Last weekend was tough. After telling the story twice this
time to the therapist, I was so immobile as to temporarily be unable to move my
hand across the page. I was scared, jangled, and raw, and I got thoroughly
convinced that she would never be back again, that she would abandon me and I’d
be stuck in that surly, raw state forever. Of course she didn’t; by the end of
the weekend I had two appointments, but the feeling that she was gone was no
less real.
So guess what triggers me now: meditation. Are you kidding
me with this? Sunday morning, I went with Gold Star Winggirl to try out the
mindfulness group at church. I sat for a full twenty minutes (usually I average
about five) and it was lovely—there was an emphatic robin trilling outside and
rain on the window panes.
But then the fucking people started to talk. They talked
about not being disciplined enough in their mindfulness, which strikes me as
not just a first world problem, but a made up one at that—really?! Not enough
of our lives are controlled, we have to make up ways to police our thoughts,
too?
Then the woman to the right of me (I was secretly thinking
of her as the Ignorant White Lady, since the week before we overheard her tell
the anti-mass-incarceration speaker that she’d never heard of such a problem.)
said that mindfulness helps her because sometimes she has feelings that she
mistakes for anger when they’re really just vulnerability or pain. Others
talked about mindfulness as a way to slow down their knee-jerk reactions. All
of those things are reasonable to say, but they filled me with fury. I piped up
(nicely) in favor of feeling all of our emotions and heeding our knee-jerk
reactions sometimes.
Nothing bad happened at all, but after I piped up I felt
like I’d gotten in trouble for something. I was terribly frightened, angry and
nauseous. Maybe it was just that we were in a circle taking turns talking just
like when we were being questioned by the police in the end of the Bad Thing
story, or maybe it’s just what mindfulness brought. By the time we were taking
a short second meditation, I was fully upset and wanted to run out, but stayed
put so I didn’t disturb anyone’s peace.
I apologized to GSW for “letting her down.” That’s how it
feels when I can’t adjust to things, when I can’t fit in. A lot of the time
lately, I feel like I’m failing at some basic and easy human thing. I envy her
her ability to mingle in groups, to take them or leave them instead of always
feeling under attack. This fear of groups is something I’ve always had, but
it’s getting worse and worse as the Bad Thing fights to leave my system.
In a touching and odd demonstration of friendship, GSW snuck
her church coffee cup into her purse—I’ve never seen petty theft act as a
gesture of solidarity before, but it worked. We skipped the regular church
service in favor of catching up in a café, but I never did shake the feeling of
having failed her, of being disconnected, and I “knew” she’d be gone like all
the other friends.
Though I didn’t speak angrily in the meditation group, I
felt saturated and poisoned by anger there, and strangely this is probably a
good thing. Each time I tell the Bad Thing story and get to the rape part, I
can’t address the anger I feel, it’s too vast. Perversely, I try to tell it as
nicely and charmingly as possible so I don’t scare the therapist or get in
trouble. I guess I’m glad the anger is coming out, even if it is in vexing
circumstances.
Even if I do weirdly try to be sweet when I tell it, it is
the nastiest and deepest anger. The closest I’ve come to actually expressing it
was during the Scary Party fiasco, and though at that time I felt like I would
drown in it, I was still coming at the real issue sideways. I want to look
directly at the anger: I’m pissed off two decades later that someone was inside
me unwanted, that I was too robotlike to fight and kick, that I was used in
such a senseless and pleasureless way, and especially that the experience
stayed there in my hoo-ha, a minefield waiting there for any man kind enough to
fuck me. That someone so vile and thoughtless could inhabit part of my body for
so long makes me frustrated and livid. I’m angry that I may never have a real
relationship with a man, that PIV sex may never feel safe and normal, that I
never found a way to get the experience out of my body before now.
I think I’d like to make friends with the anger that I was
so move to defend in mindfulness class. Instead of being scared and ashamed and
letting it make me feel like a monster, I want to embrace it. I’m angry. I’ve
always been angry. It’s one of the emotions that humans have and it happens to
be one that often motivates real change. Anger deserves just as much care and
love and therapy hours as sadness does, maybe in this case, more.
All those years ago and since, I was so overwhelmed and
terrified and ashamed by the anger that the Bad Story brought that the only way
I thought I could protect myself and others from it was to turn it inwards,
where it lived as self-hate and sadness. But, as we’ve seen from all of my
various reenactments, it’s only making me angrier that way. If I can welcome
it, make it safe, and draw it out, maybe the anger will release me and make way
for other emotions, for the next adventures.
