I f***ing hate mustaches

I hate mustaches. I really, really hate them.

That might seem like a strange word choice, but I stand by the usage.

I have a physical reaction every time I see them, like when you get sick after eating a certain food and can’t stand the sight of it anymore. If I was given the ability to change one thing in the cultural zeitgeist, I would seriously consider doing away with the entire concept. I would make them a thing of the past, an embarrassing style choice of our ancestors who were less evolved and more prone to silly mistakes. Something we all look back on and think: what neanderthal thought that was a good idea? Like fanny packs. Or giving Donald Trump a Twitter account.

When I was travelling through Thailand in January of this year, I saw so many men with mustaches and it filled me with a foreboding sense of dread. Tension-building background music played in my head as the realization hit me. The trend would only spread. I would return to the States and be greeted by a sea of pornstaches. Oh, the horror.

The pandemic caused by the coronavirus has only accelerated this “fashion” choice. Like women and their legs, men are using this time to let hair sprout between their breathing holes. I see them on my video conferences, on instagram videos, on family chats. They’re everywhere.

A cute fellow I started chatting with during quarantine once sent me a selfie of him enjoying a beer on his patio, and do you know what was on his face that was nowhere to be found on his profile? A push broom mustache.

It was a real bummer, because he was very cute otherwise, but I just couldn’t look past it. It’s like smearing shit onto a perfectly good sandwich, or using hashtags in actual conversations. One small addition that makes an otherwise appealing prospect unpalatable.

A wispy one. A full grown one. A curled one. Doesn’t matter what shape, I dislike seeing it in any form, kind of like any variation of The Bachelor franchise (if we needed any more proof that we’re in the bad timeline, there’s a singing iteration of the show now).

When people ask me where this hatred comes from, I usually tell them I don’t know, then quickly pivot into a long-winded list of other things I dislike — of which there are many.

But that’s a lie. I know exactly why I hate mustaches so much.

They remind me of my father.

Trauma manifests in strange ways sometimes.

I choose not to answer honestly because the truth invites uncomfortable questions. I don’t like uncomfortable questions, because I’m not very good at controlling my responses to them.

Trauma also manifests in very textbook ways sometimes.

Such questions also can lead to deep conversations that don’t really align well with something as innocuous as men’s facial hair. Though both involve men’s disappointing habit of making terrible choices. Only one of which I’ll talk about gladly. The other, not so much.

I don’t discuss my trauma often, and as my father played the leading role in it, I rarely talk about him either. Which means, as a consequence, I usually avoid talking about my past in general.

Because trauma bleeds. It seeps through associations, sights, and smells. It rides your memory, and when the trauma is connected to someone who was so integral in your life, you see it everywhere. When the foe is someone who was meant to protect you, you begin to see threats everywhere. Your past and present are triggers, your future dissolves. In the deep of it, you cannot see an escape. It pricks at wounds, related or otherwise, if it’s one incident or if it’s many. And so, trauma becomes inextricably part of who you are, and it feels impossible to separate yourself from it.

You learn to shield yourself to survive, especially when it occurs at such a young age that you have no defense mechanisms in place. Your brain goes into survival mode and sends your animal instincts into overdrive. My brain, for instance, chose to shut down and lock the memories away until puberty hit and they oozed back into my consciousness like bad dreams.

In my mind, I had two choices: say everything or say nothing. As I couldn’t really make sense of what had happened, I chose the latter.

Silence became my shield. It wasn’t a very good one, but it was all I could handle at the time. It started as a habit, then after a while it became part of who I was. Sometimes I pretended my tragic backstory was the big mystery in a mystery novel. One of the really clever ones you never saw coming.

My past became a ticking time bomb, something that could go off the instant the words escaped into the atmosphere. So I stuffed my feelings down deep, underneath deathly glares that kept people at a distance and eye rolls at anything resembling emotions, which at the time I associated with weakness.

Even now, after so long, I fear that I will fail to capture the enormity of this thing that is so deeply rooted in my being, or that people won’t understand. So instead I hide it, this huge part of me, because I can’t figure out a proper time and place to bring it up. There’s no good non sequitur to tell someone your father abused you as a kid (though Woody Allen does keep trying to pop his head back up into society like the world’s least welcome groundhog. May spring never come for you again, asshole).

The thought of breaking that silence still terrifies me. I’ve done it a few times, each time a little less terrifying than the last, but even still I’m scared of how it will come out and how it will be received. So I leave it out.

I suppose I look to other people like my memory does to me: an outline punctured with large gaps, a sketch riddled with eraser marks.

An ex of mine once said that I reminded him of a deep sea creature. He knows me, has been inside of me, but he doesn’t really know me. When I told my friends this, they thought it was a rude thing to say. I didn’t.

It meant he really did know me.

I can type the words or write them down, perhaps because when I’m doing this, I am alone, communicating with myself, an audience that knows exactly what I’m talking about. But saying them aloud indicates there is someone else listening, so it feels like a confession. It becomes my responsibility as orator to encapsulate this character reveal with the weight and elocution it deserves. When it comes to talking about my feelings, I have the eloquence and dictation of Brett Kavanaugh at a confirmation hearing.

Another reason I don’t talk about it is selfishness. I don’t want to feel the weight of this burden, and bringing it up only brings the beast I’ve carried for so long back to life again. Another part of me feels guilty passing it onto another person, like I’m purposefully handing them fruit I know is rotting on the inside.

Besides, I’ve carried it this far alone, haven’t I?

My father’s death complicates these matters. When people find out he died, they are sympathetic and sad for me, which, as much as I appreciate the sentiments, only adds to my discomfort at the topic.

They tell me how sorry they are and I tell them it’s okay. Because it’s easier to say that than what I really want to: don’t be. If he were still alive, I wouldn’t be.

Not because I thought he was going to kill me, or because I wanted him dead, though such thoughts did cross my mind during very low points in my life. I just never could have grappled with what happened to me if he was still a presence. Your skin cannot heal if the splinter is still inside it. Sure, the skin can grow around it. But the outside becomes calloused, numb. Dead skin hiding the infection that still lurks underneath.

Sometimes I leave things out because they’re just difficult to explain. Like how at some point in high school, I still don’t know exactly when because my memory is basically a shattered stained glass painting — all fragments and shards scattered on the floor — I started seeing flashes that felt like memories but looked like nightmares.

It’s impossible to reconcile memories of someone meant to protect you with flashes of them doing the very opposite. It makes no sense, and is even more confusing when that person is there every day acting as if those things never took place. You begin to doubt everything. Your life. Your mind. Your memories. Mostly, you doubt yourself.

At least cognitive dissonance is humanity’s jam, we basically built our society on contradictions.

The thought of hearing people’s surprise, how they couldn’t believe it, watching them try to reconcile the person they knew with the person I’m describing, is just too much. My father cut out parts of who he was as well. It is something the abused and abusers have in common. I have enough sin’s of my own; I just don’t have the emotional capacity to confess someone else’s.

I didn’t tell anyone what happened to me until decades later. I just lived with it, in an almost literal sense. Memories are heavily attached to places, so when you live where your abuse occurs, they become constant companions. Now, isolated and alone in my studio basement apartment states away from my childhood home, I often find myself contemplating what would have happened if quarantine took place when I was a teenager, lost in the thick of it. Back then I had opportunities to get away, like cheerleading practice and dance class, even school. The thought of being stuck in the place with your abuser in the place you were abused, fills me with a cold dread.

The abuse, as far as I know (re: memory sucks), only took place a few times during my childhood, then stopped. But the damage stretched much farther.

When I did start talking about it, I would only discuss chunks and fragments, leaving out details to spare people the pain of them. I withdrew, became overwhelmed with angst that my family believed was caused by puberty hormones, and I escaped into fantasies via books, video games, and movies. It feels nice to overthrow an evil empire or stick a sword through someone who betrayed you; makes you think maybe one day you’ll do it in real life.

For a very long time, I felt alone, convinced no one in the world could understand what I had been through. Sometimes I used my victimhood to feel superior to others. I would look around at happy faces and scoff at their ignorance. They had it so easy, they had no idea what pain was or what people were capable of.

I did though.

So suck on that, popular kids.

This pain was exclusively mine and that singularity gave me a sort of power. When you have so many things taken away from you, you fumble for anything that is yours and yours alone. Even if it’s your own suffering. If I was a millionaire, this would have either been my superhero or super-villain origin story, depending on my mood.

Eventually though, if you stop focusing on your own pain and look outside yourself, you realize you’re not alone. That what happened to me has happened to so many other people in so many different ways. At first, I felt a deranged sort of jealousy at the realization. This was my tragic backstory. This was what made me strong, and hard, and different.

I was supposed to be an original.

It is good, in some sense, to know there are others who understand, but also heartbreaking to know this story has been written over and over again, for as long as stories have been told.

Doubt no longer plagues me. Neither does hatred. I used to stew and think about it all the time. Whenever the smallest inconvenience popped up, or something bad happened, I couldn’t help but think of it. That and now this? Life was unfair. Life was out to get me. Why me, why me, why me? Rewind. Replay. When the tape breaks, record a new one.

But I don’t think about it much anymore, though the effects of the trauma still manifest in a variety of fun little ways (like how my need to be in control results in me getting irrationally infuriated when friends show up late to things). I don’t think about my father much anymore, either. Not the bad, not the good. For so long he had been a specter, his presence and influence haunting my every step. My whole existence was based on what he did to me.

After he died, I was kind of lost. Who could I blame my problems on now? I picked up right where he left off, cycling through a variety of self-destructive habits and actions that made me feel just as ashamed and worthless as I did when he was around. I never stopped to think about why I was doing those things, I just moved from one terrible thing to another so that I could obsess over the latest shitty thing I had done. Then eventually, that had to end too and I was left with a history of awful things I could no longer outrun. Either I turned to face them, or took myself out of the game entirely.

So I called a therapist, and began the hardest part. For someone who grabs the popcorn anytime there’s confrontation to watch, confronting my own demons was more like chewing on broken glass.

But I let it out and after a few years of processing and soul-searching, I began to see my father differently. Not just the man from my nightmares, but the man who would take me on motorcycle rides through the hills and valleys of upstate New York, who obtained not one, but two broken hot tubs through trades — he loved bartering, but was really shit at it.

I could bear hearing people tell me happy memories, too. Finally I could separate good times from tragic ones.

Now, I barely think of him at all. He’s no longer a phantom, more like a messy figure from a book I read long ago and have mostly forgotten. The more I heal, the more irrelevant he becomes, as a villain, as a person. Through the act of healing, I erase him. Sometimes, I’m overwhelmed with sadness at the thought.

Even after he died, he was there, always creeping around the fog of depression that followed me for nearly a decade. The two were so inextricably linked that as the fog fades, so does he. But then I’ll see a mustache, the hatred will flare, and there he is behind it. Not just as that person, but a flawed man with awful taste in facial hair.

I don’t waste energy wondering what my life would have been like without trauma to anchor me anymore, or deliberate on all the things I could have done differently. I did what I did, and can’t go back to change any of it.

My defense mechanisms protected me, perhaps even saved me during the worst of it. But I now fear they are now hindrances. I have built walls around myself, out of fear and shame and sometimes laziness, but I’m getting too old for that shit. When you’re in a cage, there’s a limit to how much you can grow.

I used to believe this trauma would always be my defining characteristic. That all my decisions and habits were only a result of the actions of someone else. I still have some bad habits that were formed in response to my trauma and my decision to try to run from it. Now, however, I take solace in the fact that I have outgrown being a victim.

Instead, I am a survivor shaped, but not defined, by trauma. A person who knows who she is, but has trouble letting others do the same. Someone who can recognize when her reactions are irrational, but is at least working on not projecting the pains of her past onto the potential of her present.

I mean, what if a wonderful friend or the love of my life was hiding under a handlebar mustache this whole time? Wouldn’t that just be a kick?