Not an Essay on Being Victim and Survivor

This is (late) Essay #40 of The 52 Essay Challenge, a series in which I write a new (unpolished & messy) essay each week during 2017.

On Sunday morning, I started to write Essay 40. This was right before the Me Too “movement” (are we calling it that? what do we call it?) but during the height of the Weinstein storm where *everything* was about him and sexual assault and harassment. Everywhere I turned, there it was.

Feeling triggered, I started to write my story.

This is how I process and make sense of the world: I write. Whether or not I share it is determined after I’m done writing. I write to survive. It sounds like an exaggeration but it’s not. If I don’t write, I become physically incapacitated. My body refuses to work for me. It shuts down. Sometimes to the point where I am in bed for half the day or more. So I write.

Then the Me Too thing took off. My FB newsfeed was too much to bear. So many “me toos”. So many.

I am not surprised – no woman is—but to see it, right there on the screen – a parade of “me toos”—made it all too real. My body started to shut down.

I stopped writing my story. I couldn’t fight the shutdown hard enough to write anymore.

I am tired of fighting.

I am tired of being the brave one, the strong one.

I am tired of being the one people look to, the one people turn to.

I am tired of opening up the wounds of old traumas to say, hey, me too.

I am fucking tired.

I need a break.

I want someone to take care of me for once, to hold me and just say, Don’t worry – I got this. And I love you.

Why is the burden put on us? Why must we endure more pain in order to incite change?

And then there’s the yogi part of me that remembers: suffering is optional.* So I’m asking myself how do I transform trauma into healing in ways that do not recreate suffering? Or do I allow for the suffering, sit in it, move through it, and release it each time it comes? And hope that maybe with each experience, that suffering diminishes into a tiny thing that I can flick away with my finger?

[*This statement is not meant to be dismissive of real experienced traumas, but more, for me anyway, of a way to think about how trauma is functioning -- is it keeping me stuck in the past? Or is working in another way that doesn't reinforce the groove of suffering?]

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m trying to practice self-care but I don’t even know what that looks like anymore. I’ve gone to yoga for the past three days straight and I don’t feel any less shitty. Or maybe I do feel less shitty immediately after class, but then I am subject to the shit that’s still out there so I get pushed back to where I was before I went to class.

Writing isn’t helping. I find myself all over the place. Starting one essay, then stopping halfway through. Starting a second essay, then abandoning that. Writing a poem that feels okay…. Maybe the writing is helping and I’m not noticing it. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself (which is par for the course). Maybe.

Right now, all I want to do is crawl under the covers and sleep until it doesn’t hurt any more.