(originally published in print February 2024)
Deserving.
I really don’t like “deserve.” Like, as a concept. When people say, their hearts aching with love, “You didn't deserve it.” I always think, and rarely say, “No one does.”
This world does not function in accordance with our concept of fairness. No one really deserves anything.
I say as much to my friend as we stand on the footpath discussing ideas, thoughts, images that drive us.
“I suppose it's how they cope.” She offers.
And she's right.
I just don't want the word to be draped on my shoulders.
What happened is what happened.
Better me than someone else.
Because at least I can bear it.
I spent so many years rejecting all of this rape and violence, thinking it was a detour, a wrong turn, a fatal error. When really, it was the means of my arrival. My means of arrival here to you.
I've spent years, nearly 22 of them now, trying to live with it, trying to be as good as new.
And those years, even the ones spent living in a wrong direction—performative goodness, hiding the bad, screaming: “Love me, love me, love me!” with my entire being—were excellent practice at integration and learning to hold the shards of experience within my soft body.
Of bringing the shattered self back in and letting go the dream of being whole.
Joking with my mom on the phone the other day about who would outlive the other between myself and my partner, Chris.
“I'm going first!” she said, pretending to be me. “You can stay back and sort it out!”
I laughed, and then I thought about it for a second and I said, “But, I'd be a better chronicler of mourning! I would write about that loss with such florid, aching prose. I mean, that's what I'm here to do!”
“Tiffany, the mistress of pain.” She laughed.
But she wasn't wrong.
This long, painful silence was a gift.
So I could stand here and tell you my tale.
Not the story of rape, but of what came after.
I had to live through it in order to know, so that I could tell you about it.
I had to have that silence to take a long enough view.
You can't know what you don't know, you know?
I was afraid to speak for so long. And I saw that as a failure. As proof of my weakness, my wrongness.
But I had to learn to integrate horror well enough to make it something you could come here and endure.
To borrow from one of my favorite stories, The OA, “I don't want to hurt you, and it would hurt you.”
I'll be as gentle as I can. I'll spare the details.
Rape is such a common feature of storytelling because it is such a common feature of life.
Rape is an assertion of power, a confirmation of one's power.
To take for one's own pleasure. To be the sole subject in a sea of objects made pliant through force, coercion, or sheer unfortunate opportunity, for one's use.
I see it now, but I didn't see it then.
I was taking it so personally that I couldn't see that it wasn't about me at all.
Not me, the person.
Just me, the body. The site. The object.
I wasn't a person, then.
I was merely the field of play.
It took me a long time to learn that power and agency are not equal. Agency is about what I choose to do with myself, for myself and others.
Power is such a predictable, boring game to play.
It is the first game we are introduced to and it seems to be the place so many of us remain indefinitely. Cradle to grave to cradle again.
If we could get a little clear of it, I'm sure we'd pick another, but we're scared of not knowing. And power is certainly known.
Pain is essential to growth and understanding.
It is our refusal of pain that makes it so hard for us to understand each other.
By refusing to hold our own pain, by refusing to hold it and not look away, we fling it back out at the world and each other with varying degrees of force.
I used to think that the boys and men who did these things to me had infected me with their own unreckonable darkness, but now I see that they were refusing the pain of their particular circumstances and likely I just happened to be in the way.
I was the ground in which they could bury their pain.
And here, now, are the flowers I've grown from it.
In the same way life returns even to the site of nuclear disasters.
The poison processed and transmuted.
The flora first and then the fauna follows.
I just had to be honest with myself about the facts of my life.
To integrate horror is to face reality.
I was raped repeatedly.
In my early adulthood.
By different people.
And one time, by a few people at once.
Following my molestation at 16 by my favorite old man neighbor.
These experiences were a commonplace feature of my life then.
To the point where I played the lesser instances for laughs, which mildly horrified the people I was trying to entertain.
And for a time, I was convinced rape was the purpose of my life: to be an object for use irrespective of my own desires.
It took me a long time to disabuse myself of that.
And I certainly didn't do it on my own.
It was love that made honesty possible.
The love of so many people.
And especially the love of one person.
The other reason I'm here today, geographically at least.
Love reminded me that I have a choice, and at least equally important, that I have a voice.
With which to say what I think. What I want, who I think I am, who I want to be, where I want to go.
Vengeance is the central conceit at the heart of the game of power.
And don't get me wrong, I'm plenty petty and self-righteous.
But I'm wary of revenge.
It doesn't feel right to me.
Of course, I lose myself to it from time to time like the rest of us.
But I try my best to avoid it.
This is a process of squaring, who I've been with myself of no longer refusing the girl who went into those rooms.
Marguerite Duras says doubt equals writing, so it also equals the writer, in her book titled, Writing. And I am a creature of doubt.
You can't do this in survival mode. Time to think is essential.
It shouldn't have happened only bears the fruit of vengeance.
Punishment doesn't work.
It has to end with me not taking revenge.
The victim, villain dichotomy.
Where do you go from here?
I don’t have the answers.
I don’t have a plan in place.
The only thing I do know, is that it starts with us.
Right here in our frightened hearts.
To quote College Humor’s favorite Batman, Pete Holmes:
“Mercy is where it's at.”
Although I'm forever imperfect in its execution.
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