my ticket out of the traumatime

I haven’t yet written about my experience of the Allied Media Conference, or about facilitating this workshop there, which was a first for me. I haven’t written about it yet because in many ways it has been a difficult, harrowing experience. I read a lot about trauma in preparation for the workshop. This was triggering enough, but I have a habit of rehearsing events in my head when I’m nervous, and so I thought about trauma and its after-effects almost continuously for a few days. Needless to say, this brought up a lot of painful and overwhelming psychic goo. I kept ignoring it, trying to focus on getting ready for the workshop. Finally, I broke down, and decided that sacrificing my well being was not worth it; I wasn’t going to do the workshop. Even as I made this decision, I suspected that doing so might give me the space to calm down so that I could do the workshop. This is, in fact, what happened.

I want to save actually talking in depth about my experience facilitating the workshop for another time. However, it went well. I felt empowered and confident enough to depart from my outline and discuss some of my personal experience of trauma and sexual violence, although in a relatively abstract way.

It was after the workshop that things really got hard. Reading and thinking so much about trauma and narrative, and doing the workshop, stirred up my own untold story. Half a week or so after the workshop I actually wrote out the narrative of my dad sexually abusing me. I did not plan to do this. I woke up significantly earlier than I usually do, and couldn’t fall back asleep, thoughts of what I had been thinking and feeling during the abuse filling my head. They were coming as a story, or at least I felt able to put them together in that way. I decided to write it down, while I had the chance. I did so. Later, I wrote out a separate narrative about the external events of the abuse, about what actually happened. And, then, the next day, I combined the two narratives.

Crafting that narrative has been one of the hardest things I have ever done. In a real sense, doing so has forced me to relive the trauma in the deepest way yet. Of course, that experience has been accompanied by extremely intense emotions: rage that wishes to shatter the world, shame that I was unable to stop the abuse from happening, deep disconnection, fear and distrust of everyone, simultaneous desires to be close to people so they can comfort me and to push everyone and everything away, agony as if my insides were scooped out and replaced by burning shards of broken glass, terror that it could happen again, the intense desire to make it stop, to push him away, to go back in time and change the past. But there is no way to change the past, and I have been so angry and overwhelmed that I channeled this desire into disconnection and silence. I have been pushing the world away, refusing to live my life. It has always been easy for me to attempt to express my anger through silence and distance, but I have found that this is rarely effective.

A week or so ago, I thought of the idea that pain is a messenger bringing us an important truth. I thought that I already knew all I needed to know about the abuse committed by my father, but I asked the pain what it had to tell me. This is what it said: “You are experiencing so much pain because it is so important, so urgent that this violence stop. You must become a warrior and do what you can to stop it. This is how you can use your anger.” I was so angry, though, that I resisted this. I was also mistaken about what it would mean, to become a warrior.

Here is my new story:

In order to survive, I must become a warrior. I must become a warrior fighting to transform sexual violence into safety and consent; silence into speech; trauma into healing; frozen, jagged hearts into warm, beating, vulnerable ones. I resisted this change because I thought that it would force me to become humorless, obsessed, forever fixated on pain, constantly angry: a sure recipe for rapid burn out and despair. However, when I think about the ways to transform the many factors which contribute to and enable acts of sexual violence, I feel differently. For these are things I want to encourage anyway: honest communication, empathy, expanding beyond patriarchal gender roles, healing. When I focus on these changes, on the world I want to create, I feel a joyous sense of possibility, an expansion. And my anger becomes, not an inferno threatening to destroy me, but a deep river of fuel propelling me towards change and growth.