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author’s note: i’ve been writing this entry for two months and i’m still not sure about posting it. for several reasons, some of which will be obvious early on. regardless, here it is. be warned it might go to friendslock or disappear entirely overnight because it’s making me skittish like that. the older entry i link to may also get re-secured after too much thinking, so you might want to read that while you can as it’s one of the best things i posted here - in 2005, if not ever.
__________________________________________________
the winter i was seventeen, i started to tell my best friend.
it was late. it was a school night. i was secretly in a 6.1 richter scale freak out, the walls closing in on me. so i thought: this is my best friend. i should be able to talk to her. she can talk to me. so here goes.
i told her that when i was in middle school, an adult family friend had gotten increasingly physically aggressive with me whenever we were left alone together, which, at that point, was a great deal. it dragged out for a year. over the course of that year, i became increasingly miserable, isolated, and self-destructive: it was like, deal with that shit for a minimum of four hours two nights a week, then go to school the next day so my peers could assure me i was disgusting and worthless all on my pre-existing lack of merit. with regard to what was happening after school, i was convinced nobody would believe me and, even if they did, nobody would help. i didn’t ask for help. i didn’t tell anyone. i was terrified to tell anyone, because i was certain it’d just stigmatize me that much more; turn me socially from “that freak” into “that freak who got molested.” the conversation with my friend was the first time a word about anything in my history (there’s more) had ever crossed my lips. we were on the phone. she couldn’t see me shaking.
after i told her that, she said, in a small voice, “something happened to me, too.” so i asked, and she told me a horrible experience that involved her narrowly escaping assault when she was fourteen. that moment in our friendship was as awful as it was beautiful. that moment in our friendship was exactly what i needed.
at first.
then, she used the impetus of that disclosure to launch into a frustrating and (as far as i could tell) unrelated anecdote about something her mother had done the previous day. my friend had told me about this that morning at school, but needed to tell me again, so she did. it was an upsetting story that informed my growing concern about my friend’s compounding depression and the way her current dynamic with her parents was feeding into it. so fifteen minutes out of this momentous, potentially life-changing disclosure, friend and me were talking about her baseline problems, instead. in other words, she changed the subject. i let her.
in spite of what i’ll say much later in this post, i wasn’t angry about it. i’m not angry about it. she didn't and couldn't have known. i suspect if she had, she would’ve been horrified. like a lot of traumatized post-adolescents, i guarded my killing secrets as though my life depended on their being kept, not the other way around. frankly, not having to go into the deeper part of what i was trying to tell her was a relief.
it didn’t seem as though my friend had ever really had an emotional advocate before and that’s what i tried to be for her, with varying degrees of success: someone who provided emotional safe space. someone who listened. someone she could say anything to without judgement. someone she could be herself around, even if she was feeling like an awkward vulnerable lonely mess. it’s a role i’ve played for a lot of people and i am glad to do it. it actually relates to who i need to be for my friends.
i’m not angry about it, but it illustrates a problem, something that’s come up for me over and over again, particularly when i need that same kind of non-judgmental, attentive listening and support because i am in a serious crisis and cannot, necessarily, spare the resources for serving as a witness.
the problem, when i was seventeen, is that i was about to tell my friend that the situation had culminated in my being raped. more importantly, i was going to be forced into isolated contact with this same individual over winter break and was scared witless about it. instead of talking it out with someone i trusted, instead of bringing the matter into even the dusky and obfuscated light of a conversation with my friend, i locked in and locked up. i briefly appropriated a switchblade from one of my less observant male friends, kept it in my pants pocket through the entire interaction and a couple days after that, too. fortunately, if there can be any “fortunately” in this story, my rapist had lost interest. could i have used the knife? my public-facing answer remains: no fucking question.
instead of breaking through that initial disclosure, i holed that specific issue up inside of myself for another fifteen years until my first viewing of david lynch's wild at heart put me into emotional shock.
it took me a month to tell ben why.
*
most people don't know how to listen. a lot of it goes back to the simple reality that the experience of actually being witnessed: without an agenda, without conflict, without competition, without all of those often helpful but occasionally destructive devices that occur in regular conversation - this is disturbingly rare in our society. we are encouraged to be broadcasters, not receivers. there isn't a mandatory american standardized training process for witnessing. there isn’t really any feedback to let us know if we are witnessing in a healthy manner and absolutely no tangible short-term rewards if we are. in fact, a lot of the time? listening makes you feel lonely, sad, and afraid. helpless. nobody ever wants to feel helpless. sometimes i think that our terror of helplessness might actually be one of the things that’s destroying us as a species, but i’m not ready to write about that.
most of the time, our first major opportunities for witnessing are nightmare scenarios: getting thrust into a situation where somebody we care about has been, say, assaulted, diagnosed with a serious illness, has lost someone close, has lost their marriage, has lost everything or almost everything, has LOST, and it is horrible, and it is terrible, and it is helpless, there isn’t some huge heroic action that can be taken or a logo-soaked item to be purchased.
i can’t even imagine, but let’s be honest here? i won’t even imagine. we potential witnesses come to a loved one’s agony with no path, no sense of scale, possibly alternating between terror, apathy, and guilt. we freak out. we make it all about us. we get defensive, we get solution-obsessed, we get judgmental, we get distracted, we get impatient, we feel horribly inadequate. maybe we worry that this suffering individual is going to make us take responsibility for their pain. maybe we worry that their situation is contagious. a lot of the time, we don’t want to think about it. we don’t want to think about it happening to them and we don’t want to think about it happening to ourselves. a lot of the time, we vanish.
and/or? we broadcast.
what happened to me. how i dealt with what happened to me. how i helped someone who might have been dealing with something like this in the sometimes decades-ago past. what i would do if what was happening to our loved one was happening to me. what our loved ones long-term benchmarks and strategies in the recovery process ought to be. discerning. criticizing. qualifying and quantifying. placating. what not to do. where not to go. how not to feel. who to be and how to be it. who not to be and i can’t even imagine, except here i am, imagining that what i am saying to my friend two days out of the morgue is in any way appropriate to be saying to her. we talk
and talk
and talk
and talk.
this is almost always indicative of a wound. whether we know it or not, most of us have some degree of anxiety around the idea of being heard and acknowledged. most of us have been hurt in this exact way by somebody close to us. if that anxiety hasn't been identified and confronted in some way - in the act of connecting with someone who can serve as a witness, as an emotional advocate - it tends to erupt all over our loved ones when they come to us in pain, because hey, why should she get someone to listen to and acknowledge her when i never did? this not only injures those we hold dear in their most vulnerable moments, but perpetuates the mechanisms of silence and isolation. it destroys relationships. if not in that moment, a few months, a couple years up the line.
so what can we do? outside the radius of a loved one’s crisis, we can prepare ourselves to be there for them.
i’m not attempting to present myself as an authority on the matter. i’ve screwed up every point on this list with somebody; done it before, will do it again, am probably doing it right now. however, i’ve also done a lot of work on these issues, possibly for the selfish reason of hoping that, some day, more people will be able to give real witnessing back to me and the people i care about. so here is what i’ve learned. i am and continue to be a stickler for details, in my writing if not in bookkeeping, so i’m putting this overwhelming chunk of content (you may want to read it in shifts) ( behind a cut. )
__________________________________________________
the winter i was seventeen, i started to tell my best friend.
it was late. it was a school night. i was secretly in a 6.1 richter scale freak out, the walls closing in on me. so i thought: this is my best friend. i should be able to talk to her. she can talk to me. so here goes.
i told her that when i was in middle school, an adult family friend had gotten increasingly physically aggressive with me whenever we were left alone together, which, at that point, was a great deal. it dragged out for a year. over the course of that year, i became increasingly miserable, isolated, and self-destructive: it was like, deal with that shit for a minimum of four hours two nights a week, then go to school the next day so my peers could assure me i was disgusting and worthless all on my pre-existing lack of merit. with regard to what was happening after school, i was convinced nobody would believe me and, even if they did, nobody would help. i didn’t ask for help. i didn’t tell anyone. i was terrified to tell anyone, because i was certain it’d just stigmatize me that much more; turn me socially from “that freak” into “that freak who got molested.” the conversation with my friend was the first time a word about anything in my history (there’s more) had ever crossed my lips. we were on the phone. she couldn’t see me shaking.
after i told her that, she said, in a small voice, “something happened to me, too.” so i asked, and she told me a horrible experience that involved her narrowly escaping assault when she was fourteen. that moment in our friendship was as awful as it was beautiful. that moment in our friendship was exactly what i needed.
at first.
then, she used the impetus of that disclosure to launch into a frustrating and (as far as i could tell) unrelated anecdote about something her mother had done the previous day. my friend had told me about this that morning at school, but needed to tell me again, so she did. it was an upsetting story that informed my growing concern about my friend’s compounding depression and the way her current dynamic with her parents was feeding into it. so fifteen minutes out of this momentous, potentially life-changing disclosure, friend and me were talking about her baseline problems, instead. in other words, she changed the subject. i let her.
in spite of what i’ll say much later in this post, i wasn’t angry about it. i’m not angry about it. she didn't and couldn't have known. i suspect if she had, she would’ve been horrified. like a lot of traumatized post-adolescents, i guarded my killing secrets as though my life depended on their being kept, not the other way around. frankly, not having to go into the deeper part of what i was trying to tell her was a relief.
it didn’t seem as though my friend had ever really had an emotional advocate before and that’s what i tried to be for her, with varying degrees of success: someone who provided emotional safe space. someone who listened. someone she could say anything to without judgement. someone she could be herself around, even if she was feeling like an awkward vulnerable lonely mess. it’s a role i’ve played for a lot of people and i am glad to do it. it actually relates to who i need to be for my friends.
i’m not angry about it, but it illustrates a problem, something that’s come up for me over and over again, particularly when i need that same kind of non-judgmental, attentive listening and support because i am in a serious crisis and cannot, necessarily, spare the resources for serving as a witness.
the problem, when i was seventeen, is that i was about to tell my friend that the situation had culminated in my being raped. more importantly, i was going to be forced into isolated contact with this same individual over winter break and was scared witless about it. instead of talking it out with someone i trusted, instead of bringing the matter into even the dusky and obfuscated light of a conversation with my friend, i locked in and locked up. i briefly appropriated a switchblade from one of my less observant male friends, kept it in my pants pocket through the entire interaction and a couple days after that, too. fortunately, if there can be any “fortunately” in this story, my rapist had lost interest. could i have used the knife? my public-facing answer remains: no fucking question.
instead of breaking through that initial disclosure, i holed that specific issue up inside of myself for another fifteen years until my first viewing of david lynch's wild at heart put me into emotional shock.
it took me a month to tell ben why.
*
most people don't know how to listen. a lot of it goes back to the simple reality that the experience of actually being witnessed: without an agenda, without conflict, without competition, without all of those often helpful but occasionally destructive devices that occur in regular conversation - this is disturbingly rare in our society. we are encouraged to be broadcasters, not receivers. there isn't a mandatory american standardized training process for witnessing. there isn’t really any feedback to let us know if we are witnessing in a healthy manner and absolutely no tangible short-term rewards if we are. in fact, a lot of the time? listening makes you feel lonely, sad, and afraid. helpless. nobody ever wants to feel helpless. sometimes i think that our terror of helplessness might actually be one of the things that’s destroying us as a species, but i’m not ready to write about that.
most of the time, our first major opportunities for witnessing are nightmare scenarios: getting thrust into a situation where somebody we care about has been, say, assaulted, diagnosed with a serious illness, has lost someone close, has lost their marriage, has lost everything or almost everything, has LOST, and it is horrible, and it is terrible, and it is helpless, there isn’t some huge heroic action that can be taken or a logo-soaked item to be purchased.
i can’t even imagine, but let’s be honest here? i won’t even imagine. we potential witnesses come to a loved one’s agony with no path, no sense of scale, possibly alternating between terror, apathy, and guilt. we freak out. we make it all about us. we get defensive, we get solution-obsessed, we get judgmental, we get distracted, we get impatient, we feel horribly inadequate. maybe we worry that this suffering individual is going to make us take responsibility for their pain. maybe we worry that their situation is contagious. a lot of the time, we don’t want to think about it. we don’t want to think about it happening to them and we don’t want to think about it happening to ourselves. a lot of the time, we vanish.
and/or? we broadcast.
what happened to me. how i dealt with what happened to me. how i helped someone who might have been dealing with something like this in the sometimes decades-ago past. what i would do if what was happening to our loved one was happening to me. what our loved ones long-term benchmarks and strategies in the recovery process ought to be. discerning. criticizing. qualifying and quantifying. placating. what not to do. where not to go. how not to feel. who to be and how to be it. who not to be and i can’t even imagine, except here i am, imagining that what i am saying to my friend two days out of the morgue is in any way appropriate to be saying to her. we talk
and talk
and talk
and talk.
this is almost always indicative of a wound. whether we know it or not, most of us have some degree of anxiety around the idea of being heard and acknowledged. most of us have been hurt in this exact way by somebody close to us. if that anxiety hasn't been identified and confronted in some way - in the act of connecting with someone who can serve as a witness, as an emotional advocate - it tends to erupt all over our loved ones when they come to us in pain, because hey, why should she get someone to listen to and acknowledge her when i never did? this not only injures those we hold dear in their most vulnerable moments, but perpetuates the mechanisms of silence and isolation. it destroys relationships. if not in that moment, a few months, a couple years up the line.
so what can we do? outside the radius of a loved one’s crisis, we can prepare ourselves to be there for them.
i’m not attempting to present myself as an authority on the matter. i’ve screwed up every point on this list with somebody; done it before, will do it again, am probably doing it right now. however, i’ve also done a lot of work on these issues, possibly for the selfish reason of hoping that, some day, more people will be able to give real witnessing back to me and the people i care about. so here is what i’ve learned. i am and continue to be a stickler for details, in my writing if not in bookkeeping, so i’m putting this overwhelming chunk of content (you may want to read it in shifts) ( behind a cut. )
