Tag: life

on not/belonging

First, what do I mean by the feeling I have had most of my life: that I don’t belong?

It’s not difficult for me to identify elements of my young life which embedded these feelings: my mother’s unstable mental health meant that I was passed between relatives at times, and that I was witness to her withdrawal from me. She would disappear in more ways than one, and, not only was I then virtually on my own physically, I was on my own emotionally too of course. Any three year old who stands aside and observes is bound not to feel part of things.

When I was six and a half, I went to live with my father, his new wife, and their children, aged six months and two years old. As my parents divorced before I was one year old, and as for some reason I didn’t see my father — I had only met him and my stepmother once before moving in with them.

So I entered the house already an outsider, a role cemented soon after by my father’s grooming and sexual abuse of me.

Keeping secrets separates you from the rest of your life. Like most in this situation, I learned to pretend. Pretend to be a ‘normal’ teenager. Pretend that things were okay in my house. This fragmentation — the reality of what I was living through and carrying with me, alongside my daily life in school and with friends — for years and years meant that I lived parallel lives.

I have never presented as ‘damaged’. I was able to keep going simply because I kept going. I guarded my independence once I left the family home, I pulled myself away from everyone and everything — with smiles, with humour, and sometimes out of a real love — in order to keep the ugliness — of me, of my inner life — away from them.

Versions of this fragmentation, this ‘other-ness’, haunt most survivors I think. From it, we know we do not ‘belong’, and feel we never will. It can be such a heavy, unspoken burden in life, one that spills over into ‘not belonging’ anywhere — in your work, in your culture, in society. No matter if others treat you like you belong: if you feel deep down you don’t belong, ‘other-ness’ can be unshakeable.

***

So, second: I know now that I belong. And indeed, never in my life have I felt such a sense of belonging, in every way. You may ask youself, how did I get here? (Talking Heads, 1980).

Over the last few years, the floating icebergs that I used to feel shifting inside me, drifting, have gathered in one place. There are bridges now between them, paths through them, leading one to the other. There is a layer of fresh snow, which, once walked upon, connects the pieces in a kind of knowledge and acceptance.

This fresh snow:

  • everyone I know and almost everyone I meet becomes aware that I am a survivor, and that, yes, I am now thriving
  • no secrets anymore, ever, from anyone
  • my friends and family — all of them — meet me where I am
  • understanding that perfection is not a condition of loving or being loved
  • I allow those close to me to take care of me
  • no pretending, and no soft-pedalling, around my truths, and my mental and physical health
  • I have been hurt, wounded for life — but here I am nevertheless, so blessed to love and be loved

I feel I belong in this world now. And that I am not alone.

***

Finally, third. The connections I have forged with the survivor activist community and its allies have been life-changing, and life-affirming. In a room of survivors, there is no scanning for harm, no second guessing what can and can’t be said. No rush to ‘fix’ difficult emotions.

We are all, each one of us, whole people. With whole lives, separate struggles, and particular concerns. But we are united in our understanding of what constitutes damage, loss, scapegoating, toxic family dynamics. We are united in our understanding of what constitutes abuse. We do not feel the need to prove anything, or even to offer our life narrative. None of this matters. What matters is the drive for change.

We held our first workshop under the umbrella of Remembering Together in March this year. It was possibly the most uplifting experience of my life: the most grounded I had ever felt with others, the most accepted, the most understood, the most unconditional. All of us strong survivor activists devoting ourselves — some across decades — to raising awareness, changemaking, and the prevention of child sexual abuse.

We all know so much needs to change. This project is the first of its kind — putting together a toolkit for archiving survivor activist materials and life experiences. Maybe, just maybe, we can consolidate activities from the last 50 years and begin to say so loudly we cannot be ignored: We are here! We are here! (and more than sensitive-eared Horton cares).

Survivors of child sexual abuse make up 15% of the population. And despite decades of work by individuals and brilliant organisations — this statistic has not shifted. Despite several government reports and inquiries: almost all of the recommendations in them have not been acted upon.

Remembering Together offers a start. A way in to gaining some critical mass. We all know things need to change. But the taboo, the distaste, the revulsion even — all perpetuate the abuse. Time and again our momentum has been dissipated, disbanded, unfunded.

There have always been activists. And quite suddenly, without any forethought, I find that I am one.

And I belong here. The joins between the icebergs are smoothed. I am integrated. I am myself, and I know where I belong.

anger

Safe to say it’s been a grim few days, on top of already grim days, on top of a hard year.

I was raised never to be angry. Never to disrupt. Never to raise a fuss. For abuse victim survivors of any sort, anger can bring with it a variety of outcomes, all bad: more abuse perhaps, to ‘put you in your place’; more attention, which may draw eyes to the abuse, which in turn will definitely destabilise your life — and make everything worse. This repression of anger is familial, environmentally necessary. It kept my father from flying off the handle, from making everyone suffer.

But it’s also often cultural: be reasonable. Somehow this has become the reigning metric of so many of our lives. And it has its roots in the primacy of logic. We are encouraged to stand back, to be ‘objective’.

Of course this whole ‘reasonable’ approach has the effect of removing us from our emotional selves. It downplays our emotions, our views, and ultimately is a form of gaslighting: you don’t really feel this, how could you think/feel this, and finally, you’ve got it all wrong.

Case in point: the last time I spoke to my father, in 1987, it was on the phone. I was shaking with fear and anger, struggling to hold the earpiece to my ear. I said that I wanted him to accept responsibility for what he had done to me, that it was sexual abuse. His response was to laugh, and say I’d been reading too many magazines. I then said that unless he did as I asked, he would never see any future children I might have. He laughed again.

***

In fact: he never did see my children. In that moment, that last conversation with him, I somehow managed to hold onto the importance of what I felt, of right and wrong. I somehow, and possibly for the first time, managed to speak to him, however terrifyingly hard it was — and it was — with my whole self.

This won’t be the only post I do about our whole selves, and what this means to me.

For now though I’ll say that I’ve got better at anger. I’ve got better at not always having logical reasons, at not having to explain every last thing — at just feeling something. Feeling something is not in itself threatening, not in itself dangerous.

So what do we do now with these equal measures of anger and despair? When it sometimes seems that any full-throated reaction is ‘too emotional’, ‘too political’, ‘too extreme’?

Sunday January 25th, the day after Alex Pretti’s death, I felt, like a lot of people, incandescent with rage. And grief. All day. And I couldn’t see how I was going to get out of it. Would I just have to get used to this hopelessness — would we all?

At the end of the day I had a text conversation with family. All of us are distressed. We all have loved ones in the US; we all care.

I said that I was so angry, didn’t know what to do with myself. Our younger son M wrote:

…you can have a day of being furious

…but the goal is not to trick yourself into thinking

you’re fighting BY getting angry.

In other words: anger is the justified by-product. Of grief, of horror, of despair.

But it’s not, in itself, The Fight. In itself, anger does not do any useful battle.

How do we ‘fight’ then? How do we make sure we are heard? How do we make a difference?

We are heard by being whatever loud means to us — through the written or spoken word, through image, through music — in our houses, on the streets, on the phone. By breaking barriers, pushing through the societal and familial boundaries we have been hesitant to question before now.

It is very much time to ask questions and demand answers, and to keep doing it, to press and press at it all. I think we know this. It’s time to stand together. To break all the silences which form the hierarchies which control our lives — the ‘families’ if you will, which declare how we should act and what we should say.

Nope. No more. It’s time.

I’m so grateful to son M for giving me some clarity through my overwhelming feelings. And yeah: I’m extremely proud to have played a part in raising him.