taking up space

Recently a friend posted about taking up space. About the conscious decision to take up space as a woman, to not make herself small for the convenience of men. 

I've been thinking about that a lot. How many ways I make myself small. How I learned from a young age not to take up space. It's been a message not only for how I take up space in the world in regards to men, but also my mother made it very clear that she didn't have the emotional capacity for me to take up space with wants or needs. 

Key things I learned about (not) taking up space when I  was growing up:
    1. Don't be an inconvenience.
    2. Don't make other people uncomfortable with your Truth. 
    3. Don't have needs (no matter how bad things are).
    4. Don't ask for help (no matter how bad things are).

Something that has been really sitting heavy with me is how we aren't allowed to take up space as victims/survivors. How many times have we heard "protective" men boast about how the will k*ll anyone if they ever sexually assaulted one of their loved ones, but when the latest headline of one their stans SAing someone comes out they just brush it off as "no big deal" or some how do the mental gymnastics to make it the victims fault. And these same fellas wonder why victims don't report, or report sooner. 

If we tell our story we are shamed, if we don't report we are shamed, if we wait too long we are shamed, if we disclose we are shamed. And Gods forbid if women disclose about abuse by a famous person, it's always "she's just trying to get money (and/or fame)".We can never win. No one wants to hear it. Shame on us for telling our stories, shame on us for not tell sooner.

I think about how there is shame and stigma associated with being a victim of sexual abuse/assault, but not so much with the offenders (case in point: a man credibly accused of sexual assault multiple times, including by multiple Epstein survivors still managed to get elected president). 

What would it be like instead of victims carrying the shame, the actual predators carried the shame? What if we got to take up space as victims/survivors? I know I tell a lot of hair-raising stories in my blogs, and social media, but I don't tell the "bad" shit- the shit that has had me in therapy for over 30 years, the shit that keeps me awake at night, that crawls under my skin (although my last post published since starting this post starts to delve a little deeper into that particular pit of snakes). What if ALL of me got to take up space, even those horrible things that have made me try to make myself small so no one will ever know, so no one will notice me and do those things to me again?

***Although I'm only publishing this today, the meat of this blog has been in my head for a couple weeks. The combination of my friends "taking up space blog" along with my wife telling me about Virginia Roberts Giuffre's memoir really got me thinking about how we (victims of SA) are supposed to keep quite, keep the secret, protect the men, protect the peace, protect the reputation of the family/institution/church/etc, and in doing so make ourselves so small that our soul eats itself. The fact that our truth and experience is continually dismissed, and denied- the recent memes say it so well: "The fact that people need a dead man's files to believe to believe thousands of women tells you what you need to know about whose voices they value". 

We talk about the statistics of how many victims there are of SA, but we don't talk about how many predators there are. We talk about how women can stop attack, but not about how men can stop being sexual predators. Discussions of consent get turned into jokes. And at the end of the day, it's always the victims fault for being vulnerable, for being pretty, for being too "masculine" (thus challenging his fragile sense of masculinity), for being drunk, for being at the wrong place, for not fighting hard enough, for smiling, for not smiling, for being nice, for being a bitch, for saying the "wrong" thing, for not saying "no" the right way, for not reporting, for reporting, for waiting to report...for existing. And if everything is your fault because you simply exist, then you better make yourself small, but even that doesn't protect you.

What a mighty revolution it would be if so many of us told our truth unabashedly that the tables turned and the predators, and the rape-apologists were forced to carry the shame, and the predators actually faced appropriate consequences?

I'm giving this little scrapper full permission to take up space unabashedly.

Old memories, old terror, new realization (TW: vague discussion of SA)

Last Thursday I was getting a massage and this memory popped into my head as my therapist was working on my chest: When I was 17 I had this job for part of the summer as a fencer. It was just me and this other guy who co-owned the company. The draw where we were doing this fencing job had an an old, abandoned white, Colonial style house, complete with columns slowly being swallowed up by trees, and vivid green prairie grass. Was again I was drawn into musing about just how odd it was to see that style of house in juxtaposition to "out in the middle of nowhere", nowhere-rural-Grassy Butte, ND. And I was thinking about that house, and how I'd wanted to go inside and see what it looked like (and my disappointment that I never did) when this other memory from that place popped up. 

Joe, my boss, and I were taking our lunch break. I was ready to get back to work, but he pointed out that he was the boss and we didn't have to rush back to work, and in fact he wanted to lie down for a bit. So we were lying in the midsummer sun on the pile of loose, dark brown soil piled up next to the trench it had come from. Just me and Joe, miles from another human. Joe, over 20 years my senior. Joe, stroking my back, then asking if I wanted to make out. 

In spite of the multiple times adult men had made advances, or just tried to assault me I was naïve. I thought I was safe with Joe, I thought he was a nice guy.

Cue terror. My "go to" when I'm terrified is to freeze. And freeze I did, pretending to be asleep.

The interesting thing about this particular memory popping up on this day is that earlier in the day I had been seeing my (mental health) therapist. We've been grinding through an old memory for a few months now in which, after trying to redirect another man 20+ years my senior (coincidentally, this man is the person who got me the fencing job with Joe) from assaulting me, and failing I eventually froze. That particular day in therapy I was lamenting about how there is a part of me that continually goes into freeze-mode when its a sexual assault situation, whereas if someone just tried to fight me I'd go full-on scrapper-mode, and so I feel like a failure, like I failed myself whenever I froze. 

Back to my moment of terror, "freezing" seemed to work that time. Maybe he felt me tense when he asked, maybe he knew I was faking sleep; regardless he didn't ask again, he didn't force the issue (or force himself on me). I was lucky that time. Lucky enough that I didn't have to dedicate months or years of therapy to Joe. Lucky that it was a memory that I hadn't thought about in years. Lucky, that this adult man who decided to ask a 17 year old to make out decided to respect my boundary.

Looking back I think "holy shit, that could have gone SOOOO bad". However; seventeen year old me thought he was one of the "good" ones because he stopped...but how fucking "good" was he? we were out in the middle of nowhere, I was 17, he was old enough to be my father, and he had to fucking sexualize me. And because nothing happened, I was lucky.

Over the weekend I started having really intense anxiety, and I was perseverating on all the things I potentially had said wrong the previous day. And as I was dialoguing with myself about why the hell I was feeling so life-and-death terrified about these different interactions the puzzle piece clicked into place. When I was a kid I was unsafe, period. There were no adults in my life keeping my safe, and so I took on the full responsibility for keeping myself safe, and if I failed to do so, it WAS my fault. There were so many encounters in which I wasn't as lucky as I was with Joe, encounters where I was not saying/doing the right thing to stop a man from assaulting me-thus it was my fault. In addition to the list of men, there were so many times that I physically (let alone emotionally) wasn't safe with my sister. Times my mother was completely unhinged either "because" I'd said the wrong thing or I took on the responsibility for not saying or doing the right thing to keep her from a psychotic break or an overdose of pills. Of course feeling like I've said the "wrong" thing makes me feel absolutely terrified.

Now, perhaps with a little luck, now that I've made that connection my nervous system will chill the hell out a little when it comes to thinking I'm going to die if I say the wrong thing. And, at least one time, freezing seemed to save me.

Top Surgery Anniversary

Today is the 1 year anniversary of my top surgery. 

I couldn't have gotten here without all of the support I had. From my wife, from my community, friends, chosen family, oh-and my therapist. I really don't know what to say beyond that. It takes a village, and I got a village. 

I remember in my first semester of German class one of my classmates saying how she had dreamed in German. I took 3 semesters of German, but I never dreamed in German. My dreams are weird; when I dream about people I know they rarely look (or act) like they do in awake-world. Even when I dream of my own meat sack, it's not necessarily a 1:1 awake-to-dream match, but interestingly, a few months after my top surgery I started to have an awareness that my dream body was breast-less. It IS my body, and even my psyche knows it. 

When I look at pictures prior to my surgery, that body is foreign to me. I remember the shame, embarrassment, discomfort of those days, but when I see those photos I know that that is NOT my body, THIS is MY body. Since my surgery I have had several people comment that I seem more "myself" since surgery. Yes. I have returned. 

Perhaps I'll have more cohesive thoughts later. But for now, yeah, I finally get to inhabit a body that feels like...home.