Meanings

I invest meaning in things that ought not be meaningful. Like in tomorrow. Abstract, socially constructed regimentation of the solar calendar. I am trying not to be scared, triggered. Trying to use my emotions as productive energy. I cannot be eaten by a date, an arbitrary thread, imaginary line linking the present to the past. I will not be smothered by an abstraction.

3652

That's how many days I've had this blog for (for the mathematically challenged, that's 10 years, less a day).

I'm doing a PhD in history. Studying change is something that I do. Studying stagnation, too. In 10 years I've seen change in the world, and I've seen it stagnate and go flat. Nothing changes, yet nothing stays the same. Same old story, what's the use of tears? What's the use of praying if there's nobody who hears? Turning, turning, turning turning turning through the years.

When I started this blog, it was all about me; my healing, my pain, my challenges. It was a private place; my mother knew where I kept my diary, but didn't know where to find me on the internet. Now, it's about bigger things, although the political is still very personal for me. Ten years ago, rape culture certainly existed, but wasn't labelled as such in popular discourse. The internet has given us a place for dialogue and social growth, but it is also a minefield, a sinkhole, a crevasse. Ten years ago, a teen was raped, but cell phones had no cameras, teens did not have Facebook, and text messaging was rare. Today, one click of a camera changes and ends lives. Perhaps it can bring justice, but not before bullying, stigma, and constant torment. The aftermath has changed immensely over the past ten years, and I cannot fathom how my horrors could have manifested themselves differently had they occurred in 2013, not 2003. Turning, turning, turning through the years; minutes into hours and the hours into years. Nothing changes, nothing ever can. Round and round the roundabout and back where you began.

Violence today has taken over the media; bombs went off in Boston at the finish line of the marathon, exploding bodies and changing and ending lives. Got me thinking about violence, and how we react to it as a society. Sudden violence brings sudden attention; everyone is asking whether the people they know in Boston are OK, clarifying the situation on the news. But not all violence is as explosive. People talk about rape how they talk about faraway violence in faraway wars - distant, abstract, a crime against bodies that are not our own. Civilian war casualties and rape survivors are unknown, anonymous, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time; implicitly, people who did something wrong. Ten years ago, I hid my pain, my shame, my fear. I pushed it away from my mind for as long as I can. I talked about SARS, the illness that was terrifying Toronto, and not about the social ills that had hurt me. I talked about the war in Iraq, and not about the war and violence that is wrought daily on people closer to home. I had no words to talk about how I was hurting, and could only talk allegorically, abstractly.

Shootings, bombings, even natural disasters bring dialogue. It strikes at people that it could have been them, somebody they knew. And people talk about that. Rape is different. We hear about teens who have had their lives torn apart, but if people are thinking, "that could have been me," we don't say so. People talk about an abstract girl, usually one who did something wrong, a girl who should have, could have, done something differently. That girl is also me, could also be you. We are surrounded every day by people who have experienced horrible violence, and we are silent. Around the world, people die in wars with nary a mention in the media. But there is a war on our own soil, in every country in the world, and it's not the "war on terror." We are at war, in terror, changing our lives to avoid rape, averting our gaze while talking about rape in the assumption that it always happens to someone else, never to me, never to you. Invisible, silent, anonymous, insidious violence. It is probably eating somebody near you, consuming from within.

We see the blood, the physical manifestations of violence in Boston. But the explosions in the heart of a survivor, the daily amputations of parts of the soul - those are invisible. The marathon runners who witnessed and experienced trauma in Boston today will have a venue to talk about their fears, their pain. All violence is horrible, yet some violence is privileged in its social reception.

I do not mean here to silence the violence experienced by civilians targeted in war or terrorism, but there are parallels. We are abstract and silent on the massacres of people of colour in places far away. We are abstract and silent on the sexual violence faced primarily by women in places close to home. The emotional rawness that we see in discourses of non-sexual violence affecting people of privilege is absent when violence affects us at our most marginalized. Rape culture is silencing survivors, enabling and perpetuating violence. I have not lived in a war-torn nation. I fear that it may be appropriative to suggest that rape culture is a war, so this parallel is certainly problematic. Yet, with the barrage of abuses it entails, rape culture situates women's bodies, and other bodies that don't conform to hegemonic masculinity, in an abstract nation, far away. Like war, rape culture normalizes violence that happens in a far-away, abstract place. Like war, rape culture gives a louder voice to the perpetrators of violence than to its victims.

I've survived the past ten years. Personally, I've moved a long ways. I've won a battle. I am, and we are, still at war.

Must we always be at war?

Round and round and back where you began.

Adventures in mindfulness, part 4, or so.

The mindfulness group I've been attending all term ended tonight. I'll miss it. It was the hardest thing I've done in a long time, but really rewarding.

Dissociating has been my go-to coping strategy when things are really bad, for a good 10 years now. A few years ago, I learned to at least control it, and use it as an intentional coping strategy rather than a cop-out from my subconscious. I could get away from pain by taking a brief vacation from my mind and body, somehow. It's hard to explain if you've never dissociated. Five years ago, I managed to control flashbacks, so that I would dissociated into nothingness, rather than terror. This term, I've been working on being present, and riding with things that are painful. There were nights when that was crazily hard, but I got through. 

This term has been a bit like trying to fix a hole in a knitting pattern. In order to go back, you have to rip some stitches, and that can be tricky, as there is a risk that everything might unravel. Even once you do succeed, sometimes there is still a kink in the thread where the problem was. It takes surrounding the messy part with clean parts to make the messy part blend in and not look so significant. I unravelled some of my emotions a bit this term, and have been re-knitting them. It still looks bumpy, but I'm hoping to have a well-formed sock in the end.

This morning, this appeared on my Facebook:

"The Day I Taught How Not to Rape"

I had several amazing teachers in high school. But this was not a conversation that we had. Ever. It was something that didn't happen to "people like us."

I can't help but wonder if this sort of discussion could have saved me from so many years of struggle.

Latest Case in the News...

I've been meaning for a few days now to post about the Steubenville case. I have, however, been too overwhelmed by other things to put my thoughts together coherently.

Other bloggers have done it, and quite well. See, for instance, this powerful post: http://rantagainsttherandom.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/so-youre-tired-of-hearing-about-rape-culture/

Of course she doesn't touch on everything - rape culture is far more exhaustive than any one post can portray it as. It is so insidious it is hard to sum up in writing.

I think the thing that hits me, when I read about Steubenville in the media, is that it's so much more than this case. This is the case that went public. These dramas are playing out around the world in courtrooms...and those are the minority that ever make it to court. Rape culture surrounds us. This is just its latest public manifestation, and we can watch people be outraged for a couple of weeks before it is slipped back under the rug, invisible, insidious, omnipresent, and hurtful.

I am so triggered tonight. I can feel everything happening to my body. I haven't felt that way in a long time.

I am a survivor and I have healed a good deal. But some nights are still hard, hard, hard.

It's been almost 10 years. One of my students is harassing me, following me, and it brings me back to 10 years ago, when things were starting to escalate...the media today, portraying Steubenville (more coherent post about that some other point!), saying all the horrible things I said to myself in the days, weeks, months, years I did not report or talk about it.

It gets easier but dammit, it just doesn't go away.

I am safe and taking care of myself, but feeling too many things to process them.

[Edited to add: it's morning now, and with the help of a few good friends and one squishy orange cat, I stayed grounded all night. It was surprising and scary for me to feel so bad, after so long - but I am OK and going to distract myself today with work, as a form of self care]

Survivor-friendly feminist spaces

I've seen tips on the internet lately for how feminist spaces can be made safer for people of various backgrounds/experiences/social locations/identities. As a survivor of sexual assault, I've had several experiences in feminist spaces where I felt silenced because of my experiences, or where I was triggered in a space that was meant to be safe. So here goes...a potentially growing list of dos and don'ts, written with the assumption of an audience who already has (loosely defined) feminist values. The "feminist spaces" I am talking about here includes discussion groups, events, committee meetings...a range of things.

"Safe Space" is a tricky concept. As one survivor reminded me when I asked for input for this post, for some of us, there is no such thing as a truly safe space. For this reason, we are talking here about "safer" rather than "safe" spaces, and recognizing that there can be a continuum.

Tips for creating survivor-friendly feminist spaces:

- Include trigger warnings/content warnings when advertising events.
To arrive at a meeting, for example, to learn that discussing a rape prevention initiative is on the agenda can be overwhelming for some survivors. Wherever possible, make sure that potential attendees know about the plans for a meeting, the content of a film screening, and so forth. At some meetings, it may be helpful to sandwich such discussions between breaks; this gives people who would prefer not to be involved in such discussions the option of stepping out more easily, then rejoin the meeting for parts that don't contain potential triggers. Remember that, for some survivors, just discussing sexual assault can be triggering, even if there are no graphic details whatsoever.

- Recognize that anybody can be a survivor.
Women, men, genderqueer folk, and people who identify in other ways are survivors. Assuming that only the cis women in your group are survivors silences many other individuals [partly for this reason, I am using a gender-neutral singular "they" as a pronoun to describe survivors of all gender identities throughout this blog post]. Survivors may be privileged or marginalized in a wide variety of other ways. Sexual violence is a marginalizing experience, so someone who is privileged in other respects may feel extremely marginalized by their experiences. This doesn't mean that survivors shouldn't have to check our own privileges - just that it is another dimension of privilege of which everyone should be aware.

- Never assume that a survivor is comfortable talking about their experiences.
Personally, I write quite willingly and regularly about sexual assault, though very rarely about my own experiences in any detail. I have difficulty, however, speaking about it in front of other people. Just because somebody is an activist and is somewhat open about being a survivor does not mean that they want to discuss it. For some survivors, it is easier to communicate in writing, and/or; if you're looking for input from survivors, allow us the option of contributing to a discussion in alternative ways. Many survivors will not be comfortable with other people knowing that they have survived sexual assault, and nobody should be forced to disclose whether or not they are a survivor.

- Consider having a physical space where survivors can go to take a break from a main event.
Many feminist groups have limited space available. Often, a main meeting space is designated as "safe space" and operates as a safe space quite effectively. However, there are survivors who may become triggered by posters (for example, "No Means No" campaign posters - even when the overall aim of these images is positive, it can still be overwhelming to be faced with posters, books, pamphlets, and stickers with statistics and images about something that is traumatic) and media in some rooms. If you have the resources, offering a second break-away room can be invaluable. Other possibilities include having seating in your meeting space where a survivor would not directly face posters or other media about sexual assault. 

- Remember that women, even feminist women, can perpetrate sexual assault.
This means that even in a designated safe space, people may not feel entirely safe. Being told that we are in a safe space even if we don't feel that way can be demeaning. Recognize that members of your group, of all genders, could have unchecked privilege surrounding sexual violence.

- Know that not all survivors feel that they have really "survived" and that many of us are working through difficult parts in our healing.
I use "survivor" to refer to any person, of any gender, who has experienced sexual assault. It is not perfect, but it will have to do for now, for lack of another word that is not clinical or demeaning. Not everyone is comfortable with that vocabulary - if someone prefers to refer to themself as a victim, that is their right. Allow people to name their own experiences. Remember as well that being present at a feminist event and intellectually knowing that sexual assault is not the fault of the survivor does not mean that said survivor emotionally does not carry grief or shame with them. For some, "survivor" may be an identity or status; for others, it is not.

- Allow survivors to take the lead on issues surrounding sexual violence, if and when they are comfortable.
If you are someone without lived experience of sexual assault, and you lead a feminist group, consider inviting survivors to take the lead on survivor-related campaigns you run, to the extent that they are comfortable doing so. Never push a survivor to lead an initiative - it is too draining for many people to be that involved with their own trauma.

- Check in with people before, during, and after events.
You don't know what history people bring to your group/event/space. Offering the opportunity to check in, as part of a group and individually with a facilitator, can mean the world to survivors who feel uncomfortable.

- Consider how other elements of privilege and marginalization affect a survivor's experiences.
Violence can, and often does, intersect with any and all elements of a survivor's life. This goes for gender, race, and sexual orientation, but also for less obvious manifestations of power. A survivor who is poor might not be able to afford the self-care that is often suggested for them. Many survivors feel unsafe in spaces that police fat or disabled bodies. These intersections are very often invisible, so for an anti-oppressive space, it is important to be aware of all forms of oppression that can affect survivors, and make a safe space free from racist, classist, able-ist, fat-phobic, heterosexist, and other oppressive comments.

- Recognize that violence is not abstract for us.
Someone who has not experienced violence might be able to talk about it in a detached, political or academic way. It is personal. Melissa McEwan on Shakesville says, "It is unfair to ask a woman to leave aside her personal experience and discuss feminist issues in the abstract. You are discussing the stuff of her life. Asking her to "not make it personal" is to ask her to wrench her womanhood from her personhood. Don't play Devil's advocate. Seriously. Just don't." This is the case for survivors. Some of us can leave our personal experiences aside, and some of us cannot - but how we use those experiences is entirely up to us, as individuals.

Other things to remember:
- Our feminist values may or may not be linked to our experiences as a survivor.
- Our experiences as survivors are unique; please avoid comparing one survivor's experiences with another.
- Everyone has the potential to experience sexual violence.

Please help to build and refine this list - please let me know if you have additions, suggestions, etc.

Adventures in mindfulness, part...I forget

Oddest injury ever, and one that ought to only happen in movies:

I was doing a body scan (mindfulness exercise) yesterday morning, when my foster cat came to check out what I was up to. When he snuggled against my face, I sneezed, prompting him to swat at my nose. I am now sporting a cute little scratch on my schnoz.

There are certain things that it's hard to be mindful through, and that was one of them. I had to stop my practice for the morning and go and do first aid. Dang. Mindfulness and cats can only mix to a certain extent.

Mellow Yellow: Adorable, but too inquisitive to be a good mindfulness buddy!

Privilege and Protests: A Reflection

I am unsure whether to post this, as it likely reeks considerably of privilege. But this blog is a place for my thoughts and voice - so I post with the caveat that I realize that I am on unceded land; I am middle class; I am white, educated, stably housed. At the same time, I am still a survivor. I post tonight as a mix of all of these parts of myself and my experiences.

I went to the Women's Memorial March today in Vancouver's Downtown East Side. For those who aren't familiar with it, the DTES is known as "Canada's Poorest Postal Code" and is quite a dangerous place for women, yet also a vibrant community with a completely different style from the rest of the city. It's more than just rough around the edges; for those of us who are used to a more privileged life, it's uncomfortable. As one woman, Betsey Turtle Bruyere, says in her video, "Be uncomfortable. But listen. Learn. No apologies here."

This was my first time participating in this march, and I had been expecting something more similar to the Take Back the Night marches I'd participated in in Toronto and London. The Toronto march takes place in a different low-income community each year, so that women from across the city have a chance to reclaim their streets. London's march is more centralized and less grassroots in its feel, and has more conflict between the "women's bodies not for sale" and the "sex workers' rights" chants. Toronto's march is overwhelmingly in favour of sex workers' rights, as was today's march in Vancouver.

I hung towards the back of the march with some friends. Partly this was unintentional as it was just where we happened to be when people started marching; however, I didn't feel it would be appropriate for me to rush to the front of the march and lead chants the way I would in another setting. I live outside this community, and I have a level of safety that the women who organized the march do not have. We are marching to honour women who have gone missing, and who have been murdered. Even though I am a survivor of violence as well, my experiences are starkly different from those of Vancouver's missing women. I don't mean in terms of the violence we experienced, as I don't believe in a hierarchy of whose experience is more horrifying. But there is a key difference in that I did survive. I am here. I have privilege through that. Privilege over those who did not survive what happened to them, and yet, I don't have the privilege of having not had to survive. Perhaps that is a right, not a privilege. But I digress.

After my friends left the march to go to various other commitments they had, I started to get a bit emotional; without friends to distract me, the realities behind the march sunk in. It was cold and gloomy, and I began to hurt a bit; I can't quite describe it. I had a card in my pocket that a woman gave me earlier in the march: 

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." You must do the thing you think you cannot do."

At this point women were singing a First Nations drum song; I know little about this music and don't honestly know if it would have been appropriate for me to join the singing, as a white person, so I kept silent. At the same time, the card in my pocket made me feel like I belonged, to some extent. Not as part of the DTES community, but to an acknowledgement of women's survival. This is getting very sappy, but that's how I felt it at the moment. I don't belong in that circle of women, but they were willing to let people in from the outside without asking questions, and to give us cards to affirm our ability to survive as well. Would there be the same crossover at events regarding violence against women outside the Downtown East Side? The card for me was a grounding object for the last part of my time there, and one that I needed very much; it's something I will hold on to. I don't know the woman who was distributing those cards, but I wish I could thank her for giving those affirmations to those of us who wanted them.

I think about privilege a fair bit, in both my academic work and my day-to-day life. It's something that troubles me, as I have a lot of privilege on many levels. In the circles that I move in, the more marginalized parts of my identity aren't even particularly marginal. So privilege is always an undercurrent. It rarely hits me quite the way it did today, however.

After feeling uncomfortable (not to mention that I was getting cold and hungry!) for about 15 minutes after my friends left, I decided to head off even though the march was still going on.  As I do every so often when I'm feeling a bit emotionally unsteady, I headed for the nearest wool shop to admire yarn. This particular one was warm and colourful, and had the added benefit of a friendly cat. I got to chatting with the owner, since I really felt that I needed some human connection to stay stable. Turned out that I didn't get what I needed there...this particular woman was quite opposed to such a march happening. It was slowing down the buses in front of her store, and besides, if women didn't want to get murdered, they shouldn't be out on the streets like that, should they? I asked her further what her thoughts were on the area; after all, the people in the DTES have been there for a lot longer than her shop has. Those people are bad for business. They have markets - of used goods, you know, not the sort of thing my customers would buy. My customers don't feel comfortable walking through the area when they have their market. She spoke to me with the assumption that she'd found a sympathetic ear to her grievances. I was to stunned to respond, and left the shop without buying anything.

I don't share the views of this shopkeeper, of course. But I do have the same privileges she has. At the end of the march, I could find some sort of solace - however tenuous - in a local shop, and not have my presence in the area questioned or policed. I could go get coffee and soup to warm myself up. I could go home in the evening and navel-gaze on my blog in a safe space.

Women - united - we'll never be divided they chant at many marches. But is this true? The One Billion Rising campaign has many detractors among feminists - see, for example, Natalie Gyte at the Huffington Post and the multitude of comments on her post. There are problems with One Billion Rising, I'll concede that. But at the same time, what else do we have? It has momentum. The Women's Memorial March is publicized on the One Billion Rising webpage (notably, the publicity does not seem to run in the other direction, and I'd be interested in knowing what politics there are behind this). Yes, One Billion Rising is run by people with privilege, and that's problematic. But at the same time, is it fair to say which survivors can and cannot organize? Gyte criticizes the premise of healing by dancing - and yet, for many people, there is significant power in dancing. For me, there is so much power in dancing that I have trouble doing so. She criticizes the idea of "rising" - but if we don't rise, will we sink? Or stagnate? To me, "rise" in this context does not mean to pull oneself up by the bootstraps, but rather, to refuse to be silenced.

When they say to rise, I think of Maya Angelou:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Even when we protest, we are divided. Even for the privileged, it hurts. I want us all to rise together, to survive together - but I cannot fathom how.

Adventures in Mindfulness (part 3?)

Not much to reflect on today - I fell asleep!

My conclusion is that if my body wants to sleep, rather than be mindful, I shall let it. So I had two brief naps this evening, in lieu of body scanning. Oh well. I did also go for a lovely run.