Silence

I shouldn't write I shouldn't write I shouldn't write...my brain keeps telling me this since I am so obviously triggered by what has happened this past week. All the signs are there and I know my patterns pretty well, though they can still surprise me. I know a lot of people read this who might use my vulnerability in ways I can't control, who might not know they add to the grief, who are mostly respectful but also might be compelled to read this like people watch wrecks...for the juice, for the life exposed, and it doesn't make me feel safe. My safety is an illusion I cling to with both hands.

I know I go to this confessional to lay bare my emotions, for myself and in case there is someone out there who needs my clarity and help. I know the confession hurts me more and any net gain is dubious. Trauma just keeps giving and it doesn't matter what the original source or the recent event is, it doesn't matter what the specifics of this episode are. Damage is real and accumulates, and truly I don't believe it is healable. For me. I hope it is for you. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help in real life, in some subtle way. You help me, and I know it, and I appreciate it. The more quietly you do it the more I appreciate it.

I know I no longer walk around feeling like I have a visible gaping wound in my chest that shows my faintly beating heart with all of its scars. I healed that over with fifteen years of therapy with a wonderfully supportive woman. I know I forgave my Dad by visualizing a tiny flame in the ball of ice that lay in my pelvis blocking me from a healthy sexuality for decades. That tiny flame did melt that ice, but only just. What helped the most with him was looking at his wedding photo, where both he and my Mom looked so innocently nineteen, with no possible idea what their lives would bring. He didn't mean to do anything to hurt me, but was a product of his own damage. If anything, I blame alcohol, but of course that is too simple. I don't really want to blame, I mostly want it to not have played out the way it did. Yeah, no do-overs. As I recall I was having a beer on his birthday when I made that forgiveness happen. I love irony.

Between episodes of this PTSD I am always certain that another will never come...that learning my patterns gave me the tools of prevention and self-care that would steady me so I could turn it off. I am always so discouraged when the lie is put to my faint denial. I'll carry this damage to my grave just like my broken ankle and heel and whatever else simmers inside me. The task now is to be strong despite it, to speak out through it, to use it for the forces of good instead of complete submission.

I cried yesterday just trying to watch twenty women on the street corner dressed in black. I was so grateful to be working so I didn't have the option to join them as they asked. I was grateful that they didn't walk by my booth so I didn't have to dissolve in tears of gratitude and horror. The pains are always so fresh when I am around other hurting people. I love my empathy, and wouldn't trade it, but I see too much of all you transparent people and it makes me so vulnerable to know how transparent I also am. I also derive joy from this...and hope. If we can see, we can help.

We can carry each others' pain, maybe easier than we can carry our own. I am crying for my brother and my son as they have to sort through all the ways I didn't help them, protect them, teach them how to be better men, though I suppose it wasn't completely my job and I probably did okay at it. I know, though, that my damage prevented me from projecting a healed sexual being who could teach the good ways. I hope I gave them some skills to find their own paths through what our culture throws at them. I have always tried for honesty, to an extreme, for justice, and to not be phony. My son didn't see me put on makeup to be something I wasn't, or dress to seduce, or use controlling behaviors to get my needs met...or more correctly, he helped me identify them and stop using them, a constant life process of learning improvement. I dragged him and one early girlfriend to an NVC workshop. I asked him to teach me what he knew of NLP and how it operated from his perspective. We were able to be allies rather soon in his life, though he might have rather had a bit more parental authority in place. Can't re-do that one. He seems fine: exploring, balancing, being honest.

My brother is part of our deep family tragedy that is so far back we can hardly address it any more than we have. It doesn't unfold so much now, but we've kind of evolved into addressing ways it set us up for what happened later, when we left the family and tried to find our way as independent adults. At our recent reunion all was not comfortable in our family group, despite our mutual wish that it would be. None of us have all the keys to make it so. We try pretty hard, and have the gift of the great-grandchildren and the kindness of each other. Mostly it's good, but then the damage seeps out. I try to minimize it as much as I can, keep it in my journal. None of them deserve it either.

It was rough, my past, though not so much compared to what I've read and heard about other women and children. My experiences in college and during the Sexual Revolution of the 70s and 80s were mild enough but deeply unsettling. Rough enough that I don't like to think about them. On Thursday and Friday as the world watched a battle on TV, I worked myself to exhaustion on my roof hammering on shingles one by one in the extreme heat. I didn't eat and didn't drink enough water, obsessively working in silence. I wanted to "finish it." I finally stopped on Friday at 4:00 which was probably my breaking point, and had the sensibility to take a bath, drink so much water I was amazed, and sit still after making a beautiful meal and smoking some bud. I did not allow myself to walk down to the store for a beer, though I dearly wanted one or two more than just about anything.

Escape is necessary in some form, it seems. I know better than to add alcohol to the mix at these times, though the impulses are very strong and are why I keep it at the store and not at home. I know it can be cathartic, but it's just too loaded with guilt and shame. Sugar is safer...bud is good in that it limits what I will do and say. I need limits...it's at these times when I wonder if a supportive partner would indeed help, but really, the silence of my backyard is what works best. I drink that in.

I went though the first stage, exacerbated by my 50th HS reunion which I missed. I would've liked to go, but 3000 miles and thousands of dollars prevented me, since I had to go to the same place for my family one month before. But I would have liked to see some of those friends I went through so many years with. Some of us were together since first grade. We stumbled through a lot. The first stage of examining my past was thinking about some of the hundreds of harassments and assaults I experienced as a woman born in 1950. Stuff was just built in. There was no way to avoid a lot of it, and I was unprotected, mostly, except by suburbia's relative safety, and my privilege of being in the middle class. Plus I was a smart kid, so got some entitlements. But no one encouraged me to think big back then...not really even to go to college, though you would think someone in the 99th percentile would get more encouragement. Maybe it was those old men who were the Guidance Counselors. I had one brilliant English teacher, Kay Booth, but she stands out as the only one who empowered me, and she just made me give up on college when her estimation of me didn't follow through into my treatment by my male teachers there.

College, oh dear. I dove into the revolution. We ended the war that was killing off the  boys of my generation. We all sacrificed our psyches too, though it took a long time to realize that. We had our bodies on the line as well. I can't think about the details. I stopped adding them up long ago.

What surfaced for me, this time, was all the ways in which I was complicit in the oppression of others. I feel devastated by ways I turned on other women, and even men. I see no way to make amends. I can't even remember names for sure, or all the details, and I feel sure none of the other people involved want to talk about it. I am sure no one at the reunion wanted to talk about the party where someone "pulled a train," which is a deflected way to describe gang rape of an incapacitated girl. In my memory I heard about it the next day, and it was outsider boys, not anyone in my friend group. I turned on her, though, and took away the support she deserved. I was at that party. We didn't do much to monitor each other, our level of drinking, our willingness to go all the way with our boyfriends. We were all confused kids lying to ourselves and each other about what was right and wrong. I was raised Catholic...a bad setup for sexuality, at best. No parents were watching us. They were off drinking with their own friends, I suppose. I would love to check out these memories with my old friends, to see if maybe we took better care of each other than I remember. We would now, I think.

I remember two incidents of assault, one physical and one verbal, on the day of my Dad's funeral in 1970. Really, grown men? Did you think because he wasn't there to protect his daughters, they were now fair game? So damaged. I remember being angry, and telling my Mom, but what could she do? One was a neighbor, and one was someone from my Dad's job. She couldn't respond. I could barely respond. Were they just drunk? I'm sure they had their excuses.

I don't want to list my credentials for MeToo. I don't want to have these credentials. I am fully aware that I participated in some of my own damaging experiences more or less willingly. Trauma victims do that. They often ruin their own lives, unable to imagine anything else. On some levels I have done that, though my life is far from ruined.

Yes, the challenges today are to work right though the damage to keep on shouting for less of it. I am so happy to see how powerful young women are these days, at least ones in the progressive culture. I fought hard for that, with so many others. We bought that with our painful experiences. We want that for you. That's one reason why it is so devastating to see it erode, to see the Kavanopes and the Brocks get away with their shit over and over. I am so tired of bullies. I am so dedicated to calling out bullying, no matter who it takes down, even when it is me.

Bullies hurt all of us, whether they do it through sexuality, racial injustice, economic injustice, or the current depravity of power over all. I hate America so much right now. I hate old white men (I give some exceptions to that, for those of you who are really trying, and I hope you know I see you and love you for it.) I am sad to be feeling hate. I am full of grief for so many reasons. I am stalled and can do only this.

But I'm going to call my Mom in 30 minutes and talk about none of this. Then I'm going to go out and put on some more shingles and work harder on forgiving myself, and most of you. I'm going to look harder for what's going right, to be grateful for the young man who had my back yesterday, when in my trauma I took it on myself to kick a vomiting man out of the Market. I wasn't thinking. He almost clocked me. It wasn't my job and I wasn't keeping myself safe, because traumatized people often can't do that. Thank you to my fellow member, who might not have known that he was there yesterday to save me from myself for a minute. That's the good news: allies. We are legion.

We are in this together, and we are in the right. We may not be winning all the many races and jumping over the many obstacles, but we will. It has taken our lifetimes, and it will take the lifetimes of our children, and theirs, but it is not all pain. We also have joy. I saw the Bewick's Wren and a woodpecker at the same time today, because I could rouse myself to put out the suet. The birds are hungry. I'll start there. Forgiveness is a process. Practice peace. Work for justice, one foot in front of the other. And cleansing it all with tears is pretty cathartic too, so I can feel good about that skill. I can weep. I am proud to be a woman who cares.