Words are important to me, and finding the correct word or phrase for what I experience is critical. Otherwise, why write?
Two words are bandied about freely when describing what can happen to a person attempting to stay alive after a trauma. They include healing, and the mother of all awfuls, closure.
I despise these words. I loathe them. When someone comes at me with closure, it’s everything I can do not to go full tirade.
Perhaps it is I who is the problem. I tend to get caught up in semantics. But when I hear closure, the implication is whatever has happened, it’s processed, tidied up, and neatly put away in a mildly attractive box. It’s closed.
This is not how I experience recovering from anything, ever. I experience recovery as a big, fat, never-ending mess. It is perpetual practice which gets better in incremental degrees. And I suspect the word is used more by people who haven’t experienced a trauma—the friends, families, and professionals who want us to snap out of it.
Excluding the professionals, I understand. I’d prefer to snap out of it myself, and I’d be happy to never reference it again.
The problem with silence, though, is trauma remains free to eat me alive. While the rest of you are having an enjoyable conversation making fun of someone who deserves it, I’m sitting there pretending I’m not trying to beat back the wolves.
It took me decades to find the right kind of therapist, one who specializes in trauma. I try to keep the heavy stuff to our sessions. It leaks out occasionally, but I’ve got friends and family who don’t freak when it does.
I’m lucky to have a professional. Not everyone can afford one. My therapist helped me out when I couldn’t afford her anymore, and that’s about as lucky as you can get.
I have friends and a husband who give me the room to be a disaster. It happens. Not everyone has people in their life who understand.
I’m also white and have an upper middle-class economic status. Our society isn’t simply misogynistic, it’s racist and classist. There is help available to me others don’t receive.
It’s not wise to write the next sentence, but I’ll write it anyway. Sometimes what gives me peace of mind is reminding myself if it gets too much, I can check out of this hotel.
I am alive by choice. And I’ll always stand by my right to choose, just like I’ll stand by yours.
Don’t be alarmed. I’ve started to genuinely like being alive, which is hilarious, if you look at what I’ve been doing these last few years. They’ve been no picnic.
But I’m handling them. I’m learning to be competent. Whatever life dished out, I’ve been able to show up without hurting myself. I feel a genuine toughness developing.
I think it’s called self-respect.
Perhaps I’m healing.
No, I refuse to use the word. Although it isn’t as terrible as closure, it’s a close second. Before I ventured out into this world, I was perfectly fine. Why do I have to heal, while society remains sick?
Society, heal thyself. The way to make sure others aren’t injured in the way I was is TO CHANGE SOCIETY AND ITS LAWS.
Check out these statistics from the United States Bureau of Justice:
Regardless of the victims’ sex, a greater percentage of violent incidents involved male offenders (79%) than female offenders (17%) or offenders of both sexes (3%).
Perhaps men need to heal. I’m not the sick one. Just saying.
Look, if closure and healing work for you, wonderful. But they don’t for me, and I suspect I’m not alone.
Now that we’ve cleared up why I avoid these words, something happened over the weekend. I was truly surprised by my response. It leads me to think I’m mending.
Mending is less insipid than healing. Mending is…let’s go to the dictionary:
mended; mending; mends
1. To free from faults or defects, such as:
a: to improve in manners or morals : REFORM
b: to set right : CORRECT
c: to put into good shape or working order again : patch up : REPAIR
d: to improve or strengthen (something, such as a relationship) by negotiation or conciliation
—used chiefly in the phrase mend fences
e: to restore to health : CURE
I like C and D:
c: to put into good shape or working order again : patch up : REPAIR
d: to improve or strengthen
I am not as I was. I am altered.
But just like a sock is darned or jeans are patched (before holes in jeans were a thing) a different material has been used to make me functional, to be myself again. Threads or calico have been applied in the forms of help I’ve received. My therapist is a very good seamstress.
A long preamble but needed for context. Onward, as Bettie Machete would say.
I was at a wedding recently, a very pleasant one, and introduced to a man who’d retired from a high-level career in law enforcement. We began a conversation I enjoyed. He did important work helping a vulnerable population: children.
We tend to group people into “my side” or “the other side” or a bad vs. good person. It’s exhausting and simplistic. People can be many things. It’s rare to run into someone all bad, and even rarer to run into someone all good.
This man has done good work.
He said something and was probably not expecting me to counter with an example of a case he may have worked on early in his career. He first asked if I were a lawyer. Then he asked if I were a judge.
My answer to the judge question should have been, “Yes, but not professionally.”
I simply said no and carried on with my argument. Sadly, he brought up the swinging pendulum.
Swinging pendulum isn’t always a dog whistle. But often it is, used by entitled people who get cranky when the rights they enjoy are now being demanded from people who don’t look like them.
He said,
“The problem is, the pendulum has swung so far the other way, all a woman has to do is say she’s been assaulted, and she’s believed.”
Oh dear. And we were doing so well.
I said,
“I may not be the person you want to have this conversation with.”
And yet, the fool persisted.
Now. I’ve given up being the ugly incident at weddings, and I didn’t want to mar my almost decade-long track record. But the man needed sorting. I had to figure out how to do this at a garden party.
Below is a rendering of the conversation, not a verbatim account.
His argument: assault is terrible, blah blah blah, but women need to report it immediately. They can’t sit around twiddling their thumbs and letting evidence expire.
My argument: the system makes it almost impossible for women to report rape safely.
No no, he said, everyone’s been trained and is sensitive now.
(Please hold my beer.)
Well, like I said, I may not be the person with whom you want to have this conversation, because I’ve actually reported a rape, and testifying in court was a far worse experience than the crime, I assure you. And, I’m a writer, and it’s my observation not much has changed at all, and don’t you know I wrote a piece about what it’s like reporting a rape during the E. Jean Carroll suit against Trump last year, and I was fact-checked about my own rape by a major news organization to within an inch of my life for an entire week, and the next day they had a town hall and let Trump lie with impunity. That’s the situation, sir, today.
And he says,
Well, Biden is trying to get a law passed under Title Nine that victims don’t have to testify against their accusers, you can’t take away due process…
And I countered with maybe you could work on improving the system for victims of crime…
And he said well this may upset you but…
And I said I’m not upset.
And here’s the thing: I wasn’t upset. This is the unexpected result of some great good fortune combined with a lot of difficult work.
For the first time in forty years, I wasn’t triggered. I did not cry in frustration. I was barely ruffled.
Then I thought of an analogy, because he was trying to gaslight me. I’d compare what he was doing to the way white people in the south tried to gaslight others about the effects of racism. I said,
This reminds me of when I was growing up here in the seventies, and people would say, there’s no prejudice, the Civil Rights Act was passed, everyone is equal…but one difference between a Black woman my age and myself is laws were on the books preventing her grandfather from acquiring wealth like my grandfather did. Mine was free to buy all the property he wanted and not redlined like her grandfather…
And he said,
“Well, I can’t do anything about the past.”
Oh, fer fuck’s sake. Really? Later, when I told Secret Service what he’d said, he replied,
“Well, he could learn from it.”
I wish I’d been able to say that to him, and something else I thought of, but that’s life. If I could add a sentence I’d say,
“You have no experience being a woman or testifying against a rapist in court, yet you’re talking about the experience with complete authority.”
Instead, I exited the conversation with,
“Here’s my wish. It’s my hope you think about what I’ve said.”
He said he would, although he won’t. Or if he does think about it, he’ll tell you why I’m wrong. But what he can’t say is,
She’s a hysterical woman.
Because, suddenly, I am not.
If I told you how many times in the past forty years I’ve been reduced to tears by far less than what he said. If I told you the days of frustration, the hours of hyperventilation, the retraumatizing again and again by the likes of him, you’d have a better idea of what a momentous occasion this is.
Like I said: self-respect.
But wait, there’s more.
Later in the evening, he realized the amount of trouble he was in. I was talking to his wife, and get this: we were talking about him. It was epic and wonderful, and we talked about how he’d done great good in the world, but yes, he’s insufferable (my word not hers.)
He comes up to me from behind and opens up his arms to give me a hug.
Oh, hell no.
I say,
“I’m not hugging you.”
And he replies,
“We are going to be friends,” and puts his arms around me. After I told him no. I immediately said,
“No, get your hands off me.” In front of his wife. And he got his hands off me. And I rather gracefully, I must say, excused myself.
I am mending.
Secret Service, looking quite dashing in his tuxedo, came up to me about a bit later and mercifully said,
“Ready to think about our egress?”
I’ve never loved him more. We decided to walk back to the car. It was about a mile away.
I took off my high heeled shoes and started wearing a hole in the first pair of pantyhose I’ve had on since 1997. They will not be mended. They were placed in the trash afterwards, where they belong.
I told Secret Service how happy I was not to melt down for once.
Mending is a practice. I had to find a place to deal with my addiction issues, and that’s a daily practice. I had to make a system for living, and that’s a practice too.
None of it is a one and done. With that in mind:
Please don’t judge the people who are still getting high because they can’t stand the amount of pain they’re in. Drugs are painkillers.
Please remember to be kind without condescension.
Please remember not everyone has the means to mend. We need to change that.
Please remember people are not one thing.
And if you don’t suffer from trauma, please don’t leave all the work to us. It’s my fervent wish everyone pitches in to make sure we all get help, no matter our race or economic status.
But most importantly, we would need less help recovering if society were not so sick. Survivors of trauma are not the problem.
I never thought I’d mend. But Kintsugi style vases have always been my favorites; mended with precious metals, more beautiful and strong for their scars
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Beautifully told & hope for all of us.
Love this story from the garden party. Good read first thing in the morning. I’m getting out my needle and thread to start mending again today.