My Story: Everything but What Happened

This blog for awhile, had a section called “my story” and in it contained anything related to my memories. I told the main story of how my brother raped me. I told the broken pieces of story about my father, and my mother. I blogged about the present moment, because I wrote these things still living at home.

Over the years, I started privatizing them. There were other factors involved sometimes, but the main reason was that I stopped believing myself. I would wake in the middle of the night in a dead panic, obsessing about some blog post or another, why did I write that? That didn’t happen! Why did I say those things? Everything about my father began to feel distant and unreal. Details that were once clear faded, and the only thing I had access to was the knowledge that I had once said that it was real. So I started taking those posts down, when I remembered I’d written them.

Soon, for awhile there, you’ll notice that most of my blog posts were about being an ex-Christian, and only that. That was safe. Those were blog posts that didn’t have to be personal, but moral and theological. When I wrote in the beginning of 2019 that I wasn’t going to be blogging anymore, I took down the last few stragglers of “my story” and considered that part of my blog done.

I didn’t believe myself. I could barely work on my book anymore. It’s not even that I disbelieved my father had sexually abused me, it was more that I was convinced that every detail I had ever said happened, hadn’t. And that what was underneath those false memories was something more benign (in whatever definition a survivor might define “benign sexual abuse.”)

I didn’t want to be a bad survivor anymore, even though I am. I didn’t want to have repressed memories, I didn’t want to describe my abuse with the cliches that people mock: the memories where I’m outside my body, the child-like understanding of what was happening, the memories that are dark and red with half-lidded eyes (why do we never assume you close your flipping eyes?), the memories that are a blend of things that happened more than once, so I can’t tease out which day was what, the incongruities of self, the lack of proof, the uncertainty of just what certain things even can mean. Roy Moore happened, and I wanted to write only about being a survivor, not about what it was. I wanted to be irrefutable, I never wanted anyone to be able to question me, or call me a liar (more than I already was) ever again.

I believe myself now, again. I’ve done a lot of (awful, crying-filled) work to come back to a place where I finally understand that yes, I haven’t been lying, yes it was that bad, yes, at the very least, large swaths of the memories I have are real, or at least real enough.

But I won’t tell them. Instead, I’ll tell you the surrounding stories. Those are the ones I know most clearly, and those are the ones that are easier to tell. These are the memories that are like that kind of scene in a move, where someone points a gun, the screen goes dark, and then you hear the gunshot. The stories are damning because you know what they point to, even if you don’t know the specifics of them.

Do you get the experience of being so engrossed in something, or you’re building a new habit, or something different happens, and the logic then maps onto everything else? When I play the sims in depressed fugues, afterward I’ll practically feel the bar above my head ticking down the time of every action: bathroom, hand washing, brushing teeth. When I took wood shop in school, every sidewalk became wood I imagined cutting into and sanding, until I took ceramics and it became clay. Think about how much These Pandemic Times have changed our relationship to people and objects: we put masks on anything that resembles a face, we are nervous when watching a movie and seeing people crowded in a space together. The pandemic has changed how we associate objects to meaning, and the very narrative by which we see the world.

This is what it was like for me as a child in relation to sexual abuse, when I look in the past, this is my every moment, my understanding of how the world worked. I used to call them fantasies but that was back when I hated myself for being abused, when I thought that I was a disgusting and fucked up child. So instead, I think a better way of describing it is: I was abused so much, I began to map it onto the world. My relationship with objects, with stories, with people, my relationship with how the world worked was defined by this.

We are aware of the cute phenomenon of kids learning both the rules and the metaphors for how the world is. When they ask a grown adult why their parent isn’t there to put this grown adult to bed or cut their vegetables, it’s funny because children haven’t grasped yet that the rules that they experience aren’t universal, aren’t exactly how everyone interacts with the world. And neither did I.

It’s in the games I played with my dolls, its how I rewrote the movies I watched in my head, it’s the metaphors of when plants become people and objects become representations of something else. These are my strongest memories of being abused, because they aren’t specific memories. They are the literal experience of how I saw the world. I saw the world like someone who was sexually abused.

And the reason they’re easier to tell is that they’re much harder to argue away. You can tell me that what I remembered about what my father did to me is wrong, or a misunderstanding, or that something else must have happened and my facts are wrong. But if I tell you that when I was a child I play-acted rape on my dolls while repeating on loop that they deserved it, if I tell you that anyone who even remotely looked like my father I assumed was a predator, if I tell you that every father and daughter I saw together I assumed must be sexual, these symptoms of sexual abuse are harder to re-contextualize away.

People treat child sexual abuse memories as a kind of metaphor, a narrative landscape full of emotional connections, not literal ones. Like dream  interpretation, people will tell you what the metaphor of being a child is, in order to define for us exactly what our stories mean and why we might have seen them the way that we do.

I often say that one of the most unintentional effects of being a survivor is that I know all the time how other people construct the world. Abuse is never an objective term with an objective meaning, how people define the word tells you how they see harmful behavior. Everyone has answered for themselves “why do bad things happen?” and whatever stories you tell, they will hunt for that motivation. If they believe that bad things happen  because abusers were once abused themselves, then any trauma your abusers experienced are now the cause. If they believe that all women are innocent and only men can be violent, then people will look at my mother’s pain and hurt as an explanation for why her behavior counts as something else. And if people believe that abuse is overblown because you should be violent and controlling with your kids, well, they’re going to tell you how you’re minimizing the word “abuse” by attaching it to your experiences.

You are rarely granted the right to your own emotional point of reference when you were a child being sexually abuse. Rather, others assume that you couldn’t possibly remember how you felt or your own motivation and instead, these things endless questions of endless possibilities that they can fill in to account for, well, whatever definition of sexual abuse they have, and whatever assumptions they’ve made about what sexual abuse looks like. So if I tell you a story about playing with dolls as a child, you can put as much weight onto that story as you want. You can tell me why I played with my dolls that way, what mental and emotional explanations they were, you can put on me an “unconscious” no matter what I tell you about how I felt or what I was doing.

And likewise, you could, if you want, look at that movie image: the gun pointing, the screen going dark, and then the gunshot, and you can propose anything you want. Maybe there was a subversion in tropes, it was a fake out, and the gun was fired somewhere else, right? The hypotheticals of sexual abuse are the easiest things to do this with, because all that can be claimed is that something happened.

But that’s the point. I tell you the story of me playing with my dolls as a child, telling them that they deserved it. I tell you about how I retold Disney movies to myself involving sexual violence instead, I saw the word father as the meaning rape. Draw any conclusion you want, even the most ridiculous stretches of what that could mean, up with any story you want to tell about these things, and make it make sense to what you believe it true about people, about evil, about truth, and justice, and hope.

You can do that, but it will never touch anything related to what actually happened when my father and I were together. Those memories can’t be picked up and broken apart. They can’t be doubted, they can’t be questioned, they can’t be wondered about whether they contain some other possibility to them, because you don’t have them. There is no point you get to say “ah-ha! That is what your father did, and why your father did it and why you experienced it the way that you did” about any of the actual specifics, because you don’t have access to them. You have a missing piece that means you can’t possibly know how wrong or right you are.

These memories are mine. They’re mine until people understand that no amount of statistics or therapy manuals or tweet threads of “signs of” can overwrite what it actually is to experience it, they’re mine until we can believe that it’s possible that you closed your eyes, and that means the memories themselves don’t have the crystal sharp image of an outside observer that we expect survivors to have. They’re mine until we live in a world that cares, a world that can be entrusted with such stories, they’re mine until we hold abusers accountable, and they confess, until my mother tells me everything that she knows, they’re mine until the day no one assumes that what we’ve lived through is up for dream interpretation, where every moment in time can be rewritten with new symbolism and meaning.

So instead, this is the story you get: there is a gun pointing. The screen goes dark. And there is a gunshot. And you can make of that whatever you will.

The Connector Memories

Survivors of child abuse often doubt our memories. Part of this is the pushback of abuse culture: saying that we abused is often met with a reaction that maybe we misinterpreted events, maybe our child minds couldn’t understand that our parents had our best interests at heart. I’ve written before about the expectation that survivors are held up to 100% accuracy in our memories, or else people feel free to doubt that we’re telling the truth or that we know what happened to us.

But there is also the element of memories that are often confusing because when they happened, we didn’t know what they meant. Like rewatching a childhood movie and finally understanding all the innuendo that went over your head. Except that we can’t rewatch our memories in the same way; often how we saw things then remains how we see things now, especially when the memories aren’t in our head like movies, but in our head like repetition; like two plus two, we no longer have to think about to accept as true.

And this can be reinforced by abusers who told us what happened to us. People often think of abusers telling their families what lies they should convince other people of; I don’t know if people outside of abuse understand that many times, your abuser is telling you how you should see events. It’s often a cliched trope that sexual abusers make up strange stories to convince a child to go along with the sexual abuse, relying on a child’s ignorance and trust to believe that this is what is happening. But this is what abusers do, and not just with sexual abuse. Abusers tell you they have reasons for hurting you, reasons for doing what they’re doing. Couple that with repressed memories, and abusers can exploit a child’s confusion and lack of memories to rewrite what happened to you. “You got that bruise because you tripped and fell” isn’t just an excuse to tell anyone who asks. It’s also often a way an abuser gives their victim a story when they recognize their victim is confused and can’t recall what happened.

When we are missing pieces, or when we haven’t yet grasped the full implications of a particular memory, it can be easy to doubt ourselves. We remember an abuser hurting us, but we’ve been told, interpreted or even lied to ourselves about every bruise; telling ourselves that that was because we fell, we were clumsy, and then tell ourselves because we have no memory of bruises, our memories of physical abuse must be inaccurate or it must not have been “that bad” because we believe we have no recall of anything else but these memories that seem disconnected from our other experiences.

But then sometimes we finally recognize what a particular aspect of our memories was. Sometimes that comes with reexperiencing this or that; for me, it’s being in my first sexual relationship that is making so many things make sense. We have a similar experience and it’s the closest we get to a rewatching of our memories; we finally recognize the implications, the meaning, behind what our abuser did. We finally are able to say, “No, this particular thing was related to the abuse.”

I’ve been dealing with that this week. It relates to things I’m not sure I’m ready to write about, but it was one of those moments where I finally had to acknowledge a particular memory I’ve been carrying around my whole life was related to the abuse. And from there the dominoes fall: if that memory is true then it means the memories I have of the sexual abuse are true because they connect so seamlessly. And if those memories are true then my triggers are true, and all of a sudden everything lines up perfectly. All my “I think this happened” are in even sharper light when I realize that these other memories confirm exactly what happened. Survivor memories like this are like a puzzle where we’ve been convincing ourselves all the most horrifying puzzle pieces belong to another puzzle, with another context that makes them benign. And then we finally snatch up one of those pieces and see how easily it connects, how clearly it forms the picture we’ve been secretly believing could never be true.

This is what connector memories are. The memories that tie the rest of our memories together, the memories that are kept separate, either as our brain’s way of protecting us, or as part of the lies and confusion of our childhood. And in keeping them separate we live in this space of denial and mistrust, our memories of being abused feeling as though they are on a separate track, running parallel to our other memories. Saying, “I was abused” has never had the same impact when I could also carry the doubt, and therefore the hope, that I was a liar, that I was making things up, that as some point I could find a line of reasoning, a context that would explain away my memories of abuse as something else. But realizing that not only did something happen, but that I can trust my own memories as accurate is its own realization. It’s the difference between believing and knowing. And now I have to contend with the knowing.