I grew up secreted away from the world. My parents didn’t let us watch television or listen to top 40 stations and they rarely discussed current events. My siblings and I were homeschooled, leaving our house only for church, dance lessons and supervised outings to the park. We were to be in the world but not of it, as the Bible instructed—meaning that while we lived in the world, we were supposed to be separate from the evil that lay hidden in all things secular. But evil found us anyway.
I didn’t know there was a Gulf War until 2001, sitting in a high school history class. I copied the dates of both Gulf Wars in my notebook with blue sparkly pen. And thought, How did I miss that war? How did I miss so many people dying? That’s when, I remembered yellow ribbons wrapped around trees in our Dallas neighborhood.
“What are those for?” I asked my mom.
“For the soldiers who serve our country,” she said.
I also remembered standing in line at a grocery store with my mother. I caught a glimpse of a wounded soldier on the cover of Time magazine. When my mother caught me staring, she flipped the magazine around. “This is completely inappropriate for children,” she fumed to the cashier. I knew better then to ask any questions. I didn’t know there was a war. I didn’t know there was AIDs. I didn’t know about prostitution.
When I was nine, during our family Bible time, my dad said the word “prostitute” while reading the book of Ezekial.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Someone who sells their body for money,” my mom answered.
I was confused. “Like an arm?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t learn the real answer until high school, when I looked it the word up in a dictionary after hearing it thrown around in the halls. “Your sister is a whore,” Dustin from the swim team yelled at me.
“No. She still has her arms,” I retorted. Dustin shook his head and walked away.
It’s a funny story. I like to tell it at parties, when people want to know what it was like to grow up evangelical. And people laugh. But really, the story leaves me feeling vulnerable. There were so many things I didn’t know about at the time; so many real evils that surrounded my daily life, but instead I spent my time worrying about the unseen evils.
- Spiritual warfare
- Being raptured while in the bathroom and going up to heaven without pants and all the unsaved below can see my bare butt
- Demons
- Thinking I’m saved, but I’m really not because I sometimes wish God had sent me to a different family
- Not having any spiritual gifts
- Having the smallest mansion in heaven
I was ten years old, ferreting through my father’s files in his office. I did this frequently, sifting through legal briefs and bills, looking for clues to his life outside ours. A life that involved leaving the house and working in a skyscraper in downtown Dallas that sometimes swayed in the wind. Usually I found receipts for restaurants with fancy-sounding names, or foreign coins from the countries he traveled to. This time, I found a newspaper clipping:
“A Delmar financial adviser who was disabled and suffering from hemophilia shot and killed his wife and stepson this weekend in a motel on Cape Cod before turning the gun on himself.”
The woman was my father’s cousin. The lone survivor of the attack was his cousin’s son, who would eventually go live with my great-aunt and uncle. I felt like I had fallen upon some hidden knowledge. Not just of the attack itself, but that something like that could happen so close to us. I slipped the article back among the papers and ran out of the office. It’s easier to worry about demons.
Ten years later, evil found us again, only this time it came closer. Someone in my family abused another member of my family. I can’t give more details than that. This time, I couldn’t pretend to hide the events under a stack of paper and run out the door—they are there with me at every moment, when I lie down, and when I wake up, when I eat Thanksgiving dinner and my mother sighs and says she wishes the “whole family” was here, when I hold my daughter’s hand in the parking lot, and lock the screen door because something inside me tells me that something will come in to my life again and this time it will be worse.
I plan out how evil will come. It will be a patch of ice that makes my husband’s car slip into a pole one wintry evening. It will be violence and alcohol when my daughter is 20. It will be a man with a knife coming in at night to take our TV and our lives, because he only values one of those things. When I am not being pressed for stories about princesses or staving off pregnancy heartburn, in those in-between moments, when I could be eating chocolate alone or scrubbing peanut butter off the floor, I storyboard out evil’s approach. I’ve made a list:
- Infection from improper use of eye curler
- Cancer from proximity to the microwave
- My daughter tripping in the school halls, hitting her head on the linoleum floor and biting her tongue so hard she bleeds to death
- Murder
- Dehydration
- Water intoxication
- Decapitation in the mall elevator
- Peritonitis after swallowing a fishbone
- Allergic reaction cause by bees or latex or any allergies that may as yet be unknown
- Extreme fatigue
- Sitting on top of a powerful swimming pool drain
- Stepping barefoot into a puddle with a live wire in it while simultaneously touching a metal pole
I see evil everywhere. It lurks in the walls of homes and in the eyes of the people I know and love. The first time a friend offered to change my daughter’s diaper, I got scared, shouted “No, thanks,” and snatched her away. Later, when my husband asked me why I had done that, I broke down crying.
“It’s the people you know who hurt you,” I told him. He doesn’t argue when I say that. He knows what I know and we are both a little afraid.
In order to grapple with my fears, I read about crime–fictional and non-fictional. I own books on the history of forensic science, and the psychology of witness testimony, I never miss an episode of Criminal Minds or 48 Hours, and I discuss the vintages of Law & Order episodes like some people discuss fine wines. There is nothing better than an aged, slightly musty Vincent D’Onofrio.
A 2011 study by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that people who watch non-fiction crime shows are more likely to believe that they will be the victim of a violent crime. And a 2010 article published in the inaugural issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science surmised that women watch crime shows in larger numbers partly in order to look for ways to protect themselves. While the authors of that article argue that women are looking for literal ways to protect themselves—use your car keys as a weapon, knee to the groin—I believe the knowledge that we look for is much more metaphorical. We come as close to evil as we can stand and try to control the darkness that we feel edging around us.
And as a woman that darkness is my daily reality. I know too many women who have been victims of assault, abuse, rape or incest. Statistically, that list has affected most of the women I meet, and some of the men, and I think about this whenever I smile and say, “Nice to meet you, my name is Lyz.”
My husband has never found himself walking alone at night, worried that he might lose more than his life. At the most, he told me once, if he was walking alone at night, he’d worry about me alone at home.
In order to quell my fear, I roll in stories of evil like a dog in the mud—Jodie Arias, Casey Anthony, Mariska Hargitay, Nancy Grace. Yet most of those stories pull back before it gets too deep; we want our evil to make sense. Even Dexter follows a code. “The stories look,” as Milan Kundera wrote, “for evil to follow the laws of beauty, to make sense, to have reasons.” I organize evil and categorize it so I can contain it. Even though I know it’s fruitless, I make my lists of all the ways evil can enter my home:
- SIDS
- Molestation
- Choking on a hot dog
- Falling down the stairs
- Stepping on a nail
- SARS
- Encephalitis from a mosquito
If I name it. If I call it out. It can’t touch me. Because the evil that touches you is the evil you don’t know. So I touch it all.
I sometimes find myself telling people about what happened in my family and being met with uncomfortable silence. Once a friend told me I really ought to stop talking about it because it made people feel awkward.
“It makes me feel awkward, too,” I said.
“Well, just the same, you don’t have to shove it in everyone’s face,” she said. We don’t talk much anymore.
But I got her message and I hear it from others, in eye contact avoided and topics changed.
We want our evil, but we want it contained—to exist in this world but not be of our world, to be a distant “other,” not a relative at our Thanksgiving dinner. We want darkness, but not too much. Stories with no resolution, no jail time, no villain, no DNA evidence and an easy 50-minute wrap up, need to be canceled. We force a balance of light and dark that keeps the darkness manageable. But the truth is we are always on the edge of spiraling into something awful.
At family occasions, we don’t mention the thing that happened. We don’t talk about it while we play cards. We dance around the subject even as we talk of others in similar situations. “That jerk should be in jail,” one of my family members will say about someone else who was accused of doing the same thing that ours did.
And yet, if pressed, they will admit that in our case the accused is not a jerk and should not be sent to jail.
And me, I make my lists of all the things that could push me over the edge:
- The odds of dying in a car accident: 77.
- Accidental drowning and submersion: 1,028
- Complications of medical and surgical care: 1,170
- Accident while bicycling: 4,838
- Fall involving bed, chair, other furniture: 5, 508
- Exposure to unspecified forces of nature: 87,318
Tags: evil, law and order, lyz lenz
This resonates very strongly for me. Though the evil, the outside danger, that found its way into my childhood world was very different from yours, it taught me the same lesson: that the world wants to take you unawares, it wants to hit you from behind, to surprise you.
And so your lists could have been my lists: if I worry about EVERY scenario, then none of them could possibly happen. I’ve ruled out so many things!
In many ways, I equate worry to prayer.
Thanks for this, and for making me feel less alone and strange.
“But I got her message and I hear it from others, in eye contact avoided and topics changed.”
Yeah… we are a community of people not-talking to one another and ourselves about things that happen to many more of us than we want to admit. If they engaged in your experience with evil, they might have to admit their own inner circle and interior lives are engaged with evil too.
It’s not evil’s banality that gets me a lot of the time. It’s the intimacy of evil that does.
This was a terrific read.
Wow, this was very powerful, and I want to thank you for sharing it. It boggles my mind how someone could say such a callous thing as “stop shoving it in people’s faces” about such a story.
And I thought “Legal Trends in 2014” was at the top end of the Too Real scale.
Thank you for writing this, Lyz. I recognize myself in it.
This was incredible, and this “At the most, he told me once, if he was walking alone at night, he’d worry about me alone at home.” says so much about what women are taught to fear. We’re so often held responsible for terrible things happening that really, are not much in our control just because it’s easier to say “Oh she messed up, and I would never do (XYZ)” than realize that, as Lyz puts, evil can happen to any one of us at any time.
I have to actually stop myself from thinking like this, because as a single woman who lives alone, I would be too scared to leave the house.
I feel this too. Since my best friend died unexpectedly, I think of all the ways that other friends and loved ones could die, how tenuous it all is. But even so, many of my fears aren’t related to physical danger, but to emotional danger: everyone secretly thinks I am lazy and worthless and not worth loving. I am a burden to have around. I am irritating and tiresome and stupid. They will all trickle away from me until I am alone.
Figgy 🙁 I do hope no one has said anything to make you feel this way.
Just my own brain. Which is why I will be calling a therapist this week! This time for real.
One way in which fear of evil in the world presents itself to me is definitely in the realm of “X bad thing is going to happen and I will deserve it.”
I hate when your brain is your own worst enemy. It points out all your flaws and fears. It knows every bit of you and knows exactly how to prey on your insecurities. You’re not alone.
I share those emotional fears, I think they are a lasting effect of tragedy. I’m so sorry you’ve been feeling this, and I hope you find a lot of wonderful ways to be less lonely.
I worry all the time, about everything. If my husband is late home, I worry he’s been hurt or killed. If I am alone in the house, I owrry there is a bad person inside with me. If I walk home alone I worry that I will be attacked; and that if I am the person who hurts me will never be put in prison. I’m worried that I’m allergic to wasp stings and don’t know it yet, so wasps make me panic.
I have a severe anxiety disorder (obviously) and all these are normal, reasonable fears that get blown up by my mind into unimaginable proportions.
They all come from the same place. My utter terror that I will be left alone, and lost and that no-one will hear and come for me, ever again.
I think that fear is a normal response to loss and pain, especially loss and pain of a great magnitude. It shakes your world, takes you from a place where these horrors didn’t happen and into one where they do.
I never looked at them as conscious evil. I wasn’t brought up with my mindset. I wonder if it would make it better or worse if I could think of them as evil, not as random, awful things that can happen to anyone through sheer misfortune.
Rational thought is not a comfort when you know just how random and irrational these things are. If I could think of them as coming from a conscious, evil force…
Thank you for sharing this with us. Parts of it made me laugh: “Being raptured while in the bathroom and going up to heaven without pants and all the unsaved below can see my bare butt,” but other sections made me want to reach through the computer and hug you. Keep telling your truth, especially if it makes people uncomfortable. Getting us out of our comfort zones forces us to learn and grow. I hope writing helps you heal. <3
Oh, this was so good!
Please don’t let people stop you from talking about what happened if/when you want to talk about it. While you should never be pressured to talk about it when you don’t want to, a culture of silence around these things just lets the perpetrators get away with it. It makes the victims feel alone and ashamed and…just talk if and when you feel like talking. It’s helpful for you, and it’s helpful for everyone, including the people who say they don’t want to hear it.
Being afraid of the unknown is something I think most of us can relate to. My own brain, due to chemistry and upbringing, took anxiety a bit too far, and I used to become paralyzed at the possibilities of tragedy lurking in the world. It felt like I was driving on dark highways all the time, just waiting for deer and moose to pop out and destroy my car and kill me.
But then I started going to therapy, and taking anti-anxiety meds (because of the brain chemistry), and realized that yeah, sometimes bad shit is going to happen to us – the deer is going to wander onto the road and we won’t know it til right before we smack into it. But worrying about it all the time takes away from what we do have, it takes away from our ability to be present.
So I still worry, and still lock my doors and windows at night to stave off any attacks, but I also know that I can’t give the evils in the world all my time and attention, because then they win anyway.
I’m so glad I clicked on this.
I go to college in Boston, and that phrase used to get literally no reaction but now I all I get is concerned looks and gentle touches on the shoulder. It’s hard, because I know people want to know where I was and if I knew anyone hurt but they don’t want to ask and when they do it’s immediately this uncomfortable silence and I feel like I’m talking in a vacuum.
And I can’t say what I really want to say, which is that now I feel scared every day for my friends who live all over the country over the summer, and my girlfriend who works in a city. It’s gotten better, but it used to be that every time I said goodbye to someone I was worried it would be the last time. But people don’t want to know that. They want to know if I saw anything or if I heard anything or what it was like. It sucks.
Thanks for writing this. It made my feelings seem more normal and I feel way more grounded. 🙂
I'm so glad I clicked on this.
I go to college in Boston, and that phrase used to get literally no reaction but now I all I get is concerned looks and gentle touches on the shoulder. It's hard, because I know people want to know where I was and if I knew anyone hurt but they don't want to ask and when they do it's immediately this uncomfortable silence and I feel like I'm talking in a vacuum.
And I can't say what I really want to say, which is that now I feel scared every day for my friends who live all over the country over the summer, and my girlfriend who works in a city. It's gotten better, but it used to be that every time I said goodbye to someone I was worried it would be the last time. But people don't want to know that. They want to know if I saw anything or if I heard anything or what it was like. It sucks.
Thanks for writing this. It made my feelings seem more normal and I feel way more grounded. 🙂
Whenever I drive down a highway (not often now, NYC public transit holla!) and am for some reason in the middle lane between two semi-trucks, I always start freaking out about “what if these two trucks squished me right now OMG what if my little brother was in the car and these two trucks squished us AUGH what if I had KIDS AND WE ALL DIED” and so on and so forth.
I am a competent, confident driver, but that is the one thing that always messes me up.
I hate when your brain is your own worst enemy. It points out all your flaws and fears. It knows every bit of you and knows exactly how to prey on your insecurities. You're not alone.
I hate to be the one with a cliche, pat answer, but it bears mentioning: have you tried going to a therapist? Not because it will magically solve your problems and make them go away, but because it can give you the tools needed to approach your fears, to manage your pain. And it will absolutely give you a safe space to say everything you need to about what happened in your family. I’m glad you don’t talk to that “friend” anymore – if I ever said anything like that to a friend of mine, let me die of shame.
I had a very similar upbringing, Lyz. This was a powerful post. Thanks for sharing.
My Southern Baptist home church was also riddled with sex scandals, incest and affairs. One of the worst perpetrators of all past away, very unexpectedly. This is the poem I wrote in response. It encapsulates a lot of bitterness, yes. But it is also meant to suggest that good and resilience can be found in everything.
Dear Captain,
You are the one
Who had an affair
With my friend, she was young
The same age as your daughter.
You are the one
Who pretended to serve,
But instead domineered.
You struck hate in Tim, my brother.
You told him at church,
“If you don’t tell the truth,
I can, I’ll arrest you.”
Truth? Quite crude.
You are the one
Who caused him to view
All authority as sinister,
Phony, two-faced, fools.
You are the one
Who defamed my name
You abused public records
To my family’s shame.
You are the one
With taught me ropes courses
Play softball, ride horses
They all seemed so grand.
But manipulation and heartache
Were the names of your games
Why did you do it?
You brought so much pain.
You are the one
Who made your wife care
For mentally ill patients
In your home, for the money,
Everyone knows.
You are the one
Who let your daughter be raped
In her own bed.
How’s that for protection?
You are the one
Who took me spelunking
“Safety first,” you would say
I knew you weren’t safe.
You are the one
To her parents who said, “I’ve seen that boy’s record,
And he’s been molested.”
Lies, lies! Why?
Young lovers, kept apart.
Never before, through his door
Had I heard such sobs, such pain.
Who does that? For what aim?
Again, for your own gain.
You are the one
Who epitomized vanity
To young girls you would ask,
“Am I cute in this pic?
You are the one
Who taught me self-defense
As the attacker, you “posed.”
No need for the mask.
“This is what you should do,”
You unashamedly said.
“Fuck you,” said our hearts.
You fucked us instead.
You are the one
Who taught me CPR
“This could save someone’s life,” you gloated.
Yes, but not yours.
Your son tried to save you
For thirty straight minutes
“Breathe! Just breathe!” he cried
Hate gone from his eyes.
No pretense I have, to understand death
But I am certain of this:
You cheated, you slandered,
So much abuse
You destroyed, corrupted
What did you not do?
Put simply, I do know,
Harsh, but the truth
The world is better,
Much better, without you.
Don’t get me wrong
Your legacy lives on
Your daughter, my age
Twice married, a son.
Your wife, what heartache.
And all of your children,
Who love you, but loathe you
Oh, what generations to come.
You life, a facade
Serving others, its cover
Coercion, your method.
You, your only lover.
Manipulation, effective
But it only goes so far.
Love conquers all,
That girl,
she’s my sister-in-law.
Tim, life is struggle.
“I don’t see them,” he told me,
“When passing police cars.
Not them, just him.”
Tim, my Holden Calfield.
But no asylum for him.
So afflicted, this harsh world
He somehow found peace.
Tim, all my brothers
My Catchers in the Rye
Had too much good, too much love
To e’er be your vice.