And I was furious about it. Because I didn’t choose that. I didn’t consent to wanting a man’s hands on me again, and I damn sure didn’t sign off on my body waking up from a whole coma just because some arrogant, bourbon-drinking CEO with a jawline and a God complex decided to participate in a wedding tradition. I had been spending so much time making sure no man could make me feel anything I didn’t authorize first. And this man had undone all of it with one hand and a Keith Sweat song, and he didn’t even know he’d done it, which somehow made it worse.
And then for him to be a Banks. It was just all so wrong. I know that Zainab got a good Banks man but after my encounter with Thad. I didn’t trust any of them. They were all dangerous. All men are dangerous.
But when he bumped into me in that hallway and I went nuclear, it wasn’t about the hallway. It was about the fact that I was still trembling and he was the reason and I wanted to hate him for it, but my body had other plans.
“Rage,” I said to Janelle. “It don’t care about context. Doesn’t matter if the man is a threat or not. My body goes to war every single time. My fists get tight and my jaw locks. And I can’t turn it off.”
Janelle set her pen down.
This is never a good sign. When she sets the pen down, it meant she was about to say something heavy.
“Mehar. I need you to hear me. Not just as your therapist. As a woman who sees you.”
I met her eyes. Didn’t look away. Whatever she was about to say, I could take it. I’d taken worse.
“What you’re experiencing is not generalized anxiety. And it’s not standard PTSD.” She paused. “It’s Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. C-PTSD. PTSD comes from a single event. C-PTSD develops when the trauma is prolonged, repeated and inescapable. When it happens over years at the hands of someone who was supposed to love you.”
The room got real quiet.
“Your father and Ahmad. These weren’t isolated incidents, Mehar. This was your entire life. From the time you were an abused little girl, through a marriage you didn’t choose, through a relationship that was supposed to be different and wasn’t.” She held my gaze. “You have never had a sustained period of safety in the presence of a man. Not once.”
I thought about Thad. Not the Thad Janelle knew about. The Thad in the cage. The one in the storage unit with two destroyed knees and a water bottle mounted to the bars like a hamster. The one I fed scraps to through a slot at the bottom while he cried and begged for freedom.
I’d felt nothing. Not satisfaction. Not guilt. Not even the cold power I used to feel when I first locked him in there. Just… nothing. Like checking a task off a list. Feed Thad. Pick up dry cleaning. Schedule bikini wax.
Janelle didn’t know about the cage. She got the trauma. She got the insomnia. She got the rage. She did not get Dame CoCo. She did not get the storage unit. Some doors I opened in this room. Others stayed locked.
“The insomnia, the rage, the need for control, well, those aren’t character flaws,” Janelle continued. “Those are adaptations. Your brain built them to keep you alive. The problem is your nervous system doesn’t know the war is over. It’s still fighting. Every minute. Because safe is not something your body has ever learned to believe.”
My eyes were burning. And I blinked to hold back tears. I focused on holding my face still. I wasn’t about to fall apart on this couch. I didn’t do that. Not in front of people. Not even her.
Then her voice shifted. Still clinical but something underneath cracked open. Something that sounded less like a textbook and more like a woman.
“C-PTSD is significantly under-diagnosed in Black women. The diagnostic criteria was built around combat veterans and natural disasters. It was not designed for a woman who was sexually assaulted by her husband every night for years but couldn’t name it because her religion, her family, and her community told her it was her obligation.” She shook her head. “The clinical framework was not built for us.”
Us. She saidus. And that one word cracked open a door I’d been leaning my whole body weight against for a very long time.
“Black women are not allowed to be traumatized. We are allowed to be strong. Resilient. The ride-or-die. The one holding everybody together while our own shit falls apart in silence. So our trauma responses get misread. Every time. The hypervigilance gets called aggression. The numbness gets called coldness. The rage gets called attitude.” She paused. “The world gives a Black woman a stereotype instead of a diagnosis. And she internalizes it. Believes something is fundamentally wrong with her. When the truth is nothing was ever wrong with her. Everything was wrong with what was done to her.”
That’s when it hit me. Not slow. Not gradual. All at once. Like a wave I didn’t see coming.
Every man who ever called me crazy. Every time one of my mothers told me to pray harder. Every time I’d been called too aggressive. Too difficult. Too MUCH. And I believed them. Added it to the running list of everything wrong with Mehar Ali. Too broken to love. Too damaged to trust. Too angry to be soft.
And this whole goddamn time. It had a name.
The tears came before I could stop them. I didn’t want to cry. I never wanted to cry. But my body didn’t give me a choice. It just… broke.
“You are not broken, Mehar. You are injured. Injured people can heal.”
“The walls you built saved your life,” she continued. “I’m not asking you to tear them down. I’m asking you to see that what saved you then might be trapping you now. Right now you’re living behind walls that protect you and imprison you at the same time.”
“So what do I do?”
“Show up. Sit on this couch. Tell me the truth even when it’s ugly.”
Tell me the truth even when it’s ugly. I almost laughed. If she knew the full truth—the cage, the clients, the leather and the locks and the men who paid me fifteen hundred an hour to be on their knees—those kind hazel eyes might not be so kind anymore.
But she didn’t know. And I wasn’t ready for her to.
