straining my voice.

*i started this post almost a month ago, and promptly lost it among the drafts here. it's still totally valid, still totally appropriate, so here we go again. updated, finished, published, done.*



i've been developing an intense knot in my shoulder/back over the past month or so (ever since dinner with my parents, now that i think about it.)

i've been noticing it as it's gotten worse and worse, but i've been mostly unsure about what it was stemming from. i had some ideas, mostly related to the cafe and the rest of the general stressors in my life, but none of them were all that convincing to myself.
still, i was ready to dismiss it as your general sore muscles, as general stress-related tightness.
(aside: it's times like these that i especially wish i had the funds for massage/bodywork on a regular basis. my friend tried to help me out, work it out a little bit at work, but there was only so much she could do for me. a full massage, though? where i could get to the bottom of what's really causing this ever-growing knot? would be amazing. so, those of you who know me: this isn't a bad idea for a birthday (or any-day) gift.)


this morning, though, i noticed a distant soreness in my throat. i pressed down near my larynx, above where my vocal cords lie, and...
i felt the pressure of my fingers on my throat...directly in the center of this knot in my shoulder.

my vocal cords connect to this pain, this soreness, this tightness.

directly.




i'm still a little unsure as to what exactly this means.
is my voice/body sore from speaking these things i've kept such a tight lid on for so long?
or is my voice/body sore from still not speaking those things i'm still pushing down, under that tightly sealed lid?

i wanted to lean toward the first. a big part of me wanted to believe that this work i'm doing, this incredibly hard, painful, excruciating work, was actually doing damage instead of good. a big part of me was searching - is always searching - for a reason to abandon all of this entirely.
...but after therapy a couple weeks ago, the large, large knot loosened a little. not a lot, barely enough to be noticeable, but still, enough.


and so this, i guess, is what speaking does. the act of speaking those unspeakable things, those unspeakable truths, is going to make you sore.
but keeping those unspeakable truths unspoken and pushed down underneath that ever-tightening lid...that is what causes the most pain.




i've tested this theory recently, this theory that keeping silent causes this pain, this bundling of energy into a painful little knot.
i went to Rowe Camp & Conference Center up in Rowe, MA (in the hilltowns/berkshires) last week for a self-designed personal retreat. despite the miles i spent hiking (including accidentally hiking up Todd Mtn) and the unfamiliar mattress/pillows, when i returned to northampton, that huge knot was significantly smaller. despite spending almost the entire 25 hours i was at rowe thinking about and speaking (to myself/in writing) my truths about family, trauma, abuse, love, all of these things that are so hard to think, the knot that's tied to my speaking parts (my vocal cords), was alleviated.

in the past couple days, i've thought a lot about the prospect of removing my parents from my life, of really & truly prioritizing this more real chosen family here in northampton. which means i've thought a lot about what it would mean to NOT do it, to take the easier(?) route of continuing with the self-sacrificial peacekeeping of the family, to continue caretaking my parents and the rest of the immediate family.
and the knot has re-emerged. with a vengeance.




keeping it quiet, squelching it, smothering it beneath this happy-family pillow of so-called "protection" and "peacekeeping" is painful. actually causes pain.
the process of starting to compose letters of separation to my parents, of facing and writing and really acknowledging the truth of my life was heartbreaking...but it was a welcome soreness.


to analogize:
sports aren't always apt metaphors, because the athlete culture is usually one of self-sacrifice, but in this case, i think it's appropriate:
when you pull a muscle, it fuckin' hurts. i pulled my groin last fall playing soccer. i tried to play a full game when i hadn't taken the time to get back into soccer-playing shape. bad idea. i rocked that game, sure, but i could barely walk the next day. i spent most of the day sitting on a chair in my kitchen, rotating between bags of frozen corn & frozen peas. i only got to play one or two more games for the rest of the season, at half-speed it seemed, because i'd pulled my muscle. i'd actually hurt myself.
when you wake up the day after going for a long, intense run, your muscles are sore. even if you've spent the time to cool down, to stretch before bed, to get that acid out of your muscles, there's going to be a little soreness. but it feels good. so good. it hurts, but not in a painful way. it hurts in an accomplished, satisfying way.



i don't want to be out of commission for weeks like i was when i pulled my groin muscle. i don't want to suppress my own truth to the point that i seriously hurt myself and have to take months of extra time to get back to a place where i can start to even think about my truths again. the heart-soreness that i felt at rowe hurt, sure, but in that same really good way that my calves and quads feel the day after a long run. i want more of that. i want more people to feel more of that. i think our culture would be a much more welcoming one if people weren't so incapacitated by their refusal to tell/face their truths, if people felt the growing/muscle-building pains of what it meant to tell/face their truths more often.

family is.... (take two)

i'll start this post the same way i started this post, last month:
new memories are fuckin' hard.

(seriously? new memories every month? is this going to become a trend? 'cause i'm not sure i'm really up for that.)



with that said, on to "family."

i was reading a piece in Skin, Dorothy Allison's collection of essays, today. her keynote from OutWrite 1992, "Survival is the Least of My Desires." i think i need to transcribe for you/for me the paragraph that spoke directly to my heart:

I know the myths of the family that thread through our society's literature, music, politics - and I know the reality. The reality is that for many of us family was as much the incubator of despair as the safe nurturing haven the myths promised. We are not supposed to talk about our real family lives, especially if our families do not duplicate the mythical heterosexual model. In a world in which only a fraction of people actually live in that "Father Knows Best" nuclear family, in which the largest percentage of families consists of women and children existing in poverty, we need to hear a lot more about those of us who are happy that we do not live inside that mythical model. But I also believe in hope. I believe in the re-made life, the possibilities inherent in our lesbian and gay chosen families, our families of friends and lovers, the healing that can take place among the most wounded of us. My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, and all too many stories that never got finished. That family has been part of remaking the world for me. (p. 215-216)

sometimes, it seems like dorothy allison takes the words directly from my heart and places them on paper, visible so that i can read them back to myself.


to illustrate d.a.'s point....
tell me which one of the following families sounds like a real family to you. tell me which one sounds as though it has the capacity to heal wounds.

Family 1.
i share their genetic structures. they fed me and clothed me and gave me physical shelter and some financial (loan) assistance for college.
when i came out about the abuse at 15, my birth parents acted shocked, told me that they had no idea that this was going on. told me that they would of course have stopped it if they knew.
but when i was 9, my birth parents walked in on it. (i've told this story for years until now as: my mom walked in, my mom scolded me for "teasing my brother," my mom failed to protect me. i realized today that i don't have to protect my dad, and i don't have to protect myself from the truth that he was there too. i learned today that i can't deny reality just to save myself that one "good parent," because i can't keep hoping that he'll come through as such.) my mother told me i couldn't tease john, because "boys can't always control themselves." my dad hovered in the doorway to my bedroom as my mom told me this. they believed my brother when he said he didn't know what i was doing, what i was thinking.
and they continue to maintain that they knew nothing. my mom continues to believe that she would protect me if she knew someone (her fantasy "husband" for me) was abusing me.


Family 2.
have never blamed me for the abuse. have extended love and compassion and non-judgment. when i've told them about what happened, they get angry, or sad, or both. when i put up defenses like excessive sarcasm or laughing off my pain or dismissing painful situations or shutting down entirely, they call me on it. they don't try to control it, they just point it out and let me do my thing.
they push me, past what i think are my limits but not further than what my actual limits are. they see those limits. they care that i have them.
they think i'm a good person.
they trust the decisions that i make for myself.
some of them i work with, some of them i work for, all of these members of my family give me far more as an employee/co-worker than financial support, and they all make this post-smith-college food service job something i look forward to going to at 5am every day.
every member of my family, in some way, relies on me, but they aren't co-dependent. most of them are aware of why they do the things they do. most of them are willing to look at that and change.

they love me, unconditionally. i feel that love deep in my heart.




i think it's probably pretty obvious which one fits into the category of "family." it's clear which family is more family-like.
it's not hard to tell which family has more potential to re-make the world. to revolutionize the world, abolish these structures of abuse that undermine the revolutionary potential of the idea of "family." that undermine "family" in general.

like dorothy allison said, family should be a site of re-making the world. making it into one that's not only free from abuse and neglect, but full of love and support. families (biological AND chosen) are exactly where our children should be learning these values - of love, support, awareness, etc - so that they can go forth and create their own (biological + chosen) families and communities in which to perpetuate these ideals.

changing the world through love, on a grassroots, familial/community level.

what is family, anyway?

i've recently come to the conclusion that the family i was born into - in particular, the parents i was born to and the brother i grew up with - does not constitute a "family."

my brother, for obvious reasons. ("family" doesn't do that to family.)

my parents, for somewhat more covert reasons.
i share their genes, yes.
i appreciate that they fed me and clothed me and kept a roof over my head.
i appreciate, also, that they took out loans for about half of what was left to pay for my B.A. after grants and scholarships.
i understand that they love me in the way they know how to love. and i totally get that they truly believe that they know how to love in a loving way.

but they've never protected me.
i gave up on my mom being a mother a long time ago. i was ok with that, with seeking out maternal figures in increasingly healthy ways. there's still a small (and shrinking) part of me that still holds out hope for her, hopes that she'll change of her own volition, but i know i'd never accept her attempts at mothering me anymore. it's well past that.
i've found mothers outside of, beyond, better than her.

i didn't give up on my dad until this past monday. when i finally shattered the illusion of my dad as the Good Parent, the one who actually unconditionally loved and supported me, who actually knew how to parent in a truly loving way.
i thought he could do these things.
i know now that i was wrong. quite wrong.




so yes, i am, in some ways, now an orphan. i am parentless. at 22, i shouldn't need parents anymore, but when you've never really had them, you still long for it. maybe i'll always long for it. even parenting myself, or doing what i can do to parent myself...i still miss it.

and it still fucking hurts. i'm still grieving that loss, even though i lost something i never had in the first place. i still grieve.
maybe i always will.



where i want to go with this:
family does not mean blood. family does not mean genetic ties.

maybe this is totally radical, but i think maybe it would do us good to completely sever those two aspects. make "family" mean something else entirely, make "family" mean all of the things it already means/is supposed to mean, but not have it dependent on or default to the genetic link.

i know i haven't thought this through, and there'd be all kinds of complications, and it's totally not realistic.

but it's appealing, to think up a cultural meaning behind family that would support - not attack, not challenge, not simply tolerate - a cutting of ties with abusive biological families. a complete cutting of ties.


as things stand now, i see absolutely nothing wrong with a person, in an attempt to (finally) take care of herself and not neglect her own needs, cutting off the ties that hurt her. that have traumatized/still traumatize her.

i'm so fucking sick of hearing people talk about how it's selfish to do so, to take care of yourself when your "family" needs you (i.e. needs to be able to continue to abuse you). i'm fucking sick of hearing people talk about "rash decisions" of cutting out your biological family. i'm fucking sick of hearing people speak of that decision as if it were the most radical thing you could do.
(i'm sick of hearing the people i thought supported me buying into this bullshit about family being primarily biological and using that line to judge me.)


here's my dream: a world where making this decision did not ostracize you, did not make you vulnerable to attacks based on "selfishness." a world where this decision was fully supported by everyone around you, where your chosen family - the people who actually love and support you, unconditionally - holds a lot more prevalent position in your life than the people who birthed/raised you.

i dream about a world where it is understood that the definition of family is dependent not on biological connections, but on spiritual/heart-connections. on the giving and receiving of unconditional, no-strings-attached love and compassion and support.

that's family.
the people who share my genes and witnessed (or denied/ignored/neglected) my growing up? they absolutely do not count under that category.




-------------------
somewhat related, and really important reading:
Concerning Forgiveness: The Liberating Experience of Painful Truth, by Alice Miller.

speaking out, speaking truth, speaking the unspeakable

just fyi...there are a couple other posts in the works right now, still in draft form (one is about straining / finding my voice, one is about anger). they'll still be posted in chronological order, based on when i started them, so there may be two more recently posted pieces below this one.



i went to smith's sexual violence speakout last night, the cap of their Sexual Abuse Awareness Week.
it was small, not incredibly well-attended, but it was still a great event.

almost everyone who was there got up and spoke. it was beautiful to see people giving voice to the places they hadn't expected to be able to speak from.
as happens most years, though, there was one woman who especially struck a chord in my heart.


i am totally in awe.
and in shock.
my mind? mostly blown.

a very young (but very old) first-year got up to speak last night. this, in itself, isn't astonishing - there are a ton of first-years who are victims/survivors, just as there are a ton of sophomores, juniors, seniors, and alumnae who are victims/survivors. her age didn't surprise me. the fact that almost every person there had something to say also didn't surprise me.
what astonished me was what she spoke. what she gave voice to.

speakouts are for talking, for telling your truth. that's the point.
but.
there are certain truths that are spoken, certain ways of telling your story, certain "rules" of speaking that are generally followed. most people don't deviate from that, despite its limitations and shaming capacities. i, personally, have never seen anyone really deviate from that prescriptive speech. at a speakout, you do some or all of the following things: you tell of your victimization, with or without details. you demonize and vilify your abuser. you express anger or grief -- but only toward those outside of yourself. usually (but not always), you end with something along the lines of "but now, i'm empowered, i'm keeping myself safer, i'm standing up to him/her/them, i'm doing advocacy for other victims."
this is all well and good, and these are all important words to be spoken, but they do tend to (quite effectively) cover over all of the many more complicated realities.


this first-year, though, told something else. about her older brother. (this, itself, isn't so common at speakouts. just as in every other dialogue about sexual violence, sibling abuse is usually unspoken or very quietly spoken at these events.)

but she didn't only vilify and demonize him (although she did acknowledge how many boundaries he crossed). she also spoke of the love she felt for him. and the anger, too. she talked about how he coerced her -- she was excited to receive his attention, and so she went along with it.
yes.
she actually spoke that part.
out loud.
at a public speakout.
she spoke that truth. (that truth that's almost always unspoken, but is so fucking common for so fucking many of us.)

she talked about silence, too, but not in the usual way (that is, of the rape culture silencing all victims in general). she spoke to the silence within and of the survivor movement with regards to sibling abuse. she spoke to that, to the shortcomings of this survivor movement that we're supposed to be a part of, to the shortcomings that are so, so rarely named.


she spoke. she spoke all of these things. (seemingly) unafraid.
and it blew my mind.

thoughts.

i haven't had much time to write in this past week. or, i have, but i've been reluctant to delve too deeply into any thoughts, because this week, i'm a little afraid of where those thoughts would go.


it's sexual abuse awareness week at smith. it took over my life and swallowed me up last year. and to a lesser degree the year before.
i've had a wonderful, fantastic couple of weeks. there was that wonderful, fantastic, inspiring CLPP conference. i wrote a check for the awesome, fabulous new apartment (house, really) that we move into in may. i've been in charge of the cafe while the boss is on vaca this week, and it's gone so well. i'm reconnecting with a lot of women, sisters of mine, who i'd lost touch with, some from as far back as high school.
it's been great.
but this week brings with it a lot of reflection. on the things that haven't been so great.

and also, given that it's SAAW, the clothesline project is up at smith. so it's brought a lot of reflection on not only the very personal difficult things, but also reflection on what it means to break silences, what it means to speak, when and where it's ok to speak. (there's a whole lot of controversy around and resistance to the clothesline at smith. long, long story.)



on top of all of that, i'm still totally unsettled on what my idea of "home" is.







funny how this process of re-definition / re-processing never seems to actually end.

in which jessica hoffmann blows my mind.

in such a good way.


An Open Letter to White Feminists.


this is exactly what we've been talking about all weekend at this CLPP conference.
this is also exactly what i'm afraid will never stick in the minds of white feminists, the mostly white, mostly student activist attendees of this conference.

but here's hoping.

and here's hoping that Jessica Hoffmann's open letter reaches someone who needs it.
i can't imagine how it could not.
it's one of the best, most incisive, insightful, concise critiques of white feminism i've read since the last INCITE! anthology i held in my hands.


read it read it read it.

clpp conference: healing, arts, & activism.

quick recap from the first day of the super-awesome, super-amazing, super-inspiring CLPP Reproductive Justice Conference, here in western MA at Hampshire College:


there was one workshop session today. i chose the Arts & Activism one. it was fucking incredible.


Cara Page, Tanya Karakashian, and Olga Candelario were the speakers.
(Tanya & Olga are both local, Cara lives in Atlanta.)


they were all wonderful, of course.

but i was especially blown away by Cara Page.
she's the national director of CWPE (Committee on Women, Population, & the Environment), which is sweet. what was totally incredible, though, was hearing her talk about this new project she's doing.


my renewed purpose in this social justice thing is to bring healing into the movement, make it part of this struggle toward social change. to help people understand how crucial it is to heal, and how self-defeating all of this unhealthy energy around, and unrealistic expectations of, organizing is killing our organizers. it's burning out our activists, and it's making them jaded and cynical instead of inspired and hopeful.


cara's new project?
has to do with exactly that. well, that, plus art. which is a totally logical addition, since the following equations are absolutely true:
art=healing.
art=activism.
healing=activism.
healing=an art.

she's calling it Deepening the Dialogue, and she's interviewing healers who are also organizers. i talked to her a bit afterwards, and i'm going to be emailing her soon, i think. but she was saying exactly what i'd been thinking about the state of our movement. how none of us take care of ourselves, let alone take care of others. how crucial this healing aspect is, so that our movement can be sustainable. and how art - whatever form of art it is that heals and moves you - is a perfect avenue to integrate this kind of healing into activism.

of course, i didn't think that i was the only one who had ever had a thought regarding the traumatized, wounded status of a large portion of our movement. but it's not something that's talked about at the high, mainstream level. and so, to meet someone who's invested in it, invested in documenting it, invested in making it more a part of our movement?
it was mind-blowing.
(i hope to have my mind blown many more times this weekend. i think it will be.)





i wrote about how broken my heart was yesterday.
and it's still broken. that much doesn't go away.
but now, it's also full. and swelling with inspiration and community.

heartbreak. (blog against sexual violence 2008)

this is how i started this post:

i noted, in the about page of this blog, that my story as linked (here) was a little outdated.

and it is. i wrote that post for Blog Against Sexual Violence Day 2006.

today is Blog Against Sexual Violence Day 2008.
i would not tell my story in the same way today.
i do not speak my truth in the same way.

the facts, of course, remain. the truth around them has evolved.

so, for 2008's BASV, i will re-tell my story. as it has evolved.

but that's not what i'm going to write.

i can't write that.

in fact, i can't write much right now.

because right now, my heart is too broken to come out in words. right now, that heartbreak can't come out in much of anything but dry tears.

my heart aches for the family that shattered it. my heart aches for the family - the blood-family - that will never be what i wanted them to be, that will never love how i needed them to love.
(my very wise friend t said that the grief would come. that the sadness of never having the mother & supportive family that i needed would eventually hit me. i think this is the start of it.)


so i guess my Blog Against Sexual Violence post comes to this very simple, very emotive statement:

this is what sexual violence does.
this is the result.
the broken hearts that you see in millions of women around the world, the broken hearts you don't see, the broken hearts that are hidden behind very well-designed shields...those are what comes of this rape culture.
this heart, its brokenness, its woundedness...this is what comes.









(...awareness of the brokenness is just the beginning. the healing of it is next. but that, i think, will need to come another day. another week. another month.)

i'm trying to find hope here, an opportunity for some healing....but i've got nothin'.

for a while there, i was mostly avoiding the news. i'm still currently almost totally avoiding the primary election coverage, because it only breeds frustration. but for a while, i was avoiding it all - even most of the stories posted on my fav feminist blogs.
but recently, i've been sucked back in.
first, there was that story out of South Africa, about the "rape me" games children were playing on the playgrounds.

and now, there's this.
out of Maryland.
(out of Silver Spring, MD, actually, which is where I lived when I was in DC for the summer a couple years ago.)

Backstory:
A man with severe mental health issues drowned his three children in a bathtub.

This man, Mark Castillo, should have had a restraining order against him.
but he didn't.
his wife, Ann Castillo, tried to get one. she even had a hearing.
she was denied a restraining order, despite her husband's repeated threats to her and the children.
why?
because, according to this judge, she was still "having sex" with him.
read this, and tell me if it sounds like consensual sex to you:

After the hearing, Judge Joseph A. Dugan Jr. declined to issue a permanent order. Dugan noted that Amy Castillo said she had continued to have sex with her husband, including twice on the day he allegedly talked about killing the children. Amy Castillo testified that she had sex with her husband because she was frightened of him and was worried that if she didn't, he would "assume something was wrong" and suspect that she was trying to get a restraining order against him.

huh.
that's funny.
that sure sounds like rape to me.
apparently, it doesn't sound like anything out of the realm of typical marriage to Judge Joseph Dugan:

"I am not satisfied," Dugan said, "that indeed there is clear and convincing evidence of abuse in this case."

so Dugan didn't issue the restraining order.
no restraining order because Ann Castillo was "having sex with" (read: being repeatedly raped by) her husband.
and so Mark Castillo drowned each of his three children, Anthony, 6, Austin, 4, and Athena, 3.





it's these stories that make my heart break, over and over.
and over.
and over again.


it's these stories that make my belly ache. and my jaw clench. and my head pound.



and yet.
it's these stories that never, ever surprise me.

finding/discovering/creating "home."

my good friend, e, asked me to contribute to her final project. i'm more than thrilled to do so; E is an incredible friend, and i'd be happy to do anything for her, but even more than that, E's project is a lovely one. it's an art piece, centered around the concept of "home." i don't want to give away too much of what it is, so i'll just leave it at that.

i want to contribute - i intend to contribute - but: my concept of "home" is unstable, at best. in one part of my mind, home is unsafe, a place of danger and lies and deceit and abuse. but then, i think of the home i'm creating here, in northampton. the family i'm creating here. the love that fills the home space i'm slowly forging in this town, in what's become my town. my home town.
home is in the heart, yes, but it's not just centered around my heart. it's in the connections to the hearts of the women around me. it's in the hearts of the women i admire, the women i love.
home is, traditionally, a place of oppression. of familial shame and secrecy and silence.
bucking that tradition, creating a home that's a place of love and silence-breaking and openness and honesty, then? that makes "home" a place of feminism. that makes "home" a site of this revolution that we're working towards.

but even with all of this, all of this positivity surrounding my concept of "home," i'm torn. because even with this home i've created, this home that's actually made up of and centered around love, home is still also the place where all of this heart-pain originated. and so i feel as though i have to be honest about that, as well.


i guess my point is:
my sense of home is still very much in fragments.
fragmented into pieces of love and pieces of abuse.
how do i condense my fragmented self into a contribution for E's art project? can "home" be a conglomeration of fragments?

awesome, amazing conference

just an FYI:

This weekend(!), at Hampshire College (in Amherst, Massachusetts) marks the 22nd annual CLPP conference, From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom.



It's always an incredible conference, and this year will be no different, I'm sure. Loretta Ross will be there, and she's a rockstar. As will Ellen Story, MA state rep from the Amherst area, who's pretty much the best friend that repro justice advocates could ask for in the State House. (She's been to the conference every year, and even used to work for Tapestry Health, western MA's sexual health organization.)
So many other incredible speakers will be there, so many that I can't even begin to name them all -- you can go here to see the full list.

Best of all?
IT'S TOTALLY FREE.

All you've got to do is get yourself to Amherst, and (with pre-registration), CLPP / Hampshire College will feed you and house you and provide childcare if you need it, as well as provide you with incredible workshops and breakout groups and plenaries.
Last year?
Well, I got to help organize it, which was one of the best experiences of my entire college career.
And!
I learned how to do an abortion on a papaya, how to perform gynecological self-exams, and even got a free hand mirror and speculum. And got to meet a ton of awe-inspiring activists and have a lot of thought-provoking, challenging, wonderful conversations and discussions about everything pertaining to reproductive justice.


It's all so good.
So yes, I'll be there from Friday-Sunday. (I'm even taking a day off from the cafe - unheard of!)
I hope to see you there!

what counts?

this is about:
truth. reality. authenticity. level of: influence, trauma.




how do you define violence as violence? what counts as sexual abuse, violence, rape, assault? if it didn't totally destroy you, if it didn't ruin your life and send you into some (visible) insane spiral of self-destruction, does it deserve a place in your story? should you include it when you tell your story?

(i think i have answers to these. feel free to share your answers. but these aren't questions that really need direct answers. more, they need acknowledging as questions that exist.)


my oldest friend (since pre-school) and i discussed this a few days ago. we didn't come to much of a conclusion. i still haven't come to much of a conclusion.


for some context:
M and i are both well acquainted with all of the definitions of rape and sexual violence. we've both done a good deal of activist work around violence against women. we know the talk, we know the realities of violence.
we were both abused as children. we've both been in unhealthy relationships - hers more blatantly violent than mine. we both grew up in less than functional families. so we both have plenty of trauma in our respective pasts.
but this one part, we both aren't sure about including when we tell our stories.
she and i were both, by definition, victims of an alcohol-related rape a few years ago.
we were both wasted, mostly at his insistence - especially M. the guy involved? he was totally sober. things happened that neither of us wanted to happen. things that would never have happened if we were sober. things that he was well aware would never have happened if we were sober. there was no doubt about the lack of consent; neither of us really consented to this.
neither of us know, though, whether or not to call it "rape." whether or not we want to call it that for ourselves, acknowledge it as such in our minds.
for one thing, if we do...that makes three for me, between the ages of 6 and 21. and at least two for her. that's a lot. that's a scary kind of truth to usher into either of our lives.
and the major sticking point here is: neither she or i were destroyed by this, by what happened with erik. (aside: i first wrote that as "by what we let erik do." and i caught the self-blame and rephrased. what does that default to self-blame say about what happened, about what it counts as?)
both M and i are far more scarred by the rapes we experienced prior to this, when we were little. the fact that erik made us go down on him when we clearly didn't want to? seems to pale in comparison. it didn't wound us as deeply because we didn't expect anything better than being used/abused.

does that make it less of a rape, then? should we be calling it rape when we weren't even all that traumatized by it? what does that mean for our stories, for our relationships?
other (compassionate, educated) people would probably look at this and call it rape.
but if we don't call it that...what implications does that have for the stories we tell?
does it affect our honesty? can i tell my story honestly and not include that as part of it? or, on the flip side, can i tell my story, include this as part of it, call it "rape," and still be considered "honest"?



M asked me, this week, if i included that incident when i told people my story.
usually, i don't. sometimes, i do. it's mostly an arbitrary inclusion/exclusion.
M does, kind of. but not as the main thing. and not always, but most of the time.

the questions come down to: who decides what counts as "legitimate" assault? where is that line that defines rape, and who gets to draw it?


stepping back from all of this, stepping out of the confusing tangle of facts and truths and questionable definitions, though, i go somewhere else, somewhere even bigger than this question of what counts/doesn't count.
that is: why does it matter? why is legitimacy and authenticity so important to us?
we all look for validation outside of ourselves, for people to tell us "yes, that's awful," and "yes, of course it counts." and that's so important. having people in our lives who believe us, who don't doubt our stories - it's vital for survival. but no matter how much they believe us, their validation won't validate anything...if we don't believe it ourselves. if we don't believe in ourselves.
we can't make our stories believable...if we don't believe them ourselves.

so i guess, when you break it down even further, it comes down to this question: why do we doubt ourselves? why do we doubt our own accounts, our own stories?

i could answer this with some obvious answers, answers that would sound wise and well-informed and maybe even beautifully self-aware...but they wouldn't be coming from my heart, because my heart isn't there yet. so i'll just leave the questions without answers, and add a few more:

when was this self-doubt ingrained into our psyches? how did it get to be so widespread, so endemic? where does it come from? what purpose does it serve? and, lastly: how do we heal that, how do we extend the same kind of validation and legitimacy and authenticity to ourselves that we (most of us) are so willing to extend to the people we love?

trauma, large-scale (societal/national)

via feministing, a disturbing, sad story from South Africa:
"Traumatised South African children play 'rape me' games".

reproduced in full, emphases added:

(byline: Chris McGreal, Johannesburg)
* Thursday March 13 2008

South African schoolchildren are so affected by crime that they play games of "rape me, rape me" and mimic robberies in the playground, according to the country's human rights commission. In a report on school violence published yesterday, the commission said schools were the "single most common" site of crimes against children, such as robbery and assault, including rampant sexual violence, some of it by teachers.

The commission said it had identified a number of games pupils played in response to the violence, including one in which they pretended to rape each other. "This game demonstrates the extent and level ... brutalisation of the youth has reached, and how endemic sexual violence has become in South Africa," it said.

The report said that a fifth of all sexual assaults on young people occurred at school. A survey of 1,227 female students who were victims of sexual assault found that nearly 9% of them had been attacked by teachers.

......

A separate study by the Thohoyandou Victim Empowerment Programme found that a quarter of secondary school students said that forced sexual intercourse did not necessarily constitute rape.

The human rights commission report said that more than 40% of the young people it interviewed had been victims of some form of crime. It recommended that the education department consider introducing metal detectors and fences at schools, after the Red Cross children's hospital in Cape Town said it commonly treated school pupils who had been assaulted with fists, knives, machetes or guns, or who had been raped.

when i first started this blog entry about this article, i had it up in another tab on firefox. the full title didn't show up in the tab - i only saw "traumatised south afr." looking at the title as it appeared on the tab, i didn't connect it to the full title of the article. in my mind, that excerpted title turned into "traumatised south africa," as in: a traumatized nation.

and, really, that would also have been an accurate title. because south africa is a traumatized nation. and the cycle of trauma continues there: the atrocious societal and individual traumas that it's endured in recent years aren't being healed. instead, they're being passed down, generation to generation. passed down from the adults of the country to their children.
the fact that children are playing "rape games" on the playground is disturbing and sad, yes, but not all that surprising. kids act out and play at what they know. i wish it surprised me that they know rape and sexual violence. but it doesn't. it doesn't surprise me about south africa, and it wouldn't surprise me about the u.s.
if you think of it from a child's perspective, it makes perfect sense: if they're playing these games, if they're doing it "willingly" (however "willing" something that comes from such a wounded place can be), they have control over it. if they can control this violence that they see all around them, this violence that they endure, then maybe it's ok, maybe they'll be ok. they don't even have to play games that pretend the outcome changes, they don't have to pretend that they get away in the end...just by playing it, by choosing to play these games, they can have the illusion of control. and that's vital for these abused kids to have.

(we, as adults, play these games all the time, too. they're not as obvious as running around the playground, running from a pretend-rapist, but we have the same underlying intention and seek the same kind of control.)



i get the impression from this article (in a newspaper from the country that colonized South Africa for so many years), that there is an assumption about traumatized nations. being that: South Africa, a new democracy, is so fucked up that their kids are playing rape games. that South Africa, this backward country trying to forge their way "into civilization," is so different from us developed western countries. that South Africa has created this rape culture because it's had such a turbulent history.
thing is:
we're pretty traumatized over here, too. we've got a rape culture every bit as damaging as South Africa's; ours is just more concealed. our kids rarely breathe the word "rape," even though it happens to them at what's probably a comparable rate to South Africa's. (and let's not forget that it was Britain, the country now reporting on this recent report, that colonized and, in a lot of ways, raped South Africa for years and years, contributing a good deal to their national trauma.)

[for further reading, see also my good friend's blog post on this article, here.]




moving on to a second, related point:
the ellipsis in the article as posted above was my decision to leave out a small section of the article, since it's a bit of a subject change. however, it's a subject i still want to pursue here, so here's the paragraph i left out above:

The commission also found that some boys committed what they called "corrective rape" on lesbians, justifying the assault by claiming that it would make the victims heterosexual. "There is a growing phenomenon of corrective rape. This refers to an instance where a male learner [student] rapes a lesbian female learner in the belief that after such a sexual attack the learner will no longer be lesbian," the report said.

...i wasn't aware that there was actually a term for lesbian-target rapes. "corrective rape." it's chilling. (literally: a shiver just shook my body.)

again, though, this doesn't surprise me. it chills me, but the chill doesn't come from being astounded that this happens. i'm well aware that this happens. i want to say that i may be more aware than a lot of queer women, but i don't think i can -- being raped for being queer isn't exactly an unheard of phenomenon.

i wish i had more to say about this. something wise, revelatory, beautiful, or touching. i wish i could say more about the fact that the level of homophobia in South Africa, a country which actually has protections against discrimination written into its constitution, is so high that lesbians - lesbian schoolchildren, even - have boys trying to "correct" them through sexual violence.
but all i've got is:


my heart is weighed down with rocks, stones, pebbles, sand.
this news story? it's more than a news story.
it's her story.
and her story.
and millions of women's stories.
all different, all the same.
millions of women with heavy hearts,
weighed down with rocks, stones, pebbles, sand.

other people's writing.

(because today, writing about my own individual healing is just a little bit too raw.)



this piece is from Word Warriors, an anthology of female spoken word artists, edited by Alix Olson.


Miscarriage, by Thea Hillman

I have been a mother many times, but I have never been pregnant.

There was that one child, older than me. I picked her up in a bar. Her apartment was small. She leaned back against her headboard, smug and sexy. Her mouth went slack, eyes soft, when she pulled down the straps of my bra. She made a noise I didn't understand yet.

I am the mother she never had. There have been a few of us in her life, makeshift mothers who fuck away the pain, or cry trying.

It was only moments, but it was no longer just sexy. She buried her head in my chest, arms around me. Surprised, I held her close. Something happened to this girl's mother, my head told me. This girl hasn't had a mother in a long time, my heart told me.

I am only thirty but I have been a mother to many girls. Oh my sweet girls. I haven't saved a one of them yet.

I hold her. Tell her she's beautiful. Hold her and rock her when she's hysterical, heaving sobs harder than any I've ever cried and I wonder, how will I ever hold all those tears, how can I teach her to let them go, that they are part of an ocean, lapping a welcome shore? My mother's heart breaks for a baby that isn't mine and for a child I know I'll have to give up.

I hold many of them longer than nine months. I have never carried any of them to term. It's funny that miscarriage sounds so much like marriage, but without the promise, the ring, or a future.

Poor baby. She is older tahn me, but I see the beatings in her young eyes housed in an ancient face. It's the pictures that kill me, a knife twisting in my mothergut. She shows me pictures. She hands me her hurt like a beloved headless doll, oblivious to what it reveals, each year another scar. The baby eyes in the pictures give way to a hard teenage grin and a glint that makes me wince. Each year a pristine new dress hung off her, and the pictures look progressively wronger than the year before, the boy peeking out from the girl that's getting beaten to death inside there, by her mother, by her.

I fall for the girl who takes refuge in her brother, in boyhood, the girl who sees her survival in a square ass and flat chest. Today my girls wear army fatigues, hooded sweatshirts, and briefs. Their shoulders curve to hide their chests. They get mistaken for boys on the street and in public bathrooms, but I see the little girls, invisible to the others, but unmistakable to me. Bigger than me, they get sirred all the time, but they'll always be my little girls.

I love their little boy bodies. I love their breasts. I put food on the table, I hold down a job, I keep the house clean. Each time I tell myself, this one, she'll be the one, I'm going to save this one. And she lets me in. She lets me touch her. She lets me in and I tell her I love her and I tell her how to keep a job, to feed herself, to succeed in the world. I tell her I believe in you, you have something to offer the world, you have a chance. But motherless girls don't want to be nurtured, they want to be mothered. And they'll do anything to not grow up, and not let go. So with every word of encouragement, I cement her failure. With every hope, every word of support, I build the tower of expectation she's going to fall from. And then with every hurt and disappointment, I seal a future without me in it. For she is motherless, and I will necessarily lose her, she will necessarily grow up without me. I lose another baby. And maybe I will try again, when the bleeding resumes.

see the ugliness.

do you remember when i mentioned, in my review of Louise Wisechild's The Obsidian Mirror, that what i loved about her book was that she didn't sugarcoat the ugly? she didn't gloss over the ugly, ugly, ugly, painful parts of healing.

healing isn't all about beautiful truths and incredible insights and wonderful, life-changing epiphanies.
healing's also about facing the ugly. the awful. the unfathomable. the unforgivable.



i'm not going to share my ugly.
at least, not here.
with my journal, i think.
and maybe with my therapist.



but here's part of the non-glossed-over healing, a small bit of what i'm willing to share with the world, to more accurately track this healing revolution of my own:
this fucking hurts. more than i could've ever imagined.
and it hurts because, says my therapist, all of this shit is like poison. keeping it inside is awful, and it makes you sick, and it sometimes makes you want to die, but letting it out...isn't always that much more enticing. to let it out, you've got to feel all of it on its way out. you've got to feel all of that pain that's been muffled, somehow, inside of you, and you've got to feel it fully.
she says it gets better.
that it won't always hurt like this.
i know she's right.
i just can't believe it yet.



because...
fucking.
ouch.

a couple of announcements

first:

there's a new (temporary) logo/link on the sidebar for Blog Against Sexual Violence Day. (which falls, by the way, on A Day To End Sexual Violence). the date for both of these campaigns is April 3rd...the third of the month of April, which is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

Blog Against Sexual Violence Day is, well, exactly what you'd think it is: a day for bloggers to advocate against sexual violence. i kinda do that every day, but the nice thing about these days is that the organizer (marcella chester, this year) will create a comprehensive list of everyone who's participating.
it's a great campaign, and one i hope lots of people will be participating in.

so, on April 3rd, I'll be blogging against sexual violence.
will you?


___________________________________


and second:

this YouTube video, created by David Ilan of Points With Purpose, a pointillism project, creating a drawing made up of dots that represent individual survivors.
the project itself is powerful, and sad, and beautiful.
but this video....
it's really powerful.
and sad.
and so good.
go watch it:

on healing and heart-pain. (words of wisdom)

a few hours ago, i sent my very good friend, e, this question:
people say that nobody ever died from working on this kind of healing work.
but, given how much my heart hurts right now, i'm having a hard time believing that. believing that it won't just up and give out on me. i never thought i'd get to the point of being afraid of dying from these wounds. and yet, here i am. with that as my new biggest fear.
my question, then, is this.
have you ever heard of anyone dying (as in, just dying, not directly by their own hand) because of this?



and she sent me this answer, which i re-post here, because this is wisdom that just begs to be shared:

i have not, thankfully, heard of anyone dying from this kind of work. i have, however, had the feeling -- this hurts too much. this hurts. this is so huge. i once said to beth, "i feel like i am dying." and she said, "perhaps you are just learning how to live... how to really truly love and hold your own self through your life." and i think she is right on.

it's like when you are out in the cold (all those difficult memories) and it's freezing, freezing, and your hands go numb. and they just stay numb, and you keep skating or skiing or whatever you are doing. and you do fine... it's good enough (is it?). and then you walk into a warm space -- a house (a therapist's office) for instance -- and your hands start to warm up. and the feeling starts to come back. and the first sensation is pain. unbelievable pain. and you wonder if it would've just been better to keep those hands numb because, well, OUCH! but then the warmth returns... slowly, slowly... there is tingling and it starts to feel better but a little bit weird and unfamiliar... and then they keep warming. and the feeling returns. and then you can use those hands to hold things and make things... beautiful delicate things...

writing as healing

to start off:
new memories are fuckin' hard.

(at one point, i would've looked at this as an obstacle to be avoided. who knew that i'd ever get to the point where i look at this as an obstacle to be surmounted, healed, learned from?)





and to expand, in a completely depersonalizing (or, well, not "depersonalizing" so much as "masking the too-revealing personal truths") way:
writing as healing.

i've had a long, long, long post in the works about this topic for over a month now.
it's still not nearly finished - in fact, it might be one of those that never gets "finished" - but here's a little bit of it. a little taste.


this one's about writing and healing, about healing through writing and writing as a conduit of healing.
(i love that word, “conduit.” i’ve recently rediscovered it. “a means of conveying something from one location to another.” moving from (wounded) location to (healing/healed) location. appropriate, no?)

so here we go, some thoughts on writing, healing, the process, telling the truth, and so on.

the woman whose (adorable!) daughter I babysit, Nerissa Nields, has this quote on her website:

I believe that our stories are what make us sick AND our stories are what heal us.

i'm also currently reading this absolutely incredible book by Louise DeSalvo: Writing as a Way Of Healing.
in this book, she quotes Wayne Muller:

our own wounds can be vehicles for exploring our essential nature, revealing the deepest textures of our heart and soul, if only we will sit with them, open ourselves to the pain,...without holding back, without blame.

in this same book, DeSalvo talks about how not telling our stories makes us sick, both emotionally and physically. by extension, then, telling our stories heals us, not only emotionally, but physically as well.

over time...the work of inhibiting traumatic narratives and feelings acts as an ongoing stressor and gradually undermines the body's defenses. like other significant stressors, inhibiting our stories and emotions can adversely affect immune function..

this isn't really a new concept for me; a good friend - we'll call her T - and i have been talking for a while about how this kind of suppression / repression / woundedness is probably behind her severe anemia, my roommate's borderline narcolepsy, my own poor immune system, my mother's fifteen (and counting) physical disorders, even T's mother's death.

so.
our stories make us sick, yes. holding them in, inhibiting them, repressing them sets off an extremely unhealthy cycle: we get sick because we don't open up to our stories, we tell ourselves we can't open up to our stories because we're not well enough to deal with the ramifications we imagine would come with this kind of openness.
and we can't get well by constantly, actively repressing our stories, the traumatic events of our past. we get sicker.




that paper i tried to write at the end of my senior year at smith centered around "breaking the silence." i came to kind of hate that aphorism. it seemed overused and, after reading writer after writer using it to describe how they Healed From Abuse™, i was sick of it. i'd been talking about the abuse for years, since i was 15. i'd broken the silence, and i wasn't healed. my "healing" path, my silence-breaking, wasn't achieving that kind of healing catharsis that was supposed to come from telling my story, from "breaking the silence."
yet, despite my cynicism, my argument in the paper was still based on the revolutionary aspect of breaking the silence, particularly, the community- (and self-) imposed silences around being both queer and a victim/survivor of sexual violence. i knew i didn’t fit into the model of The Survivor – at least, the one who Healed by breaking her silence – but i still saw the potential of that model. how breaking the silence could be revolutionary, could be a (the?) path to healing…even if i hadn’t quite found that path yet, or figured out how it worked. i’ve always seen the value of breaking the silence, always repeated that aphorism, even as it frustrated and eluded me.
frustrating and elusive because i was talking. i was writing. i was, at times, talking and writing at length about the abuse. breaking that silence. but something was missing. it wasn’t helping. i wasn’t healing.

what i didn’t realize then, what i didn’t realize until recently, is that there’s a particular kind of breaking that silence that is healing; just talking in facts, sans emotion, the way i had been for years, isn’t the kind of healing silence-breaking that i’d been seeking.

not feeling feels safe. being numb feels safe. but it’s not healing.

DeSalvo cites a study that forms the basis of her book, her program for writing as healing. the study was done by James Pennebaker and Sandra Beall, and they found that writing a full narrative -- with both facts and emotions -- of a trauma was healing in a way that writing only half (only facts, or only emotions) was not.

We must write in a way that links detailed descriptions of what happened with feelings – then and now – about what happened. Both thinking and feeling are involved. Linking them is critical. Feelings about the traumatic event in the past and the present are expressed and, perhaps, compared so that the writer unravels how the past impinges on the present but how, too, it’s different.

so that’s what was missing.


when amy, my last therapist, first asked me what i felt during the abuse, i was lost. i didn’t have anything to say.
“i’ve never really thought about that. nobody’s ever asked me before.”
she was floored that, in my years and years of therapy, nobody had asked me about what it felt like to that little girl who was being abused. it didn’t seem all that strange to me; people wanted to know what happened, they wanted to know what my parents did, what john did, what i did. why would they care about what any of us felt? the feelings seemed irrelevant….because nobody had ever let me believe that they were relevant or told me that the “safety” i felt by avoiding them was actually a totally false sense of security. i’d become really good at telling the facts of what happened, with little or no feeling. feeling anything about it was dangerous, opened up things that i didn’t think i could bear opening up. so i didn’t.
and, until about three months ago, i kept up that stoic façade. and then i met T, a woman who, for the first time, offered the kind of safety that i’d always sought, but never found. when i told her my story, it was different. the story itself was the same, the facts didn’t change, and i still consciously left out those parts that felt (still feel) too shameful to share, but what i opened up in the telling of the story was profoundly different. when she asked me to tell her my story, and i obliged, i felt it. for the first time, when i told the facts that, over the years, have become a little mundane, i felt them in my heart and in my gut. i told a full narrative – a short version, but full nonetheless – of the story. i opened up, with her, a package with both facts and feelings.

“ah.” i thought, “that’s what it’s supposed to be like to break the silence. this is the kind of healing that people have been talking about.”

it’s all part of living fully, of living with your heart and your head. it’s bigger than a healing way of writing, it’s bigger than me telling my story in a full way, it’s bigger than my friendship with this woman who first showed me what heart-living was about.

writing in a way that heals is just a part of living in a way that heals. but i’m a writer, always have been. so, for me, writing in a way that heals is a big part of living in a way that heals. writing in a way that links my heart-understanding of what happened with my head-understanding of what happened…that’s what it means to “break the silence.” that’s what it means to live that old, possibly overused, easily misunderstood aphorism.



so, in that vein, let me tell you a story.
...............


...and this is where the post i've been working on veers off, unfinished, into convoluted storytelling, unorganized narrative, and totally non-healing writing. so instead, i'm going to end it in a different way. read on.

i could tell lots of stories. i've considered, thoroughly, my options for which story/stories to write in this way that's supposed to heal, which stories i could share on this blog.
there are plenty of easy ones. plenty. but they're "easy" because they're things i've already done a good deal of healing around/over/in. the ones i need to tell are the ones that...are hard.
like this new memory.
the one that i tried to tell my therapist about today...and couldn't get through all of it.

it's the things that are the hardest that i most want to do. i've never liked settling for the easier tasks. i thrive on challenges, on things that are supposed to be impossible or implausible.

so i can't tell you these "easy" stories.
because the stories i want to tell aren't easy.
and i can't tell you the hard stories, either. (because i can't tell myself these stories yet, either.)
but there will be stories. they'll come.
i promise (myself. and you).

generational legacy of wounded women

when i decided to write today*, i intended to write about this topic, one of my "to-come" posts:

3) the ways in which a lot of women's reluctance to reject and deferment to the desires of (especially hetero) men is not only a sign of her own individual woundedness, but also indicative of our shared woundedness. i also want to discuss how "the patriarchy" (and everything that goes along with it) contributes to our own individual woundedness, how the oppression we feel is rarely capital-p Political, and how healing from it doesn't need to be Political. (healing, though, is inherently political, inherently an act of social change.

i thought about it, thought about Gerry, the (much older hetero male) customer at the cafe who seems to think that i want him to be more than just another regular customer i'm friendly with. i thought about my huge, huge difficulty with saying no to him, with refusing his gifts (...he gave me pearls. and a half dozen roses on valentine's day. i know, i know.) i thought a little about what that meant, given my own personal history and my socialization as a "nice girl."
i was about to write a long, well thought out post about the implications of my woundedness on my present life, how my past wounds carry on and continue wounding me now...as exemplified by this situation with gerry.



and then...my mother left me a message on my voicemail.
and, unsurprisingly, the direction of this post shifted dramatically.

this seems like a trivial anecdote, but it epitomizes the codependent, dysfunctional woundedness of my relationship with my mother (or, more accurately, of her relationship with/to me).

i recently changed my voicemail message. it's now much calmer, more peaceful, more mellow. a couple friends - friends who are part of this healing community of mine - have commented approvingly on it. they like the calmness, adultness, maturity of the new greeting.
my mom called today and left a message on my voicemail.
it started with a halting, seemingly distracted, uncomfortable: "you changed your voicemail. it just..it's...it throws me off every time i hear it."

yes.
of course it does.
because when i recorded it, i felt at peace. i wasn't in excruciating, life-impeding pain. the person on the voicemail isn't the daughter that you've grown used to, that you've cultivated. the person on my voicemail isn't a slave to the pain that you have created / rely on.


when i heard her remark, i laughed out loud. shook my head.

at some point, i know, the grief will set in. i'll mourn for the woman my mother never was, for the mother i never had, for the peace she's never felt, for the healing she will probably never feel.

but for now, it's funny. sad-funny, definitely. that kind of funny where you laugh, but you think that maybe you should also be crying. but still, funny.




the point of this anecdote? it's a generational thing, this pain. the generational legacy of abuse, of trauma, of woundedness. my woundedness, even if it weren't directly caused by my mother's wounded actions (and a big ol' chunk of it was), would still have a lot to do with the legacy of my mother's woundedness. because when a woman as wounded as my mother tries to parent, she inevitably passes on that woundedness to her child.
so, yes, in a way, my wounds are hereditary. my depression is hereditary, my PTSD is hereditary, my addictions - to unhealthy relationships, to self-injury - are hereditary. but it's not the hereditary that's passed along in genes (or maybe it is). it's a different hereditary trait.


this all means that generations of women are still wounded, grow up wounded, because they were raised by wounded women. these girls, raised by wounded women, will also raise wounded women...unless they address their wounds. acknowledge them. try to heal them.

this woundedness, this generational woundedness...it's sad. it's sad to see women, just about everywhere, in so much pain. my heart goes out to the women i see with unhealed, unacknowledged wounds. but it also makes me angry. because this legacy of woundedness is another one of those things that supports the continued prominence of patriarchal structures. it's this woundedness that, on an individual level, enables patriarchal dominance over women who are too wounded to embrace their power, who can't see that they deserve something better than what they have.



_______________________________

*"today," at first, referred to monday, march 3rd. but i didn't get around to finishing the post until today, sunday, march 9th. noted just in case the chronology of these events matters...even though i'm pretty sure it doesn't.

the best book i'd somehow never heard of

Yesterday, I finished this book: The Obsidian Mirror, by Louise Wisechild.
It took me close to two weeks to finish it.
Not because it's particularly long - it's typical memoir length, a little under 300 pages.
Not because it's intellectually dense or particularly difficult - it's well-written, but in a perfectly accessible way.
Not even because I wasn't dedicated to reading it -- there were few days I didn't have the book with me, in my bag, few days that I didn't pick it up and have a hard time putting it down.

No, it took me so long to finish this book because it was just that intense. Because there were entire chapters I didn't want to forget, so I finished, then went back 20 pages to re-read it. Even the preface (by Laura Davis) and new introduction (by the author) were read twice.
This is a book I took out from the Smith library. I don't really want to return it. I'm now torn as to where to spend the remainder of my book budget for March; I had planned on buying Writing As A Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo (about which I've got another post in the works for), but I also need this book as an addition to my library.



Why am I so enamoured with this book?
Part of it, I don't deny, is because I see myself in it, in what Wisechild is writing. I see my healing journey reflected in this memoir of her healing journey. It's my own journey, just as hers was her own, but it's a journey that reminds me that even in these hardest parts, I'm not the only one who's ever been there. Reminds me that not only have other people been there, they've gotten through it. That's huge.
But the bigger part of why I'm kind of astonished by how much I love this book is this:
It tells the story that nobody else tells. It's brutally honest about what "healing from sexual abuse" means.
I've been bitter about the myth of the Survivor, about the rhetoric around surviving / healing for a long time. Most books, stories, movies, and whatever else I've ever read or seen have emphasized the telling as The Healing Moment. Have given the impression, intentionally or not, that telling, breaking that silence, is the thing you need to do to "heal." Made it seem like healing comes automatically afterwards -- as in, speak out about the abuse, call it what it is (rape, abuse, incest, etc), tell your therapist, confront your abuser(s), and suddenly, you're healed! You're officially a Survivor!
Except...that's not how it works.
Maybe for some people, it really is that simple. But not, I don't think, for most. And certainly not for me.
Which isn't to say that the initial telling isn't important - it is, it's vitally important, and essential to starting that healing process. But that's what it is: a start. Of a process. Not the be-all and end-all of healing.

So what I love most about Wisechild's book is that it's honest about the up and down (and down and down and up and down) nature of the healing process. It's honest about it being a process. It's up-front and frank about the things she's healing from, without inaccurate metaphors and allusions to abuse. It's real, and it's true. It's not beautiful. It ends beautifully, in a very healed & still healing place, but she doesn't gloss over the ugly, ugly, painful parts of healing. In this book is so much truth, so much truth that's so often overlooked or (intentionally? subconsciously?) left out of the larger rhetoric of surviving, the larger myth of the Survivor.








And, to be totally honest, another reason I've developed such an attachment to this book is because it triggered a lot of things for me. Her story hit places in me that I needed to uncover. Places I'd been somewhat intentionally avoiding, things I'd been resisting. It hurt, to read it. It was painful. But it wasn't an unpleasant pain. It was a pain that opened, that triggered the pain of opening. It reminded me a lot of myself, I saw myself reflected often in her story...and then I also - briefly and distantly and uncertainly - saw myself in the last couple chapters, when her healing journey becomes calmer, when she's a more healed woman. A more whole woman. It hit home.
A moment of irony, fate, coincidence, something:
I'd been using a flyer as a bookmark. For the Block Island Poetry Project. I was interested in the weekend, even though I knew I could never afford it. I'd taken the brochure from the cafe's bulletin board, though, just so that I could pine away for my lost opportunities of writing poetry in a place like Block Island. I'd been to Block Island before, and had fond memories of it and its beauty. Reading this book triggered a new memory for me, something that hasn't happened in years, something which was painful beyond what I can describe here. The new memory?
From our trip to Block Island in 1998.
Ironic, don't you think?