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.

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.

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.

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?

I keep trying to replace my father, trying to force someone else into the hole he left in my life. Usually this involves having pretend relationships with straight boys. Oh, I mean, we relate to each other in reality, usually as close friends–it’s just, in my head we’re more than friends. This is rooted in my relationship with my father, for multiple reasons. The first is that I learned early on that in order to survive in my father’s house I had to craft and sustain illusions about the important people in my world: the first and most important illusion being that my father was not a rapist. The second is that my father’s abuse shattered and bent all kinds of boundaries. My father told me that he was molesting me because he loved me, that that was what love was. Part of me believed him. And so part of me thinks that my friends don’t really care about me unless they have sex with me/abuse me. Part of the reason that I play this out with straight boys that I trust a lot is because there’s no risk that they will actually go along with this.

That wasn’t the case with my father. I sometimes initiated sexual things with him–because I wanted his love, and I thought that was what love was. Because I thought that was normal. Because it was the only way I could be close to him, and I was starved for closeness. Still, despite knowing all this, I feel a deep shame when sharing this story. I feel like it means the abuse was my fault, like I am something despicable, something that deserves to be hated: something monstrous, but not strong or scary, rather weak and disgusting. Like a botched creation of a mad scientist, a creature that ought to be put out of its misery.

But that isn’t the reality. It was never my fault. A healthy, loving father would not have responded to my actions the way my father did. The responsibility is only and solely his. And the grief I feel is rooted in the distance between that caring father’s response and what my father actually did.

I don’t know how to grieve for this. And that unmoved grief seems to be the center (or one of the centers) of the chaos that has ruled my life for the past six years. I keep flopping around, being indecisivie, circling around the same unhealthy dynamics, unable to let go of the pain and shame and heartbreak that has been my center for so long. Because if I can’t have my father, I can at least have the pain that surrounds his absence. Because that pain has been what signified my father’s presence, the way that someone else might think of their father when they smell a certain aftershave.

Now comes the part where I write in inspiring ways how I’m ready to let go and move on. Part of me doesn’t want to do that–this whole post has been explaining why that is. But I can’t keep living like this. It hurts me too much. That’s the first reason. But there’s also… because there are many sources of love all around me, and letting go of the past will allow me to fully engage with him. Because I’ve turned out relatively okay, even without my father, and that means I didn’t need him after all. Because there is so much of the world beyond the sad orbit of my father’s presence and absence, because there is so much joy and wisdom and radical community and inspiring visions and real, urgent pain and important work and broken, beautiful people and hidden worlds out there, just waiting for me to re-engage with the world. Because I am already grieving, already letting go, already moving on. Because there is no dam, no fortress, no logical system that can keep out change. Because I am alive and eager to dance.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?