ask, and you shall receive
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I don’t think I’d ever cried while having sex, until last night.
Granted, big changes always unsettle me. When I first moved into the place I just left last year, I felt disoriented and weepy for the first week, questioning my decision to move and convinced I would never feel at home there. Of course I got over the disorientation and weepiness after a bit (though I never did feel quite at home there, with a roommate who was lovely but who really had made it her home). I didn’t think it would happen this time, given that on the surface there didn’t seem to be anything remotely disorienting about this move: same neighbors, same building, mirror-image floor plan of the old place. And moving in with my lover, ferchrissakes. What’s disorienting about that?
Well, I’m not quite sure what’s disorienting, but I think I do feel vaguely disoriented and weepy this time around too. The move in with her feels completely natural, and in fact it doesn’t seem like much has changed in terms of our patterns except that we no longer have the stress of trying to balance quality Us Time with roommates being around. The shift into not working also seems entirely natural — I get up early, when she does, and the past few mornings I’ve been popping muffins in the oven (batter whipped up the night before) so that by the time she leaves for work, she can take some fresh out of the oven with her to work. And then I spend my days doing (for now) house stuff — massive grocery trips, unpacking, setting up internet, cleaning, organizing… But I guess there’s a period of adjustment just the same. Stuff still spilling out of boxes, things every which way in the house, closets utterly overflowing (damn San Francisco and its tiny closets!). It’s just not settled yet. And when things in my environment are unsettled, I think I’m more prone to being emotionally unsettled, too.
So maybe that’s part of why I cried last night when she was fucking me. But somehow I think there’s more to it than that.
It’s not like she was doing anything new. She was fucking me with her right hand, which I love because she can fuck so hard and so fast that way. But lately, I’ve developed a kind of mental block about being fucked this way. It started back in November, when I noticed one time after sex that I was bleeding. Then I kept noticing it — almost every time, I bleed. And despite the fact that I brushed it away, “don’t worry, I’m fine, no it doesn’t hurt, it felt really good, don’t worry!” sure that it was just some very minor tearing, it did bug me. I did go to my gynecologist, and she didn’t find anything wrong, so that was comforting as well. So I just shrugged it off. What’s a little blood here and there?
I thought I’d shrugged it off, anyway. Except for this afore-mentioned growing mental block around penetration. There’s a tiny rise of panic when she first goes in me, which she can read and so she always checks in with me. “No, no, do it, I’m fine.” But for some reason, that tactic wasn’t working last night, and as she was fucking me, my panic was stealthily rising. Panic isn’t exactly the right word. Not anxiety either, really. It’s more like this little voice of fear in the back of my head that kept getting louder, only since I was keeping the voice kept in a glass box, it was getting louder and having to pound at the walls of the box in mounting force and anxious energy because I was trying to ignore it. (How’s that for an extended analogy?) And so suddenly, I found myself crying.
My poor lady, she was so concerned, and was probably perplexed, too. I was telling her to stop and go and “it feels good” and “something doesn’t feel right” all at once. All of that was true. It did feel good, I really, really wanted her to fuck me. But at the same time, something wasn’t right, and it wasn’t anything about our connection, or about the way she was fucking me, or anything specific like that. It was so frustrating not to be able to put my finger on it. So instead I cried.
It’s funny. I’ve often wondered about triggers, since I’ve rarely been “triggered” while having sex. I’ve heard that many women who’ve been raped have a lot of trouble with sex and have a lot of trouble with physically-triggered flashbacks. I’ve only had that once, I think. I’m not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the fact that my memories of being raped are dissociated. I don’t have physically-triggered flashbacks because my mind separated from my body completely. But I wonder whether what’s coming up for me now, what came up for me last night, is some kind of trigger. I was dissociated from my body during the actual trauma, but came slamming back into it right after and for the aftermath — immediate and long-term — I was definitely experiencing my body. I have very acute physical memories from that time. But even those are rarely triggered, and even when they are, it’s not always easy to identify what it is that’s going on. I’m not even sure whether it’s worth trying.
Last night, though. I think that was a trigger. I think the slow build-up of anxiety over the past few months about this bleeding thing, I think that’s a trigger. It’s a trigger of physical damage, lasting physical pain, blood, and above all not knowing — not knowing and trying to repress, make it go away, ignore it, not let anyone know.
Jesus. I don’t know. I guess talking about it is a good thing. I’m not sure what to do about it though. Therapy, yeah, I know, right. I’ve cut therapy out, though, for now, for budgetary reasons since leaving my job with cushy health insurance. I just wish I knew how to help soothe that panicky, isolated voice in my brain that thinks it’s invisible and inaudible and that’s afraid of — what, pain? I guess — I hope — noticing it is the first step. Hearing it, voicing it, hugging it, letting it know I hear it. Does it sound like I’m schizophrenic? I think I feel kind of schizophrenic about this. Is that what dissociating does? It’s confusing. I don’t want that flattened 15-year-old creeping back. No.
Or, maybe I do. Maybe it’s the right time to go back and visit her and tell her everything is going to be okay.
Fuck this is ridiculous. I cried during sex last night, and look what I’ve made out of it! Anyway, here’s the moral of the story: I’m working on sorting shit out. And luckily, I have the most amazing lady to support me in all of it. After the tears last night, and after a little bit of trying to articulate what was going on, she asked me if I wanted to stop.
“No,” I said. “I want you to fuck me.” And so I patted that anxious voice on the head, and listened instead to how good it feels when she’s filling me up. Mmmmm.
Well, that post on sexual violence was supposed to be Part I of IV, and I was going to do all four this month, in April, partly because it’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month but mostly because I thought it would be easier for me to write it all at once and altogether and then get right back to my regularly scheduled ruminations about my life and my relationship. I also sort of felt insecure about it, like maybe people wouldn’t want to read something so serious and harsh on my blog, so it’d be better for everyone if I just hurried up and got it all out of the way. Except that something happened that I wasn’t planning on, and what happened was I sort of ran away. I hit publish, and then turned off the internet for a week and a half. I mean, I was reading other people’s blogs and doing other stuff on the internet. But I didn’t look at any comments and didn’t check my email or post on twitter or poke my head above ground at all. But the weirdest part is I didn’t even realize I was doing that until a week later.
I guess it just needed time to sit there and have its own life for a minute before I came back to it. And it’s fine, I’m totally fine, I’m glad I wrote it and glad I shared it, and thank you all so so so much for your comments. You can’t possibly know how much they mean to me. In a funny sort of way, my healing in the past few years has been much aided by all the love and support I get now from people in my life; it’s like I can remember that time of my life but also picture the warm and loving spirits of people now saturating the air around the 15-year-old me who had no idea they were there at the time because she was hurting too much to see them, but knowing they were there all along somehow helps me now in a way that doesn’t feel entirely retroactive. It actually is almost as if I’m beginning to learn how to re-remember, re-live that time a little less lost. Memory is a funny thing.
Anyway, to get back to the original point of this post, I don’t think I’m going to be writing parts II, III, and IV quite yet. It will happen, but not this month, and for the time being I’ve got plenty of other things to write about.
Beginning with:
We have a new home! I tweeted a few weeks ago about how disappointed I was that the perfect little garden home we wanted went to another applicant — and Jen told me that it must’ve happened for a reason — and was she ever right! Back story: I currently live in a sexplex (you know, a house divided into six units, duh, minds out of the gutter people!), two flats per floor, and the flats on each floor are flip-flops of each other. The landlord’s son and daughter-in-law have lived in the flip-flop flat to mine for the past few years, and they mentioned at the beginning of April that they might be moving somewhere bigger soon. My roommate and I got excited for a hot minute about the possibility of me and the lady love taking over their flat, but then we never heard another whisper of them moving and figured it wouldn’t be happening for a while, and promptly forgot about it.
Until last week, when suddenly, one day, they were gone. The very next morning I called our landlord, and said (more or less), “hey, you know, my girlfriend and I would be totally happy to move into that flat for you, if you could keep the rent where it’s currently at. It would be so easy for you, you wouldn’t have to renovate it or show it or anything, and you know me already, and I’m already a part of the building family, and, you know, we’re awesome tenants, so how’s about it?” And WHADDOYAKNOW? He fell for it! Well, almost: he did bump the rent up a bit, but it’s still well below market rate for our neighborhood, and it’s got TWO BEDROOMS. So much space! A guest room! A music room! A library! An office! A ballroom! So many possibilities! It’s a mansion you guys, and for so cheap. No, it doesn’t have a garden, but it has a sunny little back deck of sorts, and I’m going to see about having a little herb garden back there. And moving is going to be CAKE. I just have to drag everything next door. Like, three feet.
We’re so excited. May 15th will be the first day of our lease, so that I can move everything before I travel for two weeks starting May 18th. I think I’m going to die of asphyxiation from holding my breath until then, I’m so excited. Our OWN PLACE! :)
I’ve written about enough for now, so I’ll just leave you with a little souvenir of a fun photo shoot I did yesterday. The lady love, who isn’t even a photographer, snapped about 100 shots of me in my bedroom, and they came out so lovely! The lighting is just the gorgeous sunlight filtered through my translucent insulating blinds.
I haven’t written about depression or anxiety in a while. I’ve been a bit stymied, to be frank, about the fact that I have an audience. Originally, I started writing this blog primarily as an outlet, a way to direct my depression and anxiety so that it had somewhere to go, rather than staying bottled up. I was in a bad place last summer, just felt like I was spewing my mental guts all over the sidewalk, and the blog was a way of at least spewing in a contained place. (Ew?)
And then something weird happened: I got readers. And somehow spewing my mental guts all over a bunch of kind lovely internet people is harder than spewing my mental guts all over the big internet black hole. And in tandem with getting a readership, I started slowly working my way out of the bad place I’d been in. I had started feeling like I wasn’t an I anymore, I was wasn’t a complete being, I didn’t have control over anything and I was incoherent, even to myself, but the very act of writing this blog helped me out of that. It helped me find a voice. And it helped me realize that I have a voice that other people, for whatever reason, actually listen to.
I’m choking up as I write this. Sometimes writing a blog is hard: people like it, and I start worrying that the next thing I write isn’t going to be good and people will stop liking it; or people don’t like it, and I think that maybe the next thing I write will make them change their minds. And yet. I think the more I write, the more I want to keep writing. Those of you who comment and/or send emails give me so much to think about, you inspire me so much, and the voice I thought I didn’t have is shaping and strengthening and I’m so grateful to all of you who read and all of you who write your own blogs for being a part of that.
Writing isn’t the only thing that’s helped me feel stronger, though. I have a village of people and a mental crater full of tools that help me cope. When I got an email from a reader a few days ago who was curious about what’s been going on with me mental-health-wise since I last talked about going off Prozac a few months ago, I realized I’ve been wanting to do this post for a while. Because this shit is real. Yes, I love talking about gender politics and femme-ininity and love and sex. It’s a lot of what goes on in my life, and it’s a great deal of what I think about every day. But it’s not the whole story. I’m like a tapestry, finely woven so you can only see the individual threads if you look up close, and most people just see the pretty picture, but I’m made up of millions of threads and so many different colors… femme is one thread, queer is a thread, San Francisco is a thread. My love of philosophizing and politicizing and being radical progressive: all threads. Mi’lady is a thread.
…and my history of sexual assault is a thread. My tendency towards co-dependency. My anxiety – a vibrant colored thread. My control-freak ways, my insecurity, my inability to be vulnerable, my difficulty accepting criticism. Those are all threads that were easier to write about and try to untangle when I was writing to (what I thought was) a black hole internet. Harder to write about when it feels more public.
But if anything, the fact that it’s more public now means it’s more important to write about it. For one thing, it’s good for me; it helps me unweave that one glaring thread I mentioned, my inability to be vulnerable. I can practice being vulnerable on my own fucking blog, for crying out loud. It’s a great place to practice vulnerability especially, in fact – because I can shut my computer when it’s getting hard. I can delete comments, ignore emails, I can be the boss of the space and control my level of comfort. And I also think it’s important to write about because it’s not just my truth, it’s a truth that belongs to so many of us, and I know how much it means to me to have solidarity, and maybe if I write truthfully I can help other people feel like they have company. Even if I’m in the Internet.
So. I’m not taking any medication at the moment. My intention, when I stopped taking Prozac, was to switch to Wellbutrin, but then I switched insurance providers and one thing leading to another means I haven’t actually seen a new psychiatrist yet. I may, eventually, but I’m not sure: as someone with a history of fainting/seizing, Wellbutrin is cautioned against, and the others (like Prozac) have these damn sexual side effects. So for now, I’m employing an army of strategies to see if I can get on without medication. But if it appears I can’t, you’d better believe I will go back to a psychiatrist in a heartbeat. Taking Prozac made me feel like I was going to be okay. It helped me believe that I had options, and that it wasn’t my fault. That medication was my lifeline, and I will never ever be one of those people who says you should try everything else first, that psychiatric meds are just a bandaid, that people who take psychiatric meds are just avoiding the real problem. Not. True. It’s a personal choice, of course, and if you choose not to take medication, awesome, I hope you figure out what works for you. And if you do choose to take medication, power to you, I hope you find the one that does the trick.
So, that army of strategies. I’ll share a few of them, the ones that work particularly well for me, both in general and specifically to deal with isolated situations.
1) I see a therapist. He’s gay, he’s really smart, and he specializes in coping with anxiety, trauma, and feeling out of control. He’s working with me on figuring out ways to work with my various trip-ups, rather than against them, and most of all on being forgiving to myself and parenting my own inner child to help heal past wounds.
2) I have a some somatic tricks, meditation-type techniques, that help me find my mental ground in situations (such as extreme anxiety) where I feel like I’m losing control. These include the stuff in this post, as well things like:
* finding my pulse, and counting my heartbeats
* closing my eyes, lying down if possible or at the very least sit, and greet every body part with gratitude or soothing (I know this sounds silly, but it helps me remember I’m whole, I’m human, I’m all here, for example: *wiggle my toes* “hi, toes, thanks for sticking with me”; or *inhale with my belly* “don’t worry, belly, you’ll be okay”), or if I can’t bring myself to greet my body parts, at the very least touch them and notice them and breathe into them
3) Sometimes motion is what I really need, because moving my body helps me get the emotions moving too. I’m not talking about exercise (though of course, that’s recommended for combatting depression), but about any type of motion. Shaking it all out. Taking a walk. Putting on Beyonce and dancing to it.
4) Writing.
5) Setting small goals, goals that are achievable, and then achieving them. This helps me out of my depression (helps me feel like I have more agency, like I’m not stuck) and my anxiety (by giving me something concrete to achieve, so that I’m not overwhelmed by something massive and, thus, anxiety-provoking). Example as applied to graduate school applications: small goal would be “write to undergrad professor to ask for recommendation.” Or, “register for GRE and order GRE prep book.”
6) Having a plan for what to do if I start feeling anxious. For example, I have some social anxiety, and if I’m out with large crowds and loud music, I can easily feel overwhelmed, distressed, and then panic. So, setting a plan for dealing with that particular situation, as well as an alternative plan in case it’s not working out, really helps me a lot. Example: “When I go in, first I’m going to get a drink. Then I’m going to find one person I know to have a one-on-one conversation with to ease me into the situation.” And if it doesn’t work out, if I still start getting anxiety? Alternative plan: “I’ve also really been wanting to practice my burlesque moves, so if I’m not having fun, I’m going to go do that.” That helps me know that I have options, so no situation can get the better of me.
So, this is where I am right now. Coping with my various threads, finding ways of pulling out the garish ones, but also being okay with the knowledge that my picture is far from perfect, but that’s what makes it beautiful.
Phew, congratulations if you’ve made it through to the end. Have any of your own coping or strengthening tactics to share?
don’t surrender your loneliness
so quickly.
let it cut more deeply.
let it ferment and season you
as few human
or even divine ingredients can.
something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft
my voice so tender
my need of god
absolutely clear.
-Hafiz
I’m not lonely right now, actually. I’m better than I’ve been in a long time. A month ago I hit rock bottom, and now I’m comfortably stable again, and have been for the past week and a half or two weeks. So I post that poem not because it’s leaking out of my soul right now, but because I suspect that, eventually, it will be. Because stability is an illusion, and although the downs feel so far away right now I know it’s just a matter of time. And you know what? That’s ok. Every time I plummet will give me another opportunity to learn how to survive. And so I post this poem right now as a reminder to myself, when the next wave hits. Whatever it is — loneliness, fear, insecurity, anguish, sorrow, emptiness — is beautiful in its own right, and is a gift to be embraced.
One of my favorite mentors, a woman at the rape crisis center I work at, teaches workshops on somatic healing (something I’d never heard of before, but am becoming increasingly interested in). She taught me that each finger represents an emotion to be cradled within us. I forget which finger represents which one, but I think they’re as follows: pinky is insecurity; ring finger is grief; middle finger is anger; index finger is fear; thumb is loneliness. Whenever you’re feeling one of those emotions, use your left hand to firmly hold the representative finger. Hold onto it, close your eyes, breathe in, breathe out, until you feel the warmth from your hand radiating from your finger throughout your body. And as you exhale, say to yourself, “this too shall pass.”
For some reason, to me it just feels right to put the finger holds and the Hafiz poem hand in hand. Whatever it is, welcome it, nurture it, feel it, cradle it, let go of trying to control it and force it away, and remember: it will pass. It always does.
I haven’t written about this here, yet, but part of why I’ve been so busy lately has been that I applied for, was accepted, and am now participating in an intensive rape crisis and peer counseling training at a local women-of-color-led, volunteer-based organization against sexual violence. Sixteen hours a week now I spend in their gorgeous mural-covered building in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District (actually, it’s a block away from where I live), with 20 other women, learning how to be crisis hotline volunteers and one-on-one counselors. The training is amazing, and beautiful, and hard, and brings up so, so much for me. Surprisingly, it hasn’t so far been that triggering — it doesn’t bring up stuff about my own sexual assault. Rather, it brings up all the ways I am in general a scarred, flawed human being, how that’s okay, and how I need to work on healing myself in order to be able to start helping others heal.
And it’s liberating. It might seem like being reminded that you’re a scarred, flawed being would be nerve-wracking, or defeating, or would break your sense of self-worth. For me, though, it’s been so, so healing. (I’ll probably be using that word a lot…) It’s so good for me to acknowledge to myself that yes, I’m flawed. I’m hurt. And it’s okay. I’m allowed to be imperfect. And each imperfection just gives me a beautiful opportunity to take care of myself and work on myself.
I forget that the best way to heal and the best way to be the person I really strive to be is to love myself and take care of myself. I oh so often do exactly the reverse — I make a mistake, and I berate myself for it. I get frustrated with my weaknesses, angry that I mess up. I feel powerless against my deficiencies. But I forget that it is in my power to forgive myself for messing up. I’m my own harshest critic, and I’d do well to lighten up. I watch my dad growing older, in his 60s now, terribly, terribly unhappy, all because he believes he lacks the power to help himself. I DO NOT WANT TO BE THAT PERSON. It is his belief that he is helpless and powerless in the face of his own failures that makes him so miserable. And I want to be in charge of my own happiness.
A while back, I posted a list of things I can do to care for myself. I go to that list often, when I’m feeling down and want to feel better, or when I’m facing an evening of solitude and don’t want to wallow. It’s a great list, and it was a good first step for me in focusing inward, being aware of my own needs. But I realized today that I have the wrong attitude about that list. I treat it as a resource I can use to fill a void. Lonely? Call a friend. Tired? Take a bath. Sad? Watch a funny movie. Stressed? Go to yoga. Focusing too much outward? Journal, or blog. In fact, though, self-care is not just something I need to do to fill a void. It’s not just a way to re-fill my tank when it’s on empty. I also need to take care of myself pre-emptively. I need to make a habit of taking care of myself all of the time. As a first priority. Take a bath when I’m not tired. Call my friends just to chat. Go to yoga regularly, to preempt stress.
If I can learn how to do that effectively, then my life might be able to stop looking like a seismograph during an earthquake, and might instead look like a healthy state of equilibrium. Rather than wild ups and downs, where self-care brings me up and then I run out and fall down down down and need to bring myself back up, I need to consistently be aware of taking care of my own body and my own mind, consciously checking in with myself about how I’m doing, so that I can maintain a relative balance.
This will also help me be a better person for others, to bring this post back around to the beginning, when I was talking about learning how to be able to help others. I’m going to refer here quickly, though, to a quote from Lilla Watson, a Murri aboriginal activist:
“If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time…But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
This is to say, I can only help others as much as I can be helped along the way. That doesn’t mean “I’ll only help if I get something back.” Rather, it means that (or I take it to mean that) the only way for me to heal and be whole again is for others to heal and be whole again too. And vice versa — so that others can only heal and be whole again if I make sure that I am also healing and becoming whole. So when I say that I’m learning how to help others… what I’m realizing now is that if I’m going to do this work, this so-important work of intervening in sexual violence and supporting survivors, then I need also to be wholly and completely willing to surrender myself to the healing process.
And here’s where I take a deep breath, and feel my height and width and depth, feel my past extending behind me along with everyone who has my back all lined up to catch me if I fall, and feel my whole future spread out in front of me ready for me to take it in my hands. And I can fill up all that space and feel my power and know that I will not fall off the earth because I take up space and am firmly planted here. And the healing begins.
I haven’t written about this here, yet, but part of why I’ve been so busy lately has been that I applied for, was accepted, and am now participating in an intensive rape crisis and peer counseling training at a local women-of-color-led, volunteer-based organization against sexual violence. Sixteen hours a week now I spend in their gorgeous mural-covered building in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District (actually, it’s a block away from where I live), with 20 other women, learning how to be crisis hotline volunteers and one-on-one counselors. The training is amazing, and beautiful, and hard, and brings up so, so much for me. Surprisingly, it hasn’t so far been that triggering — it doesn’t bring up stuff about my own sexual assault. Rather, it brings up all the ways I am in general a scarred, flawed human being, how that’s okay, and how I need to work on healing myself in order to be able to start helping others heal.
And it’s liberating. It might seem like being reminded that you’re a scarred, flawed being would be nerve-wracking, or defeating, or would break your sense of self-worth. For me, though, it’s been so, so healing. (I’ll probably be using that word a lot…) It’s so good for me to acknowledge to myself that yes, I’m flawed. I’m hurt. And it’s okay. I’m allowed to be imperfect. And each imperfection just gives me a beautiful opportunity to take care of myself and work on myself.
I forget that the best way to heal and the best way to be the person I really strive to be is to love myself and take care of myself. I oh so often do exactly the reverse — I make a mistake, and I berate myself for it. I get frustrated with my weaknesses, angry that I mess up. I feel powerless against my deficiencies. But I forget that it is in my power to forgive myself for messing up. I’m my own harshest critic, and I’d do well to lighten up. I watch my dad growing older, in his 60s now, terribly, terribly unhappy, all because he believes he lacks the power to help himself. I DO NOT WANT TO BE THAT PERSON. It is his belief that he is helpless and powerless in the face of his own failures that makes him so miserable. And I want to be in charge of my own happiness.
A while back, I posted a list of things I can do to care for myself. I go to that list often, when I’m feeling down and want to feel better, or when I’m facing an evening of solitude and don’t want to wallow. It’s a great list, and it was a good first step for me in focusing inward, being aware of my own needs. But I realized today that I have the wrong attitude about that list. I treat it as a resource I can use to fill a void. Lonely? Call a friend. Tired? Take a bath. Sad? Watch a funny movie. Stressed? Go to yoga. Focusing too much outward? Journal, or blog. In fact, though, self-care is not just something I need to do to fill a void. It’s not just a way to re-fill my tank when it’s on empty. I also need to take care of myself pre-emptively. I need to make a habit of taking care of myself all of the time. As a first priority. Take a bath when I’m not tired. Call my friends just to chat. Go to yoga regularly, to preempt stress.
If I can learn how to do that effectively, then my life might be able to stop looking like a seismograph during an earthquake, and might instead look like a healthy state of equilibrium. Rather than wild ups and downs, where self-care brings me up and then I run out and fall down down down and need to bring myself back up, I need to consistently be aware of taking care of my own body and my own mind, consciously checking in with myself about how I’m doing, so that I can maintain a relative balance.
This will also help me be a better person for others, to bring this post back around to the beginning, when I was talking about learning how to be able to help others. I’m going to refer here quickly, though, to a quote from Lilla Watson, a Murri aboriginal activist:
“If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time…But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
This is to say, I can only help others as much as I can be helped along the way. That doesn’t mean “I’ll only help if I get something back.” Rather, it means that (or I take it to mean that) the only way for me to heal and be whole again is for others to heal and be whole again too. And vice versa — so that others can only heal and be whole again if I make sure that I am also healing and becoming whole. So when I say that I’m learning how to help others… what I’m realizing now is that if I’m going to do this work, this so-important work of intervening in sexual violence and supporting survivors, then I need also to be wholly and completely willing to surrender myself to the healing process as well. And together, we all work on healing each other.
And here’s where I take a deep breath, and feel my height and width and depth, feel my past extending behind me along with everyone who has my back all lined up to catch me if I fall, and feel my whole future spread out in front of me ready for me to take it in my hands. And I can fill up all that space and feel my power and know that I will not fall off the earth because I take up space and am firmly planted here. And the healing begins.
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