Dis/Ability

Little white pills.
(One and a half of them -
I cut them with a kitchen knife every other day.)

Little white pills
Treating to the numbers
(I never knew to notice but
Maybe when you're fifteen you don't pay the right sort of attention
Or maybe
The kid with the dissociation problem
And PTSD
Is not the best at body awareness.
Ya think?)
They checked my throat,
Little pen marks and a tape measure,
And told me
"Little white pills, one and a half of them."

Eventually
I stopped taking them
It didn't seem to matter.

When I had doctors
I would tell them
"I took little white pills,
One and a half of them.
I want you to find the numbers."
They found the numbers,
And sent me on my way.

I argued with one,
"These are the wrong numbers.
Here are my printouts.
This is what the new standards are,"
And she told me
My numbers were fine.
The one time they weren't,
She checked again,
And they'd changed.

Sometime in my late twenties
I found a bentwood cane
In an antique shop.
"Necessary tools should be beautiful," I said.
It was about the right height,
Red and knobbly and wonderful.
I didn't usually need it
But it was nice to have.

I took little white pills
For a while
They made me feel stoned
When I changed my dose
But the world didn't hurt so much
In my mind
And that was nice.
I had to stop
When I was pregnant
Though.

My knees never recovered
From the pregnancy
And stairs were hard.

I got a new doctor
And I said to him
"I had little white pills
One and a half of them
And I want you to check my numbers."
And he did.

And he said, "I don't treat numbers,
But your numbers
(The lab would say they're fine
Like your other doctor did)
They aren't good.
I would give you little white pills
Just for this
But look --
This other number --
Those are antibodies
And they shouldn't be there."

And he gave me little white pills.
Half of one a day, to start,
And I went home with a scrip
And told everyone I knew
"I have an autoimmune disease!"
And some of them understood
Why I was so happy.

One day
There was a truckful of rocks to unload
And I took the kids outside
And I helped
Because I had little white pills.

The little white pills
Don't change my body
Into a body that isn't nonconsensually suicidal
But they start to take away its weapons
And I didn't notice
All the ways I felt better
Until the little white pills
Went away.

And then I noticed
That my knees hurt again.
That I was so tired
Too tired to think.
I noticed
All the things I knew before.
(Fatigue, depression,
Constipation,
My appetite is gone because
My metabolism is fucked
It didn't go long enough
For my fingernails to shatter
But I bet when they grow a little more
They will.)

I noticed I needed that
Bentwood cane
And I hadn't remembered
The last time
I needed it to make it through a day.

"I need new little white pills,"
I said
While trying not to want to die
In a body that was trying to kill me
Because somehow
Having it all come back
The chills
The acne down my jaw
The way the pain kept me awake
And my ankles felt like tennis balls
Of flaking, brittle skin
With the fatigue
And all
(At least my heart didn't go flipping out
Like it was doing before I got
Little white pills
This time
That scared the fuck out of me
And I couldn't say
"I think I'm going to die"
I have kids
I can't leave them like this
I couldn't even tell the doctor
Which was stupid
But it was all the same damn thing
My life a ruin for a lack
Of little white pills
I suppose
But I digress)
It broke me
Hard
And I could barely get out of bed
The day I was going to see the doctor
Who could give me
Little white pills.

(My grandmother took the pills
I don't know if they were little and white
I wonder sometimes
If that was why--
Or part of why--
But no matter.)

He gave me little white pills
I gave him blood
To check my numbers
He said "I'll call if they're really bad"
And I took my scrip
And yelled at the pharmacist
Until they gave me
Little white pills
Just one at a time
To replace
The ones that didn't work.

Today I had to have a beer
To make the pain stop.
I will take my little white pill
And hope
To be more than a little better than I was
Tomorrow.

Bleeding Mama

I got linked to these posts by guest blogger Maia on Feministe. These links came up in comments, and I am reminded of my commentary on privilege feminism a while back. And this post got linked along the way.

All of which is kind of context for where this bit is bleeding out.

Antiprincess got me between the eyes with this comment, by the way:

the idea of “child-friendly” space vs. “child-free” space is not really about comfort or convenience or “appropriate” behavior or environment. it’s piggybacking (over generations) on the “separate spheres” thing – the idea that men do things in public space and, well, women and children do whatever it is they do wherever it is they do it, at any rate in a space separate from men (private space).

And Faith followed it up with this:

Actually, no one seems to really want to address the problem of women being isolated from certain parts of society if they have children. At best folks have simply stated that parents have to accept a certain amount of isolation when we become parents (and they do use the word parent while ignoring that women are the primary caretakers the majority of the time…), yet no one who espouses this has really given any reasonable explanation for exactly why women just have to accept this isolation.

Since Little Foot was born, I've felt very political.

It's a hard and complicated thing, and I don't know where to go with it, or even where to go with talking about it. I don't know how to tackle it, because it's so large, and because there's nowhere immediate and obvious to get a grip on it. It puts a strange, sharp edge on things, things that matter to me, and I have no fucking words, here.

I've also felt overwhelmingly hopeless about it.

I mean, even if I set aside all the bits where it's farcial to imagine that a freak like me - a polyamorous pagan kinky woman who dropped out of school for mental health reasons - might manage to do a damn thing in the political machine. Even if I imagine that there's some alternate route to organisation and action that hits what I need to do that I can do, which ... I see people do, across a gulf of unshared experience, and I don't know how to pick up those pieces which aren't mine. Even if I set aside all that.

I don't know how to do it. I didn't grow up in a world where mami did the union negotiations with a baby on her hip, as BFP wrote about in one of those threads - I grew up in the world where, for all that it was more integrated then than it is now, there was the children's universe and the rest of the world and it was cute when I listened to All Things Considered and came away wanting to make the budget numbers add up because I could do algebra. Cute, not meaningful. I grew up in a world where any memory of being listened to as a human being is tainted with the sneering, raging, "Your father treats you like an adult." I grew up in a world where I wondered when I would be old enough that someone would consider my opinions on the public sphere worthwhile (answer: sometime in my twenties).

And in that world, there are no public mothers. Because of the separation of the spheres, that white privileged woman's fucking paradise, angel of the household, that thing that was the big feminist victory to escape, to let women into the public sphere. People in public aren't parents; parents - read, mothers - are demi-human, shadows on the public sphere, people who are ghosts in the economy, when the economy is what really matters to be human. Now that I am a mother, it matters to me to touch the public sphere, and now that I am a mother, I am bereft of any understanding of how to do it. (Even if the issues that lost me my schooling would let me, which is another kettle of fish entire.)

Somewhere in one of those threads is a set of people saying that centering children is buying into that Little Precious Can Do No Wrong notion that my child is somehow the most important and perfect entity ever spawned. The idea that radical love by whatever means are necessary - as the guest blogger put it - that centers children is really about the solipistic individualism of the sick society built on capitalism rather than actually being the way a movement goes.

It has to be the way a movement goes, from where I sit.

Because it's too late for me.

It's not too late for my little girl. She hasn't been sexually assaulted. She hasn't been bullied. She hasn't been broken by administrative bullshit. She hasn't had her mental health shatter in a way that destroyed her for years. All of these things that happened to me, they haven't happened to her.

I can't build a world where the stuff that happened to me didn't happen. Those words are already written into the fabric of time. I can't center me, build a political effort around making things okay for me, because even though they're okay now there are worlds and worlds of ways in which the way I got here was not okay. I can't center me and rehash the things that happened to me and make it all about me and ignore all the things that happened to other people whose different courses through the wide wild world of not okay didn't coincide with mine.

I have to center the children. Not just my baby, all the children, because it's only when the children are safe from brutality that nobody will live brutalised.

And I don't even know if this is hope or despair. It bleeds, that's all I know.

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future....

I was unaware that a particular bullying and cyberbullying case had led to a bunch of local action before it was drawn to my attention recently.

I am incapable of commenting on the particulars of the case; I haven't looked into it. I honestly find the whole subject more than a bit triggery, so I cringe and hide when it comes up, a lot, rather than put too much thought into it, to trying to figure it out, trying to empathise.

You see.

I spent about ten years almost entirely unable to cry.

It's still hard for me, and I'm more likely to get a piercing headache that feels like my eyes are being crushed out of my head instead of tears, along with the driving need to shed tears and no capacity.

Tears would prove that they had won.

And that was even more unbearable than what they put me through.

So I held my tears until I was safely off the bus and away, out of sight, out of earshot, held them until I got home, held them, held them back, probably fooling nobody but that didn't mean I didn't need to try, until I could do nothing but hold them, frozen into veins of ice in my heart that have never fully melted.

Somewhere in there my parents tried to talk to the school administrators, who said "Boys will be boys" and shrugged; sexual harassment and at least borderline assault were nonevents. (And I look at the person who commented on the article I linked who wants to know what caused the "recent uprising in bullying" and wonder what fucking planet they're from. Nobody has ever cared to fucking stop it. I mean, the closest I've seen to any general awareness or giving a damn about it was post-Columbine? And maybe they're doing something about it in Massachusetts because of this poor girl.) Things like getting invited to a slumber party at an address that didn't exist ... well, the gash left by that hope that someone was interacting with me in a manner other than mockery didn't even register as something that needed a bandage, in amongst everything else.

I've said before that nobody escapes childhood unscathed, but some of us had a rougher time than others.

And I sit here thinking, "I have a child. I have a child. My gods, I have a child."

She is eight months old and I am terrified of school for her. I flail helplessly at all kinds of ways of doing schooling for all kinds of reasons, but a lot of them come down to this:

I'm still bleeding.

Somewhere deep in me is that kid who cannot cry, who views every human interaction with distrust because they all turn to ash and mockery sooner or later. That touchy agitation jumps too far, too hard, at any slight, any dismissal, waiting for the signs that it will turn into the knife twisting in the gut.

I'm still bleeding.

Even those people I trust most completely, most utterly, can make me jump. A bad day, a moment of distance, and I'm braced for the snap. Sometimes that bracing is worn smooth and old, a bare lump of awareness, something where I can ask my lion "Are you okay?" rather than half-hiding, half-cowering in the far corner of the room because I assume something's going to shatter and leave me bereft and laughed at, catching the sudden horrific backlash of a joke half my life in the making. I don't believe it will happen - but there's that sliver of horribly twisted, broken person in me that knows it has to be prepared.

I'm still bleeding.

My baby is so innocent.

I'm so scared.

Unwritten Letters

Dear ____________,

You don't know me. We met in passing at your son's first wedding; you asked something about the logistics while I was setting up the centrepieces on the reception tables, I answered you, and when I was done with my task I fled to the bride's room to hide from you. I'm sure you figured out that I was his lover when they insisted on taking photographs that included me (as well as my husband) over your objections. I'm sure that it was not lost on you that we helped clean up the place as if we were part of the basic logistics, not merely guests, and were the ones who said the last goodbyes as all the wedding guests drifted away.

There was a time you liked the idea of me, wanted to meet me - back when you thought of me as a human being. A fellow potter, perhaps, or someone who could provide useful advice. Someone who was important to your son, yes, and I suppose that was a part of why you said you were looking forward to the opportunity.

I have this thing, though, that I won't meet people under false pretences if I can possibly avoid it. I most particularly will not step under their roof with the expectation that I will be lying to them, and pretending to be anything other than his partner would be a deception. I have a particular sense of hallpeace that I will not be so easily brought to violate; it would be an insult and a dishonor to my host were I to do so.

I know that I stopped being a person to you as soon as you knew. I was no longer someone with a set of shared interests, someone who was a major presence in your son's life; I was a symbol of so many things gone wrong, and that symbol overwhelmed any human fellowship we might have had.

I know and understand that you were hurt badly and betrayed by a partner who was unfaithful to you. I wish I could tell you that I will not betray your son and be heard, or that his devotion to me was not a betrayal of his legal spouse. I do not know how to mend this at all, or even if it is mendable; it is certainly not anything I can touch, because you have made me your enemy whether I will it or not.

There is nobody in the world beyond my immediate family whose recognition matters more to me than yours; nobody I want more to acknowledge me as his wife. I think that you are one of the people who has mattered to him most in the world, which means your regard matters to me. It might be better for me if I could dismiss it as a matter of insignificance, but that is not within my power. I am vulnerable to you; I cannot say I like it, but I acknowledge it and accept it. My dedication to your son means that you have that gut shot available to you, and that is okay.

When he and I got married, we had long, long talks about who to invite. We brought in our community as witnesses, because marriage is a thing about community. I invited my father and my brother. He wound up inviting no relatives, because he could not expect you to understand. I know how much it meant to me to have my father there, especially recognising that he is not perfectly comfortable with the structure of my family. I wish we could have opened our ceremony to include you.

I wish I could spare him the pain of all this. Or at least that I could set my own pain and anxiousness aside and just hold him rather than be plagued with tearing weakness that means that he must comfort me instead of the other way around. Every time you and he talk, I see his pain and frustration, not just at your refusal to see me or your refusal to see him, but at losing you. I wish things were different, that he did not feel forced into a choice between his mother and his wife, that ... I just wish things were different.

I wish I could talk to you and put it right, never mind that what is wrong is in a place I could not touch if I tried. There is a part of me that fervently believes that if you could see us, spend a little time with us, get to know us and our family, that you might come to forgive us for not being the white picket fence family you wanted your son to have. I know this is a fantasy, a little dream world that I spin to make it seem like this could possibly be under my control and thus something I could fix, something that could fall into a realm I could affect. Something that I could change, make better. Something that I could heal.

I know that I cannot, and it may never be better, never be different. Which is why, while I may write you letters in my mind, I cannot send them.

The Whole Story

I have been talking, with various people, about how to deal with the subject of rape, for the last day and a half or so. (And not talking, at times, because I'm not the sort of person who's really good at untangling exactly why some arguments sound like survivor-blaming and rape apologia because I find them too upsetting to disassemble coolly.)

And one of the things that came up for me and had me wickedly shaky last night is the way that no matter how many times, how many different ways, how carefully I tell my story, I cannot tell the whole story, not in one go.

I've written about the assault here not infrequently. And each post about it has a different piece of the story - like the issues around the social construction of consent and the failures of sex education to assist in rape prevention, the effects of women's sexuality being treated socially as a form of public property, my trauma around failure at the 'gatekeeper' social role, contributions from my repressed kinkiness, normalisation of rape and lack of support, the way uncertainty and the slow erosion of boundary defenses contributed, the induced vulnerability created by the social dichotomy between attractiveness and academics, trying to come to terms with shame and internalised self-hatred around the subject, comparison of superficially similar experiences, how I had to fight for the space in which I could actually lay the responsibility for the assault at the feet of the person who did it. In other places I've laid out the facts of the events, I've written about the major kink scene my liege and I did to try to do some mental reprogramming, I've written about other things. I've probably missed a few posts about it from here, too.

None of these are the whole story. The fact that there are so many renditions, so many ways of trying to talk about the experience, so many posts, that should probably be a tip-off as to the incompleteness, the giant fucking layer cake of the experience that can only be written about one pink-icinged stripe at a time.

I can't even think about it all at once, see all the layers. At least not yet; I wonder some if that's why I keep writing about it, trying to get all the angles clear so that I can grasp it as a whole.

There are so many stories in that one event.

There are all the stories about the social, societal, familial contexts that fed into what happened, that made the space in which it could happen possible, easy. And all the stories about the social, societal, familial contexts that shaped how I responded, where the damage ran, how I scarred, where, and how deeply. A few of those, I've written.

There are the stories about the events, the way things happened, and which stories those are depend on which events one wants to include.

There are the stories about the people, too.

And there are the secondary stories. Because, for example, one of the consequences of having a version of the story about him in my head - because I, unlike everyone I've told these stories to, almost knew him - is that it feeds my self-hatred and self-blame, because I can see a little bit through his eyes. And I know this, and this is why I don't often tell any of my version of his story - because it's very easy for me to slide into victim-blaming with it if I go into any depth, even though the victim is me. And even though I don't tell the story, I refer to it, I get frustrated with people who respond to my story as if he were a monster rather than an idiot kid, I gnaw at the incompleteness of things.

Someone wrote a post, talking about how there's a vision of what a rapist looks like, and it doesn't look like anyone we know, and that this isn't true.

And, for the first time I think, I wrote about who he was in response, not a name, not a referent, not treating him as an event, but the person I maybe almost knew a little. And part of that was to make that person's point a bit, to make it clear that this was ordinary, ordinary, ordinary, that my bog-standard assault narrative has a bog-standard person as the aggressor. And it's put me more in touch, mentally, with him as a person than I have been in a while, which leaves me shaky and uncertain.



He was a perfectly ordinary geeky, arty high school kid. A little on the tall side, with what gets called an athletic build; light brown hair, long enough to ruffle without actually being long and not that I ever ruffled it (that being a contact more intimate and affectionate than I was comfortable with), jeans-and-t-shirt-wearing type, like any other ordinary high school kid. I met him through one of my classmates, and he may never have known that I was technically not old enough for high school, let alone not a junior like that friend.

He did drama club at his high school, and I went to see him perform. He listened to Peter Gabriel. He lent me the Wild Cards books one at a time. He had a computer in his room at his parents' house, an old clunky thing with a green screen, and played Ultima on it. He quoted Monty Python, at length, on a frozen day outside the Smithsonian museums on the Mall, a day when it was windy enough to make the seagulls fly backwards. ("Albatross!") I remember nothing about what we talked about on the phone, and only one movie we went to (The Cutting Edge).

He was the sort of person that people I know would know, would spend time with, would never wonder about.

He was the first attractive, potentially compatible person who had ever shown interest in me; my experience of romance was all of the junior high variety, full of blatant abusiveness and harassment, and I was an awkward, nerdy kid unfamiliar with the vagaries of proper social interaction. He said I was beautiful, not that I really believed him; he said that he loved me, after a while. I had no idea how to deal with him, because in among all of this unexpected, unfamiliar, loneliness-curing kindness was the persistent ignoring of consent, pushing at boundaries whose precise location I did not, at that point, know, up until he hit the boundaries around sex, where I at least knew that I didn't want to go there.

When he let me escape after the assault, I fled to the bathroom to try to put my mind in order. When I came back out, he was fully clothed, sitting on the couch that he had tried to pin me to, and even in my pained dissociation I thought he had realised what he had nearly done, realised and was now ashamed. Maybe even wondering how he had read me wrong, maybe - and this would be good - wondering how long he had been misreading me, whether it went back to the beginning. There was sadness and silence there, and I did not ask what it was; he had never asked me what was in my head, and asking what was in his was too intimate even if I had not been shaking and shattered inside. He walked me back to the subway so I could go home.

It was probably the next weekend or the one after that he went to the second day of a Star Trek convention with me, which I left early, claiming headache, not saying that it was terrifying to be near him and I was bleeding inside. We never spoke again after that day.

I saw him, or someone who looked like him, in a bookstore a few years later. I had a panic attack and fled to the company of my mother at a cafe, sitting by the escalator he might have come down if he were leaving that way, and I watched the stairs moved in a panic.

When my lion and I went to see the Stargate movie in the theater a few years later, I was so triggered by the looks of James Spader that I could not really bear to watch any of it. I buried myself in other-things, and we laughed about the things we had done in movie theaters in the dark, without ever shedding light into that particular bit of darkness.

Tiller in the Seventh Month

I mentioned that I'd been affected by the Tiller assassination today to the shrink.

She said, "Yeah, I was wondering how you were reacting to that."

Just great. One of my therapist's thoughts about the news was how I was dealing with it, and on her own dime to boot.

It's obvious, of course, that it would. I'm seven months pregnant. I have anxiety issues. (Secondary effect of my depressive disorder.) My primary criterion for dealing with my pregnancy (both in terms of medical care and everything else) has been minimising stress and meddling, with a particular eye to things that I know I can degenerate into obsessive circles of increasingly frantic worry over; I know how to manage my brain when I'm off my meds, after all, I've been doing it that way for most of my life.

It is completely normal in the course of a pregnancy to have worries about the health of the baby, to have moments of 'what if', to fret about whether things are okay. The baby wants to hang out pretty much exclusively on my right side; does that mean the cord is tangled up and making my uterus into a trap? Etc. And my anxiety and I, we've got a little routine for this: I listen to the fretfulness, I acknowledge it, I point out that there's nothing we can do about it right now, I set it aside, and I go do something else.

Before Sunday.

On Sunday, as I'm sure you well know, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down in his church. A man who specialised in care and comfort for third-trimester women in tragic circumstances. Who conducted the abortions with sufficient skill and empathy to provide grieving parents with an intact body to mourn and bury. Who had followed in his father's footsteps in feeling that this care was essential for women in need (his father had had a patient die after refusing to perform an abortion, and thereafter changed his practice), who had been one of three people in the United States who did it at all. [Added:] Who was known to provide that care even to people who could not afford to pay for it.

There is often a foot wedged against my bottommost right rib, an uncomfortable pressure, sometimes accompanied by a sequence of thumps.

I think of the woman in my childbirth preparation class who has as her mantra, "If it's kicking, you know it's alive." She is pregnant after a miscarriage, after all.

After Sunday, I rock and pray that that is good enough. Kicking means alive, right?

I read, and see people talking about babies eaten up with terminal cancer, ancephaly, various other syndromes, deformities, failures to develop, and I try not to jump and startle with every kick, every vibration of the skin of my abdomen, try to stifle the exaggerated startles of my PTSD and just repeat, "If it's kicking, you know it's alive."

I have friends who have lost children to miscarriages; who learned that their desired baby was a blighted ovum and had to work through the whiplash from 'nurturing life' to 'harboring death'. One of my [legal] husband's coworkers had a baby recently, a baby who lived for two hours after birth.

I have been carrying this life for seven months. It's kicking, right?

But the fear is there, the overwhelming fear, from reading about, thinking about, the women who carried their lives for seven months, eight months, nearly nine, and then learned that no, what they had nurtured, invested in, prepared for, perhaps named, was going to die. Maybe killing them on the way too, bleeding out or rot or toxins poisoning the system or any of the other horrible malfunctions of flesh.

And people write about Tiller, write about the care he gave to these stricken families, and sometimes to do that, they have to write about why his job was necessary.

And I cradle my belly and want to howl with the terror of it.

I want to crawl into a hospital and demand tests, poking, prodding, knock me out and put a fucking closed circuit TV in my belly if you have to, let me know that it will be okay. Let me know that it's enough. Let me know that it will be all right. Even though I made all these careful, cautious, informed choices, avoiding the medicalisation of pregnancy, facing this natural process with calm and serenity and all that good stuff, I want to throw it all away and beg someone, anyone, somewhere, to give me reassurances.

Because a man who helped women face the worst when the worst had to be faced was murdered by a terrorist.

Who has certainly achieved a fine terrorist goal: one terrified woman. And with me, probably many others.

I talked about it so rationally, reasonably, with the shrink, noting in the abstract that it was setting off my anxiety, that I really ought to go to some effort to address that, remember my vitamins, all that good sane stuff.

I left her office, fractured, and my liege said that I looked completely exhausted. Yes.

And I had talked about it, which meant the walls around the roiling mass of terrified were breached, and the entire trip home I sniffled and fought back tears, trying to hold on a little longer without falling apart. Couldn't fall apart. Couldn't make a scene. Couldn't ... show ... fear.

I closed the kitchen door, a soft scrape into solitude, and when I was alone I howled like a terrified animal, howled and screamed and spat bile and let the tears roll down my cheeks. Only in solitude, because it was too much to show even my husbands.

Examination Burnout

I was reminded of something by this post, and it's stuff I've mostly found too raw to post about, but I feel like writing a bit now while it's in my head.

I've written before about "Just Say No" culture and sexuality. What I haven't talked about was the way denial-and-examination culture intersected with my inner kinks.

When I was an elementary school child, I started building an understanding of my sexuality as it was at the time. I had very separated experiences of physical sexual pleasure and romantic attraction - it had not occurred to me that these were related - but I explored both as best I could. I was aware that my experience of romantic attraction was somehow related to "grownup things" like marriage and families, but I recognised (consciously, even) that that was something I would figure out when I was older; for now, there was the boy, and I could beat him at wrestling.

Once my fantasy life had developed into fiction rather than fascination with the boy, and once I had grown enough of it for my sense of physical pleasure to get tied into my sense of attraction, they took on a structure of extreme power differential, often with bondage aspects. I was never ashamed of these fantasies, or, as I thought of them, the stories I told myself when going to sleep; however, I knew, bone-deep, that I could never talk about them.

I never have.

(Think about that for a moment. I have never talked about those fantasies in more than generalised referents, themes and content.)

I knew that if I told anyone about them, they would try to figure out what was wrong with me. I didn't know words like "misogyny", but I knew that I'd have the concept thrown at me. I knew that I'd be treated as sick and wrong, because Good People don't have thoughts like that. I knew that I would never, ever be able to express these things; at least on that last I was wrong.

And as I became aware that these things were things I should not express, I became aware of the idea of examination. I had an obligation, I knew, to figure out where these things had come from, that they could be excised. I was a sleeper agent of the oppressor, my sexuality out to subvert everything that women could achieve, and I had to cure myself. There was no support for this - it was still unspeakable horror - but it was clear that the wrongness was something that I would be expected to purge before I was an adult.

Guilt started to creep in around the edges. The fantasies became even more secret, because there was this edge of belief that I should not be that way, that I should be someone else, someone more loyal, more diligent, more compatible with the universal goals that I had been assigned on the basis of my sex, class, and race. I squelched the impulses in my more conscious mind, leaving them only the release of the nighttime stories, giving me dreams of the taboo-breaking man who might love and own and honor me despite the shackles of surrounding culture.

I was an emotionally isolated young adolescent, full of need and loneliness and hunger and wanting to explore the concepts of sex and not knowing how. Nothing in the world around me had ever given me any understanding for figuring out what I wanted or how to implement that safely; I was still half-consciously aware that what I wanted was Bad anyway, so figuring out how to get it was unthinkable.

It didn't go away, of course. And sometimes these things come out in badly sublimated ways. Hook a loop of fear-paralysation into a mind frantically denying its need to surrender, bait a touch-starved, curious adolescent with affection from a pretty older boy, and watch a psyche fragment into a perfect rape victim and a panicked, impotent observer. Respectful and loving submission was unavailable, unthinkable, unallowable, so all I had was deer-in-the-headlights capitulation, where my sexual drives and my terror and his unceasing pressure conspired to shove me into a closet in my head.

And maybe, with a little more examination, I might guess that this is one of the real reasons that I have never really been able to forgive myself. Because, after all, if I didn't have those wicked, shameful desires, then maybe the combination of mental lockup and pressure wouldn't have been enough to get my psyche fridged. It can't really be his damn fault, right? He just happened to luck into that siren song of unacceptable woman-hating sexuality. And I can't hold it against him, because he stopped short of rape in the end, when he saw that I was broken. (I can't even write 'that he'd broken me' and feel honest, right now.)

This was not ... the only time I fell into that pattern, though it was the only time it was assault. I had an abusive vanilla relationship that hit my submission buttons around music until I hit a wall and threw him out of my life. I had a relationship with someone who was deeply uncomfortable with my submission, and so like a good little subbie and a good little woman I stifled it again to make him happy. I had other issues. And I worked on it until I came to a place where I could return to childhood and refuse to be ashamed.

Where does it come from? I don't give a damn. And not giving a damn is not just a political position about the unworthiness of the question, but me fighting back against the investigation of myself for which fruit of Original Sin was why I deserved to be nearly raped before menarche.

If the message had been that I needed to figure out how to deal with these desires in a sane, reasonable, and balanced manner, if it had included discussion of consent and how to set boundaries, if it had been anything other than "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?! WHY ARE YOU A FREAK?!", maybe things would have been different.

Why am I like this? If my established answer isn't good enough, fuck off. Why am I a freak? Welcome to the edge of the map. The Antipodes, where men walk upside down.

Watch your step. I bite.

My Little Demon

I wasn't going to write about this. I thought I'd said everything that needed to be said at the Corvid Diaries, but it's been chewing on me, and when I saw that Trinity had posted about it at her place and at SM-F and Lina at Uncool also said a piece, I started formulating my thoughts.

I've written about wrestling with responsibility for my assault; it's a question that has been a major part of my psyche for over half a lifetime now. It's so easy to wipe it away into self-blaming, should have known better, all the things that I could have done differently if I'd been a year, a month, a few days wiser, with the wisdom that I bought with a shattered mind.

It's so easy to fall back in the place where, well, it wasn't really a rape because he stopped just shy of that, so my pain is not legitimate, my flashbacks are appropriating "real" sexual assaults. It wasn't so bad because it wasn't a stranger. It wasn't so bad because ...

It wasn't so bad because my own goddamn mother thought it was a nonevent, just something to take for granted: of course he assaulted me, he's a man and all, that's what men do. I shouldn't expect anything different; it was a nonevent.

I had to fight the demons of guilt and shame to accept it as an event.

I had to fight the world for my right to have been hurt.

I had to fight myself, the world, everything, for recognition of the fact that my sexuality was folded around nonconsent like a car wrapped around a tree by a drunk before I was old enough to know, fully, what it was.

I had to fight to be able to say: this thing happened to me. This was real. I was hurt by it. It was not my fault. In fact, it was his fault, his choice, his decision to never ask, never realise he was pushing, that he was doing harm. And I am far more forgiving of what he did than anyone I've told the story to, still, and even I know that it was his damn fault that he assaulted me, pinning me down under his naked bodyweight while I tried to curl into a ball of adolescent neutronium.

I fought. And I won that fight. I won that fight primarily with the help of a woman I traded stories with, sitting on the floor in her house in Wales one summer night talking about where we had been and what we had seen. I won that fight with the support of my husband. I won that fight with the guidance of the outraged responses to the story that so many people have given me, letting me know that my event was a real event, something that I was allowed to be affected by.

And now I run across someone saying "All men are rapists." (I'm not inclined to chase down the link enough to link that thing there, because I don't feel like retraumatising myself. If you want to read it, the posts I linked above linked it.)

And that throws me back to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, unable to talk about it, because my experience wasn't actually real, it was "just" an assault, and anyway it was my boyfriend, not some stranger. It throws me back to knowing that, anyway, it was my fault, I should have known that he'd try something, I shouldn't have gone over to watch a movie if I didn't expect that. It's back to being all my fault, not his responsibility, because that's just how men are, that's just the default setting, he shouldn't be expected to be a decent human being.

All my fault.

All my goddamn fault.

It throws me back there, in the whirling mess of adolescence and trauma, back when I was still flashbacking regularly, back when I couldn't face the pain because being in pain was degrading to people who'd had a "real" assault.

All my fault.

And I sit back and bare my teeth at that maelstrom and say, "No."

I fought that fight already, and I won, and no fleabitten RAPE APOLOGIST claiming to be a feminist will EVER take that away from me.

Is that fucking radical enough for you?

How I Learned

I was a weird shy kid in high school, a little on the young side, a little inexperienced. I wound up, freshman year, hanging out with a few other mostly weird shy kids, a group that eventually formed into a dynamic social group consisting, largely, of the sort of weird shy kid who had never had a dynamic social group before.

It was the last day of school senior year; the exam for the last class of the day. There were a few of us who were in that class, students in that year, who might never see each other again. It's an odd feeling, the triumphant escape and the mellow bittersweetness of knowing that each of us is going their separate ways.

The exam finished; the bell rang.

One of those first friends, back from freshman year, came up to me as I was gathering my things. "Hey," he said. "I want to tell you something?"

"Oh?" I had my things together; I looked at him. He looked nervous, perhaps shyer than normal, full of light anxiousness that might, if played a little more dramatically, go to fidgeting or handwringing.

"I'm gay." There was a long silent pause, and then he said, "... is that okay?"

Is that okay?

I put my arms around him and hugged him tightly. I had no words, because he had broken my heart.

Triggering the Kiss

He told me once what it was like, in sketches, from his side, filling in my memory with reflection; a few weeks of increasingly focused flirting finally winding up nestled facing each other under a blanket, staring, me full of fright, him seeing that and trying a soft, tentative kiss, a light stroking of my neck, not understanding then why his hand on my neck produced such an intensity of not-responding because we were so far away from talking about kink and reactions and still building the shapes of the trust that would come of that. He told me about wondering at my restraint, my anxious awkwardness, perhaps because I had pursued him until that point and had come all over shy, unwilling to kiss deeply, full of tension.

Knowing he can read the fear and be gentle with it helps, even on nights like this when I want to duck and hide and bury my face and be not kissed, not kissed at all, certainly not deeply; the bites along my shoulder are fine, the holding, the knot of rope grinding into the small of my back, but no kisses, none. And he kisses me anyway, and I recognise that and choose trust with the conscious work of will and ride the surge of things holding tightly to that trust and nonetheless breathe much easier when the kissing is done, when I don't have to fight with myself to have it, when I can let go.

I am not always so fearful. So rarely so, now, with him; hard to trigger, working at healing, save for the rough and fragile days when all the covering on old wounds is thin and no padding at all, when I turn away from being kissed.

Let me spin you a memory: an awkward woman-child, shy and hungry for learning how to be human, settled into her high school's auditorium seats to watch the county's selection of teenaged bands perform. The friend she came with is dancing; the boy she pines after is off with his girlfriend; that boy's friend, from a different school, is sitting with her, one arm around her shoulders.

She is terrified. Frozen up, uncertain, able to respond in an anxious laughter at times, mind racing. She watches the bands, perhaps this one a friend's performance, others from people she never will see again.

His fingers shift a little, tracing a circle on her still-developing left breast. This is a pleasant sensation; she considers relaxing a little, but still does not know him, know whether she wants to be with him at all, or how to reject him gracefully if she does not, and oh, that feels good, and it's so nice to have someone offering something other than scorn, and at the same time what should a Good girl be doing to be Safe, and shouldn't someone talk, not that she knows what the words would be, and ...

... he leans in to kiss her. And this is too much, too much to think about, obliterating thought already quite tangled trying to make sense of sensation. His tongue probes, hitting teeth. Eventually encouraging something more, deeper, with greater intensity, leaving her only able to think of the unpleasant slickness of it, trying to parse this against the knowledge that This Is What Lovers Do, trying to figure out if it will become okay with practice, if the shape of it will be different ...

... and it never changes, not in all the long months ...

... and eventually that relationship dies in the burning of coercion and pain and terror and loss and shattering shattering shattering ...

... leaving revenants haunting so many things, most especially the kiss.

And eventually she learns, as she grows into woman from child, that it can mean Hunger instead of slime, and there are times when she can hear Hunger without remembering those first forced kisses, those kisses and the entire cascade of everything that came after; even sometimes she can say it, though those are rarer, harder, edged with other fears.

But Hunger is terrifying, and it comes with ghosts.

How I Didn't Lose My Virginity

This is a story I've never told in full before.

A long time ago, I had a friend who was in love with me. A bit troubled, in a complicated sort of way. A little suicidal around the edges.

The fact that I wasn't in love with him, wasn't able to be in love with him, was driving some of the darkness. And we were close, so very close that the person he had to turn to with, "I feel like killing myself over this girl" was me, the girl.

I love him as a brother, you know. My dear little brother. Who needed me, in ways that I could not truly give.

And I sat there on the cusp, thinking about who I was, what I am. Do you know the word "hierodoule"? The breakdown of the etymology is "temple/sacred slave". A nicer word for temple prostitute, really, the women who, for reasons of faith, were vessels for sexuality in the home of the gods. I thought about that sort of thing, not in words so coherent, not in words at all.

I offered, and he agreed. And we talked, anxiously the way young people with no experience would do, trying to make plans, anxious and nervous and, for me, razor-edged. He did not know that I had been assaulted; it was well before I could even dream of telling anyone about that, it was all folded away in me.

A few days later, he decided to turn me down. He laughed and said I could get the point off the Purity Test for "offered a pity fuck and been turned down".

I was relieved, deep in that broken heart of mine. And I made him swear that if he was going to kill himself, if he decided to do it, that he would come to me first, and we would have sex, because I would not let him die without the surety of being loved. Even if it wasn't the way that he wanted.

He promised. I think he knew that it was the only way I would let him release me. The only way I was not the hierodoule, right then, was to make the vow that he could call upon me for that, that he could come to the temple, if he needed it.

These days he's, so far as I'm aware, happy; living with a woman who our mutual friends tell me is wonderful and very good for him; I am reasonably secure that he will never call in that vow.

But I still feel it at times, recognising as I get to know someone the power to heal, the weight of the hierodoule, the path that I would have had my feet upon if near-rape hadn't broken me and bent my sexuality and made me too afraid to be able to offer that touch, to be able to actually do that work when the recognition is there. I've told people in the past that I had that inclination, occasionally, talked about it, without ever saying why, without ever outright stating that trying this maybe saved a life, even failing at it saved a life or at the very least healed one, because I was willing to try, because I was willing to offer.

And I wonder about that other world, sometimes.

And I wonder about this one, where people say that sex workers clearly had to have suffered horrible things to do that job, when I know that it's only because horrible things happened to me that I didn't.

My liege made a comment once that the only way he could see me being sexual was when it was personal, when it was intimate, and the hierodoule sobbed, quietly, in the place she might have been if only if. Like I cry now, thinking of loss and salvation and missing my little brother, who doesn't answer his goddamn email. Heh.

Baby Madonna

I need to write this, and I suspect it will make me cry.

I'm not sure I've ever really forgiven myself for being fourteen.

And if anyone asks what sort of sins being fourteen might be: I let myself get assaulted. I let someone inflict lasting psychological damage on me, warp my sexuality around fear, take away the possibility of it ever being easy.

And while I have worked a great deal on forgiveness, on self-acceptance, I have never fully forgiven myself for this.

Never forgiven myself for being the sort of fourteen-year-old who could only find a partner three years older and thus well past the explorations of boundaries that are tied up with the experience of being fourteen and learning adult sexuality.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing yet where my boundaries were, none save the last, that kept it to assault from rape.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing how to go back to ground that was secure.

Never forgiven myself for ignoring his protestations of love that I knew were anglings to set up sex in the hope that my lack of responsiveness would make it go away.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing how to say "No", even when I was pinned down with his huge weight and curled into a knot of refusal. Never forgiven the lack of words, lack of articulation, from someone who was only starting to learn how not to be a child. Never forgiven the inability to speak understandings some of which I only achieved years later.

Never forgiven myself, above all, for suspecting "Do you want to come over to my place and watch a movie?" a ruse, suspecting it near enough to be a belief I might even have spoken at the time had anyone asked me, and for packing up my videotape and going in the trust that I would be asked, that time, despite a long, long history of not being asked, of being presumed. For knowing, and hiding in a cloud of denial, of expectation of the civility of directness, of presumed protocol.

For not cutting him off, for not drawing the lines I didn't know, for ...

It never occurred to me before today that I never forgave myself for not being a more competent policing actor on that guy's penis. So of course I couldn't accept the damage that came of falling off the madonna pedestal.

Half a life ago and more, and I never thought of that.

Heartbroken

So last night I called all my immediate family members -- both parents and my brother -- to wish them a happy Thanksgiving.

Talking with my brother is ... complicated, sometimes. It's like we grew up in slightly different worlds. He was never close to Dad, particularly, for reasons I understand, and maintains a closer relationship with Mom than I can imagine ever wanting. He asked me why I was finally in therapy, and I told him I'd hit rock bottom, and after a moment he said, "I'm happy for you", and ... it's a funny thing to say, though I know what he meant.

He apparently went to a Thanksgiving gathering with Mom and about a dozen (according to him) or twenty (according to her) other people. She had a great time. He felt alienated by all the strangers having their family togetherness holiday, pretty much.

And he said, "I hate holidays like this."

I asked him why.

"I don't have a family," he said.

The divorce and all its chaos happened while he was still living at home -- I was off to college, and then I went mad, and I stayed here rather than come back. Which I needed to do, and at the same time I wasn't there for him. I'm pretty sure he was upset by that, by not having my support, but I could barely keep myself together at the time.

I know he walked out somewhere in there, lived with friends for a few weeks, just didn't deal with them, because of something Mom said to him, trying to pull the coercion tricks on him because he wasn't bending to her will, because he was trying not to take sides.

I know he was a lot more scarred by the dissolution than I was. I don't know how to soothe that at all.

I just ....

"I don't have a family."

How I Horrified The Shrink

It was probably a couple of months after I broke up with my first boyfriend, the one who assaulted me. Maybe a year after, the following summer, I mean. I was still a little shellshocked about it all, was wanting to talk about it with someone, was finally coming into a place where maybe I could. It was a bright, sunny day; I remember the light coming in through the windows.

I was old enough to not trust my mother with information right out, but not so old that I didn't try to hope she might turn somehow motherly if I gave her the chance. And I can't remember the context of the conversation, whether we were having some dispute, whether I brought it up out of the blue, any of that.

I asked her, "Did you ever wonder why [the ex] never calls anymore?" I think it was relevant to the conversation, or something.

She shrugged. "I figured he'd forced himself on you," like it was just something to shrug about, like it was normal, expected, something completely unworthy of comment.

I had no idea how to deal with someone who thought I had been raped and could not bring herself to care.

I fled.

Have you ever gone mad?

If I talk to you about madness, will you take it as a rhetorical exaggeration, a little dance for effect, something said to shock and startle into understanding some lesser point?

Have you ever gone mad?

If I talk about madness, will you understand?

Let me talk about the edge of madness, the contours of it, not quite funnel shaped, not that even, but still the slicked-down grass, wet with sweat, tears, and blood, the way the feet of the mind slide on it, edging downwards even if one never loses balance, the slow circling around and around the abyss in the center, never quite sure whether the event horizon is still safely below, or something somewhere a few steps up, now crossed and unreachable, leaving one only able to orbit and slowly descend on the oozing turf towards the hole in the centre.

Let me talk about the last gasp, the recognition of the slow circling progress towards unbeing, the gathering of all the resources left that could be spent circling, circling, circling until the horrible mud makes it impossible to do anything other than slide. Let me talk about hoarding that up, pulling it all in for the last leap for freedom, hanging all the breathing left to have on "I will just do this, and when I have done this, it will be okay", the running lurch up the slope to catch at a tuft set in solid ground, something to hold on to, something that could be used to haul up out of the emptiness with maybe a little help, something secure.

(I told myself I'd have a glass of milk and it'd be okay, and went over to the little half-fridge on the floor, took out the milk, got my mug, pulled the twisty thing off the cap, tried to pour ...

... discovered it was frozen solid.)

Have you ever felt your mind break, a crystalline explosion, that last expenditure of all the resources of sanity spent grabbing for that tuft, that rock, that low branch, the brushing of the tips across the surface, too little, and gone. Have you ever watched the pieces of cognition spiral down and into the gap as one goes with them, surrounded by them, swirling, suddenly bloodstained with the effort it took it to break free of a head so shattered it feels like wind in the cranium, bloodstained with that and the effluvia of the descent, and then all of it, all the pieces, gone before you, around you, on top of you, a pelting of little fragments of a life?

Have you ever sat there, marvelling at the realisation that you are a being of light, a being of light, and everything around you is a shadow? That perfect clarity of sharded mindbits, where, look, some of the shadows are concerned about the shadow that is the body, talking in their shadowworld about shadowthings. Maybe one of them is concerned about suicide, but that's silly, death is a shadowthing, the body is a shadowthing, these shadowthings are irrelevant, there is this clear, blinding, agonisingly clear reality of existing as a being of light?

Have you ever spent days, weeks even, curled up in bed, watching life go by around you, wondering what happened to that beautiful clarity of perfect separation from all these things, aware that the sweat and body oils are building in a stench, are grinding so deep into the fibres of the sheets that they are turning black, and being distantly bothered by this, as if somewhere, in some other life, maybe it might once have mattered?

Have you ever, once you had managed to pull yourself together into something a little more resembling, happened to be one room over from someone whose sole concern in any of this was the shameful state of cleanliness that comes of two weeks unmoving on off-white sheets? Who wished to express how horrible that housekeeping was to a person who had witnessed the descent into the abyss, milk and all, and helped me claw back out again? To keep that overheard thing and never mention it, because if I was supposed to overhear, well, I'm not going to grant the satisfaction, and if I wasn't ...

If I talk about madness, will it be the eyerolls and the mutterings of "drama queen" from people who have never run their fingers across a grease spot on the sheets in detached indifference, knowing what that means without managing to know how to care?

Have you ever gone mad?

Heads and Tails

Terror can be a slow slide, a gentle collapsing of pebblework, an unseady footstep, and then in a rush of unremambered something, that last teetering wobble on the edge of the abyss, knowing that back when the first pebble shifted there was a way out.

I couldn't tell you how, precisely, I wound up pinned to the couch, trapped down by a mass of naked boy three years older, not in the sense of a linear recounting of the day's events. All of that is lost to the fractured mass of memory: golden summer sunlight filtered through Bethesda trees and the large glass patio door, tainting all of the memories with an unreal gold that echoed in the woodwork of the trim, so bright, so unreal, painted not in the sepia of memory but with the animator's undertones of exaggeration and emphasis. Tall, erect nakedness like a pillar, gashed in memory with a vividness that returned again and again for years, lit in gold, outlined in the shrinking back into the couch, the haze of black markerwork that outlines the gold with emotion. His shed clothing without me looking, as if it might be that if I never looked, never acknowledged, he would back away, ask, see if I wanted what he wanted, ask for once, not that ever in that entire relationship there was ever an asking, just the constant slide of pebbles down the hill, a slow scree of missed opportunities to object once I had time to realise that no, I hadn't wanted that, or had wanted it but not with him, or ...

It was the heaviest weight I've ever borne, the pressure of him, the driving presence of that mass, that horrible weight that meant there was no escape, no way of coming out, the way I folded inward, crushed beneath him into a white dwarf, the last choked ember of a strangled star, blowing off all of my memory, my continuity, my sense of self in an expanding haze of supernova that he never saw, never noticed. I was folded into one thought: "I don't even have my periods yet", over and over again, as if the physical immaturity was a last talisman to preserve the frail shell of identity, a last way of holding out against the crushing mass of reality. I fought for control of the button of my jeans, pulled in tighter and tighter into myself, my arms protecting what I could and crushed beneath that horrible, horrible weight. There was the last chink, the last teetering balance of repulsion and gravity before the last collapse and becoming lost to neutronium, and somewhere the weight let me go, and I fled into the bathroom.

When I emerged, he was clothed. He walked me to the subway. I went home, feeling like an expanding nebula around a shell of a star, a seething mass of charge no longer capable of burning, not quite crushed into oblivion.

The Twins dance in eternal battle -- exactly the same, perfectly opposite.

The weight of his body pins me down, forearms resting on my collarbones or hands pinning my wrists to my chest or shoulders. I wriggle a little to test it and a nuzzling kiss turns into a bite, claiming, reminding. I snuggle into the touch, the reassurance of the warmth and weight on me, wrestling for the fun of it sometimes, or maybe this time wide open, pulled open by strength and safety and the gentle support of that touch. He tilts my chin to look at me better, studying me a moment, knowing that I cannot speak when held that way and looking for answers in my eyes. To be sure I'm okay, consenting, secure.

I asked, knowing what I was asking for. I asked, he asked, and every moment is full of awareness, reading the electric energy of the feedback, the way the weight peels open my crushed-together shells and brings things together to ignite, fusion again, burning away, radiant light in the gathered memory of burning stars. I asked, he asked, we answer each other in every moment, and the weight is so very light.

I know and I choose; knowing the crushing weight that comes with consent unasked, not knowing, not being able to speak, I choose a joyous voicelessness, and I remember that stars shine.


Heads or tails?

Oh my fucking god.

Okay, so I was semi-idly getting resources for dealing with Borderline Personality Disorder for a friend, and started reading this compilation of posts.

And I'm reading along and reading along and find this, specifically this sentence:

The client said that she had heard from a friend of her mother that she had explained her estrangement from her children and grandhchildren saying that her children had been the product of marital rape.

Hit me like a bucket of ice water, first a "Do I know this therapist, did someone I talk to talk to ... no, there's no way, the relationship-to-person isn't right ... holy shit, someone else did that?"

Only she said it to my face.

Oh my fucking god.

I'm not alone.

I'm crying.

Sex Education, Andromeda Appendix

I've actually been thinking a lot about the whole sex ed thing, through reading everyone's collective contributions and discussions I'm having elsewhere. And it gets me wound up like I don't really get wound up on teh intarwebs anymore, this whole thing about sex education.

I take it so damn personally.

Because sex education is a place where The System completely and utterly betrayed me. Not just fucked me over bureaucratically (the story of much of it) or didn't manage to transfer necessary skills (much of which was at least as much my fault as The System's). Beyond that.

The sex ed I got from the school system (all six and a half fucking hours of it, total, in twelve years in the public schools) was all about How To Be Safe, with a bit of biology on the side so I knew what to expect from puberty and a little bit of the process of pregnancy. And if I wanted to be Safe I needed to avoid these diseases, not stash sperm near my ovaries, and then I would be okay.

And I didn't even run into a real predator, for whom How To Be Safe is a much more complicated proposition. I ran into another badly instructed kid, and I don't think either of us came across the word "consent" in the information we'd gotten from The System (I should find my copy of the book my parents gave me and see if "consent" is in there, but I don't actually think so), and we certainly didn't know how to negotiate it or think about it.

And yeah, it'd have been good if that kid had had the guts to say, "Hey, are you interested in this touch?" rather than trying it out on me and seeing if I punched him in the nose. And it would have been good if I'd known where my boundaries were ahead of time, rather than having to try to figure it all out on the fly and feeling over my head and too late to speak up. But deriving that shit from first principles with no support, no errors, and no clear implementation isn't exactly something that a fourteen-year-old in the middle of hormone stew is going to be skilled at. (He was seventeen. I don't know that seventeen is much better, or, for that matter, less stew-y.)

Everything I needed to know to be Safe was that if I didn't say Yes it was rape. Oh, and blood contact transmits AIDS.

That's what they taught me.

There's this little screaming voice somewhere in the back of my heart who sees an earnest person who does not mean harm saying, "Look, but we don't know if they're teaching good information in those classes, that's reasonable concern" and ... this is the person who The System was trying to appease when it lied to me, symbolically speaking.

It's hard to respond to that rationally.

I mean, a rational voice might point out that you know exactly as much about what your school's sex ed classes are teaching the kids as you do about what they're teaching about geography or science: you have the same level of access to the handouts and research materials, the same ability to look at the school curricula, the same ability to write cranky letters to the administration about it and get it adjusted. That's a rational thing to say, a rational thing to point at.

But of course learning where Madagascar is isn't as fucking terrifying as learning where the clitoris is, and the existence of electrons doesn't hold a candle to the danger of the existence of gay people.

And I can't be rational about this. There's this little chunk of my psyche that responds to the Dutiful Parent With Concerns as if it were the great oceanic beast come lurching up to devour the virgin sacrifice where The System left her bound and vulnerable to pay for its hubris. I can't be rational, with my heart tasting of sea spray and terror.

Shame, Shame, Shame

So, Renegade Evolution asked for folks to talk about experiences with sexual shame.

I come at this one from a slightly funky angle, but my world is always on a slant; my biggest shame issues around sex have a lot more to do with not doing than doing.

My libido is fairly low in general, by which I mean that I don't seek out sex or, in most circumstances, seek it out; I will respond to a partner, but almost never initiate. And when I get depressive ... well, the responsiveness takes a major hit, too, and I go from 'almost never initiate' to 'will not initiate'. If the depression gets really bad, I go from 'responsiveness takes time and effort' to 'responsiveness is impossible'.

I used to get flashbacks, too, to the sexual assault, and my major trigger was the sight of an aroused man. This has something of a chilling effect on the free expression of the sexuality of a heterosexual woman interested in partnered sex.

For a long, long time I had major shame issues around the assault. I minimised it constantly, feeling embarassed that it had damaged me badly enough to give me flashbacks, to interfere with my interactions with other people, because I was not raped or injured physically, so why, why did I have all of this mental damage? How could I possibly be that fucked up by it? I was ashamed of my damage, ashamed of needing to close my eyes, afraid of the tension that would lock up my mind at times, shutting down my ability to respond the way I wanted to. And I was too ashamed to try to seek out psychological help -- get a diagnosis for my damage, get treatment, anything that might help -- because it was an admission that I had been broken so badly by something that was, at least in my head, supposed to be trivial. He stopped, right? Before it was rape? So why was I hurt? How could I possibly be so slashed up inside my mind from that, when it didn't even cross over into the much-debated-as-legitimate "date rape"?

I've never had an adult sexuality that didn't have echoes of that as a part of it, that didn't have the shadows of him behind me. I was a late bloomer, physically; the assault came six months before menarche. (The fact that I had not developed that far at the time was about the only thing that was visible in the fractured horror-movie mirror of my mind through the experience, the: "I don't even have my periods yet. How can he think I'm ready for sex?" Over and over again, shards on shards on shards of my mind shattering around me.) I've never had an adult sexuality that was untouched by the shame.

In the end, it's that that I can never forgive him for, for taking that away from me. For associating sex and terror before I had fully grasped how to claim sex as my own thing. For tainting my uncertainties with shame.

The major thing that started to loosen the bonds of that shame on me, the thing that got me actually thinking, was that I was swapping assault stories with another survivor, late one night. She had had an experience that I parsed as flatly horrific, and had fought off her attacker by tearing his throat open with her teeth -- and when I told my story, she said, "How horrible!"

How horrible, what happened to me. From someone who knew from horrible.

There's a key to the chain. There are other locks to that shame, but that was the first and largest.

I don't know if the depression takes out my sex drive because of that, or if it's independent, but either way, it vanishes, all my ability to connect and express my sexuality fades out with the rest of the world when I'm depressed. And then I have the shame of the inadequate partner, the failure as a lover, the knowledge that others want that form of connectivity with me and I just ... can't ... open up and live that much.

And that's the shame that hurts the most these days, this sense of failure, of personal inadequacy, that I'm unable to consistently or readily fulfil that part of relationship. If I could only figure out how to set that shame aside, to get over it and myself, then maybe the flow wouldn't be blocked up with shame, maybe it wouldn't be so ... damn ... hard sometimes.

If I weren't ashamed of my shame.