Our home is wrapped in thin plastic. We can’t get out or in. The doors are sealed, windows masked and covered. This is what happens when you can finally afford to pay someone to paint your house for you. You sit inside feeling asphyxiated.
I almost taste the plastic pulling into my mouth when I breathe the way it did when I was a child experimenting with airlessness—that “I know I’m not supposed to do this which is why I’m going to try it a few times and see what happens” feeling.
Oh, the rush of air pulling in with more than ordinary force and the way the mouth heats that air, then the alien sensuality of the bag connecting with the lips all the way around, followed by that sudden, hard stop when no more air can get through, the shock and aftershock of it all at once, like a symphony going silent after roaring from the stage at full volume, the timpanist’s hand held high above his instrument, the conductor’s arms hanging in front of her as if invisible wires control her wrists and the whole orchestra rigid, focused, tingling from head to toe and back again, the only thing keeping them in place is the downbeat, the one that’s coming, coming, coming, any second, any second, just as soon as the conductor gives her orders.
Then she does. She is me. The downbeat is the moment I pull the plastic from my mouth and air flows in, unrestricted and urgent and wanton. That cool air, that life-giving air oxygenating my body and bringing my brain fully back online. You could almost call it a form of rebirth if children who play with plastic bags are capable of such a thing. I was, or at least I think I was, but I’m not your ordinary child. Or perhaps I’m too ordinary. One can never know what one is or is not in comparison with others who may or may not be what they are or are not.
Light still penetrates the plastic-covered windows but it’s gray and gauzy like one of those days that happens all the time in Seattle but never here in Tucson. Even during monsoon season, storms make the sky dark, not the color of cement or that dull, not-quite-elephant color nobody uses in the forty-eight pack of Crayons. Do forty-eight packs still exist? I remember when I got my first set. It was thrilling to see all those colors lined up tidily in their box. It felt like as many colors as the world could hold. Then the sixty-four pack came out, and I suddenly needed those additional sixteen colors. Capitalism has had its fingers in my heart my whole life.
Some of the plastic is off now. That’s a relief. I could leave through the front door if I wanted to. Now that I can, I don’t want to. When I couldn’t, “I must leave now” was the only thought in my head. It pounded in 4/4 time as I wrote this, a percussive accompaniment to my hollow key clicks that only I could hear.
Maybe I felt like I was in the womb when all that plastic surrounded me. Maybe I felt like I was a cell inside its wall. Maybe I felt like I was going to turn into ooze and transform into a moth. Maybe I felt something darker, something only my body and animal brain remember, like my recurring dream of men who are wolves who are coming for me, and I’m inside a house but there are no walls, no locks, no doors, only gauzy drapes, so I wrap myself in them but the men see me, and I can’t run because the drapes only tighten when I try.
I will describe the heartbreaking wombat poem I wanted to write last night when I was too tired to write because I’d been messing with poetry submissions for fifteen hours straight. (I actually submitted zero poems after all that effort.) The time for actually writing the heartbreaking wombat poem has passed. But here’s what I kind of think the poem would have done. Keep in mind, I never know what the poem will actually do until I start engaging with it for real.
—
The Poem Has Some Kind of Title
The poem opens with something about how a wombat can’t survive in the wild with only three legs.
The poem goes into detail about the kinds of things the wombat can no longer do because of the missing leg, making reference to an individual wombat who’s experiencing this situation. Evading predators. Foraging. Climbing.
(The poem’s not sure wombats climb. The poem will look that up.)
The poem starts to talk about the wombat in ways humans can relate to, especially those of us who are growing older.
The poem turns to humans explicitly and all the things we can’t do. The poem provides lists here because they can cover a lot of emotional territory. Accretion can be an effective technique in the poem and help the poem avoid sentimentality and other gobbledygook that mucks up poems and may muck this one up despite the poem’s efforts.
Here, the poem may take a turn toward the emotional things we can’t survive, not just the physical things. Traumas. Losses. Unimaginable suffering. The poem will provide some examples, perhaps those pulled from recent news or perhaps from the poem’s past.
The poem might move out from individual traumas to larger traumas by talking about groups of people who are like wombats, ones who’ve lost their lands and are being driven from their homes into the harsh reality that the world is no longer designed for them if it ever was. It’s for others, many of whom want them gone the way they want wombats gone.
The poem may bring up Marky Mark and the way he brutally beat two Venezuelan men when he was sixteen years old, namely how that’s not dissimilar from people attacking and harming wombats, though of course the comparison is problematic because humans aren’t wombats and Marky Mark does whatever he wants, and it’s funny how the history of celebrities always seems to be getting lost, as if it’s all being tucked inside the pouches of wombats never again to see the light of day.
It’s risky, but the poem might talk about the emotional lives of wombats, perhaps discussing how we can’t know the interior lives of nonhuman species, but we can make some educated guesses. And we really don’t know that much about our own interior lives, do we, and that doesn’t keep us from talking about ourselves and each other, so why not allow the stretch here. It’s a poem, after all, not a scientific lab that experiments on animals. (And thank goodness it’s not.)
Now the poem may list a bunch of stuff a wombat can’t do after certain types of emotional damage, like being attacked or run over or left in the road or being burned or losing habitat or whatever. The poem may feel this is an effective way to bring you into the animal’s life quickly, before you can stop reading.
The poem wants you to feel all of this, both for the wombat and for other humans, but its mechanism of action is to get you to feel. You must feel what the wombat feels so you can feel what you feel and then extend more compassion and understanding to those around you.
That’s what the poem wants.
The poem will end but not before it tells you the wombat died. Humans made the decision to euthanize the wombat once they realized the leg couldn’t be saved. The poem may offer a kind of prayer here for safe passage from this world, but the poem knows it’s better if there were safe passage within it.
The poem will leave. It will disappear into the margins because the poem always has safe passage into silence.
Trees don’t move in the wind. They’re moved by the wind, the way we all react to unseen forces, unseen faces, unseen lives, and unseen lies. But I digress. This isn’t about deleting and inserting letters to stumble on real or imagined connections. It’s about how, wherever I’m standing, I want to be standing somewhere else. A foot over, a mile, a state, a bioregion.
There, where I saw my first Blackburnian warbler. There, where I learned the name scissor-tailed flycatcher. There, the mud. There, the sand. There, the untidy rows of cows. There, tidy rows of roses a girl could hide in if it weren’t for the thorns.
I’m trying to stand still for ten minutes every morning while I watch the sun rise and listen to birds. Yesterday, a western screech owl. Today, a pyrrhuloxia, as in red or tawny, not as in pile of wood for burning the dead.
I’m trying not to think about how the northern cardinal should be the one named pyrrhuloxia, not the pyrrhuloxia, or about how that must mean the person who named the pyrrhuloxia had never seen a cardinal, or about how the person who named the pyrrhuloxia must have felt the first time they saw a cardinal after having named the pyrrhuloxia pyrrhuloxia.
I’m trying not to think, which is always the biggest impediment to not thinking. I just want to stand for ten minutes with my feet planted, my body unstirred, like palo verde trees on a calm morning after hard rain. I want to be here, with these birds and these trees and these cactuses in this desert. I want to feel safe enough to remain still for ten minutes. I’ve seen cottontail rabbits do as much, though their mouths were working incessantly because they move their jaws up to one hundred twenty times per minute when they chew. That’s twice my average resting heart rate but nowhere near the four thousand times a hummingbird’s wings beat per minute.
I’m trying not to think about facts and comparisons. This more than that. That less than this. Living beings are not just math, so I’m trying not to tilt my head and scan for rabbits or add up my heartbeats as they batter my chest or make a futile attempt to count the wingbeats of the Costa’s hummingbird who’s zipping past me.
I’m trying not to worry about Valley Fever and global warming and poisonous toads and communities in crisis and birds falling from the sky from avian influenza and assassination attempts and wildlife without habitat and unseen lies and unseen lives and unseen faces and unseen forces and my father and my family and my childhood. That’s what lies in stillness. All of that and more.
So I count. I compare. I slot things into more than that, less than this. I learn facts. I look around. I take in. I fill my head with details. And I move. I have a head full of analysis, a body full of terror, and the trauma to justify both.
Those last three things on my list are the crux of the matter: my father and my family and my childhood. They’re the real, lived dangers that tie me to the rest of the dangers in the world, the rest of the heartbreaks in the world, the rest of the injustices in the world. The broken wing. The dry lake. The toxic dust. The highway. The swimming pool. The bedroom.
My father didn’t have any guns. He’d had enough of them in Korea. We had an empty gun case built into a wall at our lake house. I wanted to fill it with flowers. He wouldn’t let me. It had to be empty, a sign for anyone who saw it that he meant them no harm.
My father was the weapon. He ultimately turned himself on himself but not until he destroyed everyone else. I mean us. I mean his family. I say his as if we belonged to him. Belonged as in were owned by, not as in were members of. He owned us all. Kin from the Old English cynn, which sounds like sin. To kin, to sin, to skin, again. Buckskin and doeskin and firing pins and deadly sins. No win, no wins, no whining, no whinneys.
I stood still for five minutes this morning. Five minutes in which I didn’t keep vigil, in which I watched the sun rise and listened to the birds. It’s not ten yet. I’ll keep trying for ten.
May we all be free from suffering for ten minutes today.
Do not see the horrors of the world. Do not speak the horrors of the world. Listen, listen to the horrors. We only need to listen to know them in our bones. Then we can see. Then we can speak.
Cover your eyes until you hear. Cover your mouth until you hear.
I mean bomb. I mean siren. I mean gun. I mean blade.
I mean hand. I mean voice. I mean footsteps. I mean heartbeat.
I mean fire in wildlands. I mean fire in territories and cities and countries. I mean whole areas turned into carbon. Trees. Structures. Animals. People.
I mean the horror we hear coming and the horror we don’t hear until it’s come, until it’s sitting on our chests, pinning us down. To the bed. To the floor. To the sopping ground.
I mean flames and thermal winds roaring like jet engines, what feels like the whole world rumbling.
I mean horror like bones breaking because horror often breaks bones but also sounds like bones breaking when no bones are broken.
The horror of wrong death, wrong place, wrong time, wrong turn, wrong war, wrong leader, wrong policy, wrong hope, wrong prayer.
The horror of wrong family, wrong father, wrong town, wrong time, wrong words, wrong body, wrong hands, wrong home.
I mean bomb turning brick to sudden dust. I mean siren screaming aimless into night. I mean gun bucking in eager hands. I mean blade causing muscle to burst like distant thunder.
I mean hand turning body into target. I mean voice lulling child into trust. I mean footsteps like percussionists pounding out time. I mean heartbeat like another person inside the chest trying to tear themselves free.
The horror of why. The sound of that question as it sits on the tongue croaking like a toad.
I mean horror as gunshots down a long hall. Then in a room. Then in a library. Then in another room. Then back in the hall.
Horror in the school, in the business, on the base, in the place of worship, in the car, on the street, in the parking lot, in the neighborhood, on the highway, at the train station, on public lands, in the bedroom, at the splash pad.
The always-more of horror. The never-endingness of horror. Our faces like dry pools. Our skin dull as powder. We want no more of this screaming horror.
Now we hear it. Now we don’t. Now we do. Now we don’t. We are children, every one of us, playing games with our senses.
I’m dealing with so much trauma that it’s been destabilizing twice now in the past year. I’ve lived with trauma and the sequelae of trauma my whole life, but learning more about my childhood trauma over the past twelve months has been too much for me to process, cope with, or even understand.
Being in Southern Utah triggered a deeper understanding of my trauma. It’s an extremely traumatized and traumatizing place. Living there was like living in a vivid dream, a scary one, one that showed me more than I could process about my childhood, my family, and my father. An alt-right extremist leader who crossed boundaries with her own students didn’t help. A seventy-year-old who sent me an inappropriate photo of himself didn’t help. A trucker who tried to solicit me for sex at a family restaurant didn’t help.
People’s behaviors were so unreal there that I felt like I was being gaslit all the time. Reality didn’t feel like reality. Things that happened on a daily basis were unfathomable.
Law enforcement being sexist, dismissive, and steeped in LDS beliefs and values didn’t help. The domestic violence center only doing phone intakes and scheduling those intakes three days out didn’t help. Their failure to keep their intake appointment with me didn’t help. Not having anyone believe me about any aspect of my trauma or the unfolding situation with my husband didn’t help.
Nothing helped. Nobody helped. Even my therapist violated ethical boundaries by touching me during sessions, almost like she was laying hands on me to remove trauma from my body. She said she could do so because she was also a licensed massage therapist. That’s not the case. She also proselytized heavily during our sessions, diagnosed my husband without seeing him or treating him as a patient, and told me to leave him. When I needed my therapist, she pushed me deeper into fear and exploited my vulnerable state to foist a religious message on me and to dictate what I should do with my life.
My husband didn’t get support, either. Not really. He was shoehorned into the same theocratic system as me. He got messages about the man being in charge, husbands monitoring what their wives do, and so forth. He got a message about everything I was perceiving being untrue. And that’s just not the case. I have legitimate concerns about my husband’s behaviors, including those that also pushed me deeper into fear.
I ended up having a brief reactive psychosis/mania twice, once in February and again in September. That can happen when current traumas are too much for me to bear and my whole complex PTSD web is activated. I’ve been dealing with far too much medical trauma, community trauma, and domestic trauma for far too long. It’s been more than two years since I developed long COVID and the slew of health diagnoses that followed. Two years since I started writing and speaking publicly about the treatment of the LGBTQ+ community in Southern Utah. Just under two years since so much more of my childhood trauma came to light. More than two years of solid stress with my husband, and before that the destabilization within our relationship that the pandemic caused.
I tried so hard to make things work in Utah, to find a place for my voice, my writing, for me as a person. I tried so hard to fight for others so they could also have a place in the community. I tried so hard to overcome diseases and conditions that leave most people homebound. I tried so hard to fight for my marriage and for my husband. I tried so hard to heal from traumas that I now fear I’ll never be able to heal from.
I don’t know what to do. I know I can’t go back to Utah. I know I’m too physically ill and too emotionally destabilized to make it on my own here in Oklahoma. I know I can’t leave my husband behind because he’ll languish in that environment, which he doesn’t deserve. Despite some of his behaviors, he also deserves a chance to grow and heal. I know major changes need to happen so I don’t panic, dissociate, and have brief psychosis every time something else happens that’s traumatizing.
I’ve really never been more terrified, day by day, moment by moment, second by second. My whole world is gone. My whole life is gone. I’m like the speaker in one of my poems who loses everything a little at a time until there’s nothing, not even hands with which to write or eyes with which to read.
Deliver me from the man who ran over a porcupine in broad daylight because of his need to thrust his way forward always forward always faster and always darker, coal smoke billowing from his tailpipe as he hits the gas hard.
Deliver me from that man who saw the porcupine struggling after his back legs were crushed, who didn’t stop, who didn’t take the porcupine to the wildlife rehab on the other side of Flying Monkey Mesa, who didn’t care because black smoke because man because manly because grrrrr because move over here I come like it or not because get off of my road and out of my town and I’ll put my foot in your ass and I’ll mow you down I mean it I mean it look at me I really mean it look at my Gadson flag and my Dixie flag can’t you see I mean business look at my neck veins little lady, pretty little lady, lady why’s there a thought in your head a little tinkling thought about love that’s so silly so outdated so childish like a school bell hey little lady listen here it’s not God’s way for you to think or tell a man what to do a big man a strong man a fast man and you damned well know it so stop thinking just stop stop it right now.
Deliver me from what the porcupine must have felt there in the road on the hot asphalt in the heat so close to the soft sage flanking the road’s shoulder. He got so close but not close enough never close enough for speed for thrill for look I killed that varment woohoo hot damn and never enough blood left in the leaking husk never enough life left in the pressured heart and never enough limp left in the body nobody will ever gather for ever.
Deliver me from those who came after and also didn’t stop. The sedans and SUVS and minivans and trucks and semis and hatchbacks and Outbacks and Elements and motorcycles and RVs.
Deliver me from every one of them. Deliver me from my neighbors. They didn’t stop. They didn’t stop. My neighbors didn’t stop. Too busy doing God’s work to do God’s work.
Deliver me from my own absence as the porcupine struggled, for coming behind too late by hours, maybe, or maybe only by minutes which is even more self-hatred to be delivered from.
Deliver me from rewriting the story so I’m there, so I take the limp, quilled creature in my arms and usher him to safety, to people who care, to angels on this earth who spend all day helping the creatures of this earth. I almost typed heart. Heart is earth. Earth is heart. Same letters. How did I never see that before? Grief brings out glimmerings, doesn’t it? This is how and why we survive grief. No glimmering, no future. No heart in earth, no earth in our hearts.
Deliver me from those who have no earth in their hearts, no heart in their earths.
Deliver me from my revisions my impossible revisions my anger that story only takes us so far into the future because it never changes the past. Our stories are cursed that way as we are cursed.
Deliver me from the cursed. Deliver me from myself as one of the cursed. Curs-ed, say it with two syllables. Say it with me. Curs-ed. Clop along to that languid beat, that dirge. The march of what we’ll all be without love and without hope.
Deliver me from revisions existing only in our minds and not actually changing what happened, what really happened. The porcupine is dead. That’s what happened. In broad daylight. Visible on open road. The driver could have slowed. The driver could have slowed. The driver could have slowed his hellbent smoke-infused take that world roll.
Deliver me from this iron-encrusted place whose heart was lost in the creek, in the canyons, up on the cliffs when … years, hours, minutes ago? How long? How long has it been? Since we came, since we named, since we shamed, since we couldn’t leave couldn’t leave couldn’t leave this place alone?
Deliver me from how long we’ve lived like this, baffled and battled and beaten and battered and branded and broken. How long must I writhe, I mean write, before I write my way out of this failing, flailing, hellish heaven on earth? A minute? An hour? A day? An eternity?
Zion—my great nephew, not the place—deliver me from this land whose name you carry in your pocket on your papers in your heart and in your genes. Yours is the real Zion. It lives inside you, little one. Never deliver me from who you are—from you, my kin, my kind, my kindred. [REDACTED] Pin me here to this tree, the only one that’s safe these days with all the fruit trees eaten bare. The family tree. My tree, our everlasting tree.
As for you, Zion—the place, not the great nephew—deliver me from you. Free me from you. Forget me. You don’t even have to forgive me. If you can’t reverse time and bring that porcupine back to life, if you can’t unwind the clocks that are all wound too tight here warping time and space and hearts and minds, then deliver me. I beseech you. Deliver me from what we’ve made you, from what you’ve become. Please deliver me.
There’s a point at which there are diminishing returns with regard to learning more about a place, a culture, a collective mindset, a community fever.
There’s a point at which it becomes time to pray with your feet. I’m at that point. I’m not an investigative journalist nor do I want to be one. I’m a creator. I want to create. As Richard Siken says, I’m just a writer. I write things down. That’s what I do and what I need to do. I need to create. I need to bring beauty to what’s awful, to what we want to look away from, to what we want to deny and suppress and ignore. But the beauty part is key. Beauty first, beauty always.
I don’t want to be pulled further into what this place is and does and isn’t and doesn’t do. I don’t want to be somewhere that takes and takes and takes everything from me, leaving no me left to love, to grow, to write, to create.
I’m leaving, come hell or high water. There, I said it. It’s time. It’s beyond time. My return to this place in March was necessary because of my health, because of my trauma, because I had issues to resolve with my husband, and because I needed to make sure I’d done all I could possibly do to be part of this community. I’ve done those things now, and I’m done.
I’m going to Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri in September. I’m looking at MFA programs in Oklahoma while I’m there. I’m evaluating the healthcare system, housing costs and availability, and employment opportunities. I have family in Oklahoma. My family. My people. Oklahoma, my home, my home, my home.
I’m going to need help to do this in the form of love, support, and understanding. There’s so much more trauma for me to address now after living in Utah for five years and Southern Utah for three years. I’m a strong person, but I’m now a broken person. I can come back. I know I can. I can become who I am again, who I’m losing, who I may have lost.
Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be fifty-two. One year ago, I was radioactive. I was sitting in a rented tiny home overlooking the Virgin River Gorge because I had to be isolated for several days. I spent hours talking to Jose Faus on the phone after watching the gorge all day. I had just started writing poetry again. I read a short piece to Jose over the phone as he fell asleep. Maybe my words put him to sleep. That’s OK. I always fall asleep reading my own writing, too. Anyone out there with insomnia might consider using my work to help them regulate their sleep.
Seven years ago, I was sitting in a hospital room in Kansas City with my husband, my legs under constant pressure and a breathing device on the table that I had to use every thirty minutes or so—the former to prevent leg clots and the latter, I think, to prevent a pulmonary embolism. I’d just had my thyroid removed to cure my autoimmune thyroiditis. They found tumors during the procedure, but the doctor assured me they wouldn’t be malignant. He came into my room all ego and narcissism and said there was only a one-percent chance the tumors would be cancerous. That’s why he went easy, left a little tissue in sensitive places. That’s why he didn’t remove the lymph nodes. Then he wished me a happy birthday. The pathology report came in a week later. It was cancer, and it hadn’t all been resected.
What will tomorrow bring? My husband and I plan to look at the stars with a telescope we’re borrowing. I plan to visit a bookstore. I plan to play with our dog, Lexi. I plan to write and write and write and read and read and read. That’s the plan. We’ll see what actually happens.
Love to those dealing with health issues, emotional issues, addictions, dependencies, and any form of pain or suffering. Love to those who’ve almost died and managed to survive. Love to those who tried to survive and didn’t manage to do so. Love to you beyond place, beyond time, beyond loss, beyond memory.
Love to you all. All of you, love.
Ad astra per aspera. PrairyErth, we are one.
It’s not Oklahoma’s fault that I was abused in Oklahoma, that I was raped in Oklahoma, that I was trafficked within and beyond Oklahoma. Humans destroy each other. Humans destroy the land. The land never destroys us. The land never trafficks us. The land never rapes us. The land never abuses us. The land never destroys itself.
I am grateful for this pain. This pain is a compass. This pain is a signal. This pain is my dearest friend, my greatest protector, my guide, my heart. This pain is everything.
Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. ― Matsuo Bashō
Cancer cells can hide inside other types of cells within the body, which is how cancer can evade detection and continue taking up residence inside us even after cancer treatment.
Viruses can mask themselves inside us and avoid being found for years. Hepatitis C does so using FAD, a molecule composed of Vitamin B2 and the energy carrying molecule ATP.
It only takes one B cell turning on our bodies to get all the B cells around them whipped up and make them act the same way, at least for a time. That’s how autoimmune diseases like alopecia areata happen, where an itch or some other benign thing affecting the skin turns into a bald patch that lasts for months or forever because first one, then many, B cells misinterpret the itch as a threat.
My immune system is dysregulated. In addition to having immune deficiency, I have several forms of autoimmunity. My humoral immune system doesn’t always attack invaders such as viruses and bacteria, but it does attack me, my body, routinely. Dysautonomia looks like it’s an autoimmune disease. That tracks with my immune system dysregulation and the way I’ve been developing more and more autoimmune diseases over the course of my adult life.
Many of the health issues I’ve been having over the past two years seem to be my body saying no, the way Gabor Maté discusses such phenomena in his book titled When the Body Says No. My body has been saying no since I was a child, since my trauma started, my familial sex abuse and trafficking. My body keeps saying no and is now in a rhythm of saying no, sometimes quietly and—in a pattern that starts every seven years and resolves in about a year’s time—sometimes piercingly.
I’m at the end of one of those cycles now, but my body isn’t coming back. I’m a rubber band whose elastic has failed, the kind that ultimately break after years of use. I still can’t gain the weight I lost. I’m in pain every day, sometimes extreme pain. My heart gallops and loses its pacing. It would be put down at the track. I’m struck by bouts of exhaustion that come when they please and leave when they please. My TSH absorption continues to be significantly dysregulated despite not even having a thyroid anymore.
I’m fighting, but I’m not coming back. I don’t know if I’ll return this time. The trauma I’ve experienced is severe. My health issues are alarming and serious. Complicated, my doctors say. Your health is complicated. They are somber when they speak to me. They don’t have as much hope as I do, or at least as much as I once had.
The first person Maté writes about in his book dies. She can’t come back from her health issues and ultimately succumbs to them. Cancer, I think. I’d have to look again, and I can’t bear looking. That book is hard for me to read. This life is hard for me to live.
But I want to live. I will live fully as long as I can, whatever that looks like for me and whatever that continues to look like over time.
Haters, especially local haters who think the problem in this community is me because of my gender and sexuality and because of the ways in which I talk about my trauma, especially in and through my poetry: You don’t need to keep me down or hold me back or marginalize me. Stop doing that to me and to others like me. You’re poison. We need the antidote, not more of you. You will be ashamed of yourself someday. You will wish you’d led with love, been flooded with love, exuded love. Trust me. (Dont’ truss me.)
From grade school forward, I was bullied, harassed, sexually assaulted, and raped by my classmates. The lesser infractions started when I was younger, with the exception of the CCSA I experienced at an older boy’s home where my mother had me go every day after school until she got off work. The more serious incidents occurred when I was an older student.
Things got much worse after my father died when I was thirteen. Most of my peers didn’t even know he was dead. His fatal heart attack occurred the Friday before spring break. My mother made me go to school the week after spring break ended. She didn’t like the way it would have looked for me to have taken any time off.
It was around that time that the orchestrated bullying began rather than the sporadic outbursts that had occurred earlier. It was a sport—I was a sport—for a growing group of students, even other students who were LGBTQ+, who were neuroatypical, who had serious health issues that made them the target of kids who didn’t like weakness, paleness, physical differences and the like, or who were scared, marginalized, and unpopular for other reasons. I was the most unpopular. I was everyone’s target and, for some, a ticket to greater inclusion and popularity if they could demonstrate a shared hatred of and derision for me.
In groups, my classmates would call me names, ridicule me, and more: in the school’s hallways, inside classrooms, on the bus. My neighbor across the street, a student I’d been friends with up until my father died, would even open her door and, alone or with her friends who were over, call me bitch or slut anytime she saw me in the yard or driveway.
What was I to them? Prude. A slut. Stupid. Ugly. A bitch. Slow. Retarded. Flat-chested. Boyish. Easy. Gay. (Only they didn’t use the word gay. They used words that were darker, words that catch in my throat to this day. I lived in terror of them finding evidence to back up that last claim. What would they say—what would they do—to me then?)
They were like plaque, those students, the way they gathered, the way they clumped up like something clogging an artery that would otherwise function properly. After my biology class, I’d go to my locker, which was just outside the classroom. It was a lower locker. JL, a tall, funny, wildly adored boy had the locker above mine. One day, he started ramming my face into his crotch and simulating oral sex, holding the back of my head, forcing it into his genital area over and over as he pretended to orgasm. I thought it was only going to happen once, that someone would stop it. A teacher. Other students. School officials. They didn’t. JL repeated the abuse anytime he caught me at my locker. It became a joke most of the students in that building participated in. They’d linger after class, stand in groups gawking, laughing, as he simulated rape.
Though this wasn’t my first experience with CCSA, it was my most public, on display right there in the bustling, glimmering hallway where the floor tile and walls were all paste white, chalk white, as white as the flour babies the girls in some kind of love and marriage class had to carry around to prove they’d one day be able to take care of a child.
I began leaving class early to go to my locker or lingering after the bell rang so I could switch my heavy books out after class had started. It worked for a while until JL caught on.
I went to the school counselor. She told me boys will be boys. The more I resisted what JL was doing, she said, the more he would do it. It was, in essence, my fault. What happened to me was *my* fault, not JL’s. The counselor didn’t do anything. I asked her if I could be assigned a different locker. She refused. I asked her if she could talk to him. She saw no need. JL continued to force my head into his crotch whenever he could.
I got a large backpack. I put all my books in it. The backpack was tremendously heavy, weighed down by my literature, chemistry, physics, biology, Latin, music, and other books. I’d managed to overcome my learning disabilities, which I’d been bullied for in grade school. I fought my way into language, into mathematics, into all the letters and numbers that confused and frustrated and bewildered me all through grade school and early middle school. I knew being smart was my only way out. Education was my way out. College was my way out.
I knew my classes were more important than anything. I didn’t want to end up like JW, who got pregnant and was never seen again. Or like MW, whose entire family disappeared overnight. Or like RY and KA and LL and LB, all of whom ended up addicted to drugs, some of whom were raped, and one of whom was gang raped. (I failed to avoid being raped, twice, but that’s another story.) I forced myself to learn how to read and do math with no help from anyone and without my learning disabilities being recognized. By junior high, I was in advanced classes. I wasn’t going to let JL or anyone hold me back. My backpack gave me the freedom to avoid my locker. My shoulders and back hurt from lugging it around, but at least I could be mobile and move away from any tangles of students forming in or between the school’s buildings, ready to attack me verbally, physically, sexually, or in some combination of the three.
Years later, I spoke with one of those classmates, a brilliant student named PD. She explained why she and the other students did what they did. You were unflappable, she said. No matter what we did, we could never get a response out of you. So they did more. And more. And more. It was a challenge.
They were trying to break me. They never broke me. I’m still not broken.
They didn’t know what kind of family I’d been born into, what I’d already survived in my own home. What I survived every day.
Unflappable. A challenge. The word is strong. The word is a survivor. The word is fierce. I was fierce, but the body and mind can’t take eighteen years of constant abuse from within the family, from within the school, from within the community, without repercussions. We aren’t designed to withstand that kind of treatment. But we are designed to heal. This is what healing looks like, believe it or not. Right now, it’s me at age fifty-one waking from a nightmare in which I’m a teenager being sexually assaulted poolside, writing this down, and processing these emotions and memories on my own terms all these years later, as I have for many years up until this point. It’s a Mobius strip, healing. It’s a process. There’s no clear beginning and no clear end.
It’s life. It’s the life I’ve had up to this point and the one I fight for every day. It’s the me I fight for, and the others I fight for, and the fight I continue for those I’ve known and loved who have fallen because they could no longer fight. My comrades. My kindreds. The ones who didn’t make it. It’s JW and RY and KA and LB and, most recently, KB. And it’s DG. Dana Guthrie. Dana Lynn Guthrie, the name I was born with, the name I got from my father and the parts of him that I still carry with me. He was a boy, too. Boys who’ll be boys. Men who’ll be men. Fathers who aren’t always fathers.
The birds are singing. Wake up. It’s time to wake up.
Yesterday, The Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States and released a guidebook that includes laws it deems discriminatory in each state, information about LGBTQ+ rights, and resources to help people relocate to states with stronger LGBTQ+ protections. Those who are LGBTQ+ are more likely to experience child sexual abuse, sexual assault, and rape. We can live with ongoing bullying, harassment, and discrimination all our lives, including during critical developmental years. We’re more likely to be stigmatized and marginalized, to receive less and poorer healthcare (including care that is neither trauma-informed nor LGBTQ-literate), and to receive inaccurate diagnostic labels when we seek mental health care—labels that are biased and don’t account for the relentless, systematic abuse we’ve faced and survived or that shift the blame for those experiences to us. Conversion therapy, which is legal in numerous states, may even be employed.
I’m wearing my Victorian chemise. I’ve been cleaning and crying and organizing my closets all day. While gently spreading a newly washed flat sheet across my bed, I thought about my dog Hayden, who died almost two years ago.
Pain, pain, pain. It came sharp and quick like needles marching up and down my body—not just losing Hayden but all the pain before and after. I think we so suddenly remember the animals we’ve lost because they allow us to enter into other painful experiences. Animals are guides, I believe, even when they’re no longer with us.
There’s been so much pain in my life, in my husband’s life, in our friends’ lives, in our families’ lives, in the neighborhoods where we’ve lived, in the cities and states we’ve called home, in public spaces, in private spaces, in our country, in the world.
Leonard Cohen spent six years meditating in silence on Mount Baldy. He finally came back because he knew he was a writer and had to write. He was writing all the time while meditating, he said.
I used to say I was a text generator, not a writer. I was rejecting agency and narrative. A fellow poet and dear friend influenced me in this regard or maybe we influenced each other. The stance was entertaining but preposterous. I’m actually a writer, not a text generator. But I had folks fooled: On Twitter, some of my followers actually thought I was a bot.
It would be easier to be a bot. It would. This world makes me bleed, and I bleed into it in turn.
When I was arranging a stack of poetry books on a high shelf this afternoon, one of them fell on my head and left a welt between my eyebrows. It’s kind of a third-eye type of thing. The offending collection was by John Donne, my favorite poet, a man whose work sets my heart beating in time with his lines. What’s that saying? Something about being hit over the head … Donne’s aim was a bit off, but close enough. Point made.
Earl Smith, a man I met once who’s dear to me said we just have to do three things: try, love, and use our gifts to help others. Phil Stutz, a Jungian analyst whose work I admire, says we will never escape the following three things: pain, hard work, and uncertainty.
That’s what I’m meditating on now, after three days of sitting with an especially painful situation. I need to try. I need to love. I need to use my gifts to help others. And I need to do those things despite pain being unavoidable, hard work being necessary and constant, and uncertainty being ever-present.
And I’m going to have to write at least some of it down. I think that’s unavoidable, too.
Dana Henry Martin 