By Kristin Idaszak

The first time I transformed into a Fury began with lemon cake.

The recipe called for the cake to be topped with paper-thin slices of lemon that caramelized as they baked. Beads of perspiration formed on my forehead. I was hot. Too hot for mid-May. My fingers skidded across the dome of the lemon as the knife perforated the rind. Though I avoided cutting into my hand, the slice was uneven, misshapen. “Fuck.” I spoke loud enough for my partner to hear in the next room. The word tasted acidic.

“Fuck,” I said again, louder.

The opening lines of Adrienne Rich’s “Planetarium” resound:

The Furies—in Greek, the Erinyes—are primordial goddesses of vengeance. Chthonic, they’re the rage-fueled stuff of nightmares, daughters of Night or Darkness or Time depending on which version of their story you choose. They exist to redress structural and systemic injustices. Crimes against nature. They offer not protection but retribution on behalf of women, the elderly, the precarious, marginal, vulnerable.

In the fifth century BCE, the Athenian playwright Aeschylus immortalized them in his cycle of tragedies, The Oresteia, a mytho-historical account of the foundations of ancient Greece. What you need to know about The Oresteia is this: There’s a lot of bloodshed. A lot. To fight the Trojan War, the leader of the Greeks, Agamemnon, sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to the gods for favorable winds. His wife Clytemnestra rules in his stead while he’s off warmongering, all the while plotting to avenge Iphigenia’s death. When he triumphantly returns ten years later, Clytemnestra murders him. Clytemnestra in turn is killed by her son, Orestes. (Did I mention there’s a lot of bloodshed?) In the trilogy’s final play, The Eumenides, the Furies pursue Orestes for committing matricide.

I can still feel my moment of transformation. My purple curls become snakes hissing and slithering. Bat wings unfurl from my shoulders, ready to carry me aloft to hunt down some miscreant. But I didn’t have a name for this awakened beast. Not yet.

The knife notched another divot into the cutting board. “I can’t do anything right.” Fire spewed from my lips.

“I’m going to give you some space,” my partner told me. His retreat brought me back to myself. Terrified, I dropped the knife and slunk into the spare room, a hybrid office/guest room/workout studio. I slapped my yoga mat on the ground and turned on a workout video to exorcise my pent-up anger. I stripped down to my sports bra and boy short underwear. Inverting into downward-facing dog, I noticed my ribs poking out like talons. I attributed the weight loss to pandemic stress. Twenty minutes into the video, the teacher’s perky, prerecorded voice instructed me to shift onto my hands and launch myself forward in an asymmetrical arm balance. I soared through the air, aided by my metamorphosis.

My vision fuzzed. The room pinwheeled. My heart raced, hurled itself against my rib cage trying to escape. I slouched into the kitchen for a glass of water. My legs couldn’t support me. I collapsed onto the floor, though a chair was right there. My partner tried taking my pulse, but it was one undifferentiated blur.

My heart is about to explode.

I’m going to die.

Those were my thoughts—not thoughts, but unformed, wordless instinct. Yet, in what was the first in a series of choices I would later regret, I didn’t go to the emergency room. I don’t know why. I wasn’t thinking. Or rather, I do know why. Everywhere outside my condo, people were dying. Going to the ER seemed more dangerous than riding out whatever was happening inside my body. Thirty minutes after my heart started racing, its regular rhythm resumed.

I crawled into bed. The week prior, my bedroom ceiling had caved in. I’d woken up one morning, and the drywall sagged above my pillow. By the end of the day, a 2′ × 4′ opening gaped over the spot where I slept. Our roof hadn’t held up to the record rains in Chicago that spring, storms that buckled the city’s infrastructure to breaking, threatening to overflow the system of locks and dams that keep the sewage in our river separate from our drinking water in the lake. My partner lined the hole with a tarp and our camping tent in between the ceiling and the roof and duct-taped a shower curtain around the hole. Still, moonlight (or streetlights) poked through when we laid in bed at night. We rearranged our bedroom furniture. No contractors were available, so we would wait the entire summer for its repair. By then we would be nostalgic for when the sky falling down around our ears was our biggest problem. The metaphor was too obvious to say aloud, but we said it anyway.

After I became a Fury, my whole body was tender for days, a pulverized slab of meat. Otherwise, life returned to its surreal pandemic monotony of teaching, meetings with traumatized students, failing to write. The school year was ending. My graduating seniors and MFA students were panicking. They wanted advice. I had none to give.

The next transformation occurred during my fortnightly trip to the grocery store. I had a long list of items I hoped to buy if they were available. The cart was mostly empty when I turned the corner from the produce section into the peanut butter aisle. Again, my heart attempted a jailbreak. Again, I felt like I was going to die. Around me shoppers continued emptying the shelves unperturbed. Nobody asked if I was okay. I finished grocery shopping. I didn’t know what else to do.

My therapist theorized they were anxiety attacks. It seemed like a reasonable explanation. It was, at least, an explanation. But the third time, I knew it wasn’t anxiety. I asked my partner to drive me to the ER. He had an important meeting for tenured faculty that I, an adjunct professor at the same university, was not included in. “Can it wait?” he asked.

After he paused to email his colleagues—our colleagues—we went to the ER. I can’t help but wonder if everything would’ve unfolded differently without that delay. By the time I’d made it to triage, my episode had abated. A flurry of nurses and technicians hooked me up to telemetry and an IV of fluids and Ativan, then left me alone for hours. I graded finals but couldn’t focus, reading the same lines over and over. A doctor drew the privacy curtain and told me the problem was my thyroid.

A few weeks later, my partner drove me to a different hospital complex—not the ER in our neighborhood, but Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago’s Loop. I was too scared to get behind the wheel in case I had another episode and crashed the car. Riding shotgun, I feasted my eyes on the lake as we cruised down Lake Shore Drive. The sunlight playing off the blues and greys of the skyscrapers and glassy water soothed my frayed nerves, though it was eerie to see the once-bustling beaches barricaded and empty. Lake Shore Drive takes an undulating route along the city’s eastern edge. I would become intimate with its contours over the coming months, joking that the only time I left my house was to go to the hospital, though it was less a joke than a statement of fact.

The endocrinologist diagnosed my hyperthyroidism as Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disease that’s hellish but less terminal than the name suggests. He compared my thyroid to a dog on a walk. When it’s hyperactive, the dog sees a squirrel and tears after it, pulling the leash taut. Everything in the body, including metabolism, speeds up. When it’s hypoactive, the dog sits on the sidewalk and the walker drags it along. Graves’ accounted for the million inexplicable ways I’d unraveled, including anger and anxiety, a byproduct of an amygdala run amok.

Still, something didn’t sit right. I asked about the cardiac events, if I should go to the hospital. No, the doctor said, not unless I lost consciousness. I tried to convey how terrorizing the episodes were.

“You need to calm down. Your mind can create palpitations.” He drew an ellipse with his finger from the head to the heart and back.

“But I am calm until it happens. I’m fine before.” Shrillness crept into my voice. Like a Victorian woman pathologized with a weeping womb, my protestations proved his point.

“You have to control your anxiety,” he said, as if that settled it.

Journalist Susan Burton notes that “doctors misdiagnose so many women’s heart attacks as anxiety that sending a woman home [from the hospital while having a heart attack] could actually be interpreted as a reasonable choice that an ordinary doctor would make . . . dismissing women doesn’t necessarily fall below the standard of care.”^[1]

What happened to me was more subtle than dismissal: My ability to trust my own judgment eroded.

Orestes descends from the House of Atreus, which in The Oresteia represents power in all its forms, military and political and economic and social. Hegemony incarnate. When the Erinyes pursue him, they not only seek to punish one man for his crime against one woman. They threaten to undermine an entire power structure that gives men carte blanche to control women, especially transgressive women such as Clytemnestra who reigned with masculine efficacy for ten years. At the end of The Oresteia, Athena (a girlboss epitome of internalized misogyny) pardons Orestes and transforms the Furies into goddesses of mercy and marriage—an exchange of property from a woman’s father to her husband. Stripped of their wrath, they become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. Aeschylus doesn’t describe their physical shape-shifting, but I imagine basilisk coiffures settling into stillness, claws retracting, ancient faces becoming preternaturally Botox smooth.

I underwent a similar reverse metamorphosis every time I walked into a doctor’s office. I wanted to be healed, and I needed them to like me. Besides, my doctors were no Oresteses. They were working heroically in unfathomable circumstances. In the depths of the pandemic, my endocrinologist once told me, his autoimmune patients didn’t respond to treatment in predictable patterns. Our diseases behaved in strange, unwieldy ways. He was correct, too, that anxiety can cause palpitations. But mine didn’t.

My fight was with the medical system that contained us all. I made myself docile and compliant, smiling and joking and charming my way through every appointment, but beneath my impotent façade skulked a primordial desire for destruction.

The Oresteia was written in the wake of a plague that killed one in four Athenians, during a time of immense political and social change. One of those changes was the systematic removal of women from public life. These plays, performed at the Great Dionysia, a civic festival in Athens from which women were excluded, are considered by feminist performance scholar Sue-Ellen Case to be “central to the formalization of misogyny”^[2] in ancient Greece, its ramifications branching down through the millennia. The literal invention of the patriarchy, the transmogrification of the Furies isn’t benign narratology. It’s acculturation.

Let women have power, and they’ll eviscerate you, emasculate you, make you answer for violence enacted on their bodies. Defang them onstage, in front of the whole city—well, it’s another metaphor that goes more or less without saying.

Pandemic restrictions eased, and friends and family made tentative returns to normalcy. Meanwhile, my health deteriorated despite the diagnosis. My thyroid levels yo-yoed. Each swing brought agonizing symptoms. I was manic or torpid, depending on the week. My chest was always sore. Walking up three flights of stairs often triggered a cardiac event. I rarely left the couch, bingeing ten seasons of The Great British Bake Off. My blue heeler, Simone dog Beauvoir, normally an energetic, squirrel-chasing canine, refused to leave my side. When my partner took her for a walk, she guided them home so she could guard me.

When my heart went haywire, my partner would drive me to the ER. We sat in the parking lot together and waited for the episodes to subside. I held off going inside, afraid the doctors would tell me I was overreacting, being dramatic, failing to control myself.

One night in bed, moonlight streaming through the roof, I watched my heart pulse out of my chest. This was my life now, my new Hadean normal. Stygian tears burned my eyes. Aeschylus echoed across the epochs, the Erinyes keening while their power saps away: “Earth, ah earth, what is this agony that crawls under my ribs?”^[3]

Here’s the truth: Part of me thrilled at the descent of my monstrosity. Not the illness—the rage. Its hot blade of clarity pierced the buttery fear of what was happening to me. A shame-filled flicker of frisson emerged at the possibilities that being monstrous unfurled for me.

Before, I was capable, people-pleasing, ambitious but in a polite, not ruthless, way. Enough to—unimaginatively—be deemed difficult. Those traits show up as deficiencies in my writing. The descriptor “masculine” is often levied at me, never as a compliment (never at the work). “Don’t be recalcitrant,” my mentor told me once, and in the next breath, “The writing needs to be more muscular.”

In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer’s analysis of consuming art by heinous men, she notes the positive connotations of the word “monster,” its glittering underpinnings of artistic swagger: “It is balls-out, male, testicular, old world. It’s a hairy word, and has teeth….The dictionary has it as something terrifying, something huge, something successful (a box-office monster).”

If my mercurial temper was a product of masculine brilliance, not feminized pathology, it could be a subversive act of gendernonconformity. If I wasn’t able to right systemic injustices or get a clear prognosis, my metamorphosis might at least generate good writing. Artistic greatness would bestow meaning to my agita and volatility—beyond the pitiable and coded She’s not well. Like Dederer, I wondered, “Am I a monster?” But I didn’t find liberation or retribution in my monstrosity. It didn’t fuel my writing. It depleted me, stripped me of my ambition and my words.

When summer ended, I went back to work. I dragged myself to class and meetings, submitted limpid drafts. My Athena was the pain and exhaustion that enervated my wrath, trying to simply make it through each fucking day as disease plundered my body.

Furies, it turns out, do not lead to genius. Though I wrung myself out, I could barely string two words together.

It took more than a year of cardiac events, hospital visits, and cardiology and genetic testing to confirm that my Fury wasn’t a phantasm of my imagination or evidence of my mind’s ungovernability. She has a name: sustained ventricular tachycardia.

A life-threatening arrhythmia that causes you to drop dead in the street.

At any moment, my heart could’ve simply ceased to beat. Now my body has been tamed through thyroid medication, a powerful antiarrhythmic, and an intravenous defibrillator. The Fury remains, though. I shout and throw things and slam doors and scare myself. Anger sits at the surface of my skin, an exposed nerve.

I am furious with myself. If I’d persisted in advocating for myself more effectually, part of me believes, my life-threatening condition would have been caught earlier; it wouldn’t have been so traumatic; my life wouldn’t have been derailed for years.

And I am furious with the world.

In a plague-ridden culture of disposability where chronically ill and disabled people are discarded like flotsam and jetsam, I don’t have a taste for mercy.

It’s au courant to celebrate women reclaiming their rage—I think of the sign held high at reproductive justice rallies, we are the daughters of the witches you failed to burn—dismantling the patriarchy that the Greeks painstakingly and devastatingly wrought. Rage feels good in the moment, but its aftermath leaves you scraped out. I don’t want to revel in my rage. I don’t want to need it. It makes me unrecognizable to myself.

I don’t know what I am now, but I’m not a Kindly One.

[1] Susan Burton. “The Outcomes.” The Retrievals, August 3, 2023. Podcast, website, 53:49. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/podcasts/serial-the-retrievals-yale-fertility-clinic.html.

[2] Sue-Ellen Case, “Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts,” Theater Journal 37, no. 3 (October 1985): 317–327, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3206851.

[3] Aeschylus. The Eumenides. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York: Washington Square Press, 1967.

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Kristin Idaszak is a playwright, essayist, and cultural critic. She is a two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow and a recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Bending Genres, HowlRound, Rescripted, and elsewhere. She’s taught at DePaul University and Northwestern University.

Photo by Omer Salom on Unsplash