Author: Chi-Ting

“I get angry because everyone’s said to him how fantastic, aren’t you courageous, what a hero,” writes Beth. “I wanted to beat the living shit out of him for what he did to our family. There were no repercussions for him. My anger was mind-blowing.”

Beth, an Australian woman whose husband came out

On the occasion of a long-time closeted man coming out, we normally congratulate and celebrate the rebirth of a man, his bravery in self-authenticity. However, this positive reaction towards the man often causes more damage to the woman who has devoted her time and effort to their marriage. From the stories of women seeking help from the Women Partners of Bisexual Men service, we can see the anger, betrayal, disbelief, and among all, helplessness when the partner they have chosen to spend the rest of their lives with reveals that he is not attracted to them. By putting myself in their shoes, it is not difficult to understand Harper’s breakdown.

The worst part is, there is no one ultimately to blame except the intrinsically homophobic society that has locked the men-loving men in the closet consciously or unconsciously. Then, they made the wrong choices.

“The way he described the boys: ‘he’s very handsome’, ‘he’s very muscular’. He probably didn’t know he was gay at the time,” she writes.
“It broke my heart to read the diary of a sweet young boy on the verge of making the wrong choice.
“And that choice was me.”

Lucy, in her acute distress, read her husband’s teenage diary

Read more of these women stories and how they coexist with reality or leave: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/03/did-i-ever-really-know-him-the-women-who-married-gay-men

In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, we can see Miranda losing her perception of time. In the almost first-person storytelling, we as readers were misguided to believe that she hasn’t been hospitalized for as long as a month. Stemming from curiosity, this post seeks to provide biological insight into this “time flies” sensation.

Our brain has its way of regulating our daily activities. Through a seesaw relationship of two proteins, CLK, which activates genes that keep up awake, and PER, which deactivates genes that produce CLK, in the SCN, our brain maintains the circadian rhyme that controls when we wake, eat, and sleep in its primitive cycles of time.

To be more precise, our brain has its own count clock, the cortex utilizes the roughly constant speed of electric signals transmitting between a pair of neurons to calculate the passing of time. That becomes our perception of time.

Miranda’s terrible body conditions caused by influenza may have severely impacted her brain activity, further disrupting her 24-hour rhythmic cycle. The disrupted circadian rhythm then, in turn, affects her consciousness in normal activities.

Furthermore, in Michel Siffre’s experiment in the cave, the darkness of the environment warped his conception of time as he counted to 120 in 5 minutes instead of 2 mins. In Miranda’s case, being severely sick may have also impacted her neurological activity that led to her confused conception of time. Time, in my experiences, truly did spin on a different axis when I was ill or sleep-deprived.

Frankly speaking, her delayed realization of time may have been included to exaggerate her sickness or her sentiments of lost love. Forcing biology into theater somehow takes away the impact of evoking this bitter-sweet feeling. Such a drama pooper. However, there must have been a scientific explanation for such phenomenon for it to widely resonate with so many of us. After all, she was merely a fellow lovestruck human in the shifting times of an epidemic.