i am under-grounded

Today I read that Donald Trump referred to the women who were trafficked by Epstein and other rich, powerful men like himself, “victims or whatever…” And I was immediately drawn back to 10 years ago, when I heard a similar thing come out of my sister’s mouth, about this very blog I’m going to post this to. She said, “I know you think you’re helping people…or whatever…”. I remember how small I felt, how small she intended for me to feel, how, in that moment, she took the thing that made my life worth living and tossed it over her shoulder with an eye roll. She was repeating the pattern of abuse my father had started by showing me how little the things I cared about mattered. She dismantled my humanity in one sentence fragment and a shrug of her shoulders that was somehow audible over the phone.

In the next sentence, she told me that, by writing about the abuse that happened in our family, I had caused harm to her family—to her teenaged daughters who had never read or heard of my writing, but who conceivably might stumble across it one day. That she had deliberately hid my father’s abuse from them and I, just by writing down what had happened, had shifted the role of perpetrator from my father’s shoulders onto mine, and that I was now the one she needed to protect her family from.

Looking back further, the signs of her projecting my father’s perpetrator role onto me had been there all along. When my sister’s oldest was three and a half and her youngest was a few months old, she brought both girls to visit me in California. From the moment she stepped off the airplane, I felt the stress wrapping around her like a protective and punishing cyclone. She refused my offers of help, saying she had to get used to doing everything on her own. I didn’t understand, but I wasn’t a parent myself, so I tried to let it be. 

On the last morning of her visit, when she hadn’t slept and neither of my niece’s had napped, we went to a nature center where there were easy, toddler-friendly hikes. I asked her if she wanted me to take my older niece ahead on the trail so she could have some quiet time with the younger one. “No,” she said. I asked her later if it would be helpful if I took the older one to the playground near my house while she fed the younger one and she hissed at me through clenched jaw, “why are you trying so hard to be alone with my kid?” It took a minute for me to process what she was saying, in the silence that followed my confused “what?!” that she never answered. I couldn’t  process the fact that she was implying that I was trying to hurt her kid so I tucked it away in my mind and managed to say, “you just seem so stressed and I know you’re tired, and I was trying to give you a break.”

“I don’t need a break,” she snapped. “They’re my kids.” 

There are so many ways to tell the story of sexual assault and abuse that make girls and women complicit in their own dehumanization. There are the classic ways–why were you dancing with him, why was your skirt so short, why did you kiss him if you didn’t actually want to be dragged behind a dumpster while you were unconscious and assaulted?” There are the ways we talk about women like they are the actual perpetrators, that we are manipulative and all the poor, stupid men are just following our lead, because they can’t help being led around by their dick and/or their righteous rage. Meanwhile, a woman’s rage is never righteous. It’s unladylike, (read “non-gender-conforming”) shrill and hysterical. Which is, by the way, just another reason to dismiss us as too emotional. We are abused as kids but taught to question ourselves into old age–hmmm, maybe four year old me was actually a manipulative bitch who deserved to be abused? Maybe my sister is right and I shouldn’t ever be around children? These questions are ridiculous but pervasive.

We live in a world where women and children are disposable. We are imprisoning children, jailing them in squalid, inhumane conditions that they will be lucky to survive. We are knowingly inflicting trauma with a shrug and telling the lie that this will somehow make our country stronger. We live in a world where children have washed up on the shores of resort beaches because the overcrowded boats they were put on to flee from something more dangerous, sank in the ocean. And we have a news cycle that’s so fast, these facts are blips. These lives are blips. But we can tell our stories, clearly and without shame. And we can remember. 

How easy it is to place the blame on the ones who tell their story, when so much effort, time and money has been spent to make women believe we have to earn our lives with every breath we take. How easy it is to express compassion with a hashtag #notallmen when survivors speaking out get lumped in together as whores and liars and money grubbers and then dismissed with an eye roll and the wave of a hand. How men get to be a complexity of humanity and women are shrill, manipulative harpies. The people who use dehumanization to harm others perform the task so easily, their shrugs and dismissal of other’s humanity warranting nothing more than a small shrug, a bitter chuckle, an eye roll. The rules of the game are to accuse women who speak out against abuse of being gold-diggers, of wanting a payday. Make no mistake, people say this not realizing what they’re actually saying, which is, “these women just want more access to power (because money equals power), and that’s a bigger crime than rape.” Men’s righteousness almost always follows like a tidal wave—a torrent of rage so big there is no way through or out of it. 

This past summer, I told my story to a man who I momentarily mistook for a friend. I’d done an energy healing session in a discourse called “reaching and holding” where the practitioner creates a safe space for the client to unwind and be held. I’d told him that I’d felt my torn perineum—an injury from being sexually abused as a child—healing itself, knitting back together, the pain finally receding, a merciful, ebbing tide. He told me it made him angry, and I asked him, from the youngest, most hopeful part of myself, “Are you angry because someone hurt me?” He said, in his measured, matter of fact way that gave any question you asked him the same weight, “Well, the fact that it happened to someone I know makes it a bit more personal, but what makes me really angry is that I’ve had to learn to control myself and that man (the man who tore my perineum) did not.” As though rape is man’s natural instinct and it is a burden to learn not to rape when other men go ahead and rape. As though this is all about what’s fair to the men who feel they deserve a cookie for not raping us.

This man’s response shocked, but did not surprise me. I have known, since I was four years old, that most men hate women. If you are a man reading this and you feel your righteousness spiking, feel free to jump on social media and write a bunch of #notallmen posts. Or, find any part of you that is curious and try to stay with me. Stay with all the women you claim to love. 

I am, of course, writing this the day after CNN broke the story about the “Rape Academy” website that teaches men how to rape women while we’re sleeping. During the month of February, the site had 62 million views. In the shortest month of the year, the month in which we’re also supposed to squeeze in all of Black History, which is actually world history, and American history, and the history of humanity in general. 62 million eager readers wanting to be more efficient rapists. We are in Wonderland where what should be small is enormous and what should take up space is miniscule, barely worth a thought, and when the note said “eat me” I wish that Alice and all the rest of us had given the world the finger and yelled, “yeah, EAT ME!” instead of swallowing the bullshit narrative that’s made this world dangerous for women and children for centuries, while men are so often subsumed with righteousness when this mere fact is pointed out.

I am also writing this two months after a client shared their screen with me during a zoom session to show me a photo, from the Epstein files, of their perpetrator. I looked at the photo and saw, right next to my client’s perpetrator, one of my own perpetrators. My father, on the occasional Sunday, left me in his office with this man–this doctor–while he went and did rounds at the hospital. In the photo, this man was a couple of decades older, but unmistakable, as his face is seared into my brain. 

What followed, after I saw the photo, were two solid weeks of new memories flooding my brain while I sat with myself through it in the kindest way I have ever known. I came through it with a much deeper understanding of why my blood pressure is high whenever I’m in a doctor’s office, but normal when I take it at home. And I came through it understanding that The Universe, herself, sees and remembers everything, whether it happens in secret or not. I came through it with an understanding that these men have always been able to find one another, will always have each other’s backs and will throw a woman under an actual bus if it helps to save his reputation and standing. Because a man’s reputation and standing is always more important than a woman’s dignity, or her life. 

I also came through it with a deeply grounded belief that survivors deserve all the support we need, and that this support is out of reach for so many of us. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars over the last 35 years trying to access support, trying to figure out how to live in this world, learning how to trust myself and my own ground again. I’ve done that at the cost of saving for retirement, at the cost of many other things. And I would not have been able to access as much help without the financial support of my husband, who works in a traditionally male industry where his time is simply worth 4 times what mine is.. I have incredible privilege, and gratitude because of the access this has given me to doing more than surviving. I make it a practice to pass this on to folks without the same access I have to healing. I don’t believe in capitalism–it has institutionalized the necessity for people to be bought and sold for our bodies, whether they are for sex or labor or something else. But that’s another rant for another day.

I don’t know if my sister still thinks I caused her family harm. I haven’t heard from her through Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to congress, through all those gymnasts–girls and women–speaking out against Larry Nassar, through Virginia Giuffre’s memoir and death, through Epstein’s victim’s speaking out about what they went through. I don’t know if witnessing the courage of those women and girls revised her narrative about me. I don’t know if, in her mind, I am still the monster who caused harm to her family. But I know who I am. I have lived through abuse, and I have had the incredible luck and privilege to build a life where I can hold myself with kindness, where I trust myself deeply, where I get to love and be loved by my family and friends. I have the privilege of knowing that trusting myself to act in integrity in the world bears more weight in my life and on my soul than what anyone else thinks of me. And it makes me sad for her to think she might still be living inside a narrative that says it’s women who cause harm when they speak the truth out loud. But I know her narrative is her choice, and I support her decision to choose for herself who to be.

What I know for sure is this: survivors of sexual abuse, of violence, of political oppression–those who stand up and tell their stories–are taking a stand for our dignity, and our collective humanity. The most human thing we can do is listen, and find ways to give every one of us the support we need to regain our humanity and live in this world..