excavating burning bricks, building a bridge

In aftermath of resurfaced memories, I feel a flood of emotions.  I feel like the abuse is happening all the time, or like he is about to spring out from behind a couch and rape me.  I feel like everyone secretly wants to hurt me.  I am trying to learn how to remind myself that I am in the present, not the past, that I am no longer within his reach.  At the same time, periods like this are important opportunities for me to discover what my hidden emotional realities as a child were like.

Here are some pieces I have found.  I watched my father all the time, analyzing his every facial expression, body movement and tone of voice, attempting to discern when he would next rape me.  There were certainly clues–he would touch me more and more around other people, in apparently innocent ways, but each hand on my shoulder hit me like the tremors that precede an enormous earthquake, like a secret code written in burning poison, like a flag planted in soil, announcing to everyone around that I would soon be shamed, conquered and broken.

I felt like we were continuously fighting a secret war.  I could not acknowledge the violence–because he threatened to kill me, but more importantly because my primary way of keeping myself safe was by denying that it was happening.  If I would have remembered as a child, I would have lost my mind.  I would probably not be alive today.  But part of me knew; part of me has always known.  That part of me watched, and tried to keep myself safe.  In our secret war, I was always trying to subtly influence and control my family, to avoid being alone with him, to avoid the situations that would result in him raping me yet again.

Of course, I couldn’t always be successful.  And sometimes I surrendered.  Sometimes the waiting, the anxious anticipation got so intense that it felt better to just get it over with.  Then I would approach him and ask him to abuse me and in a way it would be a relief.  At least I would be in control of when it happened; at least I no longer had to maintain a constant vigilance.

Another strategy that I attempted to use to keep myself safe was pretending that I wanted to have sex with my father.  I pretended that he loved me; I pretended that I was in love with him.  He encouraged this, at least sometimes or in some ways–telling me he loved me during the abuse, cuddling me or kissing me or touching me in romantic ways–but it was also impossible for me to maintain the illusion that we were a loving romantic couple because he would suddenly change.  He would become angry, violent and intensely control, yelling and swearing and hitting me.  The creeping corrosion, the poisonous flower of his love would instantly transform into a flurry of cutting blades, an unpredictable storm of anger like an enraged monkey in human skin.

Last night, I realized that all of this hidden history was happening at the same time as the life I have always been able to remember. It happened from the time I was five to when I was seventeen.  From grade school all the way up through high school. Of course this is obvious in a way.  But they have never seemed very connected to me; as I wrote in my last post, they felt like different worlds.  There was always some overlap, some clues, some pollution.  By the time, I was eight or nine, I knew that I did not want to be like my father when I grew up.  I tried to be as little like him as possible.  I had strange anxieties about sex.

But last night I really thought about it for the first time.  All of these intense dynamics and impossible to navigate emotional dangers were happening at the same time as I was going to school and getting all As.  They were happening at the same time that I was writing and sending off science fiction stories to magazine as a 7th grader.  And at the same time that I wrote a novel in 8th grade (which is rather terrible, but I’m impressed that I just did it).  They were happening at the same time that I took bike rides and built snow forts and played Genesis and looked under rocks for bugs.  They were happening at the same time that I started dressing in black.  They were happening at the same time that I acted in plays in high school (and I’m sure part of the reason I did so was to avoid being at home as much as possible).  They were happening at the same time that I took the SAT and the ACT, at the same time that I started therapy because my mom found a drawing of a schoolchild writing “I hate myself” over and over on a blackboard.  They were happening at the same time that I came out.

I managed to do all of that while being terrorized and tortured and lied to and manipulated and raped.  This is tragic and painful and sad, but more than anything it makes me realize how intensely strong I am.  How powerful my mind and soul and heart are.  He tried to break me and he failed.  Even the fact that I kept all of this hidden from everyone–from my teachers, from my friends, from my cousins and aunts and uncles, from my therapist, from myself–is evidence of a deep and intense power.  That power might have been misguided, turned in a way opposite from the direction I need to grow now, but the intention behind it was to protect me, to keep me safe.  The more I can learn how to be safe in other ways, the more I can turn that enormous strength in new directions and unleash my will and my love in the service of magickal healing transformation.  So mote it be.

a world or two

When I was a child, I lived in two worlds.  (For decades, I was only consciously aware of one of them.)  In the sunlit world, the world that made sense, I was a fairly normal nerd living in a safe suburban neighborhood.  The worst thing that happened to me was what happens to all nerds–the cruel mockery of children at school.  My life was full of books, of squabbling with my sister, laughing with my cousins, elaborate games of let’s pretend, bike rides, walks in the woods, turning over rocks to watch with fascination all the bugs scurrying for safety, the ants carrying their white pupae.

I remember thinking, one sunny summer day in my spacious green backyard, that nothing truly bad was going to happen to me, because my life wasn’t that kind of story.  It wasn’t that kind of genre.  But what I didn’t realize was that horrific, agonizing things had already happened to me, were continuing to happen to me.  For there was another world, a secret, claustrophobic, subterranean world, which only my father and I knew how to enter.  In that world, my father raped me repeatedly.  But he didn’t just rape me.  He tortured me psychologically.  He comforted me, told me I was safe, told me he would never hurt me again and then, once I had calmed, once I had (apparently) believed him, he would rape me again.  He told me he was raping me because he loved me; he told me the abuse was love.  He told me I was dirty, filthy, that I deserved to be hurt.  He told me that I wanted to be hurt, that all of this was happening because of some twisted desire within me.

And I believed him.  How could I disbelieve the only other person in the world?  How could I refuse food, even if it was tainted, poisoned, even if it cut up my tongue, stretched my throat as I swallowed it down?  I was starving for my father’s love, desperate for his touch.  I even asked him to touch me “in the dirty way” sometimes, because those were the only times he was close to me, the only times he paid attention to me, the only times he touched me.  Because I knew the violence would come eventually, hitting the skin of my soul like a hailstorm of knives, and it was better if I could at least control when it happened.

Though it seems like an intense betrayal of myself to have asked my father to touch me in those ways, I know that I did what I had to do to survive that terrible, fractured, terrifying childhood.  I did what I had to do to keep myself as safe and as sane as I could.  And one of the biggest tactics I used was keeping the worlds separate.  I locked the secret world away from the sunlit world, burying it deep inside my bones, pushing it far out past the edges of the sky.  I wanted to keep it away, far away, from me forever.  But that kind of disassociation has a steep price.  To maintain it, I must be constantly vigilant.  I must ignore the cries of pain, the soft sobs of the wounded children within me.  I must become as stagnant and frozen as the bars of a cage.

I am not willing to refuse to grow, to refuse to move and dance, to refuse to listen to all of the voices within me.  And so sometimes memories, fragments of that displaced world, come shooting back into my life, hitting the surface of my current reality with the calamitious force of meteorites.  When this happens, great clouds of pain-filled dust shoot up into the sky, darkening the world, making it appear that I have sucked back down into that subterranean world with my father.  That world seems so separate–because I experienced it so distinctly as a child, because the only way I could survive the twelve years of ceaseless terror was to put as much force into separating the worlds as I could–that when it reappears in my life, it feels all-consuming.

The rules of my childhood say, you can only be in one world at a time.  And so when a new memory snatches me back into that hellish underworld, I feel like it is the only thing which is real.  I am constantly afraid, constantly in pain, constantly certain that my father is going to find me and rape me again (though he does not know where I am, though he likely knows that I am strong enough now to remember, strong enough to speak out, strong enough to ask for help).  It is extremely difficult for me to trust people.  When I hold hands with someone I love and trust, all I can feel is tendrils of pain and danger crawling up my arm.

Perhaps this is too neat a picture.  Perhaps in the past few weeks, reeling from the aftermath of yet another memory, I had had moments of genuine laughter.  I have written and created, I have opened up to Divine love, I have walked and stretched.  I have loved and been loved.  But the pain and the fear keep returning, keep insisting that they are the most real.  Sometimes trauma feels as powerful, as inevitable as gravity, and all the comforts I build are fragile structures waiting to fall.  The truth is: a part of really, truly believes (as my father told me) that everyone wants to hurt me.  A part of me is still clenched up, still waiting for the corrosive acid of his tongue on my skin.

That part of me will probably take a long time to unwind, and it will probably not be a permanent or simple process; I will relax into the neverending stream of the present, relax into the sensations of my body which tell me that now, at this moment, I am safe and free from being harmed.  Now at this moment, nothing bad is happening to me.  And then I will clench up again, and then I will slowly uncurl, and then I will panic and fold back up, for a moment, for a day or a week, before the steady beat of my heart lulls me back into trust.

In the meantime, I will slowly, carefully, wildly, passionately, angrily, gently undo the split between the worlds.  I will send secret messages through the wall.  I will smash the wall with hammers.  I will let the moat, deep as a severed limb, close until all that remains is the faintest scar.  I will cross the border heedlessly, spreading flora and fauna from one world to the other like paint spilling across canvases.  I will sit calmly in the sunlit world, rooted in my body, in the safety of now, in a circle of Divine love, and I will reach my hand into that other world, as dark as unseen pain, I will reach my hand into that other world with my palm open in friendship and acceptance and I will wait, as long as it takes, until another hand unclenches and reaches out, tentative and uncertain, hungry for the warmth of safe touch.

When I was a child, I grew up in one world, a world as convoluted as a coral reef, filled with pain and love, silence and song, wounding and healing.

five gems from the allied media conference

I plan to expand these into more full posts later but for right now I just need to get them down on the digital page in rough form.

1. Being at the Allied Media Conference filled me with such hope, with the knowledge that we can and are building another world because I saw it happen. I saw amazing fierce beautiful people come together across the differences the system tries to use to separate us and instead we built a space of love and radical possibility and deep dreaming and shared joy and power.

2. After leaving the AMC, a deep swell of sorrow swept over me. Some of that I’m sure is due to crashing after the high. But not all of it. I feel lonely because I’m not connected to that radical, beautiful, powerful movement in my day to day life or even in my weekly or monthly life. I want to live with the magic and music and fierce creative love and open dialogue and empowerment of marginalized voices and honesty about the super fucked up state of the world and inspiring courageous work for healing and liberation. I want that to be my life. But I feel scared that I’m not good enough or strong enough or cool enough or or or.

3. One of the obstacles which I have hardly named or spoken about is an invisible disability. I haven’t spoken of this partially because of my fear of the word “disabled” and what that means or implies about me. But the truth is this: for the past five years I have had difficulty walking and standing. I can walk and stand, but for much less time than most people.

I didn’t want to call myself disabled for multiple reasons: my own internalized ableism, not wanting to be defined by a weakness of problem, needing to believe that my condition was not permanent, the fact that I haven’t seen a doctor in about five years and so don’t have some official medical diagnosis, my sense that the concept of “disability” was all tied up with the Western medical perspective, the fact that I see the problem with my knees and hips as part of the wreckage caused by my father’s sexual abuse and not caused by something else.

At the opening to the AMC, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha shared some amazing and inspiring words about disability justice. Part of what she said (and I’m paraphrasing) was that people with disabilities carry the weight of legacies of violence and domination in their bodies. This resonates with my story, with my truth about the pain in my body: my father’s violation of my sexuality has caused my pelvis to be dislocated.

I still know and believe that I can become stronger and healthier. But right now I am dealing with limited mobility, with a disability. I do not have to be ashamed by that. I do not have to attempt to hide that, to be silent, to pass as an able-bodied person, to carry around this weight of shame. Doing so has exhausted me.

4. I also need to come out as genderqueer. I’m semi-out, but for a long time I’ve thought that I was comfortable enough in the assumed identity of male that people place me in but I’m not. I don’t really have models for people who are out about the fact that they are neither men nor women. But I need to find and cultivate and create spaces in which I can express the totality of my gender in all its complexity and shifting nature.

5. I’ve also been hiding my gifts, my own songs, my own fierce love, my own tears at the violence tearing apart the world, my own wild dreams. I have hidden these even from myself. Doing so has hurt me, but it has also hurt the world, the movement, the beautiful people I long to be connected with, who are also longing to be connected with me. These words are the beginning of a bridge, a road, which connects me to the world, the life, the movement we are dreaming and building together. So mote it be.

the grief at the center

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center.
–Margaret Atwood, Variations on the Word Sleep

I oftentimes think of my father as a monster. A werewolf or an evil sorcerer, a lich. Because what he did was monstrous. Because I can only describe the reality of my childhood with fantastic, otherworldly metaphors. Because the experience of being raped by him was as terrifying, as jarring and out of place, as if a three-headed man with horns had stepped from the shadows between the streetlights on the suburban sidewalk. Because it’s easier to think of him as a monster, a demon, than to deal with the complexity of his humanity. Because I want to defend my self from my vulnerability, my longing for his warm human touch.

Because, the truth is, I miss him terribly. I’ve been missing him terribly for my whole life. I’ve been yearning for him to pick me up when I fall down, to hold me safe and secure in his arms, to kiss my scrapes and cuts with that healing parental magic, “There, all better.” I’ve been yearning for him to look at me and really see me, to be proud of me. I’ve been yearning for his guidance, for at least a partial roadmap through the landscape of life in this world, which is treacherous for anyone. I’ve been yearning for him to say, “I’ve struggled with that too, here’s my story.” Here are my tears, here is my smile, here are my true words, here is my sympathy, here is my heart. Here is your dad.

I’ve been yearning for a dad for my whole life and in his place I had a monster, a frozen mask, an angry little boy pretending to be a man, a blank space. So much blank space. Because my father gave me none of those things. This makes me so angry. But it also makes me unspeakably sad. It’s a loss to large for me to comprehend. It’s a loss I don’t know how to grieve. How do you mourn for something that you never had?

walking

The other night I was walking down the street, crying–I was that overwhelmed. Normally I can’t cry in front of people unless I trust them deeply but there I was, not really caring that I was crying in front of strangers–or caring, but not enough to stop. I was also singing–not in that loud, pay attention to me kind of way, but also not so quietly as to be “singing to myself”. I was singing “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, or at least the beginning to it, but after a while singing that started to make me feel even more suicidal. So then I started to sing “Me and a Gun” by Tori Amos, which made my voice waver and made me cry again.

Tonight I was walking down the street again, crying again. Feeling even more suicidal. I was imagining talking with a friend, and saying to him, I have to kill myself so he can’t touch me again. And I imagined my friend saying, he can’t touch you again now anyway. And me saying, but you don’t understand. I’m not safe. I have to go away so I’ll be safe. I have to go all the way away.

And then the wind blew around me–I mean, the wind was blowing the whole time, I just noticed it and I realized that I was living out the past, that I wasn’t responding to what was actually happening but to this dreamworld of ghosts. And it was like there were multiple ghostworlds, layers of them ripped up and uneven, partially covering over each other like ragged clothes. But I wasn’t actually in them, and they–he–can’t hurt me anymore. I am safe. Or as safe as anyone.

Also, tonight, I was thinking about the Divine and I was so pissed–like, fuck you, you say you love me, you say you were there with me when the abuse was happening, but you didn’t stop it, you’re worthless, you’re worse than worthless. But after the wind came, that shifted and I wanted to be connected to the Divine and I realized I need to direct all that anger towards my dad. Which is scary and overwhelming.

I’ve been realizing in general that I don’t want to carry all this anger around anymore. It’s like Anne Lamott says, “Refusing to forgive is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.” I don’t really think I need to forgive my dad–I don’t like that word in this context. But the important thing is that, however justified it is, holding onto the anger is mostly hurting me. So I need to let go of the anger, which I think involves both expresses it and letting patterns of thinking and responding change.

It’s funny because I didn’t mean for this post to be so optimistic. I wanted to end with something like, “This is what it likes in the time around my birthday.” I guess change and growth can come even in the darkest, most difficult places.