It’s okay, I’ve been told, you don’t have to remember what happened to you to heal from it.
There are things that live in an inexpressible part of my brain. There is a shut door and behind it contains things I can’t see, but I can’t always find the door. I don’t always know that it is a door, door my brain tries to recall, and fails. When I do find it, on occasion, and open it, it is screaminghummingpiercing noise, a mess of objects, bashed and broken, like an earthquake that turns a house into rubble.
No one can come with me into this rubble and say I think that used to be a television set, because first I would have to describe for them the shape, and I don’t have the shape. Everything runs together, the sound, the rubble, it is one object, and there is no name for the screaminghummingpiercingbashedbrokencracked.
And then the door slams shut. Then there is no door.
You don’t need to remember to heal from it.
Let me describe to what I fear: I can’t. Let me tell you about how I see my body, about the metaphors and meaning the abuse wrote on me: I can’t. Let me tell you what makes me feel powerless and out of control: I can’t. Those take up the whole house of my head, but they too are screaminghummingpiercingbashedbrokencracked, a frenzy of pain without words.
You don’t know what memory is, I want to say, if you think you that you don’t need it. You think that trauma is as simple as conditioning, as linear individualized triggers you expose yourself too until you feel safe, and patched up. It’s not. That’s merely a reassurance under the cold and dismissive belief that humans are mechanical, a mathematical formula you can punch an equation into and have us spit out the same answer, without history, without personhood, without community.
Feelings are a memory. Words are a memory. The ability to express the internalities of yourself, to have a sense of awareness, confidence, and forward motion–these are also memories. And they are also trauma memories, easily lost in the rubble.
Statements like this strike me as reflective of how we much prefer to fix survivors than to correct the injustice of abuse. We would rather lop us off from our complicated and messy memories, extract us quietly from the people who hurt us, keep societies eyes away from the horrifying details of what happened to us, and from the work of holding our abusers accountable.
There is a door, and I can’t find it. But I can always hear what’s inside it, I can feel it, I can smell it, I can see it, in a place in my mind that can’t make sense of the details, I remember the screamingbrokenpiercingcrackingandcracked, always. It’s there because I can’t find it, because I cannot sift through the debris and figure out what was and therefore, where it goes. It lives because it can’t be made manifest, because I cannot call it forth in order to remember where it belongs, to put it properly in the past. I cannot advocate on behalf of a the parts of me that are still a half-lidded, wordless child, dissociatingly sleeping through the pain, because I cannot tell you what there is to advocate for.
You need your memory to be you, by the way. You would not let me come into your mind and extract whatever I found appealing, to yank out anything I wanted, to scramble it around, because what’s the difference, one way or another, to your future healing, right? You know you need that. To be happy, to be whole, to be yourself.
I want to lunge through everything; all the bright and cheerful platitudes, the colorful motivational posters of phrases survivors get, told to us by people who regurgitate it word for word to soothe, not my fear, but theirs, not my despair, but theirs, not my pain, but theirs, I want to tear my body through the flimsy paper of it all, and grab them by the shirt collar and say I need my fucking memories back.
You make for me a world in which I can find that door, and open it, and see what happened. You make for me a science that understands traumatic memory enough to help me access it, you make for me a therapy strong enough to withstand the men who cry falsehoods! Brainwashing! through their guilty teeth, while someone helps me pick up broken things out of the rubble and name them, you make for me a society that hears us as a witness to our own bodies. That’s what I need.
Speaking When the World Sleeps 
Memory is so important. Without it, it’s so hard to have a sense of self. There’s always the sensation of hollow. Sometimes people wonder if not remembering trauma is “better”, but no really, in my experience. Without memory, triggers still affect just as strongly, just that it seems out of the blue…and therefore utterly bewildering to me. For better or for worse, I want the memories.