On Dido, PTSD, & Self-Mythology
how i learned one of life's Truths
My mouth tastes like sugar. Pink sugar. I open my eyes, blinking against the light. I’m sitting on the roof of a tall building, sharing a cookie cake with myself. I have been here before. I don’t look at her face, but I know she’s there and I know she’s me. We sit across from each other at a grubby plastic table and we eat our cookie cake. It has pink frosting. Below us, there’s the lulling hum of hundreds of car motors jumbled together and the occasional horn honk. We don’t talk much, myself & I. We mostly just watch the sun set, passing each other pieces of the cookie cake in a comfortable silence.
It’s spring.
It wasn’t always like this. I used to be much worse company. I used to say this thing—not often, but enough for the silence to be tense, not comfortable. Just three words, you know them, those three words:
“Told you so.”
Is there anything better than getting to hiss those words with all of the righteous rightness of being right? Is there anything worse than being handed those words on a hateful little silver platter? “Told you so.” Gah! I’m sure wars have been fought and lives have been lost at the altar of those three little words. Eros has nothing on Eris.1
Not anymore. This rooftop is quieter now and all the better for it.
The day It happened, I had a job interview.2 I got off the phone with my mom and walked to it in the haze of shock. I have no memory of how I got there. All I remember is sitting in the lobby, body thrumming, looking at my phone through tunnel vision. My hands shook as I searched “therapists near me.” I chose one with a nice picture and left a probably concerning voicemail along the lines of “something has happened, do you have any availability?” They called me back that same day and they are still my therapist today, more than five years later. In that moment, I was desperate to do anything to regain any level of control. There are worse methods to attempt that than scheduling a therapy appointment—although I was no stranger to those either.
The interview was for an on-campus student teaching position and it was a group interview. I remember almost none of this either, just that there were popsicle sticks involved and that at one point I choked up answering one of the questions. It was a stupid question—irrelevant—I just let it all slip for a second.
It felt like I was living in the unceasing, unnatural silence of a slow-motion movie explosion. Each step was an eternity in the ringing quiet: glass spraying around me, time congealing like it was printed on jello. I lived there for so long. Sometimes I worry I’m still there.
I got the job. My mom came down to Chicago later that day—we drove around my neighborhood and tried to talk. She was in shock too and I don’t think either of us said the right things to each other.
In January 2023, I was diagnosed with PTSD from the trauma that happened in early 2020. This diagnosis came in the last semester of my undergrad and really defined the period of time that I now call my “dark night of the soul.”3 I began CPT (Cognitive Processing Therapy) almost immediately after the diagnosis. I have yet to decide if the dead of winter is the best time to begin CPT therapy. However, I can say that spring is a good time to finish it—even if it was the most melancholy spring I have yet to experience.4 I sacrificed one season for the sake of future ones. Not a bad trade off.
The first thing you learn in CPT is the fact that trauma does not start at the index event5 and move exclusively forward in time. It’s not as if there is a before and after: a life without trauma and then a life with it. Instead, the index event is just the final, damning puzzle piece of a picture not yet in focus. It crystallizes your past to warp your future; reaching back in time to dig up every negative belief you have ever cultivated and transform these seeds of trauma into a flowering tree. We all collect these seeds throughout our lives. We all grow different flowers.
A huge part of CPT is weekly homework, focusing on 5 main themes: Safety, Trust, Power and Control, Esteem and Intimacy. The themes are really good for those of us who find a sick joy in digging things up within our psyches with the same compulsive revulsion that one picks off a scab (or stalks their exes on Instagram). They truly rival the 7 deadly sins in their flawless packaging of the human experience.
You start CPT by writing a statement about why you believe the index event occurred and examine its impact through the lenses of the 5 themes. Then, over the course of about 10-20 weeks, you create a giant list of “stuck points” or unreasonable, unconscious beliefs you have about the world and you attack them.
You would be surprised about what can be a stuck point—the subconscious is very tricky. Some examples of mine included:
“Bad things happen to me because I deserve it.”
“I have always been alone and I will always be alone.”
“If I can deserve safety, then I will have it.”
I made huge breakthroughs when I realized the pervasiveness of “deserving” in my stuck points, perhaps a relic of my Catholic upbringing or just the natural inclination of my OCD-ridden brain. If I can deserve something, it’s my fault that I don’t have it. Responsibility goes hand in hand with that as well. If I am responsible for it, I can stop it from happening again. In the end, it all boiled down to control.
As more time passed and I started to feel some relief, meta stuck points began to emerge. I started feeling afraid to fully engage with CPT. If it didn’t work, then what? Paradoxically, I also began to realize that those meta fears extended to the possibility of it succeeding.
“If I am no longer traumatized, I am no longer interesting.”
Trauma is a currency. It makes you valuable, special, tragic. Female suffering in particular is fetishized and thus subverted into something absurd—a performance.6 Gradually, I became aware that I wasn’t just dismantling the bad things I believed, but tearing down the entire belief system through which I understood myself. My traumas felt like the building blocks of my identity and I was sickeningly attached to them. I was aware of this; but merely enough to revel in the double tragedy of that. Unraveling them was incredibly destabilizing and I was faced with a new question.
Who am I without my trauma? Where does my value come from?
I sing of arms and the woman whom fate had sent
- Virgil, Aeneid (translated by David Ferry)7
At the same time that I was undergoing CPT, I read the Aeneid for the first time. I have to resist the urge to claim that I immediately loved it. Truthfully, I didn’t realize I even liked it until I caught myself savoring it on my patio—hand in hand with a cigarette and the feeble first steps of spring. It was the last semester of my undergrad.
In short, Virgil’s Aeneid is basically Roman fan fiction of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. It was written as a superhero origin story for the Roman Empire and designed to justify the destruction of Rome’s greatest rival—Carthage.8 The poem’s structure is essentially the reverse of Homer’s: the first half details Aeneas’ escape from the ashes of Troy and his journey to Italy, and the second half tells of the battle to colonize the land.
Along the way, Aeneas and his men encounter violent storms that wash them up on the shores of Carthage. It is here that Aeneas meets Dido, the “Tragic Queen of Carthage,” and predictably fucks up her life. Remember, nothing is more important than man’s noble quest for power and empire! Especially when the quest is divinely sponsored by the always-reasonable Roman pantheon!
Before Aeneas arrives, Dido is the absolutely powerful ruler of the nation she founded herself. She was born the princess of Tyre—a nation across the sea—but was forced to flee after her tyrannical brother murdered her husband and took power. Yet, even in the wake of unimaginable devastation, she gathered her strength and built herself a new kingdom. Alone. Carthage was built from Dido’s grief. I sometimes wonder if she would have rather it never have been built at all. When Aeneas washes up on Dido’s shores, he is helpless and she must choose what to do with him. She has every right to be suspicious of foreign visitors and she has her own problems as the parent of a new nation in hostile lands. Despite that, she takes pity on Aeneas and his men and benevolently welcomes them to her domain.
In response to her hospitality, she is coerced by Cupid into falling in love with Aeneas—something she vowed to never do again. When she realizes what has happened, she is agonized; wishing for even death before love:
I have to tell you, I feel the amorous fire
Stirring, that I thought had been put out.
Rather than yield to that, I pray that the earth
Would open its jaws and swallow me9
Her sister comforts her and urges her to reconsider, asking why she must condemn herself to a solitary life:
Do you think the dust gives any
Thought at all to any of these things?10
She also appeals to Dido’s sense of duty by reminding her of the enemies surrounding her lands and arguing that the union could be politically beneficial. Against her better judgement, Dido allows herself to hope that she might not have to be alone forever.
She is unaware that her fate is being negotiated elsewhere. It is ultimately Venus (Aeneas’ mother) and Juno (the patron of Carthage) who agree on marriage between the two. The nuptials take place in a cave, and Virgil warns the readers that it is here that Dido’s conjugal noose is knotted:
That day was the cause of the death to come, the cause
Of calamity11
By marrying Aeneas, Dido is relinquishing her total independence and at least half her power; but that’s not all. She is also scorning the advances of King Iarbas (a neighboring power she could have married for political security). When Aeneas betrays her, he is not just leaving her in the same place he found her—albeit heartbroken. He is leaving her to die at the hands of her enemies. He knows all this, and it doesn’t stop him. He receives his orders from the gods and he starts preparing to depart without even fucking saying anything to her. It basically says he was planning to tell her but she finds out before he can.12 She’s understandably furious at the discovery and she lets him know it:
I have been shamed,
And I have lost my honor, the fame that was
To be carried up to the stars. To what am I
Abandoned, dying, by this alien guest?
For guest is the name that is all that’s left of husband.13
Even in the face of utter betrayal, she is not simply furious because her husband is abandoning her. She is capable of articulating something far beyond that. He hasn’t just broken her heart—he’s stolen her honor. Tarnished her legacy. It’s unforgivable. And you know what Aeneas does in response? He doesn’t even look at her14 and chooses instead to make excuses, claiming he has no choice in the matter.
It is here that she states the most heartbreaking line in the whole epic—and the line that my entire argument hinges on. When she confronts Aeneas, she is so utterly betrayed that she questions what she could possibly say to him. Grasping for understanding, she exclaims to the heavens:
Insanely, I,
Gave him a place beside me on my throne.15
To this day, it still gives me goosebumps. I almost never read this line, as it was translated differently in my edition of the Aeneid. I was introduced to it by the author Peyton Thomas, in his blog post “Virgil Had a Pussy and I’ll Prove It.”16 If I didn’t stumble across his post, this one would have probably never been written.
Not only did Thomas expose me to the David Ferry translation, but he also introduced me to the idea of Dido’s masculinity—which helped me to consider her character from a different angle. In his piece, Thomas argues that Virgil was a trans man. Part of the way he does this is by investigating Dido’s own gender nonconformity, using Marilynn Desmond’s book Reading Dido as evidence. He argues:
“Dido is not a woman. Not really. She has, to again use Christine de Pizan’s phrasing, from female, become male by fortune. A widow, a sovereign ruler, she neither occupies the traditional narrative role of a woman nor comports herself like other women in the story. When Aeneas arrives in her life, she holds far greater power than he does. She gets to decide whether he lives or dies. And her chief concern after falling in love with him is this: will this weaken me?”
This idea was singular to me and transformed my entire understanding of Dido. I became fascinated with the transformation that Dido underwent. What did she sacrifice for her kingdom? Was it the right choice? Could she have avoided her fate? Was she doomed from the beginning?
Dido is often understood as recklessly throwing away her royal obligations the second that Aeneas came into her life. I’m not convinced. When her first husband was murdered, she took a vow of isolation. Part of that was to honor him, but I think part of it also was an attempt to avoid further suffering. Dido rejected the traditional expectations of the time and stepped into a new, all-powerful role. She protected herself with the power of her throne and—crucially—her isolation. It was all jeopardized the moment that she felt the first stirrings of love in her chest and she knew that. It terrified her! Still, she lets herself get talked into trusting someone. In the end, her only true mistake was believing that—maybe—she didn’t have to be alone to survive.
Alas, she does not survive. Aeneas leaves and Dido is left alone, utterly ruined, once again. In the face of this mortal injustice, Dido does the last thing she can do—claiming the only power she has left. She curses Aeneas and all of his descendants and his entire future empire with her final breaths.17 She builds a funeral pyre out of the relics of her marriage—including her marriage bed—and stabs herself upon it.
I have lived my life. I have
Completed the journey that fortune has put me upon,
And now my image will go with dignity
Beneath the earth. I was the builder of
A famous city. My eyes have seen its walls.
I have avenged my husband and I have
Punished my brother for his enmity.
Happy, too greatly happy, if the Dardan
Keels had never touched upon our beaches.18
Aeneas sees the funeral fires from his ship. Dido bids him farewell with an inferno of her grief and fury. It burns fast and strong.
I was on my way to a first date when I stumbled upon the final piece of the puzzle. My friend had posted about the new Florence & the Machine album and I absentmindedly put it on as I left my house. King is the first song on the album, a choice I have often wondered about. Is it the preface? The prologue? Must the album be listened to in the light of it?
The song starts lightly, masquerading as a simple love song about an argument. But after a few lines, she launches into an investigation of the nature of making art out of your pain and the value of art itself.
And how much is art really worth?
The very thing you’re best at is the thing that hurts the most
Florence answers this question with the same horrible double-awareness I had about my stuck points:
I need my golden crown of sorrow, my bloody sword to swing
My empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology
I am no mother, I am no bride
I am King
When I first heard these lines I stopped in my tracks and let them consume me. The words sound like they are ripped from her chest. They sound like Dido cursing from her fiery pyre.
Dido isn’t the Queen of Carthage. She is King.
And Florence captures this so fully and simply in the most breathtaking way. What does it mean to be King? It’s storytelling: creating your own personal epic full of journeys and wars and losses and lessons. It’s armoring yourself with your trauma and your self-proclaimed identity. It’s rejecting true connection and living and dying on the hill of your own self-mythology. It’s fanaticism. It’s falling down at your own throne and begging for forgiveness. It’s not just just writing your own narrative, but worshiping it—and repeating it to anyone who will listen. A mantra. A prayer! A one-person religion with adoration and surrender and punishment.
Above all, it’s choosing loneliness over “weakness.” Again and again and again.
My empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology
Always alone along some vacant street
Unendingly unaccompanied she seeks19
You are not crowned King simply by suffering. You crown yourself—through isolation and by running from feeling and mythologizing it instead. The horrible irony of it all is that, in trying to be King, you doom yourself to the self-fulfilling prophecy of repeated disappointment. Because the only thing that you can expect in this life is that you will not have control over what comes.
As the song progresses, it completely unravels. Florence repeats the King lyric, dipping so low that it becomes a throaty snarl before she launches into a 30 second long scream. It might be a melodic scream but it’s a pure, total, wordless release of emotion and control. And despite all the power of the release, she still ends the song admitting the weakness of her response—the weakness of her Kingdom.
I was never satisfied, it never let me go
Just dragged me by my hair and back on with the show
Even with all of the rage and defiance of being King and screaming it to the world, she can’t escape the truth. She can’t end the song without exposing her self-mythology for what it truly is: a performance.
I sang this song many times that spring: drunkenly and soberly; at midnight and midday; with my friends and at them. I was always vaguely self-conscious, no matter how drunk I was, when I sang those lines. I could feel the desperation quietly seeping out of my pores. It would sit heavy in the air; lurid and cloying. The need for… for what? For understanding, I think—and I got it, but not the kind I was looking for. I am aware now that singing King was perhaps one of the things that exposed me the most; stripping away my self-mythology by begging the audience, “Please see it, please. I am King.”
This is where we return to Dido and the line, flung just before her death—to the gods, to Aeneas, to herself, or to nobody.
INSANELY, I / GAVE HIM A PLACE BESIDE ME ON MY THRONE.
Her lament does not come from the loss of Aeneas himself, or his love, or even her sealed fate of death at the hands of her political enemies. No, it is so much bigger than that. She is mourning the loss of her self-mythology! Her Kingdom! If the scream of King had words, it would be these.
This is how it feels to be traumatized: not necessarily the traumatizing experience, but the post-trauma existence. You are ruined. You are humiliated. You are so confused but desperate for an answer so you make yourself one. You gather up the scattered shards, and you use them to build a crooked throne for yourself. You perch on it alone and fancy yourself protected and responsible for everything. And so what if you’re lonely? At least you're safe. If you aren’t safe then it is your own fault, and you deserve it then, because you should know better than to let others join you on your throne.
But it is inevitable to slip up. It is inevitable to let people in. It's human. It’s good. Because eventually the throne gets unbearable and you start to see it for the cage that it is. And because you have hope. You can’t help it. You were born to a hopeful mother. You are your mother’s daughter. So you unlock the cage door—and what happens? You get hurt! BECAUSE THAT IS LIFE!
But when you’re traumatized this is unbearable because it reveals that your protective cage is not impenetrable and that you are not safe from future pain. The smallest, most pitiful part of you is proven right, (“told you fucking so!”) and the only option is to stab yourself and throw yourself on your marriage pyre.
Because at least you can control that.
It took me a very long time to write this. I found myself sitting in all of this swirling, electric muck, unable to shake the feeling that I had yet to stumble across The Point.
However, there was something that illuminated everything for me. I think it was the final, wrenching step out of my dark night of the soul into the morning light; out of my eternal spring into summer. Everything shifted the week I volunteered at a summer camp for children whose guardians had been impacted by cancer.
(I’ve thought hard about whether and how to include this part because I don’t want to exploit any of these kids and their problems for the sake of my own personal development. I’m going to keep it short and I am conscious of the clichés lurking at the edges.)
The entire week was luminous. In the mornings we ate cereal and eggo waffles and in the evenings I read out loud to my cabin. We swam in the lake and made friendship bracelets and practiced skits for the talent show. During the scavenger hunt, the older kids let the younger kids win. We caught fireflies under the full moon. In her light, I sat in a hammock and reveled in the incomprehensible, childlike goodness I had witnessed. I wrote in my notes:
“i heard myself laugh today, like really laugh. i felt it waver in its realness, like i was just trying it out before committing completely.”
One of the pivotal activities of the week was an event called “Empowerment” where the entire camp gathers together and to share their own feelings about camp and their experiences in general. It’s a powerful activity, as you can probably imagine. We—the counselors—let the campers know that if anything got too heavy during the activity they could tell us and we would take them out. One of my campers asked to leave and we stood on the wooden porch of the Main House looking over the camp. It was drizzling slightly, muting the air and morphing the view into one of astonishing blues and greens. The air smelled like rain. We sat in silence for a while and composed ourselves, until the camper turned to me and asked me a simple question:
“What happened to you?”
I was stunned. I have thought back to this moment many times and the incredible phrasing of the question is what sticks out to me. If she had asked me if I had a guardian impacted by cancer (as many of the counselors did) I would have said no, because I didn’t. But that’s not what she asked. She asked “What happened to you?” And the answer is something. As anyone’s answer would be.
Of course, it’s only a child who could articulate a truth so vast in such a simple way. It takes most of us decades to figure it out. Entire religions begin from this truth. Something has happened to all of us. It is exactly when you feel most alone that you are the most connected to your humanity. We all know this on some level, but wisdom like this is not communicable in words alone. It must be learned firsthand! I felt it at summer camp. Maybe Florence hears it when the crowd sings her lyrics. I think even Dido learned it too.
In Book 6 of the Aeneid, Aeneas goes to the underworld to speak to his father. Along the way, he comes face to face with Dido in the Fields of Lamentation; the part of the underworld reserved for souls “whom desire has wasted away.”20 Its inhabitants walk shrouded paths through a twisting myrtle forest.
Among these others,
In the great woods wandering, was Phoenician Dido21
When Aeneas sees Dido, he weeps for her, asking:
Is it true, what I was told, that you were dead,
And with a sword had brought about your death?
And was it I, alas, who caused it? I
Swear by the stars, and by the upper world,
And by whatever here below is holy,
I left your shores unwillingly22
In response to his excuses, Dido looks at Aeneas with total hate and disgust… and says nothing. Except, her silence says so much. Anyone who has been betrayed knows the true satisfaction doesn’t come from lambasting them with your fury and hurt. It comes when you no longer feel the need for that recognition—when you are indifferent enough to remain unheard by them. Dido has grown since Aeneas last saw her. Instead, she turns to reunite with Sychaeus, her first love.
Now, this may be gratifying but I honestly think Virgil made a mistake here. First of all, the Fields of Lamentation are reserved for those who suffered mortal wounds of love. Unless he was in love with Dido’s brother, Sychaeus does not belong there.
I think this is just Virgil’s attempt to give Dido the resolution she unquestionably deserves, but he does so in a misguided way: he gives Dido her old husband back and assures the readers, “don’t worry, she’s still loved by a different guy!” As if that’s what matters here!
She doesn’t get “happily ever after.” But she also doesn’t get the emptiness of wayward shade-hood for all eternity. She gets something real—she walks among others just like her. She gets friendship, community, and understanding. The inhabitants of the Fields of Lamentation walk together through its shaded groves.23 Dido died alone, begging to be seen. She’s not alone anymore. She can finally take off the crown.
The Fields of Lamentations sound of laughter. Loudest of all is Dido, the once-tragic Queen of Carthage.
I think what I’m getting at is this: pain is worth something. But its value does not come in making you worth something. It’s so much better than that. It’s communion at the altar of suffering; kneeling down together with every person alive or once alive and every person who will ever be. It’s you and your mother; wrinkled palms and skinned knees; loss and laughter; saying “I told you so” and being forgiven—
and bites of cookie cake with pink frosting, shared with an old friend.
If you made it this far, thank you. This essay was the idea that made me start Really writing for myself and was the first personal essay I ever started. It took me over 2 years to finally finish it and I learned so much from the whole process. There’s a level of irony here because this entire essay was—to some extent—an act of mythologization. However, I found that analyzing this experience helped me to symbolically let go of my identifications with the event. I told a friend recently that I have finally reached a point where I don’t feel as though you need to know the story of my trauma in order to know me. It’s become simply a thing of history, and for that I am grateful. I’m looking forward to pursuing new horizons and I’ll talk to you soon!
Love Lize
Allow me to mix my mythology please.
2020 January or February, I can’t remember or find any records of this day. Also, you may be trying to guess what It is—whatever you have guessed, I can guarantee that you are wrong.
Thank you to my roommate for gifting me this phrase.
Also first wlw heartbreak, so I was in the TRENCHES.
Main traumatic event
In the words of Rayne Fisher-Quann in “standing on the shoulders of complex female characters,” “i’m not unwell or self-destructive or entirely unbearable — i’m in my fleabag era!” There’s so much to be said about this and much of it has been articulated by others far better than I can. It’s not a new conversation and not really the focus of this piece—I am trying to look at what comes after.
(I am misquoting slightly.)
City state in modern Libya that Rome destroyed about 100 years before the Aeneid was written.
Book 4, 33-36
Book 4, 49-50
Book 4, 252-253
Meanwhile, since Dido will be ignorant
About what’s going on, and since she will
Be unsuspecting that a love as strong
As theirs might ever be broken, he will have time
To find the soothing words, and the moment to speak them. (Book 4, 410-414)
Book 4, 453-356
As Jove commanded him he did
Not look at her in response; he looked at the future
He was required to look at, and resolutely
Suppressed the anguishing sorrow in his breast. (Book 4, 464-467)
Book 4, 526-527
published on The Niche Blog
This is particularly significant because it’s basically propaganda to explain and justify the destruction of Carthage. Interestingly, Virgil still treats Dido as a sympathetic character.
Book 4, 920-928
Book 4, 658-659
Book 6, 107
Book 6, 617-618
Book 6, 627-632
In the Robert Fagles translation, they are described as “walking side by side” (Book 6, 518)
Wonderful read