Last week there was some brief discussion about triggering, and I wrote that I’d only been triggered once. After writing that, I went out for a walk, and while walking I realized that wasn’t the case. I’ve been triggered twice. The first time happened on Jezebel.
Many of you will probably be shaking your heads right now and either going “silly Jezebel, they’re always posting triggering shit” or “silly commenters, always getting triggered.” But you know? That wasn’t the case at all.
I don’t remember the post this happened on. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do believe it was about consent and the influence of alcohol. Something like that. And I think I commented something like, “LOL something like this happened to me, and I sure as hell wasn’t raped” and then a certain commenter (who is also on Tumblr, but I won’t call her out because perhaps she doesn’t even remember) engaged me in a discussion that left me… well, shattered. I don’t think I said as much in the actual discussion, I think it was more a process that had been put into motion. Dominos had started falling, and I couldn’t stop it. I started remembering things, and I started seeing how my life had been influenced by one stupid night.
The way I remember this period now, I was curled up under my bed in a fetal position, listening to music, and journalling. But really I went to class, I saw my family from time to time, I went to work. Okay, so I did email my mom that she was banned from asking me how I was (which, as it turns out, scared her shitless) and I did tell that friend who wasn’t a friend any more only she didn’t know that yet that I would shove my umbrella down her throat if she didn’t shut the fuck up. So I wasn’t all that well.
In the end, I wrote down my memories of a certain night in December 2002. And I posted them to my Livejournal. It may seem a strange thing to do, but I couldn’t talk about this to anyone, and here I had a group of people I trusted. And they were there for me and supported me and in the end I managed to go to an intake interview for the school psychologist and I let them read my little memoirs and they hooked me up with EMDR. So I spent a couple of sessions focusing on the worst memories, which oddly were me drinking a glass of water in the kitchen and my knee chafing on the structure-painted wall. And I started doing better, generally. But the words never sat right with me.
During one of my therapy sessions, the psychologist asked me to tell her what happened to me, using a verb. I told her I couldn’t, because nothing worked. We went through everything. The Dutch words for rape, assault, harassment, molestation. The English words for the same things. For a while, I did settle on rape - in English, though I did use the Dutch words a couple of times, when talking about this on two specific occasions. But for a good time now, this hasn’t sat well with me. Because honestly, I just don’t know what happened to me. To other people it might be crystal clear. If I tell them the story they might come away thinking I was raped or I had sex, depending on their… well, morality. And education, perhaps. But to me, it’s anything but clear. So for a while now, this has been my beastie.
My beastie is something I always carry with me. It bristles when someone makes a rape joke. It went into convulsions during orientation last year. It might be the reason I’ve been single and, well, celibate for as long as I have. I picture it as a hedgehog living in a dark spot in my heart. Generally, it’s quite well-behaved. It minds its own business a lot. But sometimes someone pokes at it, and it curls up into a ball and stings. It’s no longer something that stands in my way, but it’s not something that is going to leave me either. So my beastie and I, we’re learning how to get along. I’m still getting to know it, and its influence on my life. But we’ll get there, in the end. My beastie might have been the result of something I never wanted to happen, but it’s also what made me me. I don’t know if I’d be a better or a worse me without it, and I guess I never will. But I kinda like me, beastie and all.
*Applauds*
I have no words for how much this has touched me.