Except in the most intimate of safe spaces, relegated to therapy and a few family and friends, I rarely share my specific stories of abuse, neglect and molestation. Only in recent years have I called myself a “survivor” related to that combination of things. It’s as if growing up poor, black and female shouldn’t include more trauma, or that it’s so obvious given my identity and upbringing and moot as a result. But there was catastrophic trauma and oftentimes I keep quiet and rage inside because no one wants to hear another story from someone like me. I don’t share the inappropriate touches and sexual assaults because ignorant and/or hateful people want to make that my reason for being queer. It doesn’t seem worth it to discuss the constant beatings and verbal violence from my grandmother until about age 11 because people won’t hear the immense love she also had for me and protection she offered me out of constant fear that my mother’s partners might rape me. No one ever considered the women, random children and babysitters, unsurprisingly. Grandma had reasons to be afraid. My mother was kidnapped, gang raped, drugged and impregnated with my older sister at 14 after all; something I wouldn’t learn about until my 30s, after that sister, my mother and grandmother had all been dead for over a decade.
Occasionally I’ll reference my witnessing of the domestic violence and sexual exploitation in my home growing up, which caused my mother to be detached emotionally at critical times since she was barely holding onto herself then. This trauma marked all of my childhood and still wears on me. Usually this is raised as a matter of fact and through humor – sometimes through twisted stories, all true, of me coming of age through violence as retaliation, school and local violence or when I thought I had learned to harness my own sexual power with countless boys and many more men before I was a woman and even after I was. It’s difficult to share these stories or to remember them. It sounds like justification for bad behavior. The numbness that’s sometimes required for me to function and serve others is all I have in my most vulnerable times. I shut my shit down when I’m still more fortunate than my black and brown peers or their offspring. So I let other believable women and men and underrepresented and discounted transgender people take the lead. I let liars exploit our stories for profit so I don’t have to be abused further. Because no one wants to hear this from me. Or they do, but want to hear only this from me. Because I’m supposed to be nothing.
When I skip to resilience without these stories, I’m disjointed. When I remain silent, I suffer. When I share though, I’m sometimes bare and uncared for, or people just don’t know what to do with it, or then I’m positioned to care for them since it’s too heavy for them to digest. Every now and again, someone asks, listens, abstains from judgement and offers comfort. And if they’re really loving they don’t use it against me in conflict. Thank you to those. In moments of their support and celebration, I’m told to write books about it since that’s the only way people think a story can be told, because capitalism, and our obsession with certain narratives, as if it’s not perpetually living on my soul, eyes and skin telling all kinds of stories. Still, I don’t know what to do with all this pain, all these stories, all this harm. It’s a litany of traumatic experiences before the age of 18 to have to recount and use for God’s glory, mostly before the age of 11, before I had even caused my own harm to myself and others. And it feels really fucking unfair in moments like this. But I blog anyway. Some good must come from this. And today, I don’t feel much like a survivor so I’ll fake it til I do.
❤️