OLD BITCH SURVIVORS WHO CRY AND LAUGH
As a young survivor, I read a lot of survivor writing—the feminist of color, slam poetry kind, the Dorothy Allison kind. What I picked up on was that telling the raw truth could heal you. Running away could heal you. Cutting off someone's dick could heal you (thank God Lorena Bobbitt was in the news when I was twenty). Sex could heal you, and solitude, and a closed door. Time and space and silence.
What I didn't see much of were stories of what came after—what long-term survivorhood looked like after you'd been trying to heal for a while. Besides the vague encouragement found in The Courage to Heal that eventually I'd be a nice normal housewife/social worker who didn't think about my rape much. The two options seemed to be either that or suicide.
It would've meant a lot to me, I think, if I'd seen stories and pictures of some middle-aged or older femme survivors who were happy and yet not done. Who were a lot less triggered than they used to be but still snapped at their partner, froze up when touched a certain way, had a great month and then a panic attack week and then had to just get the fuck out of town for a while. Who were successful on their own terms and who also had at least a few deeply shitty mental health times a year. Who had chosen queer family that was wonderful, the best, and also fell the fuck apart in completely unpredictable ways. Who thought they knew everything about their abuse story, but who then woke up one day at forty-two and thought, Shit, maybe my mom also abused my older cousin who was like me and who she also had a "special closeness" to, or, What if I'm not just grateful to be free; I'm deeply angry and sad that I don't have a mom? Who had a full rich life, but one where the abuse memories were never faint.
There are still not enough of those stories, so here are some of mine: I'm forty-three and I live in a house with my amazing femme of color partner; a white, disabled, queer artist friend who rents studio space to help out with the rent; and a roommate, plus two cats, in a greenbelt strip in Southside Seattle, where there are big trees and blackberry bushes and a secret creek, and it's also ten minutes from Wendy's. I love my partner, and the survivor, femme of color love I get from them has transformed my heart and my cunt and my life. Living together is amazing and was also super hard in ways I never expected—moving in hit me with all the PTSD from past abuse in the world. Working through all those triggers is real. I love my friends, and I have panic attacks that lay me out for two days that I sometimes still feel deeply ashamed of but am working on it. I'm still unpacking deep shame I have around both "being crazy" and around being the survivor of childhood sexual abuse that is stigmatized (mother-daughter, happened early). By unpacking I mean sometimes it hits in a gut punch in the middle of my day, in the middle of negotiating sex or teaching a workshop.
I still feel sad about my abuse. I grieve not having a mom. And I let myself feel fucking sad, because it is fucking sad. Two years ago, my grief about not having a mom hit me right behind the knees the day after Mother's Day, and I stayed there for a long time, and I canceled shit and worked in pajamas and cried longer than I thought there were days and hated it and had no choice. I didn't know that grief was there.
My happiness is messy. It's all of it. I can be defensive and stubborn as hell. I can be wrong. I can have a meltdown. I can be frozen. I can jerk off for hours and not be able to get out of bed. I can win awards. I make dinner for friends. I have somatic flashbacks of my rape. Still. I'm still scared to talk to my family, and visiting the town where I grew up is something I never do casually or without an escape plan. I experience months of joy and weeks that get sucked under when I trip over a wire and a trap door opens. Sometimes I experience deep psychic pain. Sometimes things change.
I have a lot of tools. I have Ativan, prayer, counseling, an altar, DBT cards in my purse, and a shit ton of tinctures and crystals. Sometimes I grip my steering wheel and have no idea where I am. I perform at Princeton, Hampshire, UC Davis. I am not a supersurvivor or supercrip. I am a crip survivor with superpowers who has joy and sadness, rage and loneliness, grief and discovery.
I don't want to be fixed, if being fixed means being bleached of memory, untaught by what I have learned through this miracle of surviving. My survivorhood is not an individual problem. I want the communion of all of us who have survived, and the knowledge.
I do not want to be fixed. I want to change the world. I want to be alive, awake, grieving, and full of joy. And I am.
sanctioned-suicide.net
