The important thing about GenFem isn’t how I got there the first time (it was a woman in my Pilates class, who noticed me weeping during stretches and suggested I visit her “women’s support group”), but that I joined. That Dr. Cindy noted my presence from my very first meeting, where I sat in the back with my Pilates friend, and singled me out. “Come up here, new girl, pretty girl, sad girl,” she said, gesturing me to the front of the room where she sat on a high stool like an eagle on a perch. “You look like you’re in need of a Confrontation.”
I didn’t know what a Confrontation was and didn’t much like the idea of going onstage in front of all those strangers (I had gratefully left all that behind when I was eighteen), but something about the way Dr. Cindy was looking at me made me feel like I had no choice in the matter. The pamphlet I’d been handed when I walked through the door said that Dr. Cindy Medina—but just Dr. Cindy to us!—was a world-renowned psychologist with ninety-seven international patents for behavioral therapy breakthroughs. She had a PhD plus a string of unrecognizable abbreviations after her name that made me feel stupid and uneducated.
In person, she exuded a friendly gravitas, an aura of success, that demanded you take her seriously. Nearly twice my age, she had finger-wide gray streaks in her black bob, neat wire-rimmed glasses, and a gold silk scarf knotted loosely at her neck. I will never figure out how to tie a scarf like that, I thought as I stood up. It looked both effortless and utterly intentional.
Did Dr. Cindy know who I was when she singled me out from the crowd? She pretended she didn’t, but looking back on it now, she must have known. Dr. Cindy always did her research.
In any case, on that first day, in just half an hour onstage, Dr. Cindy tore my whole life story out of me: from the day I was born eleven minutes after my twin sister to the night when I kicked that sister out of my house, telling her to “get out now and don’t come back.” The whole messy tale of Sam-and-Elli, and by the time I got to the end, I was in tears. The injury of it felt just as raw as it did in the moment—just two weeks earlier!—when I’d caught my sister drunk in the den, dressed as me, trying to get my husband to impregnate her.
I found myself publicly weeping at the unfairness of it all. That I couldn’t get pregnant, but Sam, my flighty twin? The one who didn’t even want a kid? She could.
I’d spent my life being the counterweight to Sam, I told Dr. Cindy in that first Confrontation. I was always trying to balance Sam’s chaos and destruction, making myself small next to her larger-than-life persona. Always being the hand she could use to steady herself when things got rocky. I’d told myself that I was being a positive role model, and that Sam was the one who had things wrong. And yet, as Dr. Cindy pried the story out of me, I began to realize that I’d just been a doormat, letting Sam step on me as she saw fit. I’d done everything “right”—reliable husband, beautiful home, creative job, lots of money, blah blah blah—and yet none of it made me happy because I’d been denied the one thing I wanted the most. A baby of my own.
I was angry, and I didn’t know what to do with my anger. I never had.
As I told my story, Dr. Cindy sat across from me on the small GenFem stage. Her eyes held my gaze so tight that I couldn’t look away; her breath was in perfect time with mine; her voice like a smooth pond upon which I could trustingly skate. She nodded at the end of each of my sentences, encouraging me, making me open myself wide.
In the audience, two dozen women watched the Confrontation, their damp eyes mirroring my tears, all of us as one in our common understanding that life isn’t fair.
“You’re right. Life isn’t fair,” Dr. Cindy said when I was finally done talking. “But so what? We can make it fair. We can grab life by the balls and force it to give us what we want the most. That anger you feel? It’s time to start using it. So now that you’ve put a name and face on your pain, I want you to look it right in the eye and tell it to go away. You’re going to choose not to be a victim.” When I shook my head, laughing a little, she repeated herself, suddenly impatient. “I mean it. Scream it. Be rude.”
I hesitated, then I closed my eyes, and let the words pour out of me. “Go away, pain! I choose not to be a victim! Fuck you!” My heart pounded out of my chest. I was a little shocked at myself. It was thrilling.
Dr. Cindy smiled, gripped my hand. “Good girl. That’s how we start.” She turned to face the room, a stillness emanating from her that made the air electric, brought goosebumps to all of our arms. “Women are taught to be nice,” she said. “We are supposed to be kind and gentle and nurturing. We’re supposed to gracefully accept the ways that the world has shafted us, put us in positions of vulnerability, while instead giving all the opportunities in life to the loudest, largest voices in the room. Usually that’s men, but sometimes it’s women, too.
“My patented Method empowers women to reclaim the ability to steer their own destinies, letting go of the restrictions that society has mandated on what is right and wrong for us to do,” she continued. “I want to revolutionize the world by teaching women their self-worth, helping them remove all the toxic obstructions from their lives, so that they can take what’s rightly theirs. I want you”—her finger scanned the room, landing on each of our faces—“to achieve the success you’re all seeking.” Two dozen shining eyes lifted hopefully to hers. “I can teach you.”
I stepped off the tiny stage, shaking, feeling like that hollow-shell place inside me had been filled up with a hot light. She was going to help me get—no, take—what I wanted most. I didn’t know how, but I wanted in. Of course I did.
After the Confrontation the women in the room made a point of coming over to introduce themselves to me. They carried Kate Spade bags, wore cute floral sundresses, and their hair was blown out and shiny. They all seemed so happy and beautiful and put together. They spontaneously hugged me as if I were a long-lost sister and not a stranger who had just wandered in the door. I felt dizzy and disoriented, but pleasantly so, as if I’d come back to a home that I didn’t realize was there.
Before I walked out the door that night, I signed up for a five-day workshop with Dr. Cindy the following week. Limited time offer, a reduced price of only three thousand dollars that night only.
I would achieve Level One by the end of the month.
* * *
—
By the end of the year, five months and fifty thousand dollars later, I’d made it to Level Four. A lot of money, yes, but money well spent, I told myself; I was part of a revolutionary sisterhood, changing women’s lives for the better (and my own, in the process). Anyway, I had well over a million dollars collecting dust in the bank account that my parents opened for me back when Sam and I cashed our first To the Maxx paychecks. There was no child to spend it on, and I wasn’t paying for any more of Sam’s rehab, so I figured I might as well use it to make myself happier.
Dr. Cindy said the money would come back to me manifold once I’d conquered the Method and achieved Level Ten.
So I went to meeting after meeting, workshop after workshop, letting GenFem hone my pain into a sharp point of rage, with which I felt I could stab the world, poke it wide open, leave a hole through which to climb to the bright, clear air on the other side. A more hopeful place, where I could leave all my disappointments behind.
* * *