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.
