So I wrote this, and left it up overnight, and woke up in the morning and deleted it. But deleting it didn't feel right. I wasn't comfortable with the reasons why I deleted it: it felt like shame, and silence, and not talking about "these things" in polite company. And you know what? FUCK SHAME & FUCK SILENCE.
It's my right to talk about this, and I choose to. For myself, and for all the many (many, many people- this is a fucking big club I belong to) who can't or don't want to talk about it publicly. I will, because I can, and it's my right to do so.
And so, on with the post, with an additional Trigger Warning: Don't read this if you're not feeling safe and comfortable with reading about experiences of physical & sexual violence.
Sometimes you can have known somebody for a long time- or a short time, but intensely. And they begin to speak, maybe in a monotone or maybe in exactly the same voice as they were just using to tell you about their weekend just gone. But what they are telling you is about the things, the deep, cutting, rupturing things that have made them who they are, without which you could never really know them. And it is difficult to know what to do with that knowledge, suddenly thrust, of their deepest, of their darkest, of their fault lines and their hair-triggers.
So I have a need, right now, to tell you these things, that I do not often or willingly share in public forums.
The first, and by now easiest, is about going to the desert, to Woomera in 2002, as a 19 year old university student, about being part of a liberation-by-force action, about coming face to face with the iron fist of the state and the people whose bodies suffered it directly.
This is what I wrote about it, back then, aged 19, just returned:
I've been in the desert. 1000 kilometers away from home, rescuing refugees from concentration camps. I don't know how far away news of my actions travelled because I've been cut off from phone, email, news and papers for almost a week (it feels like much longer). If you have heard of us in the news, please know that probably most of what you've heard has been lies. Just. You know. So you know.
I was there. In a great, flat desert where they lock people away for having the audacity to try to enter my country. I smashed down fences and fought back when the cops hit me and I pulled people out of captivity. I screamed and cried and ran with them and shielded them with my body and presence when they would have been recaptured. Some of the ones I was looking after were recaptured and I used my voice to call for cameras- not to record the police brutality, but to stop it. They stop kicking children when it's being recorded.
I have images burned into my memory that will never go away. Things have changed that will never change back. I'm not the same person I was before easter and the desert. The fine, clean red dust will never entirely wash out of my boots and jeans and balaclava. The children being bashed by police officers will never leave my mind. The fear and pride and shocking responsibility of liberating human beings will never fade.
I don't know how to move in the world I've come back to. I don't know how to talk to friends who weren't there. I don't know how to see the benign concrete jungle again and not a sinister parasite cloaking everyone I know and love in blind, complacent deceptions. I don't know how to cry about it and let it out. I don't know how to forget.
I never learned how to forget, and there are things that I have never been able to do since I came home from there. It's 7 years later now, and still: I have never been able to watch television, for example, or most movies. I can't- not won't, but CAN'T- deal with entertaining narratives of traumas being done to people. I can't go into supermarkets without breaking into cold sweats. I can't and refuse to engage in political arguments with emotionally removed people who create abstractions of human lives. I cry, often, and (in this cultural context) inappropriately. I care too much, and uselessly, and turn my energies to community activism (where I hope and believe I can make a difference) rather than that brutal real activism where I saw the truth, saw my powerlessness in the face of it, and was completely broken by it.
So. And. The other thing that I might tell you, in a light-hearted voice maybe to distract you from what I am saying, is that I care a lot about community actions around consent, and boundaries, and trust, and power, and abuse, and assault. And I care about these things because (and I will mumble this bit) my girlfriend used to rape me and ha ha ha well I mean I don't usually put that word to it because hey she's a woman and I'm a strong person and these things don't really happen and- I will go on, and on, and meander and monologue, but what I mean is: I said no, and my saying no meant nothing, and I learned to hate myself, and my body, and sex, and sexual response, because what I wanted, what I said, all of my proud feminist training and all of my sex-positive experiences meant nothing because when I said no, she kept going, and there was nothing I could do about it.
And the doubt, and the fear, and the re-writing of memories, and the deciding not to speak out about it (for what I felt were my very valid reasons at the time). And the having physical and intimate boundaries that are 40 foot high, topped with razor-wire, and patrolled not only by dogs that shoot bees out of their mouths when they bark but also sharks that have lazer-beams strapped to their foreheads. And being all of these things while also being a 26 year old polyamorous kinky queer dyke who likes to dress skimpy and do (in this cultural context) incredibly adventurous things in public. And dealing with the disconnect between that public persona, and the expectations that people produce from reading me out there, who then encounter me sitting on top of those 40 foot high personal walls, among the razor-wire. Thinking, you could not possibly ever want me enough to bother scaling these.
These aren't the only experiences that have formed me but they are the invisible ones, the ones that don't tend to be part of the grander or more casual narratives, the ones that, when they pop out, make people look at me differently and re-consider what they thought they knew. I'm an extrovert, and I thrive on being known and seen for what I am. Recently I have found myself declaring, more and more often, who and what I am. I am not so interested in simply claiming my "survivor" badge (although I do, and with pride). I care more about connecting with other people with similar experiences, with pooling our knowledge and beginning to understand what this shit means, all of it or little pieces of it.
I am coming to believe, a little bit, in the power of what communities are capable of doing when they're mobilised for the collective or individual good. I am becoming brave enough to pick up publications like the "World Without Sexual Assault" newspaper and wait til I get home before I start crying over it. I am learning that my personal response to trauma, which is (as it is for everyone) multifaceted but often winds up presenting as this proud and clear statement of my experiences: that this is useful for other people, and that it is, perhaps, worth my while to speak up.