Are you angry at your girlfriend or something,” I asked him.
He stared at me for a long time, probably realizing he’d maybe not tidied up as thoroughly as he’d believed, realizing he might be in trouble. Or maybe he’d just never thought to wonder about how he was feeling. He studied me, looking for any signs of aggression or judgment. Finally the muscles in his face relaxed.
“I… guess I am,” he managed.
I nodded. We went back to what we were doing.
We were still in the elevator and I’d broken out into a cold sweat now, because I’d already renounced holding space for this type of man, aiding his sense of shame, abetting his arrested development. I’d already committed myself to not-drinking, to my own friendships, to someone else’s children, someone else’s parents, someone else’s pets: something outside myself, greater than myself, a sort of secular convent. I was about to go home and straight to bed.
“How did he know to ask you that?” my L.A. friend wondered aloud. She seemed to think it unusual to invite complete strangers out to the next bar, never mind the impulse to accept, never mind the impulse to follow through on that impulse.
“It’s just my pattern,” I said. “He had my number, that’s all.” I turned bitter: “He could tell I’m a good-time gal.” I smiled, a wince. Now I admitted I felt awful, sickened, guilty.
She inspected me. “You’re going to have to get used to the look of rejection on people’s faces,” she finally said.
“Whoa,” said my best childhood friend, still standing with me in the parking lot, just outside the store’s glass double-doors.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think about it a lot.” My friend’s words had hit me like a ton of bricks.
“But it’s not just seeing that look of rejection,” I continued, “it’s feeling it. And so I’m trying to say no, but I also want to say something to cushion it, to explain it. Because rejection is my core wound.
“But as soon as someone can tell your own boundary is hurting you, they see your pain as an opening, and they go after it, needling it. You cannot reveal a single emotion.” You have to be mean as hell, all while feeling their feelings overwhelm your body. What are my feelings?
It isn’t “eager to please,” either. Where this all began was, not after a breakup or some similar blow to the ego, but standing outside a theater-kid house party as a teen, in the dark, next to a freshman I really cared about, waiting for both our moms to come pick us up. It was a rare treat, being around other people my age, without my own parent phoning each of the other parents first.
He was great. I think he was the same age but a grade behind, well-liked, gregarious and incredibly funny, never mean although capable of a rare, blazing anger, kind of a troublemaker and kind of an oddball, compact, unexpectedly and uncannily athletic the way a kangaroo is. His brother, older and taller and leaner and fairer, was a little gentler, more overtly tender, and erudite and well-read once you got him talking. They both had the same blush pattern, under the cheekbone, right above the jaw.
We’d been mostly silent, but suddenly he spoke.
“Can I feel your boobs?” he asked.
Plain, tidy speech. I turned my head and stared at him, studying him. He wasn’t being funny. His face was open and curious.
I’d never felt so seen. Right? It’s crazy that I even have these! What are bodies, even? I was literally the safest person for him to ask, because I understood the nature of the ask, and I wasn’t gonna blab about it to everyone, either, or try to date him or make it a thing.
“Sure,” I said. We had to work quick, before I got caught in the high beams of my mom’s Honda, never to be allowed out of the house again. I fully faced him and lowered my shoulders a little.
He got this look of intense focus and kind of raised his hands, hovering for a second, and then, rather than attacking them straight on, or cupping them, he felt the sides first, how they connect to the pectoral muscle, and then underneath, studying how they sit on the body. He’d kept his curiosity to the outside my shirt. He was careful to not brush his hands across anything objectionable, making it clear that this was science.
He exhaled. He’d been holding his breath. He dropped his hands to his sides. “Thanks,” he said.
“No problem,” I said. We went back to waiting for our moms, never to speak of it again. This is, in fact, the first time I’ve mentioned it, breaking my vow of silence.
My best friend asked me if I wanted to look around or if I just wanted to get straight to our errand. I said I’d like to look around. We stared at the array of weather radios, lined up on the shelf, on acrylic stairsteps. I tapped the best one, a shock-white rectangle that hangs on the shower wall, and told her I’d had two of them—one for upstairs, one for downstairs. It’s the best because it crackles on and starts blasting anytime there’s an emergency.
“Because of the earthquakes?” she asked me.
“The wildfires,” I clarified. I thought, briefly, of Silicon Valley, the burnished orange sky, the rolling power outages, my neighbor Dolly opening a bottle of wine in the dark of her kitchen, a tour of her tabletop Christmas village.
Next to the radios were the various electronic weather-measuring gadgets and analog temperature gauges. “I left my barometric pressure gauge in storage,” I told my best friend, “but maybe I should get it out. It used to be on my apartment wall.” My apartment had always felt like living below deck on a little boat.
“I didn’t know this before,” I told her, “but you have to tap on the glass to get the gauge to update.” I tapped on the outer glass of a circular thermometer, demonstrating. “So I’d feel pressure in my face, and I’d tap on the glass,” tap tap tap, “and the pointer would drop, and I’d be like ‘oh yeah, there it goes’.”
We walked through the DVDs. It was an extremely weird selection, with Hallmark movies, bizarre low-budget stuff, but also Chinatown. I picked up the Blu-Ray of Twin Peaks: the Return and examined it.
“I thought you already had that,” she said.
I explained that The Return was a series on Showtime airing 25 years after the original series. It’s part of the plot, I explained, but also, David Lynch knew that two castmembers were going to die, so he’d hustled everyone together for a last ride. Several castmembers had dropped off since it’d aired in 2017, including David Lynch himself.
“You’d hate Twin Peaks,” I said, and she confirmed she found it unwatchable, “but David Lynch really understood the nature of… everything.”
I’d watched season 2 with friends last year, I explained, and then we’d watched Fire Walk with Me, then The Return. I’d wept straight through The Return. Then again, “I cried through it the first time, too. Mostly because of Derek.”
She’d been looking at mopheads, but now she whirled to look at me. I’d thought what I’d said was self-explanatory, but I guess it wasn’t. Finally I explained, “He loved Twin Peaks. He didn’t live to see The Return.”
“Oh!” she said.
His widow had posted on his birthday, I explained. She was still undone by grief. I’d had a certain closure, but she never had. I’d broken into my bottles of sake.
“I wondered what set you off,” she whispered.
Now I was softly sobbing in the cleaning aisle of the family discount retail store while my best friend stared at me wide-eyed. I put my hand over my mouth and sucked hard on my lower lip until I’d recovered.
“They call it disorganized attachment,” I was telling a friend recently, “but that’s kind of mean. It’s more like a reactive attachment. If someone is avoidant, I become needy and clingy. If someone is clingy, I become dismissive.”
“Your nervous system is organized,” he teased, “around somebody else’s.”
“That is,” I breathed, “so correct, and so well articulated.” I leaned on the door frame. “The stupidest part is, you can heal disorganized attachment—by hanging out with securely-attached people, long enough for your nervous system to remember how to be normal.”
Later that friend and I were sitting with his wife. I was describing the feeling of feeling other people’s feelings while his wife nodded, gazing at her husband, watching his face to see if he could understand. It’s an overconnected mirror neuron system, I explained, correlated with autism or some sort of developmental trauma, but the whole rest of the body is in on it, too: the neurons, the nerves, the soft tissues, expanding and contracting in an uncontrolled way.
I briefly excused myself because I could feel a fresh hive forming on my jaw and I was desperate to do something about it. My host gallantly told me where I could find his hydrocortisone cream.
“Well,” I said, back on the sofa and answering a question now, “we marry our own shadows.” The couple looked at each other. “We marry someone whose earliest wounds validate and nurture our own earliest wounds,” I continued, “but there’s also the golden shadow. That’s where you admire qualities that you yourself have, or have the potential to possess.” Etc etc.
“That’s why I like women who can be rude,” he said.
“You’re still learning to stick up for yourself,” I agreed, nodding. I pointed out that he probably feels safer with his spouse around, since her willingness to pipe up means she can be rude on his behalf, like a sort of protector, a boundary-maker. “We outsource this stuff,” I said.
“I’ve noticed that I can be social and outgoing on my own,” she said, “but when I’m at a party with him, I retreat.”
Right: we naturally defer to the expert.
“Professionally I’ve always tried to act like I’ve never had sex at all,” I told his wife later, “but that eventually drives you crazy.” I sighed. “It’s what [the years-long harassment campaign] was predicated on: finding whatever it is about you that makes you human, like having relationships or opinions or biases, and then needling you over those because you’re not a perfect A.I. journalist, reporting from a vacuum.”
“You’re not a journalist,” she said, surprised.
“No I am not,” I agreed firmly. “What did your husband call me?” I paused, trying to recall it. I started laughing. “‘An artist, a scholar, a writer,’” I remembered. He’d made me laugh in shock. (“Good lord!” I’d exclaimed at him.) “He gets it. I am not a journalist.” What I am is a lot messier than that.
Then I realized and admitted I had written about sex in the context of tech—we agreed that the tech/sex intersection is the most interesting and possibly most important tech beat—but it’d been about Second Life sex, “which isn’t real,” I said, and about Second Life church, which is real. The whole point of the piece is that Second Life sex isn’t real.
“But people fall in love in Second Life all the time,” she protested. Then I answered her increasingly granular questions about Second Life sex until she’d decided for herself, no, it wasn’t real after all.
Everyone had been ecstatic at Easter Sunday dim sum. The original idea was traced back to me, although I’d required my married friends’ help to execute. (“Conception, implementation,” one of the guests had said, jokingly gesturing to each of us at the table, dispensing credit.)
Afterward we sat in a circle with our coffees. The woman next to me was explaining that A.I. simply wasn’t a good tool for her purposes: when she inputs a command, she needs the output to be predictable. The conversation moved on, but I turned to her and asked her to explain to me what a ‘hook’ was, “because that’s something in Jungian psychology, a hook,” I said. She explained that, with programming, and particularly with A.I., some processes or commands are entirely internal, and they only ever “touch” or engage with other internal processes. You need a hook, some sort of magic command, to draw them out, extricating them in order to work with them.
“That’s exactly like psychology,” I said, amused and a little horrified. “The subconscious, or unconscious,” deep underneath where we can’t get at it. Then I said something then about the “daemon,” the secret background process that runs uninterrupted unless you meaningfully interfere with it, yanking its programming topside in order to work with it.
She said something about humans being messily, imperfectly programmed, and we both smiled.
I forget what she said next, but it had caused me to take a big breath and hold it.
“That was a big breath you just took!” she said.
I nodded. Where even to begin? “Canonization, preservation, what we choose to remember and hand down,” I said, and she nodded emphatically, “what a can of worms. A big question gets a big breath.” At that, we both turned to face forward, rejoining the rest of the conversation. Later I would turn and watch her eyes glitter as she watched her husband talk passionately about a particular programming language.
On the drive back I talked about working at the toy store and art gallery. At the end of each workday, closing up shop, I’d start swearing—letting every curse and swear that had built up inside of me blow out. By day, I was patient, helpful, thoughtful, conciliatory, sincere. So thorough a job was I doing, the store owners were getting pinged by Craigslist ‘Missed Connections’ posts. They’d set up a Google Alert for the store’s name; as such, they received a notification each time a customer posted online wondering who I was, wondering if my helpfulness, my sincerity, had been intended as amorous. It had been mortifying.
One night after close, there had been a rap at the window. I’d unlocked the front door and poked my head out. Once I was done, the young woman said, would I like to go to karaoke? Then she’d paced around outside, waiting for me to wrap up. This is how we became good friends. She’s a well-known writer now but at the time she worked retail, and there is allegiance among Chicago service workers, who’d generously recognized me as one of their own. Here is where my drinking really took off, I explained. I could be mean and sweaty and bratty and funny and sing at the top of my lungs all night: Day Jenn and Night Jenn. I’d joined forces with other psychologically-bifurcated night people, all of them overeducated and underemployed, underpaid.
I peeked over at my friend, who was driving, and his brow was furrowed. I don’t think he loved hearing about this.
“It’s too bad you couldn’t Severance yourself,” he finally said.
“I haven’t seen the second season yet,” I said, nodding.
“Don’t bother,” his wife piped up from the backseat.