Catharsis and Purification

[kiya]

This story takes a lot of context to tell properly; I'm going to tell it with all its context for the first time ever. It may well be frightfully dull. Some of it will be graphic.

In a way, writing this will be an offering to the Eyes of Ra for the new year: there is in here stuff that needs to die. Kheperu.



In some ways I was a terribly early bloomer; in others I was a very late one.

I was seven or eight when I got my first crush. I've written about him before; the details are not directly germaine. Tied into here are what I identify as some of the fundamental seeds of Story for me - I would tell myself stories going to sleep at night, but eventually I got weirded out by telling stories about him-in-specific because I didn't know if that would bug him, so I started applying facades and eventually got to telling unique stories about people who neither deeply resembled him or me. He's still, in an odd way, my first Muse.

I've always been, in memory, very fond of touch. Sexual attraction for me manifests always as a strong tropism towards physical contact, casual touch, snuggling touch. The explicitly sexual portions of that come as an outgrowth of touch-hunger rather than a thing of their own. One of the reasons I identify that early crush as clearly a sign of juvenile sexuality was precisely that urge towards touch -- an urge that only got manifested in one opportunity to beat him in a wrestling match. Which I made an utter fool of myself about later, mind, but it's still there.

In a lot of ways I told myself the stereotypical romances - I've always been very focused on intense relationships, primary relationships. But it was always the boy who was trapped somewhere and needed to be rescued. (Because stereotypical romance is boring if you're stuck in the 'princess' role. I don't think it occurred to me that I was flipping things around at the time; these were just the stories I was telling myself.) The rescue-from-imprisonment thread of a lot of these early princeess-in-tower stories eventually evolved, as my sexuality developed, into some fairly active BDSM fantasies.

At the same time of all this, I was terribly socially awkward. I had thought in elementary school that I was socially isolated and alone; then we moved. I was a socially awkward child, painfully introverted, out of touch with the mainstream (my peers were horrified I had never heard of the New Kids on the Block -- I was horrified that they'd never heard of Peter, Paul, and Mary), younger than everyone, and deeply uncertain about this new culture that I'd been thrust into. (We moved from a steadily degenerating semiurban neighbourhood to a wealthy suburban one; I did, in fact, have culture shock.)

It's from my experiences over the next several years that I came to my poisoned bread analogy about words: it's a lot easier to shrug off verbal abuse if one has a healthy social life, is getting all the social interaction one needs. Humans are social animals; babies will die without adequate social contact. When someone isn't getting enough healthy social interaction, the unhealthy social interaction that's available is a choice between poisoned bread and starvation.

Among those "unhealthy social interactions" there were the boys. (I know I've written about them too, but I can't dig up the entry right now. Maybe another time.) They were in my gym classes; they were also on the same bus that I rode to school. I blessed the fact that I was taking maths at the high school because that meant I almost never had to take the bus in the morning; I did after-school activities as often as I could so I would not have to take the bus in the evening. Gym was, unfortunately, unavoidable.

I knew that their perpetual commentaries were both sexual and directed at me, but I was too unfamiliar with slang to know what they meant. The day that one of them tried to cop a feel on the bus and I laid him out on the floor I think I actually told my parents about it. They spoke to the school administration and got "Boys will be boys". At least I didn't get cited for hitting the little twerp. Some of the commentary and the undesired touch was why I changed the way I cut my hair in the summer between junior high and high school; I couldn't change it when I was there, or they'd have known they got to me. They knew anyway, of course. (And I've never told anyone that that's why I changed my hair around; I don't know if anyone ever put the pieces together. But if I ever react weirdly to the question, "Oh, are you growing your bangs out?" that's why.)

I went to RM instead of Quince Orchard because I couldn't survive in that social environment for another four years, and I knew it. I was already bleeding too badly, and going too crazy. I entered high school both badly wounded and utterly unaware of how to make friends and interact with people as a human being.

At the same time, I was still that same girl with the intense internal life, the tendency to romanticism, the long-term devotion. I tried, on and off, to stay in touch with Alick (that first crush); to this day, this is one of the major Trousers of Time questions I have, wondering what might have come of that had things been different. I developed intense feelings, and had no clue about how to verbalise, how to make sense of them, how to process things.

I was thirteen.

I managed to make a few friends of varying levels of quality and awkwardness in that first semester of high school -- Sapna and Shayna the first (Shayna about whom there will be commentary later); a boy named Steve on whom I had a tremendous crush and his girlfriend Alex, both older than I (he was in my pre-calculus class), who I followed into doing forensics after-school, something I pursued all through high school; a completely different Steve whose name wasn't actually Steve (the local pot dealer), and Wendolyn.

As I was turning fourteen, there were advertisements posted around the school for a yearly event, a concert of local student-run bands, to be held in the RM auditorium. Steve on whom I had a crush was going to be going to see it; faux Steve's band would be performing. I sort of wanted to go because of Steve-Steving, but was awkward about going alone; I mentioned this to Wendolyn, who wanted to go but didn't want to go alone. We made a deal that we'd meet up and go to the concert together.

So we went to the concert. I drifted around sort of awkwardly, because of the aforementioned social ineptitude, and eventually ran into Steve, who introduced me to a friend of his, attending BCC, named Greg. Wendolyn wandered off to dance. I ran into faux Steve and chatted with him a bit. Life went on for a while.

Greg and I were left alone as people did their thing, talked a little, that sort of thing. Then he put one arm around my shoulders.

My mind shut down.

This is something that always happens to me when I'm dealing with situations that I haven't anticipated and planned for, this sort of violent gear-crunching and lockdown while I try to untangle myself from the unexpected event. These days I identify it as an artifact of the compiled inefficiencies of my plurality; the fact that I can remember it so clearly from before the assault is really my primary bit of evidence that I've always been plural rather than being a trauma-created system. But I can't know, because . . . I'll get to that.

I didn't know the guy, really, at all, except that he was a friend of Steve's, he did drama club, the sort of casual things one picks up in conversation. He was attractive in an aesthetic way; I didn't know him well enough to know if he was attractive as anything other than a decoration. At the same time, there was this long history of sexual curiosity, openness, inventiveness, the hunger towards touch that had been consistently frustrated for a long time due to ineptness and lack of interest on the other parties' parts. And the complete derailment into the unexpected, which tends to give me severe brain-lockup.

There were a couple of firsts that night -- kiss among them -- and Alex made the comment, "I heard you two hit it off," and I didn't know what to say. I didn't know if we'd hit it off. I knew that . . . there was too much for me to assimilate and it kept overloading my processor. I knew that . . . some things felt good. I knew that . . . I hadn't sorted out whether them feeling good in the abstract was sufficient to overcome the fact that I hadn't sorted out Greg in the specific. I knew that . . . I needed to sort out Greg in the specific.

I didn't know how to communicate, how to say, "Wait", how to say, "Give me a moment to figure out whether or not I want to say no." He had a habit of taking silence as assent.

I picked up, over the course of that interaction, a lot of experience of dubious consent. And by the time I worked out that really, what I wanted was to say 'no' or maybe 'not yet' to that first kiss, back in March, which took me until perhaps May -- by then it wasn't really possible for me to say anything about it.

Somewhere in here I met some of Shayna's friends -- Marcie and Beth I remember -- and we spent time together on and off. Some of that time consisted of being interrogated, usually by Shayna, about the qualities of my erstwhile boyfriend. My ambivalence about the entire situation was only enhanced and aggravated by her prying, her prurient obsession with the quality of the kiss; it left me feeling secretive about my doubts, berated with the urge to mainstream, to be okay, to Have A Boyfriend.

Over time, he started dropping hints of an increasingly sexual nature. I didn't know how to deal with them. I knew, from social stuff, that I was supposed to have to say "Yes" to sex, so I tried not acknowledging the comments, because that way I wasn't saying "Yes". They didn't stop. Had I been perhaps a little wiser, I would have noted that silence didn't register to him as doubt, as uncertainty, as fear -- but given that I had all those, I did not know how to speak, to say "No."

He invited me to come over to his place and watch a movie. And I said "sure". I . . . was worried a little, but not enough. I packed up a copy of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and took the Metro into Bethesda.

He showed me a computer game. I think it was one of the Ultima games, something vaguely roguelike, green on black, dungeon exploration. I don't remember it very well, but I can tell you how the bedroom was laid out, with the waterbed against one wall in the back corner, the door in the front computer, the computer against the wall opposite the bed and next to the door. I sat on the floor and watched him play a while.

I don't remember which one of us suggested going downstairs to watch the movie, but we did, into the well-lit living room, the yellowish artificial light instead of mostly blue-filtered light through the trees outside that was upstairs. That room I remember in shades of orange, the orangey-yellow wood most of it. The couch in the corner had a patio door to the left, the telly on a little rolly table in front of it, a few other chairs; there was a counter to the right separating that space from the kitchen, then a hallway towards the front of the house, and the bathroom was left of the corridor, its door in the same plane as the patio door.

It's both perfectly clear and perfectly fuzzy.

We put in the movie.

Somewhere, he took his shirt off. And, of course, I locked up.

At this point, my sense of time goes completely to hell. I know that things happened, but I don't remember in what order. It's all completely disjointed, completely broken.

I remember most clearly -- and this is what I get when I get the flashbacks, which has neither been often nor intense for the past few years -- him standing in front of me, completely naked and erect, and saying, "I love you. I want to make love to you."

I remember lying on that couch with him lying on top of me, trying to get his hands to the button on my jeans, and locking my arms tight across my waist so he couldn't.

I remember the plea, "At least take your shirt off."

I remember him putting my hand onto his penis, to get me to stroke it. I remember the odd softness of the skin, how alien it was to me. I stopped, fairly quickly, because it was more than I could deal with.

The only verbal thought I had at all, through the entire experience, was, "I'm only fourteen. I don't even have my periods yet. I don't even have my periods yet." I remember this with his weight on me, the knowledge that I did not have the strength to hold him off if he persisted.

I remember feeling my ability to resist start to collapse, to completely shatter.

He relented, I think, but am not sure, just around the time I was going to just go null, burrow into the center of me, go catatonic, and stop being.

At some point I fled into the bathroom. It was walking, a quiet walking, a flight of a calm, quiet walking, and I stayed in there for the few minutes it took me to manage a faked working brain. When I came out again, he was dressed.

I took the videotape, he walked me to the Metro. It was hot and muggy, the way a summer day will be near Washington; I remember the rippling shadows and the way they filtered the sunlight.

I was numb; I was null. I went catatonic inside a mobile shell, basically. Too little, too late.

We had a scheduled date a little after that; I had a weekend pass to a Star Trek convention in Rockville and he was going to be there for one day. When he showed up, I was null, broken, not there. I claimed headache and went home.

I felt sorry for him, in a way, recognising that he was probably as confused as I was. But I never spoke to him again after that. He never called me either.

For the next two years, more or less, I was null; broken, non-present. I wish I'd sent me a postcard, because I don't know where I was. There is complete dissociation there, and very few memories. And this is why I can't know if the multiplicity is trauma-based -- I wasn't there, I don't know if we're the same self as was there before, because of that break.

I had English sophomore year with Shayna. And somewhere in there she made a comment, she said, "You have Gre-eg" in that sing-songy tone she had, and . . . I remember the rage and the pain, and how much it took me not to break into tears or violence right there, to rip her smug head off. I found Beth after that in the auditorium and I talked around it, without ever saying what had happened, without ever saying I had been assaulted.

It took me years to be able to say I had been assaulted. It took me years to be able to say, "I wasn't raped. He stopped before it got that far. But I'm still damaged. I'm still hurt."

At one point, I don't remember why, I asked my mother if she knew why Greg never called anymore. I think she brought something related up. She sort of shrugged and said, "I figured he'd forced himself on you." I'm fairly sure I fled from that, fled in disbelief, from the . . . prosaic nature of it. The apparent indifference.

Because who can I say, "I keep getting visions of this guy, like he's carved into the bone right above my eyes" to, faced with that?

I already knew that "Boys will be boys", after all. There is no support, there is no help.

And I hadn't even been raped. Someone might have cared if I had.

But . . . I looked at the stories of people who had been raped. And saw how they got turned into 'the rape victim', and were expected to live that role for the rest of their lives. And I didn't want that. It was safer to be the invisible one, the blind statistic, the walking, silent wounded than it was to be identified as The Victim.

(I wrote in griffen's journal that we have suffered the wounds of silence and will. Not. Do. That. Again. This in here, this is what I was talking about there.)

I started to come out of my shell about two years later. I was sixteen, and dated . . . well, gods, I dated another Steve, or Stephen, dirtydianadd's little brother, for forty days, before he dumped me because my religion was too weird. (I was Wiccan at the time, and when the relationship started that had been kinda interesting. I theorised that it was an excuse, but I slapped him the next time I saw him.)

I got a crush on teinedreugan a while after that, which was frustrated for a while, and then had the brief relationship with Peter-who-fixed-my-head. Peter . . . ah, he didn't do anything except be himself, and a sweet, undemanding boyfriend was really what I needed to have. I love him dearly.

I propositioned teinedreugan I think within a month of us actually starting our relationship. Nonplussed the hell out of him. But I needed to prove to myself that sexuality was something that I could control. And I still come on too strong when I'm on, still need to be the initiator, still need to call the shots, because Here Be Dragons.

And every so often it all goes away. All handle on the sexuality. All connections up between parts of me, because of this damage, scar tissue cutting off the nerves.

And sex and power have always been twined, always been linked, and they're linked defectively now.

And I wonder what would have happened with the girl I was, the one who was unafraid, if she'd been allowed to grow up. If that healthy exploration and curiosity hadn't been killed.

And the boys on the bus, there are a few who I'd happily drop off a cliff.

It took me years to be able to watch A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum again. I still have to think about it. I want to get a copy of it, so that . . . I can work on building new associations. That leaves me angry.

I still prefer sex in the dark. Because I can't see a naked man without the triggering event, without the vision, and while I can . . . make it go away now . . . or even not have it automatic -- I remember the day I noticed I wasn't being traumatised -- I . . . it's more than I can deal with.

Initiating sexual components to relationships is one of the most terrifying things I can do. I suspect that girl would not have grown into someone who did casual sex, just because of the way I have always interacted with people, but she would not have been reduced to tears by the terror of the prospect. I explained this to brooksmoses early in our relationship, I know, and he held me while I shook.

I'm still mostly not angry with Greg. I . . . understand too well what it is to be socially confused to be angry with him, mostly. Though I thought I saw him in the Borders in White Flint once, and had a full-bore panic attack and had to hide in the stacks for a while. If I were to be angry with him, if I were to hate him, it would be because he has roughly the same body type as teinedreugan, and that is just not fucking fair to him, to someone who's been there for me for ten years now.


That's all of it. All that I can remember right now. All as coherent as I can get it.

If I rip open the scar tissue, maybe it'll bleed out the rot, and maybe it'll heal true this time.

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

I've had this window open for a while, trying to figure out how to respond. Not just because *hug* or anything like that seems - ineffective, and possibly inappropriate; but because a lot of what you've written here is very terribly familiar to me. I spent a lot of my second decade not really in my body...

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

I know they are not enough, but *HUG*s are all I have right now. Now and forever, if you ever need them.

[snippy]

I am outraged on your behalf. How dare he!

[lysana.livejournal.com]

I've been shut down like that. I was with a guy who thought he had consent but only had my frozen brain. I know. I hear. I understand.

[keshwyn]

Not frightfully dull, but certainly frightful.

*gently hugs the roomiesan*

I wish I could have been there for you at the time.

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

I've always been, in memory, very fond of touch. Sexual attraction for me manifests always as a strong tropism towards physical contact, casual touch, snuggling touch. The explicitly sexual portions of that come as an outgrowth of touch-hunger rather than a thing of their own.

It took me the *longest* time to even start to figure this one out. And I think I hadn't totally realized it until just now when your words made my brain go "A-ha!". Because I was so completely touch-starved as a smaller person, that I never knew what to do with it. And now I can look back to junior high and know that that uncontrollable urge to play with the hair of the girl in front of me in class was attraction, and not nuisance. I just didn't have the mental equipment to process it right.

But I don't want to spill too much of my stuff in your space, so I'll stop now. And I guess hugs aren't neccesarily appropriate, so instead I will offer meek little noises of support and thanking and wishes for healing for you. And wander off to think about things.

unknowing...

[tendyl.livejournal.com]

I don't know how to respond. It felt like we were sharing the same t-shirt for a while - about implied consent and not knowing how to respond and shutting down. I offer thoughts of healing for those scars.

[ardaniel]

Yup. It took me eight or nine years to listen to "One More Night" by Phil Collins again.

[io.livejournal.com]

Hi. It's Beth.

I think most of us wanted to rip Shaynna's head off fairly often. She was over-the-top scary/annoying. She must have assumed that any relationship was better than no relationship... hardly the case.

I wish I had known what was going on at the time and would hope I could have been there for you in some way or another. But who knows, I was a pretty self-absorbed teenager.

Hope you're doing well now.

[kiya]

Oh! hey! Beth! (Did I ever know this was you and forgot like the flake I am?)

Muddling through and working on the better, whole, healthy thing.

[io.livejournal.com]

Actually, I found your journal recently and just haven't gotten around to the whole saying "hi its me" thing! :-) It's good to have found you... small world here on livejournal! Marcie is memerath.

[kiya]

*grin* How'd you find me? Through dirtydianadd?

Ooh, Marcie! *scurries over to bounce on her journal*

[memerath.livejournal.com]

Well, *I* knew her when it was spelled "Shana"! I guess you all did too though.

It's an RM reunion! Man, it's been a while. I'll have to check out dirtydianadd too!

And H--I never knew, of course, what was going on, but you have my sympathy. High school boys sucked, just in general. And children don't get to touch enough period, so re-learning how to do that (with or without it evolving into sexual touch) is a tricky transition. Our society is messed up like that. Adults too, of course, but we can control our touch a lot more than kids and teens. Maybe that's why we were all laying on top of each other at CTY--outside of normal society, so outside of boundaries, and we were free to use that fifth sense.

FWIW, I also had a guy stop interest in me when I expressed interest in Wicca...course now I'm a firm agnostic (if there is such a thing).

[kiya]

Aga is larksdream (and moving to Cambridge, uh, tomorrow, I saw you were local, the hell did that happen?) and Ben is donperros, too, if you want to collect the whole set (that I know of).

Growing up is hard. Let's go shopping.

Heh. At least not militant agnostic ("I don't know and you don't either!"). ;) I'm, of course, getting increasingly complicated religiously, but hell, I've got a hell of a lot of satisfying relationshippage, so it's not like Discordian Kemetic with Feri Leanings scaring people off is gonna traumatise me. ;)

[memerath.livejournal.com]

I moved to Boston in 2002, after deciding DC was boring. :)

Oooh, shopping...

[kiya]

We should, like, hook up sometime or something.

Gotta run. Must go field an incoming at the airport . . .

[elf]

I wanna say something. I wanna say something useful and brilliant and touching and funny, that will make all the blank hurt spots turn into color splashes and wash away with the next rainfall and leave fresh, healthy skin underneath.

I don't have anything like that. I don't think anyone does. Am sorry.

Sorry for you; sorry for the ones whose partners *didn't* have the sense to stop when it finally got through that "she's not responding," sorry for the guys who misread shock for shyness and didn't know how to apologize or even figure out where they went wrong.

Plenty of sorrow to go around.

The Fetch--the Sticky One, Vivi--remembers everything. All those blurry, choppy details in your conscious mind are still there, sharp & direct, for her. For you. When you're ready to tackle them, you can bring them up, one instant at a time, like watching a slide show, and use your understanding of Sex, and Power, and Passion, and Pride, and Self... and tell her it's not her fault.

Do it often enough and she can grow to believe you. You can grow to believe you.

[kiya]

Yup.

And you've hit on why this thing came up at a time it felt topical to me, what with starting to work with the Iron Pentacle's energies and finding my weak places (Sex and Pride, it seems, but I could probably have told that in advance).

And a moderately sized hunk of one of the reasons I thought it would be a good idea to study Feri in the first place.

[ailbhe]

I used to have a postcard; it said


No means No.
Not Yet means No.
I Don't Know means No.
Silence means No.

[mindways]

I'd heard the core of this before, but not the surrounding context. It's good to know. Would that such a hurtful thing had not happened. *hug*

Because I can't see a naked man without the triggering event...

Does this kick in for non-sexual contexts as well? Goodness knows I tend to wander out of the shower without any clothes on, regardless of who's over. I can make an effort to avoid doing that when you're around, if you'd prefer - I've always assumed that if you'd rather I didn't, that you'd have mentioned it, but now I'm thinking I should have asked explicitly...

(Or did I? I lose track. :\ )

"Boys will be boys"

I lack appropriate words for my loathing of and fury at that attitude.

I just...[incoherent noise].

[kiya]

It used to do so, some while ago; I stopped being that sensitive about three or four years back. Don't feel you need to worry about it -- at this point it would only be liable to be a concern if you stopped to have a conversation in the middle, which you haven't been prone to doing that I've noticed.

And "incoherent noise" is about the best I can do too.

[mindways]

...at this point it would only be liable to be a concern if you stopped to have a conversation in the middle, which you haven't been prone to doing that I've noticed.

*nod* Partly because I haven't completely overcome my worry[*] about other folks being discomfited, so I don't tend to pause for conversation while undressed except with some folks who I know are OK with it...but mostly because the times I'm getting out of the shower when you're around, I'm usually a touch late for gaming or game night or something and am in a hurry to get dressed + do whatever-it-is. :)

[*] = Though I'm chipping away at it.

[kiya]

*noddle*

Though I'm reminded of the fellow who turned up to the skyclad Discordian ritual. He didn't throw me much, though perhaps that was because I was feeling moderately sorry for him. Also, I didn't interact with him really.

Basically, I wouldn't worry about it or make changes in what your preferences are on my account for this. I do thank you for asking, though.

Though that does raise the question of what your preferences would be for the off-chance that I do trigger badly. (This is, I emphasise, at this point a remote chance, but since the topic's under discussion and all . . .)

[mindways]

Though that does raise the question of what your preferences would be for the off-chance that I do trigger badly.

Anything along the lines of "Er...naked man. Triggering badly. Clothes?" ought to cue me in that we've hit that off-chance, and I'll go get clothes.

If you were to omit the request for clothes and instead leave the room, I'd probably interpret it as an explanation for "here's why I'm abruptly making myself scarce". (I'd still go get clothes in a timely fashion, but would be more apt to finish whatever thought or whatnot I was involved in at the time.)

Either situation is equally fine by me.

But hopefully, it won't be an issue. :)

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to say I read this. *hugs*

Thank you

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks, Darkhawk, for pointing me to your story. If it's of any use, *I* am angry at Greg for you. His actions were completely inexcusable. It breaks my heart to think of you in the situation he put you in.

You said And I wonder what would have happened with the girl I was, the one who was unafraid, if she'd been allowed to grow up.

I have often felt this, too, over the last year and a half that I have been working through my own assault memories. Earlier on, I felt I needed to mourn the loss of that girl, and I did. But now, suddenly, I am beginning to feel I am still that girl, but extra.

I want to posit that perhaps you, too, are still that girl, but with extra. Those parts of ourselves don't die...they just go into hiding because they get scared. Eventually, when you work through stuff enough to tell her it's safe to come out, she will, and will become a part of you again that you can feel.

For what it's worth, working with a therapist who specializes in sexual assault, and after a while, starting to go to sexual assault support groups, has been a huge help in my healing process. I don't know if you have tried either, but they have helped me very much. They haven't always been easy, but the work I've done in both continues to yield rich rewards.

A great big hug to you.

Miss Syl

[hawlla.livejournal.com]

I thought I was the only one who wrote stories in my head. A thousand little scripts every night before I went to sleep.