The world has turned and left me here

Alexandra Coburn on public victimhood and private grief.

Today I would like to talk about doing nothing. This is perhaps my first attempt to write in any public way about the even more public trauma I experienced in March 2022. I have been thinking a lot lately about the unexciting aftermath: the pause, the interim, the transformation of my 24th year into a waiting room. Many people have written very insightful pieces about the doing nothing-ness of the pandemic lockdown, and though I did collect unemployment and sit at home for many months with the rest of them, mid-2022 was distinct. It was the first time in my life that I felt, as Weezer of all bands put it, that the world had turned and left me here. This is an essay about the here.

I don’t want to reiterate the details of this event, and my language when referring to it will be vague. In March of 2022, I was one of three victims of a public murder attempt. This happened indoors and in broad daylight. I was stabbed three times, once in the neck and twice in the lower back. The attack made international news for several days, and images of me bleeding out were circulated all over the internet, eventually making the cover of the New York Times and the New York Post. Hack artists copied and painted these pictures for their edgy, ironic, doomer fanbases. Men online posted images of my brutalized body and fantasized about sleeping with me. Reporters entered my apartment building, called at all hours of the day, and refused my family’s request for privacy. My friends, desperate to do something, stole papers from newsstands and made it their full-time job to obliterate everyone on social media who was being weird about the whole thing. It was extreme, it was unusual, it was high-profile, and it was, for all of these intersecting reasons, alienating beyond belief. I have never felt less like a person and more like a body.

Because it happened in an art museum, the event was immediately aestheticized. I remember seeing pictures of the empty crime scene snapped by a shell-shocked coworker, the little block heel footprints that I left in the blood like tracks in snow. It’s easy for me to encourage you now to fight against this tendency, but during my teen years my Tumblr was filled with images of women in glamorous distress. “Blood doesn’t look like that,” discerning horror movie fans point out while watching their favorite slashers, but it does. It’s sticky and syrupy, ripe for photographing. “You couldn’t even make this situation up if you tried,” my friends told me, “It’s unreal.” And perhaps the unreality of it is rooted in the fact that I was almost murdered in a place built for voyeurism. We go to art museums to be privy to other people’s inner worlds—but what happened wasn’t a performance, it was real. Maybe if the art that people made about this event was good I wouldn’t care.

When internet ‘artists’ shared their renditions of me and my fellow survivors, I realized that they didn’t think they’d ever have to answer for it. I spent my first few days after the attack scrolling and siccing my army of friends on anyone sexualizing me or making light of the situation. I felt like a loser, and I wished I didn’t care, but I cared so deeply that I couldn’t eat. Each flippant joke from some probably otherwise normal person filled me with rage that had no outlet. I couldn’t fight back, because my anonymity was at stake, and that was the one thing I still had left. Some of the posters were oddly insistent upon their right to say they wanted to [redacted] me on the stretcher, and they’re correct that it’s their right to do so. But know that I saw it, that my parents saw it, and know that it made everything worse, even if you don’t care.

And then something strange happened: it quieted down. What they don’t tell you is that when something traumatic happens, the earth does not stop spinning. Everyone will move on with their lives, and you will eventually do the same, though you will spend much longer in this purgatory, growing bitter and enduring a sort of itchy malaise that always follows stark, razor-cut moments. I couldn’t help screaming internally, fists beating on the ground like a child throwing a tantrum, “It’s not fair! Be angry on my behalf! Stop what you’re doing! Think about me!” And everyone was thinking about me, but it wasn’t making me feel any better.

I remember bursting into tears on the sixth day post-attack, crying openly in the living room in front of my mother, and all I could manage to verbalize was, “I don’t know how to feel.” Much of doing nothing was recalibrating my emotions and reactions. When your life is threatened, you have such intensity of feeling; all that exists is the door. I know that I will probably never want to live as badly as I did that day. Afterwards, my ordinary life desaturated before my eyes. I would giggle to myself while picking out cereal at the grocery store, because it seemed so silly, to be choosing between Kashi and Grape Nuts at a time like this. It felt cruel that despite everything I had been through, I still had to age.

As with the early coronavirus lockdown, I can’t recall what I did with my time; I remember watching movies, becoming weepy for no reason, and eating very elaborate breakfasts. I used to cat-sit for my busy and employed friend in his sixth-floor walk up in Chinatown, taking the Q to Canal, feeding the cat, then getting a massage at my favorite spot a few blocks down. I’d return to the cat, do some crosswords, then wander home to watch a movie with whichever roommate was on ‘Alex duty’ that night. I don’t refer to it as ‘Alex duty’ pejoratively, and I know everyone was glad to do it. What I mean is that I needed a lot of care at the time, so much that it had to be scheduled and blocked out. The people surrounding me were transformed into a task force they didn’t ask to be a part of, and I am forever indebted, though they are all too sweet to collect said debt.

Grief is the closest word to what I felt. I was grieving for myself, constantly reliving the much more likely hypothetical scenario of not surviving the attack. Nearly two years later, that thought still stops me cold sometimes. The knife entered my neck and back about two centimeters from my spinal cord. The hospital staff repeated to me over and over that I was lucky. That was all anyone could say. I should not have lived, but I did, and that’s the grief. As I was rolled into the MRI machine two hours after the attack, alone for the first time that day, I started crying, finally. I cried and I thought about my parents, convincing myself they would have to care for their invalid daughter for the rest of their lives. When the MRI technician told me that, miraculously, my attacker had missed my spinal cord and I was still able to walk and skip and kiss and hold hands, I sobbed. She said, “You still look so pretty; don’t cry off your eyeliner now!” My appearance came up several times that day, the fact that I looked “good” despite everything. I know that the women in the hospital were well-intentioned, but it felt like a reinforcement of everything the freaks online had already said: that I was an interesting victim because I am a thin, young white woman. That I looked pretty even though (or because) I was covered in blood.