"The R Word," Why now? and various other musings

First, another article I read and need to share. Warning that this is heavy - triggering, for some, and more graphic than most things I've ever posted. It's a discussion of the trivializing use of the word "rape," in this case specifically in video games: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9766-The-R-Word

I think I was especially struck by this article because it articulated so many of the arguments that I tried (and sometimes failed) to make in similar discussions, most notably one evening on Facebook last year when I argued about the term "Facebook rape" with some friends of friends who I didn't even know. That night hurt and sent me into a tailspin for a little while. The author of this article describes his own experiences in pretty stark detail, which is disconcerting but probably necessary to drive home his point, especially in the gaming world which is a harsh place where I don't hang out (not just because of things like this in gaming culture - also because I'm not great at video games!).

Some key quotations, for those not keen on clicking on the potentially triggering link:

"Despite all the articles, I have yet to see one that helps people understand, in detail, why this is such a personal topic for people who have had rape in their past. Perhaps it's our fault for not taking you there, for just assuming you'd care about something that for you is an abstract idea, but for us is a painful reality." Yes. So much. And it's so hard to hammer home that point to people...but that's exactly what this brave man did. 

He voices the troubles faced by people with PTSD, rape survivors in particular, and this bit especially rings true: "My whole life I had felt worthless. I always tried harder than anyone because I was afraid of what authority figures, those who had power over me, would do if I failed. That's not uncommon for rape victims, it turns out. Trauma like that changes your brain chemistry, makes you feel helpless and inadequate even in situations you're perfectly capable of handling." My terror of authority is one of the few things that still really hinders me - at work, and in unexpected situations when I become afraid of people I merely perceive to be in positions of authority, such as more experienced drivers or better-dressed people on the street. I still cower in the face of criticism, and it wounds me in a way that is far from constructive. It is cliché to say that being a perfectionist is a weakness at work, but I do think in my case that it is. It means that when something goes wrong, and is noticed, that I dissolve entirely and have difficulty rebuilding, staying in a fearful mental space for far longer than is healthy or normal. Some of this may be due to being emotionally abused by a teacher in elementary school, compounded by years of bullying, but I do often think it was driven home by rape, which instilled in me an even deeper fear of how people in power truly could hurt me. Part of me, even years later, is still ensnared by that fear, which emerges whenever there is a situation that brings up even tangentially related emotions. It's not very productive!

Then the anonymous gamer makes a key point which I've never quite elucidated in my own arguments on this topic: the difference between hurt and offense. It seems obvious, but somehow is something I struggled to make clear to people when I objected to their words and became upset. In this case, again, his words are better than mine: "Often I won't say anything, even when I'm upset, because I don't want to be negative and ruin everyone's fun. Except "ruining fun" is exactly why I dislike it when people use that word. It ruins my fun. It sucks the fun out of a game like oxygen through a blown airlock. Being raped was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I don't like to be reminded of it when I'm supposed to be enjoying myself. Imagine if someone captured your flag or dominated you in deathmatch, then rubbed in your face how your sister was killed by a drunk driver or your dad abandoned you when you were little. That's how close it cuts. People keep using the word "offended," in this discussion -- I'm not offended, I'm hurt. Hearing this word causes me emotional pain."

I'm hurt, not offended. This is what I wish I'd said, what I need to say, in so many similar situations. A little over a month ago, at a staff training retreat at work, several of us at lunch ended up talking about stalkers. I'm not sure how the topic came up - I certainly didn't introduce it. Someone in a more senior position to me mentioned how she'd been "stalked" by someone who gave her cookies and other baked goods, and how she'd not been fond of his behaviour but wanted to keep him around for the baking. She set up this supposed stalker with a friend of hers and they are close now.

I wanted to scream (but didn't; this is my boss we're talking about - and remember my issues with authority here! - it was also at work in a dining hall also crowded with staff whom I quasi-supervise). This isn't stalking we're talking about - this is an annoyance, petty behaviour. Stalking is a crime. Intimidation. Threats. Harassment. Not repeated purchase of cookies that stops when you ask nicely. I was stalked off and on for years by the man who raped me, and on a different occasion followed from my elementary school, threatened, and intimidated by a stranger as a child. Those are experiences I remember with terror - there is no humour in them and they are certainly not experiences I'd bring up as light lunchtime conversation with my colleagues. In my usual pattern, I retreated and proceeded to stew over it. I've been stewing since mid May, and it's now the end of June. It all brought me back to the inaccurate, trivializing, hurtful use of "rape" as a term to describe various virtual interactions that aren't very nice, but also aren't rape. Hurtful. I wasn't just offended by how this person, and other co-workers who mentioned having "stalkers" at various points, lightly told their stories as though talking about their first dates. I was profoundly hurt. She did not intend it, but something that terrified me for years became with this group of people a simple part of dating and courtship instead of the crime that it is. I felt jealous, confused, and angry - but most of all, hurt. And it's taken me a long time to put a finger on it, and to be able to explain to myself why I feel doubly wounded when somebody accuses me of simply being easily offended when I become upset about how people use these words.

I feel like I'm ranting at this point. I probably am. So I'll change gears. Another thing that's been on my mind these past few nights...why now? I've had enough of the "why me?" musings - they aren't productive and there is little I can do but accept that this happened to me. Happened. In the past. So why is it - "it" in this case being my past, issues of rape and bullying, trauma and the fear I always hid - hurting me more this spring than others?

This spring has been tumultuous for my family. My sister has been very ill, and our life has been turned upside-down. Things wrench inside of me because of the fear of losing her, almost every night. Simultaneously, a good friend is also struggling with mental illness that scares me - again, a feeling of loss with each night in the hospital, being overwhelmed and confused, terrified, and feeling helpless. All of this is a huge understatement. It will probably be a long time before I'll be able to really explain how this is all making me feel. One would think my mind would be wholly occupied with the daemons of its present, but instead in the long nights once I think things have subsided and I am finally about to sleep, the past awakens. I haven't had flashbacks again, thankfully, or hurt myself, but the anger and the fear from years ago has been flooding back. Why now? I've been puzzled by this. The best I can come up with is that there is some sort of a connection created by emotions in my brain.

I've been thinking about times and experiences as though they are islands, linked by bridges of emotion in my mind. Currently there is fear, anger, loss, hopelessness relating to my current situation and the fear of losing people whom I love. In the past, there was fear, anger, hopelessness, and so forth while being raped, and dealing with the aftermath of it, but those feelings were so intense I couldn't name them or recognize them at the time. The best I can surmise is that right now there is a bridge of sorts between those feelings, and that something inside of me is crossing over.

It's not fun. Hell no. But I am not as overpowered by my own feelings as I have been in the past. Somehow I know what they are now. Perhaps it's writing about them; perhaps it's time. In my Memories Series poem (which I posted last night while somewhat working through this post in my head), one line reads "Memories are fluid, and engulf me when it’s right \ To look at all the shattered glass that’s gathered in my knees. \ I pull out every shard of glass, and I keep up my fight: \ A fight that’s set on fire by my memories." Lately I've been wondering whether this is simply the time that my subconscious has chosen for pulling out at least some of the splinters that have been hurting me for years, which have become so engrained that I've become accustomed to them. Perhaps when I've been hurting so intensely because of other things in my life, I have the fuel to work through elements of my past that I usually keep buried so that I don't let those feelings free.

At work I jotted down today some things, just fragments, metaphorically linking this again to pulling out splinters: "healing is like pulling out deeply embedded splinters. Bleeding is inevitable even if the nerve endings have long since been severed. It's like unplugging something. It hurts unimaginably and acutely but is cleaner and less toxic than leaving a fragment to keep stabbing for eternity, fermenting, turning gangrenous inside of me."As a child I was always petrified of getting small slivers in my feet from running barefoot on the back deck, and I remember keenly the fear of my mother attempting to root out some stubborn splinters of wood, reluctantly and as gently as she could, with a sterilized needle. Now I know that slivers have to come out. Perhaps now is a time to release the splinters of wood, the slivers of the past, which have been catalyzed by my present fear. I can only hope that this won't be too dramatic or pull me down for too long.

Memories, and thoughts for something I'm working on

I've been working lately on a piece of some sort about a comment somebody made at work a few weeks ago about stalking...a comment that is still eating at my mind with the unfairness of it all, and how people can live so close to one another, and yet in different words dictated by memory. As a historian, memory is a powerful thing to me. As a survivor, even more so.

On that note, even though I haven't figured out the post I've been meaning to post since the middle of May, here's a poem series. It hurts but it's hopeful; it shows how far I've come in the long lifespan of this blog.

2004: I will always have these memories

Sometimes I try to hide from my memories,

Stuff them in a box in the closet

And crawl down under my bed.

Running a race where I'm going nowhere,

Running away from the thoughts in my head.

Chorus:

Memories come calling to find me every night

Buzzing through my brain like a horde of angry bees.

I try to cover up my heart but they still rip off a bite.

I will always always always have these memories.

Killing me so quietly, drowning me in my own thoughts.

I pack all of my fears away but still they hurt me lots and lots.

Always running, never sleeping, never knowing what to do.

Always doubting, always crying, wondering if my thoughts are true.

(Repeat Chorus)

Simple silence is inviting; conversations scare me more

When I just wish with all my heart to be just like I was before.

You claim that thinking cannot kill; I don't believe a bit of it.

Apologies are powerless; I really couldn't give a shit.

(Repeat Chorus)

And still you say you understand the nightmares that have captured me.

I could describe the horror but I know that still you wouldn't see.

My brain is in a whirlwind with the bottom flying to the top.

There's nothing I wouldn't give just for this awful hell to stop.

(Repeat Chorus)

But the memories follow everywhere as I climb this ladder high.

I stop on every rung, and I always ask the question, "why?"

Thinking feels so poisonous, the snake that bit could never know

All the pain that it can bring to ignore when I say "no."

(Repeat Chorus)

Memories come chasing me, so vivid, so hard to ignore.

Why oh why can't my life be as simple as it was before?

I try to just convince myself, it didn't happen, not to me.

A little part inside myself is crying out, this couldn't be.

(Repeat Chorus)

I'll chase myself in circles 'til I just come to accept this pain.

I wonder: can the flowers grow with little sun and only rain?

I toss and turn and overthink and never do I really sleep

But there's so many questions with the answers buried far to deep.

(Repeat Chorus)

In and out and round about and just to hide what I am hiding.

No safety bar to catch me on the Ferris wheel that I am riding.

It's time to climb a wall that stands all cold and stone and foreboding.

I dance in circles on the ground and always my head is exploding.

(Repeat Chorus)

Sometimes I try to hide from my memories,

Stuff them in a box in the closet

And crawl down under my bed.

Running a race where I'm going nowhere.

Running away from the thoughts in my head.

***

2005: Forget regret, or suffocate in memories

Last year I tried to dig up my memories

From the dark depths of my closet

And far down under my bed.

In a whole year

I’ve finally gone somewhere

And managed to catch

The thoughts in my head.

Memories came calling to find me every night

Buzzing through my brain like a horde of angry bees.

I tried to cover up my heart but memories aren’t water-tight.

Forget regret, or suffocate in memories.

Simple silence is inviting; some things scare me very much.

I wish it didn’t hurt but still I’ll run from just a friendly touch.

But finally I’m sleeping, having dreams that might make sense to you

But when you ask me what I want I really haven’t got a clue.

The big bad wolf’s stopped chasing me and now I can release this pain.

It’s winter but the sun’s come out to shine a rainbow through the rain.

But sometimes still I wonder how my life has changed because of it:

I try but can’t remember back before the pain had truly hit.

I’m just another paper doll, a carbon copy in a line

And I just wish that moment didn’t have the power to define

The pain that’s in the craters that follow everywhere I go

The craters that he tore and dug when he ignored when I said, “no.”

There’s skin now on my shoulders and I go to school without the fear

That I’ll forget and hurt myself when past and present smudge and smear.

My clock is going clockwise and I know I see the exit sign.

When I look at the past two years, it’s tangled, but it’s still a line.

***

2007: I built my fight from shattered memories

Memories are fluid, and engulf me when it’s right

To look at all the shattered glass that’s gathered in my knees.

I pull out every shard of glass, and I keep up my fight:

A fight that’s set on fire by my memories.

I build a fort of crystal shards

That puncture everyone I tell

I do not want to hurt them

But my silence always screams of hell.

The world is getting closer

And I’m finally back to live in it

But all these touches hover

‘til the memory hides me under it.

I don’t know where the hurt seeps in

But still I want to patch that hole

A hurt as hard and chilling

As a tongue stuck to a frozen pole

My freckles all are separate now

But still there are too much to count

But even so the memories

Outnumber them by sheer amount.

I keep the fight, take back the night

To puncture all my memories

But shards of glass are silent

And they can’t reveal what no-one sees.

I try and try and try again

To reclaim April every year

But taking back the day is hard

When no-one understands the thing I fear.

Memories are fluid and engulf me when it’s right

To pull out all the shattered glass that’s gathered in my knees.

The world is not a crystal ball

But that cannot stop my fight:

A fight with a sharp sword that’s made of memories.

***

2008: Memories might travel

Memories come calling: a sharp and savage bite

Acute and unexpected fear that brings me to my knees

I fight it, overcome it, but still on every flight

I go further but I can’t erase these memories.

You tell me snippets of your life

I’m certain we are not alone

But still, I had forgotten

Things can hurt me even far from home

I’ll try not to be frightened

But a part of me is terrified

That I will never sleep

In every hostel, every train I ride…

***

2011: I can turn around my sordid memories

The memories now are rarer, like a clatter in the night

A mirror reflecting fragments of the terror that it sees

What’s hardest now is that I know, though I have won this fight

For others, fear is realer than my memories.

Sometimes life is strange and silent;

Sometimes memories follow here.

Sometimes everything I see

Morphs into everything I fear.

Memories that snag into

The tapestry I’m knitting up

Come and paralyze my throat

Like pebbles in a sippy cup.

Monsters underneath the bed

Disperse when they see morning light

But monsters dwelling in my head

Are unreliable in their fright.

Day to day I’ll never know

When memories will swallow me.

A captive in a sunless cell

Will never know when she’ll be free

But always still I’ll live my life.

With dreams so big, I’ll voyage through

The gorge that jumps into my path

To strangle everything I do.

The fingers tightening ‘round my neck

Don’t know that they are powerless:

Now I can turn each touch I fear

Into a loving, safe caress.

The memories now are rarer, like a clatter in the night,

And now they quickly disappear like an evasive breeze.

I may never understand them, but I know the future’s bright:

I can win any war armed with my memories.

Mouthfuls

The hardest thing sometimes about being a twin is when the bond feels like it's been broken.
She keeps trying to end her life. I cannot let her. She doesn't want to speak to me, because I stopped her.
She wrote a note to say goodbye, and never mentioned me. Everyone else thinks this is a cruel oversight, on her part. But I think it's because she knows she didn't need to say anything at all.