Survivorship, getting up off the mat, and creating more light

*Trigger warning for survivors

We are not alone has never been so comforting or devastating. Our national consciousness has no idea what it means to be a survivor. Every time I hear Ronan Farrow’s name attached to incredible investigative reporting on all this darkness, I think of the moment I told my brother about being assaulted. I was 25, he was 22. I remember him asking me if I needed him to jump in a car and drive up to the bay (he lived/s in So Cal). I remember how in the many heartbreaks of that time hearing my brothers anger/concern/worry was terrible, like not only was my innocence being taken but his was too. Ronan Farrow is a brother who was outraged for a sister and took that and built more light for all the women who had been through what she’d been through — and not once has he said “as the brother of a sister”. And yet, every time I hear his name, I think about my brothers face the first time I saw him after the most violent assault. I think about his grief and his worry. This is a post about things I remember and things I hope we remember about the survivors coming forward.

Being a survivor of assault is the hardest possible process that you can imagine. I’ve spent the last eleven years trying to figure out how to describe how assault’s aftermath tears you open and slices you into shreds of yourself and then at some point you choose to put this Van Gogh version of you back together.

I want to be clear, I wouldn’t change who I am or what that process made me. The depth of my empathy, my ability to sit with someone in their pain, the understanding of when my reactions come from a button — not the actual moment, and so many more things all stem from having seen the ugliest parts of humanity and the choice I made to pull myself up out of the violation. That choice y’all, it’s the hardest choice a survivor makes.

I can still remember the days after my most violent assault. I remember my best friend who slept in my bed for weeks so that every single time I woke with a paralyzing nightmare — someone was there to comfort me. I remember the police report where I had to repeat detail by detail every single thing that had happened to me to a set of officers with zero emotional intelligence. I remember the invasiveness of the exams. I remember having my body photographed like it was an object. I remember my friends putting my shaking body into a car the next day and taking me to my therapist. I remember days after a male friend at the time coming over and telling me I needed to suck it up and be stronger and crying myself to sleep not understanding how. I remember a week later facilitating a workshop with 50 young folks and praying my pieces would not come apart in front of everyone. I remember a month later feeling like I was hurting the people I loved by telling them what happened and knowing this trauma was both uniquely mine and somehow felt by all my persons. I remember a year later performing at work but struggling to do even the simplest tasks in my personal life. I remember 6 months later feeling like I should be “over it” and berating myself for having flashback after flashback of that night.

I remember 2 to 3 years later and noticing how much weight I gained and hoping it would protect me. I remember 5 years later feeling like my body wasn’t my own and noticing how I could barely even notice when I had to go to the restroom or eat unless I was bursting or starving such was the severity of the separation of my mind and my body. I remember four years later when I realized I was likely a blip in the life of my attacker even though he was a machete in mine. I remember running down Rock Creek Park in DC one day so angry about it that I threw up into the side of the creek and quietly pulled myself back together so that my friend walking ahead didn’t realize what had just happened. I remember all of the therapy that it took to pull my body and my heart back together. I remember the pain of realizing just this last year that by the time they came back together, I had put my body through so much, it was in pain a good chunk of the time. I remember sobbing through the middle of a workout this week after hearing my trainer tell me how strong I was because it was the first time in a long time I heard that and believed it. These are a fraction of my moments, of my stories, of the pieces that shape what it took to get off the mat over and over again. Multiply this by as many people as you’ve seen come forward. Understand that so many survivors are holding themselves together as their sisters/brothers remind them that the monsters came for so many of us.

The light that’s coming into the darkness hoarded by men who use their physical, social, economic, and political power is stunning. But I don’t want us to lose sight that every person coming forward has a story that could be a relative to mine. It is the price this sister/brotherhood has paid to satisfy an addiction to power and a society that has structured the price of justice to be incurred by those with the least institutional power. We continue to make those choices. None of those structures have changed, even if the risks of that price have been repeatedly paid by the brave. We can’t be satisfied with drafting off their wind. They have earned their wind. They should get to reap the benefit of that freedom. And we have to figure out how to better structure a society that doesn’t require quite so much of someone who has already paid such a steep cost. It has got to get easier for us to shed light where the monsters dwell. We have got to see our survivors as ours and take our outrage and build more light for every last person who has been through what they’ve been through.