I realize now that the turmoil I feel is not unnamable anymore; it does have a language, even if these words on the screen feel like a gross joke, the far-off ripples of a whirlpool of self-destruction that's trying to suck me down while laughing maniacally about it. But I won't let it take me, no, fuck that.
This turmoil I have inside of me has a language because other people speak about it and have spoken about it. Others who look similar to me, and others who seem completely different. I know this because I took part in the March to End Rape Culture yesterday.
For perhaps an hour yesterday, my voice joined hundreds of others, chanting, marching with people from all walks of life, reverberating off the buildings of Center City into the ears of hundreds or thousands as we commanded the streets, demanding to be heard. What an empowering thing.
So in the spirit of the March and with the courage to speak my truth still with me, I am going to share my story of sexual abuse.
I am now quite certain that at the age of five or six I endured some sort of sexual trauma. I don't remember the actual event or events, but I believe it was a teacher, a neighbor or perhaps both, who were the perpetrators.
The insidious thing, and the reason I feel I'll never have the language to exactly describe the deeper feelings around this is that I don't actually remember the event or events. I was five or six with no conception of what sex actually was. The events could have been physical in nature or they could have been verbal; I may never know.
What clued me into this is a specific memory of trying to communicate "something" to my parents and receiving a strong reaction of panic and fear. I said some words to my parents and my parents reacted strongly out of concern. "What happened? What happened? Tell us!!!!" Incongruence, confusion, panic, fear. What did I do wrong?
I shut down. I didn't understand what was happening. I was trying to say this thing and now my parents are freaking out. My voice is lost. I can't say the words. I don't understand why their reaction to my words is so strong.
Nothing ever came of it. There was nothing to go on, no words to say to implicate anyone. Life went on and I was a decent kid. I didn't act out, I didn't get into trouble.
This memory was buried except in moments of drunkenness. I'd get drunk in college and start balling on friends' dorm room beds, much to their confusion and consternation, and mine as well.
I apparently shared this secret with a couple of close friends over the years while drunk, that I believed something happened to me as a child, but I have no memory of this. When sober, this memory didn't exist, it was not accessible.
When I was 27, I had what I affectionately call a psychotic awakening. And what was the memory that popped up several hours before I lost my shit and landed in a psych ward? The memory of trying to communicate that something happened to me but having no words to express it.
I recovered from my mental break and life went on. Until my life unraveled again and I found myself once more on the brink of mental collapse. And what was there at the bottom of it? That good old memory, the communication, the strong reaction, the confusion of it. Except this time when it popped up, I got whiffs of other things.
Walking down the hall hand-in-hand with a teacher in kindergarten or first grade, apparently going to take some sort of test. Sunlight streaming through the windows of a classroom, alone with someone else, reading Frog and Toad. There are no faces or names. Fragments, fragrances.
This time when these memories surfaced, the realization that I had endured sexual trauma was also there. It's like, wait a second, wait a second, what is this, what is this? And then it all made sense for a moment: all of the pain and internal turmoil I couldn't name, it made sense. It had a name, and that was sexual abuse. I am a survivor of sexual abuse. It all added up, the psych ward, the near-psychotic state I was in at the time, churning in my head, all of the evidence, it all clicked. And then I died.
Everything I knew to be true was a farce. All of my life from the age of five or six was in some ways false. I was living under false pretenses. My frame of reference shifted and I could see clearly, if only for a moment, the truth of my life, the truth that the near-psychotic bed-ridden person with this realization was the same human as the one that at five or six experienced something which no language could describe. There was continuity.
My life up to that point was disconnected. A series of disconnected moments. Drunken reveries the night before turned into dismal hangovers the next day. There was a free side to me only accessible through substances and then there was the mundane side to me that went to work, but the two were not connected. The continuity blew through all of that, blew through the walls that separated the disconnected moments and now my 27 year-old self was, underneath it all, the same as my six year old self. And so my mental conception of myself died, at least temporarily, and my life since that moment has been a back-and-forth wave of transcendence and plunging back into the muck of the mental conception and pain.
While writing this I feel the strong need to exonerate my parents in some way and that doesn't feel quite right. Exoneration can lead to or be a form denial. So I don't want to exonerate them, nor do I want to blame them. I want to simply state what happened to me and my experience of it. I've talked to my parents about this over the last few years and our relationship has improved, but it has been a difficult process. At the end of the day, I love my parents and have empathy for their side of this experience.
So who do I blame? Who do I exonerate? That's a tough one. I can't really blame my perpetrators because I don't know who they are. I don't remember. That's probably why a lot of the rage I feel is directed at the general level of things, towards society and towards God and existence. I have a lot of existential grief. I've also realized that blame doesn't really accomplish anything.
Participating in the March to End Rape Culture and Take Back The Night earlier this year has made me aware of two things. The first is that we live in a culture that is deeply damaged, that has a rampantly unhealthy attitude towards sex. The second is that I have a voice to share my truth. Sharing my truth, living it is the only thing that I can do because I know the other option is denial, which leads to self destruction, which leads to going crazy if taken far enough.
And I haven't even really touched on the shame I've felt and the grief this has caused me. I'd like to explore the topic of shame in future posts, but for now I will say that if you've experienced some sort of sexual trauma, then you understand what I am speaking of here. If you've experienced it yourself, or know someone who has experienced it - which, statistically speaking, is likely - then you know.
There was a speaker at the March yesterday, Ronald Savage, a hip hop producer, who recounted his experience of being molested by Afrika Bambaataa. The message that stuck with me was this: when you're ready to tell someone about what happened to you, then share it when you're ready.
Know that there are others who have experienced sexual trauma; there is strength in that knowing, there is strength in that admission and acceptance. Like a chant developing in a crowd, one person's voice may not be heard. But one person steps out and offers their voice and soon others around them add their voices and eventually a hundred, a thousand voices are commanding attention, strong, reverberating, undeniable. And that's hugely empowering. That's when change happens.
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