In a study they did with mice, researchers concluded what we already knew: that trauma lives in our blood. Every time I tell myself that I am worthless, how do I know whether it’s me thinking it, or the white voices I’ve internalized? Or it — my broken cells.

It would be inhumane to quarantine assault victims in a room with their abusers for hundreds of years and demand they act natural. Comparisons, of course, are cheap and unfair. I have come to understand my body as an argument, a site of proof and contention.

I try to use therapy to unload my specific personal demons, but anytime I dare to self-indulge, to be the center of my own story, I am reminded of my skin. My symptoms flare. I’m inundated with my insignificance. This is not the work of my disorder. It’s my Twitter feed clogged with hate speech. It’s nigger jokes. It’s that scene in “Malcolm X,” in the library, when he discovers that even our dictionary, our language, insists on our inherent evil.

And then there’s the way it all compounds: average number of times a day a white person walks right into me on the street. Number of mornings a week a white girl flips her wet hair into my face on the subway. Number of black women with speaking roles on “Girls.” Number of police convictions. Number of times I have been mistaken for another black woman. Number of days between the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth, when slaves in Texas were finally informed of it. Number of ways in which this is a metaphor for contemporary black American life.

Some nights I turn over and over in bed groaning to myself, “Why do I feel this way? What can I do to feel better? How can I think my way out of this?” I realize I am in mourning. For the people I never got to be and never will be. I mourn my own possibility.

I had one therapist who told me that every neurosis and blockage could be traced to a locus of fear. She would ask me, again and again, “What is the fear?” and though I never liked my answers — alternately “death” and “abandonment” — I became obsessed with asking the question. For white police officers who commit murder, for white politicians and heads of television networks or publishing houses or universities who — though they admit their inefficacy in protecting, promoting and celebrating minorities, do not step down from their own posts to make way — the answer, always, is the fear of relinquishing control.

What is the fear? Is it that you worry we will treat you how you have treated us? There are two neuroses that I consider particularly American: the habit of forgetting, and the inability to imagine what has not been. We are even afraid to imagine our own rehabilitation. We have never been free, in that we have never been given the chance to define freedom for ourselves. When we love ourselves, it’s a revolution.

In regard to restitution, I submit to the American government an invoice totaling fees incurred for medical treatment. I believe you will find the bill reasonable and fair, all things considered.