Today I’m grateful.
For the capacity to stay in feeling, in spite of a world that harrows us & tempts us into numbness. When I catch it, the passing thought that I wish I could be less impacted by suffering, I pause; do I really want to bear witness to genocide & not feel anguish? If I frame it that way, an easy “no” follows.
I am deeply practiced in pain. My memories that are most vivid still make my heart race. Hiding behind bedroom doors & peeking between the hinges. I witnessed and knew I was meant to not speak about what I was hearing. So it began, the secrets, the withholding, the swallowing of truth.
Then the other memories come - the ones where my body was taught it wasn’t my own. The feeling that I was tainted still follows me from those tiny years, I taste it as my throat turns to copper. It began at 5, then looped til 8 & 9 & 14 & 19, 20, 23.
My belly churns with the confusion. Patriarchy told me my value was my body & it was given by male gaze. If that's true, why this well of disgust? At my core, there’s a knowing that what has happened to me isn’t to be spoken of; the generational practice of letting men’s violence flow over & through us.
I remember for years all I could manage when I spoke of my childhood was tears, a flood that always felt like it would never stop. The sensation of a tap broken & water pressure consuming all of me. I never wanted to be seen as a body eclipsed by sin; under the culture I was steeped in, I was taught it was my fault. My body was the problem, & the domination my punishment.
The experience of having my own tissues as the site of violence, I wonder if that’s why I can let in the horrors. The overwhelming chaos of choking the land & mining our humanity feels familiar. The parts of me that curl up at the memory of my bones being violated know suffering & can hold the realities of the world.
This capacity in me is one I both deeply love & resent. A skill not wielded choicefully can become a burden. Letting in the stream of violence (sexual, historical, colonial, etc.) coupled with my power of containment short circuits my nervous system. My body & I are still mending, tending, & learning to trust each other. Odd that we’re one and the same, and yet violence has split us into this sense of separation.
The hands and bodies that took away my choice left their prints on my pinned shoulders & the center of my thighs. All these years later, and all I wish is to feel me, not their shadows. Refusing to feel the shade doesn’t mean I’m free of sunless days, so I may as well feel them.
As I turn toward the parts of me I’d rather exile, I see the ways they’ve taken care of me. & maybe in the same way the goal isn’t to be unshaken by mass death or climate catastrophy, the aim is to allow room for the ache that this body has been violated by family, colleagues, partners & strangers. Navigating a sense that the next shadow was potentially in any and all spaces my body frequents has made connections difficult at best. & there’s wisdom there; a desire to be safe, in exchange for belonging.
They’re moving through me and will cycle as their rhythm needs; for the first time, I imagine the grazing of the back of my head or two palms wrapping around my shoulders won’t activate a fight response.
Can you feel it too?
