coming back to life

This post is long, rambling and potentially triggering for survivors of sexual violence.

I want to write an uplifting, inspiring post about how amazing the AMC was this year. But that’s not the post I need to write right now, or at least that post needs to be interspersed with a very different post in which I take the bloody, tangled mess that I’ve been running away from, pushing away, trying to destroy and excavate it and tell the story/change the story into a new story by telling it, a story of how one moves from powerlessness to power, isolation to connection, fear to love. Maybe this post will be inspiring after all.

At the AMC I saw many beautiful and exciting examples of how individuals and groups who have been (and are being) abused and dominated by oppressive systems are surviving and resisting, turning their pain into song, using the power of their voices to demand change and to build alternate systems and communities.

–I don’t want to write this, not really. I don’t want to stop running away, because the pain seems immense, like it could swallow me whole/it pulls on me like destiny, like gravity But I’ve already ceded so much ground to it and I need to write this.

This year has been shitty for me. It’s been punctuated/punctured by new memories of the sexual abuse my father imposed on me, the violence he inflicted on my body/mind/soul. Starting last May, and then again a month or so later, and then again in January and then again at the end of June. I don’t know how I survived my childhood/how I can survive this. I don’t know how many times my father molested me. Again and again, he found me and tore me up inside, turning my precious soul into a rag which he used to wipe up his cum. He raped me and I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t know how to breath. There, in that space, there is only him and me and the pain and fear and rage–rage pushed away like a balloon, distorted into the wish for death, the floating away up to the ceiling, as if I were having a near death experience or being abducted by aliens. Once, when I was a kid, I was convinced that I was going to be abducted by aliens. I didn’t want to be, but I felt like it was my destiny and I had to be there, you know? I stayed at home while my parents went to church. Who knows what they thought about this? The aliens never came. It was my father, all along.

And one of the worst things is that my father’s violence took him away from me, as a nurturing, loving presence in my life. I mean, he probably wasn’t that nurturing anyway… but sometimes he was. And now I feel this terrible hunger, this open wound that I keep trying to fill with the wrong things, with sensitive codependent straight boys who will never be my lover, who will never be my father.

This is how I talk in the traumatime, in fragments and jumping around, weaving a new path, a safe way to walk by going into the pain and coming out, reconnecting through allowing my disassociated mind to move at its own pace, through the terrible howling void, as bleak as outer space only full of monsters like some bad science fiction horror move and out into vast realms of creativity and play and humor and back into the physical world and around again.

This is what I remembered, a few weeks ago:

I was fourteen years old, I was sitting on my bed and masturbating. My dad came into the room. “Do you want to see how a real man does it?” he said. I told him I didn’t want to. He threatened to kill me. I can never be safe. He touched my penis with his hand and masturbated me. He forced me to do the same to him. I wanted to kill him/I wanted to die. I didn’t want to ever be touched again. After I ejaculated, he hit me on the face, with a calculated amount of force so that I wouldn’t bruise. My father was a master of disguise, subtle as a chameleon until he exploded into a shrapnel of obscene colors. My father stitched a mask onto my face, into my soul. That is why I couldn’t breath–that and the bodily memory of his penis stuck in me throat like a sword, like a factory wedged into a wetland, clogging the lungs of the earth with smoke. After my father hit me, when I was fourteen, he said something like, “You made me do this, you wanted this, you dirty faggot.”

It’s a relief to write this, or perhaps I’m just disassociated. One of the most difficult things for me to deal with is my murderous rage at my father. I don’t just want to kill him–I want to rape him, to do the very same things he did to me, and then snap his bones, his neck, in two with my hands. I know that this is a completely understandable reaction, this desire for vengeance. But it’s terrifying to admit that part of me wants to rape anyone, even my father. Especially because I know this very desire for vengeance, displaced from the abuser onto weaker, safer targets, is part of what leads to sexual violence. Like many survivors, I feel, deep down in the guts of my slow-changing emotional body, that one can either be an abuser or a victim. I decided, long ago, that I would rather die than become an abuser like my father, and so I turned that terrible rage towards myself and it became a host of gremlins hacking away at the architecture of my interior, sabotaging my life in so many ways. In a way, in my suicidal ideation, I play both roles–I am inflicting violence upon myself, at least emotionally. Really, who doesn’t inflict some violence upon themselves in this country? But I know there is another path, a way apart from the path of the abuser or the path of the disempowered, never-going-to-heal victim. I no longer live in my father’s house. For me, that path involves telling my story, especially the scariest parts of it, the oh-my-god no one will love me if I say this parts of it. In telling this story, I am feeling my way in the darkness along this path, this third way, and moving back towards life, back towards hope, back towards the warmth and cacophony of human crowds. I am the phoenix and I am coming back to life.

Much love!

More about the AMC soon

translator’s notes on erasure

Sometimes I speak with the voice of a part of me that I’ll refer to as the translator. This usually happens when the more emotional, spontaneous parts of me are dealing with too much raw pain to speak directly. The translator is trained but still stands close enough to the wild to hear it, to listen to the torn-up children and broken wolves, the bloodthirsty demons and howling ruined bodies and obsessive hermits, the bleeting wounds and ferocious enraged monsters within me. The translator surveys the ruined landscape, the rivers of blood and pus, the poisoned rain, the torture chamber beneath the quiet suburban house and the monstrous bloated woundworlds that belch up from it, bursting through the bubble of denial. The translator surveys and he analyzes and summarizes, distancing himself from himself necessarily, in order to still breath and speak and move, albeit in limited, constrained ways. The translator knows how to communicate the howls and cries and terrible anger and pain in ways that are socially appropriate, in ways that others have at least a chance of understanding.

This is what the translator says:

this, i do not want

I don’t want to be here again, staring into the gullet of familial history, waiting for another monstrous memory to emerge like vomit, hissing and acid, burning my skin, the skin of the world, away.

I don’t want to be here again, in that terrible closed off place where my father rapes me again and again.

I don’t want to be here again, this place of not-wanting, this place of refusal, this place where I split from myself and live in the gaps and cut-off corners, my body like a colonized land split into pieces, artificially divided zones mapped out by my father-rapist, my conqueror, in collaboration with the treacherous parts of me. But maybe that’s not right. In at least two ways. Whose responsibility is my pain, now? My disconnection, now? And as much as the divisions hurt and cost me, they were (and sometimes are) necessary for my survival. They could be barricades built by the resistance. The first duty of a revolutionary is to survive. Yes, and the second duty of a revolutionary is to remember, to reconnect that which has been severed. But survival must come first. And so the revolution-within-me may now be tearing down the barricades they once built in self-defense. But, Goddess, I wish it did not hurt so much.

three threads twined into one post

I’ve fallen silent recently, mostly because a lot was stirred up by the workshop. Today I’ve been reading a lot of things that have been really inspiring–it’s so amazing to me how much the written word can do, how it can tear us and the world apart and then put us back together again. I want to share what I’ve read with you:

First, Hope in Common by David Graeber (which really needs to be read in full):

Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) …It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically.

Next, The Love of My Life by Cheryl Strayed. One of the most difficult things about dealing with my father’s abuse has been the terrible loss–I can’t be close to him and, really, I never could. Strayed’s essay about her overwhelming grief after the death of her mother struck a deep chord in me, and made me cry. A lot. Here’s the opening:

THE FIRST TIME I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week. I was in a cafe in Minneapolis watching a man. He watched me back. He was slightly pudgy, with jet-black hair and skin so white it looked as if he’d powdered it. He stood and walked to my table and sat down without asking. He wanted to know if I had a cat. I folded my hands on the table, steadying myself; I was shaking, nervous at what I would do. I was raw, fragile, vicious with grief. I would do anything.

After reading this, I spent more time browsing through The Sun’s archives and came across this interview with Andrew Harvey, a gay man who’s been writing about spiritual and religious traditions for decades and now feels called to engage in sacred activism:

Harvey: …Sacred activism is the fusion of the mystic’s passion for God with the activist’s passion for justice, creating a third fire, which is the burning sacred heart that longs to help, preserve, and nurture every living thing.

Lawler: So mysticism alone is not enough? It must merge with activism?

Harvey: All mystical systems are addicted to transcending this reality. This addiction is part of the reason why the world is being destroyed. The monotheistic religions honor an off-planet God and would sacrifice this world and its attachments to the adoration of that God. But the God I met was both immanent and transcendent. This world is not an illusion, and the philosophies that say it is are half-baked half-truths. In an authentic mystical experience, the world does disappear and reveal itself as the dance of the divine consciousness. But then it reappears, and you see that everything you are looking at is God, and everything you’re touching is God. This vision completely shatters you.

We are so addicted, either to materialism or to transcending material reality, that we don’t see God right in front of us, in the beggar, the starving child, the brokenhearted woman; in our friend; in the cat; in the flea. We miss it, and in missing it, we allow the world to be destroyed.

keep on digging

I’ve been reading and really enjoying Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Here’s an interesting quote from it:

A political activist can take her answers from the current ideology of her movement, but an artist has got to dig those answers out of herself, and keep on digging until she knows she has got as close as she can possibly get to the truth.

What do you think?