The Vampire as Psychological Metaphor: Carmilla, Trauma, and the Myth of Coercive Desire

When the man who broke into my home to drug me and sexually assault me failed to kill me passively via overdose, his anxiety became increasingly palpable as the days dragged on.

At one point, he'd asked for a knife and bucket--only to change his mind when I didn't flinch, ready to accept the fate that I'd determined must be my destiny ever since I became clear-headed enough to recognize what was happening.

My refusal to die passively was a problem: the plan had been for me to overdose on GHB, which is unable to be detected in the body after 6 hours. If I died this way, it protected him from shame: since sociopaths survive in self-constructed fantasies to avoid shame over their behaviors, a drug overdose allowed him to tell himself he wasn't a murderer, that I'd died by accident.

He avoided thinking he was a rapist through the fantasy that I DESERVED IT.

I shudder to think of how many people die by these circumstances, their deaths deemed a mystery, their monster free of guilt and consequences.

No matter how much GHB he gave me, I could go unconscious for hours, nearly whole days sometimes--but I kept waking up.

In one of my comas, I did, indeed, leave my body. I was met by my loved ones passed, and I was told I'd survive and I needed to be brave.

So there I sat, disoriented, without a plan, armed with nothing but faith, next to a man who I'd previously mistaken as a friend–my neighbor and apartment maintenance man--as he brooded over the problem of the living, breathing evidence that he wasn't the good man that he pretended to be.

Strangely, I didn't feel fear of him: since I'd met him, he felt as comfortable as HOME.

I was raised by monsters. I'm not without my own powers and mysteries that I hadn't even begun to discover within myself yet back then.

"You want me to pull your tarot?" I suggested cheerfully--fawning for dangerous men was a tool of survival since my childhood, and I'd hoped my tarot might tell me something I needed to know.

He visibly flinched, "No, NO," he said adamantly.

"Why? It's just for fun," I said.

"My mom used to throw tarot. That shit is REAL. I don't want to know."

"I know, it's gospel," I said. "What about a different deck? I have one that gives you your spirit animal."

He looked at me skeptically, and I looked at him wide-eyed and hopefully, the same way I looked at my father when I wanted his attention as a child.

Just like my father, he finally thawed and relented, shrugging nonchalantly, "Fine, ok."

After having him shuffle, hold a crystal, and pick his card, I gasped.

"What?" his head snapped.

"A BAT." I showed him the card.

He offered me the same smirk he flashed after the first time he attacked me--one so dark that the cognitive dissonance between who I thought he was and that insidious smile made my brain feel swollen.

He looked straight at me, "I'm a vampire."

I looked straight back at him and said nothing: I know, I thought.

The biggest revelation from the worst trauma of my life was the discovery that vampires were real.

Before vampires were darkly romantic, they were darkly diagnostic--metaphors to stand in as names for psychological ailments humanity did not yet understand or have names for, a way to discuss traumas so taboo that victims locked them away in their mind like their own personal madwoman in the attic.