poison in the sun turns to something else

I try to use my writing here to add things of value and beauty and hope to the world. Even when I write about pain and hardship, I attempt to do so in ways which focus on transformation and healing. I’m not sure I can do that right now, but I’m still writing in the hopes that letting the nastiness out will somehow change it.

For the longest time, I thought that my father had only molested me once. Recently, though, two more memories have surfaced. When I was seven, my father attempted to abuse me again but I stopped him by threatening to tell. When I was twelve, my father did rape me again. We were outside, raking leaves, and I asked him for a hug and he raped me.

I don’t think that words can truly describe how much pain and anger and raw hurt I am in, drowning in, torn apart by, a screeching clawing monster in my throat encased in numbness, part of me, forever? I’m scared that trauma turns my words and sentences into cliches–how many metaphors can one come up with for pain and violation? There’s some interesting trauma theory about the nature of the “unspeakable” and Arthur Frank talks about “chaos stories” which can’t be told because the nature of intense suffering is to destroy narrative. But, also, of course, we need stories to live, especially in times of suffering. If I’m worried about trauma turning my words into cliches, I know it’s turned my mind into a broken record–I keep thinking, over and over again, my father raped me when I was twelve, I don’t want to be alive, my father raped me when I was twelve, everything inside of me is broken. As if through enough repetition, the words will become part of a story that somehow makes sense.

Here’s another story: I went to a noisy, crowded social gathering last night, even though I didn’t want to, because I felt obligated. People wanted to hug me and I let them because it seemed too difficult and complicated to say no. It took me a while to realize this, but after people hugged me, my desire to die flared up and became much more intense. This is what my father’s violence has done to me, made every touch feel like rape. I don’t know how to respond to that, or to my intense world-breaking feelings, the storms inside which were hidden but have now erupted into sight. I do know that silence=death and that the only way to survive is to keep telling my story, even if it falters into cliche or fragments into chaos, I must keep speaking and striving for coherence.

Learning to speak about the experience of surviving incest requires becoming fluent in the tongue of pain. But the language that we have inherited, that has been passed down to us, is full of holes–places where the tongue reaches out for something solid, a touchstone, a tooth with which to shape a word, a name for a feeling, a concept, a state of being and instead finds nothing, a void. This is not an accident. This is the result of a history of silencing, erasure. This is the result of very real and ongoing violence, as telling our stories is sometimes synonymous with surviving.

* * *

I’m scared of running out of metaphors for my pain, my anger, my terror. And metaphors are a way of transforming the things which they describe.

* * *

I am circling around a wound, which is raw and still screaming. I am searching for the words with which to offer some estimation of just how much pain I am in. I want to die, and this is a certain gauge, but those of us who live in the bruised dark of trauma know that there are many levels and intensities of wanting-to-die. The only way to truly explain my pain is in context.

* * *

When I graduated from college, I simultaneously lost my job, as it was a student-only position. I had very little idea of what I wanted to do in my immediate future and so I wandered around, lost, unemployed, uncertain, struggling to find a job because I was depressed and depressed because I was struggling to find a job. I grew apart (or was abandoned by) many of my college friends. Then, I attended Between the Worlds, an intense pagan festival for queer men. This stirred the cauldron of my heart and soul and, along with the emptiness of my situation, created the space for the memory of my father’s abuse to return to my conscious awareness.

* * *

I quit my job in January and have been wandering since then, first to California, then to Oregon, and now visiting people in Michigan. This Beltaine I attended an intense ritual, and opened myself deeply. I then told my friend Ben the full, detailed story of when my father molested me, which was quite difficult but healing, to share and relive the experience with a man who I knew would not hurt me, who heard my words with empathy and love. And then, a few weeks ago, a new memory came. My dad attempted to molest me again, when I was seven, but I stopped him by threatening to tell.

This might seem like a victory, but that is far outweighed by waves of agony. I know that I remembered in part because I have done so much healing and integrating of the first memories, because I have become strong enough to bear this new wound. But it hurts so much.

* * *

This is not the end of my story.

a thousand words for home (part 1)

As I prepare to leave Michigan, which has been my home for all twenty-six years of my life-so-far, I have been contemplating home.

“Home” is a complicated concept for me, as it is for many queer people, for most survivors of incest. The house that I grew up in was not a safe place for me. In my parent’s house, my father sexually abused me. And, then, for years I absorbed the poison of shame, silence, and denial. My parents’ taught me their own fundamentalist Christian beliefs, taught me that my queerness was evil and sick, and that a loving, perfectly just God would sentence me to be tortured for eternity in the fires of hell. In a sense, then, my parents’ house was never home.

Despite this complicated history, this lack (and/or because of it), home has a deep resonance for me, a mythological significance. This longing for home is also a deep current in the river of shared dreams we call “culture”. You can hear it in the lyrics, “Her grace has seen me safe so far/Her grace shall see me home.” (A beloved Christian song from my culture of origin that I have reappropriated for my own witchy purposes.) Home is the promise of a place where we will finally belong, where we will be whole and safe, where we will express the love and power we know, in our deepest core, that we are capable of, and where others will love us for being loving and powerful and whole.

My parent’s house was certainly not that place, although I did find some safety in the empathy and love of my mother (which has always been limited by her denial/ignorance of the truth).

The funny thing is, my parent talked about finding a new house for most of my childhood, and I was always staunchly opposed to moving. I was terrified of leaving, of loss, of being lost. I could not imagine navigating a world away from the familiar houses and trees, my neighborhood friends. This lack of trust in myself and the world was rooted in my experience of sexual abuse, and demonstrates one of the worst features of traumatic violations: they rob us of the very treasures we need to escape their soot-smoke grasp. My mother told me, not so long ago, that my childhood opposition was one of the reasons that my parents never moved.

tell me your post-vegetarian stories

So, my post on becoming post-vegetarian has gotten the most hits of anything I’ve written here. It seems like there is considerable interest in the topic, and I haven’t seen much information about it online. If you do have any links of interest, please share them in the comments. I’m even more interested in hearing your stories. I’ll post the most interesting ones. Here are some questions to consider:

Why did you decide to start eating meat again?
What choices do you make regarding food?
What have your post-vegetarian experiences been like?
(How) has your identity changed with this dietary change?
How have other people in your life responded to this change?

for may day - desire flowering in asphalt deserts

This post is one day late.

Today, May Day, is a celebration of desire, of the sacred yearning of earth for sky, trees for air, fire for wood, flesh for flesh. As my emotions continue to flow out from my recent retelling of the full narrative of when my father molested me, desire has come through amidst the pain, pleasure and pain all tangled together like silk sheets and barbed wire, like water and poison. One of my tasks is to simply allow these emotions to be, as they are, in the wide open circle of clear eyed acceptance; another task is to learn to separate them, to strain out the poison, to unravel the lies, to dispel the trap he put me in. Both of these approaches are needed for my ultimate goal of reclaiming the sacred birthright of my sexual pleasure.

My father’s act of abuse twisted my desire in at least two ways. First, he literally told me that he was raping me because I wanted it; this victim-blaming burned the message into me: desiring men is dangerous and they will hurt you if they know about it. Of course, I didn’t actually want my father to have sex with me; it was his own desire, displaced, pushed away and bottled up by continuing internal violence and then projected onto me, that he saw reflected in my eyes. He made his illusion into a self-fulfilling prophecy though, touching me in ways that brought both pleasure and pain, forcing me to touch myself in those ways. This is the second way that he twisted my desire, wrapped it up with violence and sealed it with black waxy hate. By turning the natural pleasure of my body against me, he severed my natural trust in my body and made my inborn joy into something to fear, something to watch lest it betray me, something to push down and run away from, screaming, a monster.

These dynamics are, unfortunately, hardly uncommon. Many abusers intentionally inflict pleasure on their victims. One effect this has is to bind the victim and abuser together in a netherworld of shame and silence; my father told me that if I told anyone, they would know that I was a faggot and blame me for the abuse. Although I know now that any basically aware person would never ascribe responsibility for an adult’s abuse to their five year old victim, I did not know this when I was a five year old.

This is what my experience has been like, remembering: waves of pain, pleasure, and deep discomfort, feeling turned on and then scared and wounded, “I don’t want this to be happening,” and a voice responding, angry, forceful, my father’s voice inside my head, “Yes, you want it, you dirty faggot.” And the fact that, in a way, I did enjoy it creates emotional confusion, “Maybe he was right,” and of course that’s what he wants. It’s no accident that my father’s rape made it nearly impossible to trust myself, my own perceptions, my very reactions, my very flesh and bones, the world itself. If something so shattering could appear out of nowhere, how could I know for sure that walls would not melt, that teeth would not jump out of shadows to bite me, that anyone could be counted upon as safe? When I was a few years older, I had a persistent daydream that everyone in the world but me was an alien and they would revert to their monstrous, blobby forms when I was absent, assuming human shapes only when necessary to disguise their true nature from me. I imagined that there were secret sensors hidden under the floor tiles in our kitchen, in the stone path in our backyard, to alert the aliens to my approach. These fantasies made me feel anxious and slightly sick, but I felt compelled to create them. Yes, one of the reasons I write speculative fiction is because my own childhood felt unreal, because the only metaphors strange enough to bridge the as-yet-unremembered trauma, to bring as many of the fractured pieces of me as close to back-together as possible, came from science fiction and fantasy, horror and mythology.

Now, after memory’s return, I am trying to take this view: although my father should never have been sexual with me, the pleasure I felt was not intrinsically bad, anymore than the deer’s hunger for the poisoned salt lick is intrinsically bad, or the explosive exuberance of the minerals in gunpowder, though it may be used to kill and main and oppress. No, the pleasure I felt was part of that vast holy river, that rolicking orgasmic flood spreading out from the Goddess’s first orgasm, the Big Band, spreading out through time and space to create worlds and galaxies, spinning clouds and trees and fish and you and me. As I allow myself to feel all of my emotions, to inhabit all of my heart and mind and body once more, I release the pain and shame, the lies and distortions of my father and I reclaim my pleasure, my sex, my connection.

I am the kiss between earth and heaven
I am the song between sky and ground
I sing for myself
And for the world we’re making
Nothing is lost that can’t be found