How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Rape

(a non-exhaustive list in no particular order)

I became no one.

I became someone.

I got really into objecthood.

And eventually got out of it, a bit.

I fell in love with everything.

I read The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.

I got tattoos.

I shaved my head three times (not in a row).

I got stoned.

I became the flaneur.

I travelled.

I listened to music.

I wrote love letters and made mix tapes.

I collaged.

I ripped pages out of books I loved.

I wrote.

I collected beautiful things.

I imagined.

I dreamed.

I cried.

I fretted.

I fucked.

I laughed.

I moved away.

I moved back.

I changed jobs.

I tried things.

I fell in love, built a life, loved it, left it, and began again.

I did this one many times.

I took pictures.

I chased beauty around.

I read more and more.

I applied myself to the problems of my existence as if they were an area of study.

I talked with lots of different people.

I took up knitting.

I wrote letters to my favourite authors. (Some of them wrote back.)

I went West.

I went East.

I took to the sea.

I took up kickboxing, then yoga, then cycling.

More falling in love.

More heartbreak.

I went to college.

I moved away again on a whim.

I never returned.

I fell in love, for the last time with any luck.

I did mushrooms.

I played frisbee.

I got run over.

I got back on the bike and took it abroad with the then love of my life.

I got some therapy.

I got compensated by the VA, thus I got given the gift of time.

I forgave those guys. All of them.

And my parents, they didn't do anything wrong. They just made me in their image.¹

I saw the gifts waiting at the heart of my curses.

I played D&D.

I took collage to the public. And saw the beauty of people falling in love with my favorite way to pass the time.

I began to speak, which is to say, I began to trust.

I accepted the facts of my life.

In short, I lived.

I tried so hard to give it away,

to fuck it away, to love it away,

to hide it away in the heart of another.

But away was never the right direction.

I didn't need to learn how to give it away.

I needed to learn how to hold it.

To be with it.

To stop holding up my hands between us and to just let it exist.

How do you integrate horror?

By ceasing to deny the truth of what has happened to you.

1. And whose image were they made in?