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:
In January, I remembered that my father raped me when I was fifteen. I’ve been struggling a lot since then. I’ve been feeling an intense amount of self-blame and self-hatred. Self-blame is a common defensive mechanism for survivors. It’s been worse this time, because… well, lots of times when I tell friends that I feel like it was my fault, they’ll say, “There was nothing you could have done. You were only a child.” But is a fifteen year old a child? It seems like fifteen is in that liminal space between childhood and adulthood, when boys are becoming men and are expected to begin defending themselves. I know this is toxic patriarchal bullshit but I feel, deep down, like I failed to protect myself, like I failed to be a man. I feel ruined and broken and alone.
As bad as that is, blaming myself is a defense mechanism because it protects me from even worse terror–if there was nothing I could have done, then there’s nothing I could do now, if someone assaulted me again. Of course, this is an existential reality; in this world, there’s no guarantee of safety or security for anyone. But most people deal with that through some form of denial, some form of pretending that they are in fact safe. To preserve that protective bubble, I have to believe that I could have stopped it but failed.
I feel like I shouldn’t talk about this but there’s no way to tell the story of my life right now without talking about it: I’ve been thinking about suicide a lot. Part of this is an extension of that self-blame–I feel like I deserve to die for failing to stop the rape. But it’s also a kind of denial. There’s this quote I read for the first time in high school, from George Sand–”We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.” I don’t know how to accept that this terrible thing happened, that I’m so deeply wounded, and there’s a deep, powerful part of me that feels like I have to do anything to stop it from happening. Of course, I can’t change the past, but that part of me wants to erase the past by “throwing the whole book into the fire”. It feels like it’s more important to erase the trauma than it is to be alive. Allowing the trauma to be real, to be something that happened to me, feels like dying itself, or something worse than dying.
Of course, this is very much about control. I hate hate hate that I’m not in control of so much. I feel like the basic situation of my life is not one that I consented to. I’m extremely angry at the world and at everyone in it for failing to stop the rape from occurring. So that’s part of it too–suicide as a way of saying, “Fuck you, I’m leaving.” But I also feel like it’s the only way I can retain control, the only way I can say, no, this is not okay. This can’t happen.
I know it might be scary to read all of this. The fact that I’m writing it actually probably means you should worry less because writing of this kind is inevitably a way of letting go, of allowing all of this tangled mess to change through exposure to light and air, a new story to begin to take shape in the clearing.
Okay, back to what I was saying. Part of me feels like I haven’t consented to this and so my ongoing existence itself is something unconsensual, a strange metaphysical form of rape. This is probably related to the way that unresolved trauma doesn’t sit contained within the typical narrative order of past, present and future; my daily life feels like rape because I’m re-experiencing the emotions of the earlier, repressed past, the day to day life in that house where my father raped me, where he held a knife to my throat and forced me to moan in pretend pleasure as he fucked me. Typing that is like dropping a block of cement into my stomach, acid splashing all over, I don’t know how to breath I don’t know how to breath I don’t know how to breath but I am still breathing and I hate that in and out like the ticking of some interminable, soulless, unstoppable clock, a juggernaut, a machine, my flesh is a machine my body is outside of me and I will not let you put me back together.
Well, that last little bit wasn’t the translator speaking, obviously, but there was still some translation, as in any writing or speaking. See how I disassociate by using postmodern literary theory? I don’t know the ending to this story yet. But I hope that reconstructing the fragments and speaking from this place of deep pain, even in a translated way, will help someone else understand their own story, their own pain, and find the courage to speak, in whatever voice they need.
