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.

Twas brillig
and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogroves
And the momeraths outgrabe.

Something terrible has happened
and every part of me is exploding with fear and grief.

Beware my thoughts, her absent eyes, the beeping, and the tears.
Every pill I'd pull from her
and take myself instead.

This is so close to what I could have written. I don't like regret as a sentiment; it's too final.  But the muddled-ness and confusion, the guilt, the attempts to forget...this woman has hit the nail on the head.

http://thegloss.com/sex-and-dating/i-regret-not-pressing-charges-against-my-rapist-212/comment-page-1/#comment-404047

What did homophobia have to do with being raped?

This is more pre-work to our TEACH storytelling workshop, which I wrote 5 days prior to the workshop itself. For the record, I still haven't managed to tell aloud any reworkings of my story for the group - more about that later.

Offside - this is my 50th public post!

Bear with me here - this is personal stuff, tough stuff. I don't usually think about connections between my own experiences or try to detangle things, so I would love comments/constructive criticism if anybody does read this.

TW for non-graphic discussion of rape

What did homophobia have to do with being raped?

When it happened, I didn't see any connections. Just pain, shame, fear, and confusion. Now the links are more obvious. Homophobia was a catalyst, not a cause - in my case, rape was not a specifically homophobic crime - and it was one of the biggest hurdles that kept me silent.

In my first year of high school, fitting in was paramount. Boys were a sudden new feature of my perplexing new social landscape. I knew that admitting that I was interested in them only as friends, and that I instead harboured a crush on the girl who sat next to me in science class, would be social suicide. It would mean a return to the bullying that had followed me from school to school for five years and which I hoped desperately to escape.

So when my sister told of a guy who she and a friend had a crush on, I thought it best to play along. I flirted back, awkwardly, and kept mum through fear when he first began to touch me in the halls. Saying no would, I thought, out me right away. And telling a teacher? After years of bullying from students and teachers alike, I was reluctant to trust them. Besides, he was acting the way I believed older high school boys were meant to behave. My response was to act like a typical teen girl; that is, to giggle and play along. I hoped that would let me maintain for my classmates the illusion of being straight. To me, it was a performance. For him, it was real. I didn't know how dangerous that could be.

The situation escalated. He pursued other girls as well, but they stood up for themselves. I was too scared to, and didn't fight him off when he casually but inappropriately touched me at my locker, my heart pounding and my insides shriveling up with shame. I'd sacrifice the private parts of my body to keep my real crushes private and protect my fledgling friendships. At the same time, I felt like a traitor to myself, and to my feminist values. I started to separate my body from my mind.

In early April of that year, I made plans to come out. A good friend was scheduled to visit from out of town over the Easter long weekend, and I planned to come out to her to test the waters. The idea was that if that went well, I'd tell my whole family at our upcoming Passover Seder. None of that ever happened.

The Wednesday before that weekend, the boy I'd feared and flirted with raped me after school.

My friend never visited that weekend; fears or a flu epidemic kept her home. I couldn't come out to her as practice. Besides, I felt guilty and tainted, fearing that I'd let this happen; that I was a phoney lesbian; that other women would shun me. I came to believe that, perhaps, I had deserved it.

After that, I couldn't tell my family. Besides, my mind was reeling and my body was so detached that I would touch my own hands numbly, doubting that they were mine. As the months passed, I began to wonder if I was even real. I hurt myself, to test if I existed and to see if I could feel more pain. Mostly I felt nothing but numbness. When I did feel anything, I felt grief for what I had lost: the sanctity of my body and the queer community which, by flirting with the boy who raped me, I thought I had betrayed.

On the second anniversary of the rape, I wrote a speech about feminism which a friend of mine read for my grade eleven English class. I told of how rape had reinforced my feminist views, and outed myself as a rape survivor. Yet I emphatically denied that I was a lesbian, telling my classmates that it was something I had thought about but that it didn't really describe me. I don't know what they made of that but it was, to an extent, true. At that point, I identified as asexual, thinking any hope I had of sexuality had been destroyed by rape, and denying the attractions that I felt towards women on the grounds that I didn't deserve those feelings. Now, I feel that asexuality wasn't the word or concept that I needed, but at the time it was a way for me to acknowledge for myself that I was certainly not straight. It also justified my own decision to trample my own same-sex attractions.

Overcome by pangs of jealousy when a friend came out as a lesbian, I called a queer youth helpline. They listened to me. They assured me that my past could not dictate my identity. The young woman at the end of the line never doubted me or denied my pain. She just said, "that's rough" and let me talk all I wanted. The guilt and uncertainty that had paralyzed me for two years began to melt away. I could almost feel my body thaw. It was not easy. Over the past few years I have felt and lived through the pain that I had denied by living separately from my own body. Dissociation, I have since learned, compounds physical pain and saves it for later, like a systemic burning regurgitation of an unwanted meal. That's not to say that I don't still sometimes dissociate - but it's a coping strategy I use when it's the safest thing to do at the time, rather than by default. I no longer hurt myself.

Days after calling the helpline, I came out to my immediate family, and in the weeks that followed, to some close friends. I was lucky to be surrounded by accepting and loving people. My fears of rejection and further abuse were unfounded. I only wish that I'd squarely faced homophobia and my fears of its potential impact before it blinded me to the positive forces that were with me, and within me, all along.

Thoughts before storytelling workshop

A few days ago we had a storytelling workshop at TEACH. Here's a piece I wrote a couple of weeks beforehand.

***

We have a storytelling workshop booked for later this month. I've been telling the same story, with just a handful of adjustments, for six years now. It's become engrained. I talk about positives: a loving family; finding community as a young adult; the freedom of finally finishing high school.

I hardly mention bullying, much less homophobic bullying. The kids excluded me, and I excluded myself, to varying degrees, for as long as I can remember. It's part of being an imaginative, intellectual kid. And the more excluded you are, the more awkward you become. And the circle continues.

I remember a kid calling my t-shirt "gay" when I was nine, at day camp. I told him that people could be gay, but shirts couldn't - was he stupid? - but that just made the other (bigger, cooler, sportier, more confident, prettier, smarter?) kids laugh. It hurt most when girls laughed at me, when I just wanted to impress them and join them.

So when the kids at my new school that fall called my outdated children's clothing "gay," I didn't speak up. I changed my clothes to something tighter and less childish, hated myself for giving in, and compromised that I'd wear only purple for the rest of the school year, just to keep some control.

The kids still teased me.

It was almost two years before someone next called me "gay." I was eleven years old, at camp - an all-girls overnight camp, this time - and one of my richer, prettier, more confident, and better-dressed cabin-mates called me a lesbian. I forget how it came up, other than that it was somehow part of the card game we were playing and "lesbian" basically was intended to be synonymous with "loser." I said that lesbians were cool and that I didn't want to play anymore. And that was it for any hope of friendship, or even peaceful cohabitation, with my cabin-mates. They didn't know what "lesbian" was other than an insult, when to me it was a word that I knew described some of my childhood role models. Unfortunately, I didn't know how to fight back.

That was really just the tip of the bullying iceberg...

What's this? Another post in less than a month?

I think I've revived all my old posts, minus a few that I felt were inappropriate to keep now that I've made my blog visible. Just as an aside, anything that appears on this blog has the potential to be upsetting, minus the few-month period where I made some posts public on the illusion that this was a travel blog.

At any rate, I recently finished reading Alice Sebold's memoir, Lucky, and one quotation really resonated with me and reminded me of a poem I wrote years and years ago that I never posted here (I wrote a lot more poetry than is in the archives of this blog - most of it wasn't worth posting, even based on the somewhat grandiose self-serving criteria of the teenager that I was).

She wrote, "I live in a world where the two truths coexist; where hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand" (p. 243). I think that's the answer I was looking for in 2004.

Fractured Truths

April 7^th, 2004

I have two strong hands,

And they’re stronger than you think.

Strong enough to take the truth

And pull it into two pieces,

One to hold in each hand.

It’s still the truth,

And nothing but the truth.

The whole truth? Perhaps not,

But it’s not as if anybody

Really knows the difference.

I’m not a liar. There’s no wrong

In splitting my past into two parcels

And sharing it around how I like.

And if I use my mouth

And take a bite to keep,

Is there anything wrong with that?

I have two hands, one mouth, and one truth.

Why can’t I split it?

Some timetravelling tonight...

I haven't updated here in over three years.Welcome back.

I wrote this essay/speech seven years ago. Seventeen-year-old me is in a sense worlds different from how I am today, but simultaneously exactly the same. Then, I wrote it as a response to a class debate on feminism, not realizing the reaction it would cause from my classmates, teacher, principal, and even the school superintendent. Now, I am less concerned about a reaction than about having a place, years on, to share once again. Several years later, I might phrase things somewhat differently, and it would likely be more academic in tone. The sentiment, however, is exactly the same.

To share with whom? I frankly have no idea. Perhaps the blogosphere, but likely not. If anybody is out there, reading, then say hello.

Here goes...

**trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault**

Let Each Girl Grow To Become a Phenomenal Woman: Why I Am A Feminist

April 16^th, 2005

“I should never be able…to hand you after an hour’s discours a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantle-piece forever” ~ Virginia Woolf.

I will, however, try very hard to convince you of my plight as a feminist, as Virginia Woolf did for me in A Room of One’s Own.

***

I am a feminist. I was raised and educated as a feminist, but that is certainly not the sole basis for my feminism. I consider becoming a feminist to be a personal decision; it can be influenced by outside factors, but the final piece of the puzzle rests in a person’s heart. I know what I want, and I am working toward it. My feminism is not based on my feminist education, my female role models, or even my realization that I am not entirely safe in the world. It is the convergence of all of my social values, my present reality, the story of my past, and my views of the world that make me a feminist. I am proud to be a feminist.

Some people like to point out that I was raised without a male role model, but that is neither true, nor would it mean that I hate men. I absolutely do not hate men. I did grow up without a father, but there were still enough men in my life for me not to develop the idea that men were violent. I was never suspicious of men; on the contrary, I frequently wondered what would happen if a man I met was my father, and I usually decided that while it would be quite agreeable, I liked my life enough as it was. My male role models were gentle and kind to me and to other girls and women. Men can be feminists too. A feminist can be any person of any race, sex, or sexual orientation.

I have often heard remarks that I do not “dress like a feminist”. What, might I ask, does a feminist dress like? Is a feminist supposed to fade into the woodwork and hide her whole body under clothing so that men cannot mistake her as a sex object? Or is she supposed to dress in clothes that are as revealing as possible to prove that she is proud of her sexuality? Or should she dress as eclectically as possible, so she can let the world know that she is not afraid of being different? I think a feminist can fit any combination of these descriptions; she should dress however she likes, and not try to live up to standards that she does not support. My clothes match if I can be bothered to match them, and are as modest or immodest as I wish, depending on how self-conscious I feel on a particular day. I disagree with any idea that only women who wear certain types of clothing are “real” feminists.

I also do not fit the stereotype of the butch woman who plays hockey. I have never, ever, simultaneously worn skates and held a hockey stick, and I have no intention to. I do not see any reason to play traditionally male sports just to prove that I am as tough as a man. I also do not see any reason to fight, to push people around, or to attempt to claw my way to the top of any sort of a chain. I can be a successful woman and be good at what I do without living on the top of the world and hurting other people to get there. A strong woman should not need to hurt other people to get where she needs; she can get there without sacrificing the dignity of other people. A feminist does not necessarily have to be richer or louder than a man; she just needs to know what she wants and know how to get there, wherever it may be.

I have read the newspaper ever since I could read. Every so often, I would see an article that talked about how a woman was raped or injured by a man. It upset me. I did not want to be a part of the so-called weaker sex, but I wanted to be a woman. At school I learned about the media, and how much it degraded society. I hated the stereotypes presented in the magazines that my classmates read. I hated hearing about women in the sex trade who had to sell their bodies to survive, and were killed because there was no safe place for them. I hated the music that talked about sex, because it was usually shallow and it all sounded the same. I was sick of hearing stories about a beautiful woman lured into bed, told through toneless music designed to appeal to a man’s sexual desires rather than his musical ear. That is not what music is supposed to be about. Most of all, I hated the music, movies, and magazines that glorified violence, especially sexual violence. I did not think it was fair that the music and pop culture industry supported the hell that some people had to live through, every day of their lives.

One story in particular bothered me. A girl who was introduced to my grade seven class as Sally was assaulted because she had supposedly “implied consent” by wearing a low-cut top to a job interview. The court ruled against her, saying that it was her own fault, and that she had chosen for the assault to happen by dressing the way she had. As far as I had learned, assault is an involuntary action, and a survivor could not have simply “implied consent” with her choice of dress. It disgusted me that a woman could be hurt in the way that Sally had, and that the law would not even support her by punishing her assaulter. I have since learned that it is nearly impossible to convict a rapist; the survivor’s “character” is shredded by the defense, the people she is allowed to use as witnesses are screened, and the case is usually dropped due to lack of evidence. Ninety percent of rape trials end without a guilty verdict for the rapist. This does not mean that ninety percent of alleged rapes did not really occur; instead, it shows the gross faults in the justice system’s ability to deal with sex crimes.

My campaign to crush violence against women began two years before this violence became a suffocating part of my own life. I started writing articles for a school zine, On Target. I wrote empowering poetry and drew cartoons. I doubt that my work ever had any impact on my community, but it felt fulfilling and gave me a sense of the reality I would experience when sexual violence shattered my life on April 16^th, 2003. I do not like to delve into details, but I will admit that I no longer feel safe at school, where the attack occurred. I think that is where my feminist ideas took hold of my life more and more. I deserve to feel safe at school. As I slowly recovered and accepted that the memories I have from that terrible afternoon will always be a part of my life, I realized more and more how little my peers realized that events like this actually happen. Many people think that rape is something that happens in the movies, to people who they do not know. That is undeniably false. It had never occurred to me that these things could happen to me until I experienced them first-hand.

One person who I commend for her courage in bringing the issue of sexual violence to light is a young woman named Hanne, who posted the following empowering story on her online journal, provoking a large group of women in an online community to acknowledge that they deserve better, and creating a huge response:

After a dear friend of mine was raped a few weeks ago, I've been thinking a lot about sexual violence and how you're not supposed to talk about it.

This friend of mine who was raped recently isn't the only person I know who has endured being raped and lived through the aftermath, just the most recent. She isn't the only person I know who has had to try to figure out how to glue the broken bowl of her life back together after having it shattered by sexual violence, praying that it'll still hold water when she's done.

As I have altogether too many times in the past when other friends have become victims of rape or other sex crimes, I have wondered what I can possibly do to make it better. But I also know I can't take it back or prevent it or even really make it easier. The best thing I can do is come out and let her know that she's not alone, that there are others of us out here, that she can make it through, because I'm a rape survivor, and we do make it through.

I was thinking in the shower this morning about how many people I know -- women, men, transfolks, others -- have some sort of sexual violence somewhere in their pasts, wondering how many more people I know have some sort of sexual violence lurking in their future.

I wondered for a moment what it would look like if just for one day, everyone who had survived sexual violence were visible as a survivor, if we could actually see the extent of it, if we could all know just how very not-alone we are. I wondered how angry and sad it would make me to know. I wondered how much power there might be in the truth.

I'm not sure what to do with this, yet. But I do feel like outing myself, and encouraging other people to out themselves if they feel okay about doing so. This isn't about telling the story of what happened -- just for the record, I don't generally like to talk about it much and I get uncomfortable with other people's voyeuristic curiosity about what happened to me, although other people feel differently about telling their stories or being asked questions, and I think people should be free to place their own limits on how and with whom they want to talk about details.

This is about being public in regard to something that is normally kept a very big, very dark secret, thus ensuring that we can [not] all pretend that This Sort Of Thing Doesn't Happen To People Like You And Me.

It does happen to people like you and me. Trust me, I know.

I'm Hanne. I'm a survivor of sexual violence.

No Pity. No Shame. No Silence.

Like Hanne, I want to raise awareness and bring the issue to light without highlighting my own story, which I still find very painful to tell. However, I am stepping up and giving my point of view after realizing how many of my female classmates think that women have had equal rights to men since the 1970s. These girls are far too wrong; women still pay more money for the same services, such as the identical dry-cleaning job or haircut, than a man would pay. At last, some government officials want to fix this problem, but they are scorned by other officials who feel that the government has better things to do than protect women’s rights.

Women living in Toronto are very fortunate; we get much easier access to abortion, health care, and other social services than women in rural areas, let alone those in less progressive parts of the world. It scares me. I do not feel safe at my own high school, and yet I am considered fortunate compared to many of the world’s women. I am appalled by the political situation in the United States. I dread the day when abortions are again made illegal. Many countries are embarking on a path that will eventually take away the rights that feminists have strived for over many generations. I fear that one day, women will have no rights at all. Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale presents a terrifying depiction of a woman’s life in a future republic in what is now the United States of America. This woman’s life as a handmaid, having no rights, sexually degraded, and forbidden from anything that gives her real pleasure, is eerily close to the future that I fear the world may be approaching.

To me, a feminist has many essential roles. She must protect women’s rights from descending into a dark hole, until they are eventually forgotten and women are dismissed as no longer legally being “persons”. She must advocate for women’s rights in countries where women are still not legally recognized as citizens, and where they do not have the freedom to choose their own path in life. She must demand justice for women who are hurt in sex crimes, and have no fair justice system to turn to. Being a feminist is not about standing up and saying “I am woman, hear me roar!” It is about proving to the world through actions that women can do more than roar. We can also make change.

I am a feminist because I believe that I deserve more rights and freedoms than I currently have. One in four women experience sexual violence that is inflicted by men in their lifetimes, but hardly any men experience the same violence from women. I am one of those one in four women, and I want to change this statistic, as well as many others. I will not stop fighting for my cause until that statistic is evened out, or until violence is removed from our society altogether. I will not stop until women feel safe, and do not have to endure degrading whistles as they walk down the street. I will not stop until women and men are financially equal. I have no wish for women to be better than men, only equal. I am a feminist not to fulfill somebody else’s dream for me, not to get revenge for my past, or to make men feel as degraded and unvalued as many women have felt. I am a feminist to build a better future myself and for the girls and women who I care about.

Resources

Print Sources:

Angelou, Maya. Phenomenal Woman.

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Steward-Bantam Limited, 1985.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Frogmore: Triad/Panther Books, 1977.

Canadian Women Studies Journal/ The Linden School. On Target: Taking Aim At Violence.

Online Sources:

Australian Women’s Intra Network. International Women’s Day: A World to Win. 16 Apr. 2005.

B, Hanne. No Pity. No Shame. No Silence. 8 Mar. 2004. 16 Apr. 2005.

Tiana. Rape: It’s not your fault. 11 Oct. 2001. 16 Apr. 2005.

Self-injury, and TEACH

*TW for mentions of self-injury and sexual assault - but nothing graphic*

Why is self-injury such a closed topic at TEACH? I know full well that many of us do it, or have done it - yet there are people who are too self-conscious to wear short sleeves at meetings. Even people who tell most of their friends, who don't give a damn when rude strangers stare at their scars, and who are upfront about other parts of their lives.

Most of us have been through a lot. But yet, we don't share the aftermaths of our experiences. A few other volunteers know that I was raped in high school, but only some of those know that I struggled with PTSD and depression for years afterwards. Even fewer know that now, much later, I still have my bad days, my sleepless nights.

In our stories, we bravely bare the truth about our parents' reactions, bullying, and the violence that we experienced; sex; masturbation; first kisses; broken hearts. TEACH volunteers have stood in front of countless high school classes to discuss issues of race, sexism, media, politics, and sex changes - including some rather graphic details. But I have yet to hear someone discuss mental illness, although it is prevalent in the queer community. We vaguely touch on suicide and the social circumstances leading up to it, but usually leave out that this internal emotional turmoil has a name: depression, anxiety, personality disorders, PTSD, eating disorders...and the list goes on.

We have discussed occasionally how queer people are stigmatized by psychiatry, as diseased due to our sexuality. It is time for those of us who have experienced mental illness to name it. I would describe my experiences of mental illness and my sexual orientation as two people running from a zombie: they are separate, but sometimes they trip each other up while trying to save me from themselves.

I wonder, for how long she can eat nothing
why there's nothing she will eat except herself
or, except pills, one by one
two by two
one by one

I know only how to go
two by two
not
one by one

Toenails

Another old piece of prose from camp. This one's kinda gross, really. 

*triggers for gross mentions of feet, and other stuff*

I am a piece of toenail. If I swallowed myself, I would feel myself scratch against my esophagus, and my tongue would scream the taste of toe. I am a piece of sharp shell that once was alive and a part of me. When the sun comes out, toenails dance and separate themselves, leaving behind deserted homes: the empty, bloody sockets. But toenails are dead, perpetually death. They are a piece of life that failed and grew into a protective death-shell. Nothing tastes good on fifteen-year-old toenails; not mayonnaise, not guacamole, not whipped cream.

I am broken and ragged and sharp, a fragment of my shattered toe. I will visit reality, piece by piece. Life will mean more than broken nails. The world must accept this and refuse to put up with toe stubbing. Nails can hold the world together. Caked blood seals the crack between the fifteen-year-old toenail and the world.