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I’ve been beating myself up lately because it feels like really, the only thing on my mind that compels me to write is fucking rape, and then I get like, “who wants to read about that? who comes here to read my navel-gazing about how fucked up I am and how I can’t stop obsessing about a stupid event that happened ten fucking years ago? and why do I need to dwell on it anyway can’t I fucking move on with my life?” and the truth is my life has moved on, and it also hasn’t. And the same people who were interested in reading about my relationship and my random thoughts about queer politics might or might not be interested in reading me process my trauma, but that’s not my problem. And processing this rape isn’t really only just processing this rape but it’s about processing how everything in my life before and at the time was already brittle and it’s about trying to piece those things together so that I can figure out how to want, fully, to be alive.
The past two weeks I’ve been on the east coast and have spent a bunch of time with friends of mine from college. These friends were the very first people in the world who knew about my rape other than my rapist and the nurse at Planned Parenthood a few weeks later who, when I went for STD testing, knew immediately what the situation was just by looking at me, even though the whole reason I waited a few weeks was to avoid just that likelihood. But otherwise my friends in college were the very first people I ever told and it has been so strange now, at the ten-year mark, to revisit my relationship to it then. In ways I can’t believe how much I was able to separate myself from myself, how much I clung to this “this fucked up thing happened but it is in the past and anyway now I’m stronger for it” fucked-up survivor narrative which is now the whole reason why I have so many problems with the word “survivor.” Cuz in retrospect it doesn’t really feel like I survived it feels like I was just getting by however I could, and in college, my m.o. was like, I just gotta have a normal life, have real friendships that are meaningful to me and I can’t fuck them up by dumping some insane fucking trauma on them. I was also scared, I think, because I didn’t know what would happen to ME if I actually started really talking. When I was in Boston last week I spoke about it a bit with my best friend from college who is actually the first person I ever told about it and she said that yeah, it had been clear to her at the time that I hadn’t really known how to talk about it, how to be both a person who was still reeling from this nightmare AND a person who could be normal and thrive. And I of course remember still having intense flashbacks during those years, especially the first two years of college, and just not being able to move for hours, days, but not being able to even think about telling anyone why.
I guess I had a lot of internalized shame and to be honest I guess I still do. Otherwise I wouldn’t be feeling disgusted with myself for continuing to use this blog as a platform to write about this stuff. And if anyone else who has ever experienced any kind of sexual trauma or violence were to say to me that they felt shame around talking about their experiences I would SO VEHEMENTLY reject that without skipping a fucking beat, and so I’m trying to have that same graciousness with myself. And it makes me wonder how in another five years, ten years, how I will look back on myself now and think, “how did I do it? how did I survive?” the way I’m looking back now at college. I try to remember when and how it started getting easier and I can’t even force my mind to go back there without feeling like I’m going to throw up so I don’t know how to figure it out.
In early May, I went to a queer dance party in Oakland and left early by myself because I was feeling tired and drained, and I was followed by two assholes who were bantering with each other about my ass as a piece of fucking meat and I turned around and yelled at them to fuck off, yelled as loud as I could and was so angry. And rather than leave me alone they shoved me against a building and one of them went through my shit and stole all my cash and the other one went through my dress and stole my body. He couldn’t get a full erection (evidently my fault because I was a “fucking pervert dyke”) so he decided his hand was good enough. The whole thing lasted all of about five minutes and I am insanely proud of myself for staying in my body and not abandoning it. I stayed put with all my might. And I consciously decided at some point to just cry, thinking that maybe if I let it all out and just let my emotions be what they were, maybe it would stop them. So I did, I cried and crumpled to the ground and begged them to stop. And the one going through my shit was like, “this isn’t fun anymore, let’s go” and they left. And I felt broken and shaken and flattened and disgusted and terrified and humiliated, but I was like, whoa, I’m still here. I’m all here. And I called about eight different people to try and connect with someone, to stand up to my inner voice that wants me to isolate, cuz I was like, I am not going to do this again, I am not going to go through this alone. And I am so proud of that.
And then last week I was with my dad in my hometown and we were driving back to his apartment but there was some sort of race or parade or something through my town so he had to take a weird route and he drove right down that street and passed right by the spot where my rapist watched me run by him from his car ten years ago. And my clueless father took us right down that street and I have very intentionally avoided that spot for ten whole years. I haven’t been to that spot since it happened. And it’s funny because I was just thinking recently about how maybe I would want to pay that spot a visit sometime, maybe by myself or maybe with someone close to me, but maybe just by myself and sit there and rock. I thought maybe it would be good to confront that and see it as a regular spot on a regular street in a regular town. But the very second I knew where the car was going, I started throwing up and I had to frantically open the car door and lean out and puke on the street while my baffled father tried to figure out what to do. I couldn’t even talk to him I couldn’t even think, I just had this total panic meltdown and every tiny millimeter of my body needed to get the fuck away. And it was raining and we got back to my dad’s place and I couldn’t go inside, I needed air so I walked to the playground at my old elementary school and sat on the bench in the rain and stared at the playground that I used to play on before, and I tried to connect to a time before everything, when I would just play, on that very playground, with the same (child) body I have now.
I’m struggling. It’s like time is fucking around with me and has decided that it doesn’t need to move in a linear fashion, it doesn’t need to make things easier for me, it doesn’t need to be predictable and it will just do whatever it wants so-help-it-god. And I’m left trying to pick up the pieces and make sense of it all. Sometimes though it feels like even picking up the pieces is too much work, let alone the making sense of it.
One of my very favorite bloggers, and someone who in the meantime I feel really close to, wrote recently about a particular memory of her own trauma, a very specific memory that always flattens her and leaves her shattered. And someone commented, and said to her, have you ever asked that memory what it wants? Asked it why it keeps coming back? Cuz maybe if you can figure that out, you can give it what it wants and it will eventually stop coming back.
The simplicity of that stunned me. What does it want, this part of me that keeps poking and prodding and sticking, and what do they want, these images and memories and body-memories that keep revisiting? I know I need to figure that out. The thing is, the only way I’ve really known how to deal with it has been to push it away and say “no, you are not allowed.” I’m so terrified of giving it space and letting it in, I’m so terrified of what it will do it me and by syllogism, what it will do to everyone in my life.
In the meantime, I’m on the plane to Berlin right now. By the time I post this I will be there already but I’m writing this on the plane. And for the next three weeks I’m hoping that whatever part of my brain it is that is rising up and needing attention will just quiet down so that I can get some rest, get some space, and maybe then try to start figuring this out when I get back.
Also, sorry for saying fuck so much lately. It just sorta happens.
It’s April and I have so many unread and unresponded-to emails sitting in my inbox from all of you and I’m so sorry. I’m going to get to it. I can’t believe I haven’t posted since January. Shit happens?
Last year in April I didn’t post at all. A year before that in April, I posted this as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month which falls in April. And then a week or so later I posted this. And that part I has been all by its lonesome since then, these two years since. I don’t know if I’ll ever write the II, III and IV I’d intended on writing then, I don’t know if it’s important anymore. Two years later it almost feels fitting to leave it hanging like that because it never will wrap up in my life, it never will be completed, finished. There will always be more to the story and the violence will go on, against me and others.
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and it is also the month in which I was raped. This year, in April, it was ten years ago.
I feel exhausted by that. It’s been ten years and it still feels like it was a moment ago. Is it always going to be so close? It’s been ten years and it also feels like it’s been a hundred long, hard years. Will it continue to drag on and on and on like that? Will the next ten years feel this long too? Its nearness feels claustrophobic and its distance is draining.
Last year, my friend’s husband died all of a sudden and a few months later she asked me, “will it get easier?” and I didn’t know what to say. Does sudden and horrible trauma get easier? In ways, of course. Yes. Life becomes livable because it has to. There isn’t really an alternative. I go on and do things, I get excited about things, I feel pain and joy eventually and I love people and they love me and I laugh and sometimes cry and I struggle in normal ways and in extremely difficult ways. And in ways, no. You can never get back what you had before and you have to live with that, as long as you live.
Ten years on and I’m now struggling with that perhaps more than in the past. I’m far enough away that I’m squarely on my feet, but not so far that I don’t remember what it was like before and I want her back. I want the her-bef0re back, I need her. I want to remember what it feels like to feel unthinkingly safe and to take up all the space I can and to breathe SO deep and laugh SO hard and to feel like my body is my own and to be in it. I have always thought that the her-then needs the me-now, and that has given me some comfort, to imagine the me-now and everyone who loves her surrounding the her-then and giving her strength, and imagining the her-then feeling it, re-imagining the isolation. That has given me some comfort. But now I feel like it’s the me-now that needs the her-before because the me-now — I am tired and I want to remember. Just that.
Some years on that day I’ve tried to forget, some years I’ve intentionally remembered, some years I’ve tried nothing at all and let what came up come up. Some years it’s been a normal day and some years I’ve cleared my calendar and done something special alone. I don’t know yet what I’m going to do this year.
I’ll be back soon, I think. With more to say about other things than this.
There’s something on my mind recently that I’ve been struggling to put to words. When I was out last weekend with ML, we had a good conversation about it and I intended to write about it right away but then I sat and stared at a blank document for a while, the words bottlenecked in the tips of my fingers and I couldn’t type. Maybe this time will be different.
[Trigger warning: this post discusses violent rape.]
There’s a serial rapist in a neighborhood in San Francisco where many of my friends live and where I go to frequently, and he’s struck multiple times. The attacks have been violent and in public in early morning hours. And I’ve been really turned off by the way it has been discoursed in communities I’m tangential to and in general by the patterns I have witnessed over and over in the past, repeated here, as responses to extreme violence against women.
I found out about it because of an email blast by the local rape crisis center to all of its volunteers; the email gave the details of the attacks, I guess just as an advisement to the volunteers about potential hotline callers. It also said that the police are on the case but that they’re asking that it not be brought to media in order that they can find the rapist more easily; media attention might alert him that they’re looking and he could relocate. Before too long this email had spread throughout the various networks I’m a part of and I got it sent to me in various truncated forms several additional times, always along with some sort of cautionary note by the sender about being careful, not walking alone, taking appropriate measures, and finally “be safe.” People are hyperaware and there has been a palpable climate of anxiety.
There are multiple layers of all of this that I struggle with. There’s the obvious fact that the sensationalizing of the street attack and the stranger rape is highly problematic, especially given the ubiquity of rape, sexual assault, and violence perpetrated by non-strangers. For me, though, that’s a more difficult argument to grapple with given that for me it is not a myth, it is not sensational. Still, I can’t write about the problematics of what’s going on in SF right now without bringing that up, the hyper-paranoia and perhaps exaggerated response to this sort of rape, especially in contrast to the silence around all other (and way more common) forms of sexual violence. Related to and beyond that, though, I’m angered by the way this kind of information is just sent into the world to live its own sensationalized life and that it seems like the only real possible reaction to it is fear, and the result is a kind of social control of women operated through this fear. One of my friends called the rape crisis center to ask if they were planning or knew of any organized community or collaborative response and she said they just sounded annoyed and dismissed her. This isn’t to say that it’s their job to put something like that together, but that given the way they disseminated the information and offered no container for coping with the gutteral punch of the email other than to suggest that individuals who have feelings about it call the crisis hotline, a dismissive response to my friend’s inquiry just seems inconsiderate and even irresponsible to me.
I’m also struggling with the faith in the police that that initial message conveyed, and particularly with the lack of questioning the police’s methods which, in this case, was essentially “don’t tell the media because we need to find the guy and if he knows he’s being hunted he’ll move” and to me reads as “we need him to strike again so we can catch him” or, “it’s more important that our strategy for catching him not be interrupted than for the community to be able to feel safe.” When I was subletting in North Berkeley in summer of 2008, there was also a serial rapist who was breaking into the homes of young women who were living alone and violently raping them. I was, in fact, living alone and in the immediate vicinity of his previous attacks when the police knocked on my door, handed me a flyer with “information” and how to contact a tip line, and then left me alone in my ground floor apartment with windows that didn’t lock, shrugging and saying “sorry, can’t help you there” when I asked them, panicked, “well what should I do??” What we should do, apparently, is fear for our lives and our bodies, because what else does this method of disseminating information call for? And, why did the crisis center that historically only will cooperate with police to the extent that it is forced to so blindly follow in the police’s footsteps in this case?
Then there’s the fact that eventually a local newspaper did release a blurry black and white still from a security camera of the suspect, and that the only thing about him that is discernible from this photo is that he is black and that he was wearing a dark hoodie. What is the purpose of this circulating when there is no chance that anyone will actually be able to identify him based on that photo and instead it just sends the message: “be afraid of black men in hoodies.” This is such an ugly dynamic and it’s one that I don’t really know how to untangle. But sending that out into a world in which black men are already racially profiled in super intense ways and experience intense criminalization on a daily basis is irresponsible at best and nasty and racist at worst. This is not to say that it’s racist to talk about a black man being a rapist, or to identify this one as a black man. I’m not saying we should pretend he’s not black or refuse to engage what comes up around his race. I’m just asking, in this case, what is the point of that blurry photo being circulated? If the rest of the messaging around there being a serial rapist is “he’s brutal, he comes up from behind, and he isn’t deterred by fighting back” then how is having a blurry and unidentifiable photo of him helpful for the community? If the logic is the paternal “ladies, just stay inside” then it seems to me that this photo will only exacerbate that as the message by bolstering the public imaginary that all black men are to be feared. It’s just ugly.
And then for me there’s the very personal level of struggle. I have been feeling a lot of anger, resentment, irritation with people who have been talking about this and have been having difficulty articulating why. I don’t think even I have really been able to understand myself why those emotions are coming up for me. It came up for me a lot when I was hanging out with one of my friends who lives just blocks away from the most recent attack and she insisted on walking me the one block to my parking spot when I was leaving around midnight. I wasn’t angry at her or irritated at her but I was feeling a mess of angry/frustrated emotions that I couldn’t quite place. I guess the best way for me to explain it is that, for me, this serial rapist on the loose doesn’t change things. I don’t feel any less safe knowing that that’s out there. I don’t feel any more safe at any other time when there isn’t a known rapist on the loose. I always feel that fear, I always feel like any second now it could happen again. I know that when it happened to me there hadn’t been any community warnings and so I guess I just feel like, what do these warnings do, what are they for, if it happens anyway, whether we are prepared for it or not. And, what does it even mean to be prepared for it? It’s impossible, you can’t possibly. I feel like I just have so much resentment that I can’t understand the fear that other people have about it, I can’t understand fear from the side of not-knowing. It makes it hit home for me so much that I live in a different world than they do. My normal is so wildly different. And it’s occasions like this that bring it all back to me when in general I feel like I do a pretty good job of dissociating from it in my daily life. I do a good job of intentional forgetting. Not forgetting that it happened, there is not a single day that goes by that it is not present for me, but forgetting how it makes me different, forgetting the anger and bitterness about it being the background of my daily life.
I didn’t really intend to end here. I wanted to go into a sort of brainstorming session of what might a robust and healthy community response to sexual violence look like, and how might we organize around that more rather than stopping at feeling trapped and afraid? I have thoughts. But I’m feeling drained, so I’m going to stop. More soon. Xoxo.
I hardly even know where to begin. It’s easy enough to talk about the “stuff” going on in my life — getting our kitten next week (reader poll: Should We Name Our Cat?: a) Gilda b) Greta c) Simone), moving to Oakland at the end of July, starting my summer practicum in a few weeks, seriously considering staying for a PhD but also looking seriously at other PhD programs elsewhere, my part-time library job, which I actually love, family goings-on, the stuff I’ve been reading and obsessing about… and I’m sure I’ll write about more of that stuff here in the coming weeks. It’s summer, after all, and I’m not in class. I’m not intending to let this place die.
But today I want to write, again, about my hair. I wrote about it here already, last fall, when I was starting the project of growing it out. Now it’s nine months later and I’ve got a just-below-chin-length bob and just-above-brow-level bangs. I get my hair colored, too; it’s a sort of auburn with golden streaks right now. It’s funny, when I had quite short hair I never felt unfeminine and as I started identifying more as femme in the past four years or so I always was adamant that I wasn’t femme despite the short hair but rather that the hair was an integral part of my femininity. And certainly this in no way reflects on short-haired femmes in general, but for me — wow, I had no idea how much having longer hair would affect my sense of myself.
I feel so much stronger, so much fiercer, so much more solid in my body. I feel so much more myself, sexier, more flippant. It’s hard to know, actually, how much of that is related to just the hair and how much is related to other things (like this education, my graduate program, which is hardening me and breaking me all at once), but I have felt it as being integrally related to my hair. I don’t feel more feminine, per se, but I feel do feel more femme — like the way I want femme to feel for me. This sounds funny, but I feel more visible — not more visibly queer (in fact I think it’s the opposite), but more apparent to the world. And that doesn’t mean that I’m more apparent to other people but that I’m more apparent to myself. I’m showing up differently, somehow.
Though there is the thing about being more apparent to other people and that’s what I really wanted to write about. The longer my hair has gotten the more I’ve been a target of street harassment. Again, this is not a generalization of women-with-long-hair-get-more-street-harassment, not at all, but that has been my experience, and as I’ve felt more powerful in how I show up and walk around in my body, as I have felt sexier, I have also been getting a lot more desperately unwanted attention. And I don’t know what to do about this because I hate it, that isn’t strong enough, I don’t just hate it I loathe it, it makes me shake with rage.
I don’t quite know how to manage it. When ML and I were talking about moving to Oakland, one of the things she brought up was safety — is that neighborhood safer than, equivalent to, or not as safe as the Mission? And to be honest I can’t take those questions seriously because I never feel safe, ever. Ever. I’m always on my guard, no matter where I am, no matter who’s around. I’ve learned first hand, multiple times, that safety, for women, is an illusion and I feel like debating the nature of the safety of neighborhoods is the privilege of people who do feel safe in places. That probably sounds crass, and intellectually I know it probably is, but what I’m not saying is that we should throw ourselves in the path of danger or, through ignorance, subject ourselves to more of it. (Though even that sentence is victim-blaming, do you see it?) So I try to engage those issues seriously and with care but I end up generally getting really impatient and feeling like it’s all a farse, because honestly whether one neighborhood “seems” safer than another feels so arbitrary and so fictive. Also, racist. But at the same time, I don’t want to be flippant.
And still every week I get yelled at, whistled at, followed, groped, cat-called, in every neighborhood and no matter where I am. I feel less safe with the longer hair, feel somehow more vulnerable as I also feel stronger. Perhaps it’s that as I’ve felt more like me, I’ve felt less like I’m hiding — in short hair and in my body in general — and as I’m hiding less I feel more vulnerable. I don’t know, maybe that’s not it, maybe I’m entirely off base. But I need to figure out a way to respond, for my own sanity… And my hair grows longer.
I also just have to say that there is an adorable, tiny kitten playing on my lap trying to get my attention right now. So I’m going to go dote on her :)
My mother reads Dear Abby religiously. She’s done it for as long as I can remember, always picking out the “Lifestyle” section of our local daily paper and turning to page B2. Some days growing up, my sister or father would abscond with the section before she got to it to do the crossword or read the comics, but she would keep her eye on it, calling dibs on the section next. As a kid, it didn’t occur to me to question her loyalty to the column, and in fact I blindly followed suit–reading Dear Abby, it seemed, was something one did if one was to be a Woman. I was never all that impressed by the advice “Abby” (Jeanne Pauline Phillips was her real name, if I remember correctly) doled out, and eventually I got bored of her predictable responses and stopped reading. The act of stopping wasn’t all that memorable or all that conscious; it just sort of slipped away, superseded by more important things.
It wasn’t until I was in college, home from a break one year, that I thought to ask my mother why she liked Dear Abby so much. I was sitting at the breakfast table with her some late morning (summer? weekend?), watched her reach for Lifestyle and turn to B2, and was momentarily struck with mild curiosity. “Mom,” I said, “why do you read Dear Abby every day?” She looked up at me, stricken, and sighed. ”Well,” she said, “I guess there’s no reason not to tell you.”
When she was 11, she told me, she’d been assaulted by a friend of her parents. At that age in 1964, she didn’t have the language to identify what specifically had happened, she just knew she’d been violated. And she was scared. She knew, vaguely, that babies were made by men “doing things” to women, unspeakable things, and she knew that something unspeakable had been done to her, because the man had told her so, admonishing her that it was their “secret.” She felt isolated, ashamed, and was afraid that it meant she would have a baby. So, unable to talk to her parents and lacking knowledge or awareness of any other resources at her disposal, she wrote to Dear Abby. Asking if she was pregnant. And every day, 11 years old, she read Dear Abby, hoping for a response.
And she got one. Dear Abby printed her letter, and wrote a warm and kind response explaining exactly what would’ve had to have happened for her to be pregnant, affirming that no matter what he’d done, it was wrong and not her fault, and telling her about some books that she could check out at the library for girls about their bodies and their sexuality. In printing her letter, Abby made a connection with my mom that she didn’t have in anyone else, validated her when otherwise in her life there was silence, unflinchingly and lovingly spoke to the fears and ignorance of a little girl coming of age in an environment so sexually repressive that she couldn’t even ask what exactly it was that made babies. In printing her letter, Abby unwittingly secured for herself a lifelong follower. It is an emotional connection, my mother told me, that hasn’t wavered, even though (she admitted) the printed responses these days seem more canned.
I cried when she told me this. I cried for the lonely and scared little girl in 1964; I cried because suddenly my mother wasn’t just my mother but a complete person whose life began way before I was even imagined; and I cried because I’d silenced myself, too, at 15, perhaps not so ignorant as my mother at 11 but every bit as lost and alone, when I’d been raped. I cried because I hadn’t told my mom, just like she hadn’t told hers, generation after generation recommitting itself to isolation. Wait, no, strike that — we don’t commit ourselves to isolation — isolation is imposed on us by a dominant society that reprimands and shames sexuality expressed, that awkwardly and embarrassedly approaches very limited and basic lessons about sex and sexuality, that embraces tired discourses of women as sexual “gatekeepers,” men as sexual animals, and rigid heterosexuality within the confines of marriage as the only acceptable sexual option, that does not invite questions, conversation, or any sort of genuine human connection around the topics of sex and sexuality.
My mother’s and my own fear and isolation after experiencing sexual violence is only one effect of the smothering silence. My fear in high school of being gay and praying to a god I didn’t even believe in to send me a boyfriend was another effect. My complete ignorance of any kind of sex and sexuality other than heterosexual penis-in-vagina-in-and-out-cum-done sex, including ways that non-heterosexuals have sex and specifically have *safe(r)* sex, is another. My going to the public library after I was raped to search for ways to force a miscarriage in case I was pregnant, rather than asking my mom for help or my health teacher or anyone for crying out loud, is yet another. And these are just the ways that a dearth of information and conversation about healthy sex and sexuality affected me. My heart hurts for all the other kids and teens out there now who are suffering through the silence in their own unique ways.
Scarleteen is a website that is breaking through all of that, providing a robust, inviting, kind, and healthy space for teenagers to get answers, make connections, and feel supported in all aspects of their awakening sexualities. They need support to stay on the web, and kids need them. I needed them. My mom needed them. If you can, give a little bit. If you can’t, tell people in your life, especially teenagers, that the website exists. You know, just slip it casually into conversation… teenagers don’t respond well to directions ;)
***
This post is part of the Scarleteen Sex-Ed Blog Carnival. See aagblog.com for a full list of participating blogs! There have been a lot of really fantastic posts so far.
It’s impossible for me to think about my relationship to race and racism without connecting it to my rape by a black man at the age of fifteen. Of course, the fact that it took fifteen years for me to begin to consciously conceptualize my racial identity is itself glaringly indicative of my white privilege. That is not lost on me, and I will return to it later. But since even that awareness came about indirectly as a result of my rape, it’s hard for me not to begin with my rape.
It’s funny—in my training to become a certified rape crisis counselor in the State of California, two “myths” of rape were drilled into us: the first, the myth of stranger rape, and the second, the myth of the rape by the “dark man.” And while intellectually I understand that something like ninety-five percent of rapes are committed by family, friends, or acquaintances and that the major structural problem in rape culture is white male supremacy[1], those myths are, in fact, my reality, and I have struggled—continue to struggle—to come to terms with that. I feel uneasy about a black male stranger on the street or on the bus or at a social gathering and I have to ask myself “is this something real, a trigger, my brain responding to a perceived danger as a result of having learned experientially that something like this once caused me harm? Or is this a figment of my white imagination, is this my brain just responding to a perceived danger as a result of having learned through socially constructed norms that something like this could or even is supposed to cause me harm?”
I imagine that it’s a combination of both, and as a white person who cares very strongly about anti-racist work (and who also strongly believes that as a white woman, I do have a stake in racial justice), I sometimes find myself frozen, unsure where to go and what to do and how to proceed with undoing this massive tangle of myths and truths and lived experience and resistance and social indoctrination. In my early years of reading and learning about anti-racism, shortly after my rape, I erred on the side of risking my own safety. I was ashamed of my feelings of unease, sure that they were proof of my racism, and unwilling to be “that” white woman who runs away from the black man in fear or who clutches her purse tighter. The reason I say “erred” is that twice more in the years since then I have been physically and sexually assaulted by black men, strangers, in situations which felt distinctly “off” to me before the assault happened.[2] (Fluke? Probably, yes. Or at the most, a weird coincidence of complicated circumstances.) Neither of these assaults were as invasive as the first, and neither of them resulted in substantial physical or psychological harm to me, but the fact remains that they were both situations in which I had prioritized the social indoctrination cause over the lived experience cause in trying to understand the source of my unease. I trusted my reason over my gut, at the expense of my personal safety.
And what then? Already I can feel my stomach curdle and my eyes roll in irritation with myself for even attempting to further disentangle this mess. The truth is there are times when I feel unsafe and sometimes they’re white men, sometimes they’re other men of color, but most often they’re black men. That is my reality. It unsettles me, deeply. But I don’t know of any other way of dealing with it other than in these insufficient ways: 1) by listening to my body telling me when it feels unsafe, which is different from trusting my body—I can listen to it and support it and prioritize my safety without believing that it’s telling a truth; 2) by committing to unlearn my racialized feelings of safety vs. harm in whatever ways I can; part of this has also been noticing how often I don’t feel threatened or uneasy, noticing particularly when there are black men I don’t feel uneasy around, and also noticing how often I feel uneasy around men that are not black to try to understand what other signals, other than race, put my body on alert; and 3) by always attempting to prioritize my safety in a way that does not perpetuate cycles of racism, that does not jeopardize the comfort of the man in question as much as is possible, and that is quiet and subtle, so as not to serve to unintentionally alert other white people or emphasize publicly the white fear of men of color. At various times, this has meant getting off a bus early as if it were my stop; getting out my cell phone to call someone, carry on a normal conversation, and move at a normal pace towards a pedestrian-heavy and/or well-lit area; and once even saying gently to a black male stranger who was following me and trying to get me to engage with him (about pornography, no less), “look, I don’t know you, and I can’t tell what your intentions are, so I apologize if this is misdirected and I want you to understand that it’s not about you personally, but I am a woman and as a woman in this society I don’t feel safe with strange men following me, so I’m just telling you now that if you continue to follow me I will call the police.” (It worked; the guy looked like I’d dumped him over the head with a bucket of ice and yelled, “well fuck off then, BITCH!”.) The point is to take care of myself first, always, but to do so not at the expense of perpetuating ugly cycles of racism—including the “dark stranger” rape myth.
The thing is I know that the reason why it’s called a “myth” isn’t because it doesn’t happen, but rather because every instance of it happening supports a mythical cultural norm. It’s a trope that benefits white supremacy and male supremacy by insisting that white women need white men to protect us from “dangerous” men of color (and through this, establishing that women of color are both not worthy of this same protection and perhaps even are to be sexually available for white men’s “perverted” fantasies that are “unfit” for the virginal white woman). And because it’s a trope that benefits white male supremacy, it is the trope that has become most visible and most powerful. I know this. But it was attempting to come to terms with the fact that this myth had been my reality was what prompted me to start trying to understand the myth in the first place, and that was my so-called wake-up call to the nasty dynamics of race in a white-dominated and white supremacist world.
According to my county’s website, the town I grew up in is 93% white. The non-white kids were the odd ones out, but it never occurred to me that they may have experienced their race much differently than I experienced it (theirs, and mine). I certainly didn’t have adults in my life that demonstrated otherwise. So the aftermath of the rape was the first time in my life I’d ever even considered that black people experience the world differently from white people, and it was a huge, huge realization for me. Of course, rape is a weapon of sexism more than anything else, and it does no one any good, least of all me if I’m to come to terms with its affect on me, to see it as just a crime against a white person at the hands of a person of color. But race was there. It was visible. And it threw me head-first into navigating the churning racist waters beneath the surface calm white folks have the privilege of floating peacefully on.
Later: I’m coming back to this a day later, having collapsed at the end of last night after writing this, an emotionally exhausted crying heap. I don’t want to re-write it, but it feels disingenuous to publish this with the emotion so markedly absent. I thought it had little place here, since this is about how the rape woke me up to thinking about racism, and not about the rape’s emotional effects on me. So I’ll say just this: this was hard for me to write.
[1] I imagine there are more rapes perpetrated by white men on women, both white and of color, than by men of color on white women (I looked for statistics, but couldn’t find any), and ninety percent of reported rapes are intraracial, according to a report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence from 1969—and these are just reported rapes. One can imagine what the racial demographics might be of unreported rapes, given that ours is a legal system that systematically privileges white people and subjugates people of color (as well as questions like “who is the proper Rape Victim?” with the implicit assumption of most people being “an appropriately feminine upper-class white woman beyond moral reproach (read: chaste)”, etc.).
[2] I have also been assaulted by a white man, someone I knew.
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 feelquite 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.
I am one of that tiny 4% of survivors of stranger rape. It was just like you read about in the papers. Only my story wasn’t in the papers.
Fifteen. A sophomore in high school. It was early spring; I’d been back from London, where I’d spent the first half of that school year, for about three months. The hiatus from my suburban public school in the states made me feel out of place, and that, combined with my wild adolescent hormones and confusions about my sexuality (I was barely conscious of them, as such, but they were there), made for some emotional turbulence.
I coped with this turbulence in two ways: disordered eating, and disordered exercising. I didn’t have body image issues—it was never about how I looked. It was about how I felt. I felt utterly out of place in my body, out of control of my life. Controlling my food and my exercise felt like a way I could get things back into my own grip and start finding my way again.
And so it happened that one night, as I often did, I got up for a midnight run. Snuck out of the house after my parents were asleep to hound my sense of urgency about I-didn’t-know-what into the neighborhood sidewalks with my feet. That night, as usual, the streets were empty and I had them to myself. Except that I didn’t have them completely to myself, because suddenly I heard a car door open right behind me, a car that had been just sitting, parked, by the curb, waiting, lights off, so I had no idea at all there was anyone there, and suddenly there he was right behind me and rather than fighting or kicking or yelling or screaming when he grabbed me I froze. I closed my eyes. I dissociated. So my memory and my flashbacks aren’t of me in my body, being raped in the back of his car. They’re of me hovering somewhere in some purgatory that must be reserved for such things watching the shell of my body get raped. I watched this man from up above, and while I was sick with fear and hurt for that body down there, I also couldn’t stop thinking why is he doing this? how ill is this man that he can see this same body that I am seeing right now and not feel compassion and respect for it? And I pitied him.
But as soon as it was over and he pushed me out of his car, grunting that I should be grateful he didn’t kill me so I’d better not tell a soul, I was *snap* right back in my body and that pity and wonder I’d felt from above blew up in smoke and there I was, back in that body of mine, and I started puking and lay there on the sidewalk throwing up and bleeding and praying to the god I didn’t even believe in to help me get up on my feet because I knew that if I didn’t, I would die. Not from physical injury, but because my soul was flattened under the weight of the hurt and movement, I knew, was the only way I could coax it back to life.
***
I didn’t tell anyone that night, or the next day, or the day after. Or for thousands of days after that. No one knew. I didn’t go to the hospital. I didn’t call the police. I didn’t get a pregnancy test or a pap smear and when my period didn’t come when it was supposed to, and three weeks came and went and it still wasn’t there, I didn’t go to Planned Parenthood. I knew I wasn’t necessarily pregnant, that the sheer trauma was enough to fuck up my cycle, but I was afraid to find out, so instead I sat at the computer in the public library and searched the internet for ways to intentionally miscarry. Just in case. And I did them all. One day a few weeks later I had the worst period of my life, so much blood, so much cramping, and maybe it wasn’t actually my menstrual cycle revving its engine to start up again anew, maybe it was something else I can’t even type. I’ll never know.
***
And meanwhile, no one knew. You know why? You know why no one knew about a fifteen-year-old girl who had been raped at knifepoint on neighborhood streets, a girl who was hurting so much that she didn’t know where to put it all except to absorb it in her pores which would harden and splinter and break her into a hundred thousand pieces? You know why no one knew?
Because we live in a fucking victim-blaming society. Because the fifteen-year-old me, already emotionally fragile even before, would not have survived the brutality of being questioned, doubted, chastised, scorned, patronized, picked apart. Blamed. I’d been explicitly taught and had absorbed through cultural osmosis that women who are raped are dirty, they’re trash, they deserve it. Sluts. Bad things don’t happen to good girls. Keep your legs closed, dress modestly, don’t talk to strangers, don’t go out at night by yourself, yell and scream for help, carry pepper spray, take a self-defense class, say no loud and clear and with your body, make sure he knows you mean it. Because obviously it’s YOUR responsibility to make sure you’re saying it in a way HE understands. If you do all those things right, nothing bad can happen to you. And if something bad does happen? You did something wrong. You were out running at night on quiet streets? You were asking for it. Here, have some fucking preventive measures. Next time you’ll be better off.
Next time? What next time? Why is there a next time? (This is just Part I, after all.) There’s a next time because when you blame the victim, the perpetrator gets away. Even if he gets locked up, he still gets away. And you get laden with more responsibilities, you are given a longer list of things you need to do to prevent rape. And if you don’t do them, then next time’s your fault too.
Always be alert and aware. Get in the habit of looking inside your car and the back seat before you get into the vehicle. Always keep your drink in your hand. Install adequate exterior lighting at all entrances.
Be afraid. Know your place.
*
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. If you aren’t fucking aware already you’d better open up your eyes and ears to the stories we’re all telling. And also, can this awareness extend beyond April? Awesome.
I’m a few days late (hello 2010!), but, well, as they say: better late than never.
(Funny aside: when I was visiting visiting my family for Christmas, my brother and sister and I one day decided somehow (don’t remember why) that we would talk to each other only in cliches, idioms, and proverbs. Easier said than done! Ha. Ha. But certainly provided some entertainment.)
Anyway. I’m not usually a fan of reviews and resolutions, but I figure I’ll do one this year because (1) this has been quite an eventful year for me, and some of it’s made it on my blog and some of it hasn’t, so this will be a good way for y’all to come up to speed on my life where it’s at (Cliff notes, if you will), and (2) I’m hoping that 2010 will also be eventful and transforming for me, and so I’d like to make note of some of the changes that I’d like to see. Not so much resolutions as goals.
So, in 2009, I:
- fell in love with mi’lady. We started dating in November of 2008, but I definitely consider the falling in love part to have happened in 2009. It’s been my best relationship yet, without a doubt, and the sex has been the best sex I’ve had too. With her I feel safe to be my best and also sometimes (unfortunately) my worst, with the confidence that we’ll come out on top. With her I can communicate better than I’ve ever been able to communicate, and she inspires and motivates me to be the best person and lover I can be. There are ups and downs, of course, as there always are in any relationship, but I am deeply content and very, very excited about what’s to come for us this year.
- moved out of my former flat in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco, where I was living with a friend from college (a rocky situation at its worst, but absolutely lovely at its best), when she left SF to go to medical school in July. I moved into a tiny flat in the Mission with a wonderful roommate who has become one of my best friends here. Living with roommates I think can be very tricky, and our roommate relationship has its sources of tension and frustration, but we communicate through them pretty well, and I feel very lucky to be here.
- started taking anti-depressants for my PMDD (pre-menstrual dysphoria disorder), which was diagnosed in July after a particularly scary episode during which I was afraid I would actually do something really dangerous. I’ve had an interesting time with the medication, which I’ve discussed a bit on here, and I’ve actually stopped taking it temporarily because it was interfering with my orgasms (!!), but it was a really important step in my self-care regiment and in my acknowledgement that sometimes, it is really, really important to seek outside help.
- learned that my parents are getting divorced. Still processing this one, and I imagine I will be for quite some time.
- started coming to terms with my identity as femme. This has been thrilling! I don’t think I need to elaborate on this here at all, because I’ve expounded on it quite a bit on this blog already — just check out the archives.
- have been at the same job all year, and have become increasingly dissatisfied with it. I almost decided to leave it recently, and then realized that even acknowledging to myself that it is in fact my choice to be there (and that there are major advantages to being there, such as: the income, the fact that it’s a job I can leave behind when I leave the office) was enough to help me feel un-stuck for now.
- applied to several graduate programs in both public policy and cultural anthropology. I’ve yet to hear back from any of them, and don’t expect to hear anything until March at the earliest, but this is exciting for me and has also helped me feel more direction and purpose in my life.
- started working as a volunteer crisis counselor at a local rape crisis center, which has been deeply gratifying (while certainly not cheerful), has helped me feel more rooted here, and has been the catalyst for several new friendships. I haven’t written here too much about the processing I’ve been doing surrounding my own sexual assault(s), but I do plan to do so in the (near?) future, as it’s been a pretty profound influence on my life and my thinking and my sense of direction. It’s hard to write about, but it’s so so so important to me that I can’t imagine not doing so at some point.
- erased most of this blog and more or less started over! Writing here in the latter half of this year has been a source of comfort, comradery, introspection and motivation for me. Thanks y’all so much for reading!
And in 2010, I hope to:
- continue to fall in love and deepen my relationship with mi’lady. I’m looking forward to more great sex, more power play, even better communication as we learn each other through and through and more and more, mini-retreats (that hopefully won’t be too expensive), accompanying her to her sister’s wedding where she’ll be outing herself to all of her extended family and family friends, and maybe even moving in together (!) (but we’ll wait to see what my grad school plans are before we really talk about that seriously).
- start graduate school (speaking of).
- leave my job (which should be concurrent with grad school, but in case I don’t get into any of the programs I’m hoping to enroll in, I STILL would like to leave my job).
- continue to take care of myself and be strong enough to seek help in taking care of myself, from medication and therapy, but also from intellectual, spiritual, and physical mentors, as well as friends and family.
- come out to my grandparents. There. I said it. I made it a goal.
- continue to write here and use it as a platform for airing my relationship-, life-, and self-processing, and continue to strengthen my internet bonds.
Happy new year! In German, they say “guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr,” which means “good slip into the new year” and I love that, it makes the actual moment, the ball-drop at midnight, seem less critical and stretches it out, makes it seem softer and more gradual and a little whimsical, whoopsydaisical, and allows for some glitches and mess-ups. So, I hope you all have a good slip into 2010!
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.
