Back in May, I came across this article from the Women in the World section of the New York Times: http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2016/05/12/dutch-victim-of-childhood-sex-abuse-suffering-from-ptsd-allowed-euthanasia/
“There was no prospect of hope for her.” All summer, I’ve held this phrase under my tongue, let it rattle like a marble against my teeth. I think now it’s begun to dissolve. I do believe her death was humane, and am not interested in sidelining my subject with concerns over euthanasia as a practice. My need to stare down her decision is personal.
The years she endured (ages 5-15) closly overlap the years I endured (ages 6-16). Of course, I don’t know the particulars of what happened to her, beyond the shorthand given in the article.
What happened to me all those years, in legal shorthand: Rape and Sodomy of a Minor Child, first and second degrees. That’s to the point, alright. But they only charged him on three counts when there should’ve been a couple thousand. I am not being hyperbolic.
In therapists’ shorthand: childhood sexual abuse. I happen to hate this phrase, not because of what it describes, rather because of how. It’s so full of lolling l’s and oooohs that it sounds like a taunt, especially when it lands on the softness, the sinisterness of the s. I want what happened to sound a hard stop. I want it curt and finite.
In literary shorthand: reader, I am Lolita. Or at least I was once. It should go without saying that you can’t trust Humbert’s version of events, and if you take him at his face you’re a fool. I don’t care if you think he was a genius: Kubrick’s movie sucked. The 90’s remake was even worse.
My Humbert died in prison over a decade ago. I am 18 years now removed from him, and on the front of things I’m nothing like the tragedy I was expected to be.
I’m nothing like the tragedy I was expected to be. All the old scars are barely audible anymore. I have a life that I truly like. My children are half-grown, brilliant and bright, and they know their skin as their own. They know themselves as their own. I wasn’t the first girl my Humbert hurt, but I was the last. And my life may still be under poverty lines, but it is wholly mine.
Recently, one of my loves asked, “What saved you?” and that phrase has twined with the other, “There was no prospect of hope for her."
What saved me. What saved me. The what’s and who’s are too many and too long to encompass here for now, although of course I take stock and keep the list running. And often I don't feel particularly saved, though I so often meet the phrase "you look great!" I say I believe her death was humane because I know, no matter how great I look or how much I love my life, my head is often still a nest of terrors. What I've done is learned to carry my nest of terrors in ways that it can't hobble me or bring the world more hurt.
Of course I’ve already said all of this. I’ve said it part-way already on this blog, which I keep leaving vacant for months, sometimes years, because I keep losing my nerve to speak. I’ve said it in therapist’s offices and group therapy rooms and I’ve said it in hospitals and I’ve said it in court rooms and lawyers’ offices and twelve-step rooms and I’ve said it on the phone with friends and mentors and across the table in restaurants and bars and I’ve said it in classrooms and I’ve said it from podiums, said it and said it and I’m sick of hearing myself say it and I’m sick of all the language—the survival and the salvage and the wreckage and the damage and the redemption and the healing, whatever that means, and all these words I’ve received to explain myself, most of none of which are mine.
And yet, when I stare down the figment of that Dutch girl, that now-dead girl, and the so many others of us there have been, it doesn’t so much matter how sick I am of my own story. It doesn’t so much matter, either, how sick you are—those of you who aren’t survivors, or those of you (survivor or not) who don’t want to sit with other people’s pain, those of you who think it’s oh so blasé when people show their vulnerable seams.
If you don’t want to read this, I’m not writing it for you. But here’s what I’m about to do—I ordered the old weekly workbook I used in group therapy well over a decade ago, Beyond Survival: A Writing Journey for Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse . And for the next year, I’m going to retrace my steps through it here, every week, publicly. Looking through these pages, now even the headings make me cringe. I’m not going to give you the headings or the chapters. If you want those, go track the book down yourself. It’s out of print but you can find it used. The chapters are full of twelve-step truisms and presumptions and language vague enough to land in a horoscope column. It’s a pretty rudimentary map, definitely not literary writing. But still I’m so glad Maureen Brady doubled back through herself and made that map for me, because there was a time that I badly needed the particular trail it cut. Now, I’m going to double back and tamp that ground again with my own feet. For the dead Dutch girl. For me. For whoever else needs to know there are ways out.
And this isn’t meant to be literary writing. This is immediate raw draft, hit send, then let it go writing. Therapeutic writing. Who knows what the hell will come out of it. The prompts are three parts. Part one typically goes: complete the sentence that’s been started for at least twenty minutes. I’ll start that sentence and write, then erase the words that started me which weren’t mine. Then come parts two and three: the vision and the action. I’ll show you how I work those each week, too. Starting now.
WEEK ONE:
Down on Bay Minette Creek
Biting horseflies and yellowjackets down the point that stretched into the creekbend. Skinny dipping, I am old enough to be embarassed when the boat passes. I can’t tell how much of me the passengers can see. Their motor rips a current through the water, cold and tea-black. Beneath my feet, sogged leaves. The passengers (how many?) I can hardly remember. I remember their metallic cans, lettered in red, and their sun-umbered shoulders, and the unconcerned corners of their mouths.
He leans into the shelf of earth and roots above the point’s small sandbar beach, stands there in his polo shirt. His jean shorts, a moderate blue, a reasonable blue, a no-hysterics-here blue. He waves at the passengers, smiles genuine and easy.
I shift my feet underwater, and new weight on the leaves sends up methane around me. Bubbles, minnows bristle my bare skin. All my skin is bare. It doesn’t matter if I want an audience. It doesn’t matter if I want clothes at all. If I get out of the water, the horseflies and yellow jackets will swarm to welt my skin.
It doesn’t matter if I want to want or want not to want. It doesn’t matter if I want the attention—I happen to hate attention. I want to melt into foam on the creek. But I know I will be centrifugal until I figure out how to break myself.
The only way out was to break myself. He wanted me his and whole and his.
I carved hypocrisy beneath my breasts for him to find. This is not a metaphor. I carved the word, “hypocrisy.” I carved others on my thighs, ankles, torso, for him to find. I wanted him to find me being mine. I needed to see it, too, for me. I used a straight razor.
I did not want “the attention.” I was trying to break his gaze. I was trying to force him to look away. I was trying to find a way to make my form mine, and cutting lettered lines in my skin wasn’t shit compared to what all else I’d endured.
I hacked my hair in the bathroom mirror. I bleached out the gold he coveted and made it run manic panic red—red as stop signs, red as women’s blood, acapella red as Tori Amos singing but I haven’t seen Barbados, so I must get out of this.
And by the time I started breaking open and breaking out, I did not give a fuck what you thought of how I carried that pain.
This summer, I toned my hair back to match my original dark ash/gold roots, something I’ve tried and tried over the years to do and keep, but can’t seem to manage to do for too long, because facing my face, framed like it was when I was still his, triggers all manner of flashbacks and dissociative spells. My brain sees my face framed in dark gold, and suddenly it’s set back in a past it thinks I need protection from. This pisses me off. Forcrissakes, it’s hair. And it’s mine. I should be able to do whateverthefuck I want to do with it, without it being some outsized ordeal.
Vision: I want to be able to face my own face in a way that’s daily and mundane. I want to be able to wear my own damn hair however I please without my brain sending out its terror patrols. It’s not so much that it matters to me what color it is. I’m not attached to a particular way of having my hair. What I want is to break the trigger.
Action: For this year (and maybe longer, maybe), I’m going to let my hair continue to grow back to its natural state. I’m going to let it be as it is, dark ash and gold with silver branching in, without frying it at the roots, until the trigger is broken.