What we have lost

I was trying to sleep tonight, but because of an exchange with a friend on Facebook, on top of many revelations in this past months in relation to the #metoo movement, I began to cry for what we have lost. All women. I will speak for women because I am one. I will speak for women because we so rarely have the chance to frame our own narrative, claim our own reality on our own terms, unless it's packaged in a way considered somehow acceptable or tamed through a "female" genre or whatever.

So, I will speak for women and what we have lost, any of us - who are probably most of us - who have experienced any form of sexual assault or harassment and its evil step-twin misogyny. Which then basically makes it all women, and what I want to speak of is what we have lost.

What we have lost is not so much about the events themselves, it is about how the effects of these events and the misogynist surround which greets us when or if we ever try to tell or don't tell or just exist afterwards, or during repeated harassment or assault, resound throughout our entire lives. The damage that does not go away, no matter how much therapy or recovery or crystal work or religion or dream work or art we make or yoga and meditation we do or careers we succeed or fail in or relationships that may even be - against all odds - loving we experience. Because surrounding us is fear, loss of confidence, the proverbial hole in the soul, a kind of brittleness that means the fluidity we always hear about is not available to us so certain events or sounds or motions or smells or enclosures or open roads or houses or ways people look at us or even the weather can send us right back to the event or events and there we are again, helpless, crying, enraged or whatever, but in some way reactive. In some essential way not free. I have fought this reality my whole life, that is what I learned to do, but underneath the fight is an abandoned and abused girl child and then adult woman who even when she tried to "make it" in the world faced resistances not faced by her male counterparts but was told she was "equal" so felt even weaker because why if she was "equal" did she feel so inferior and so...a felt shamed by a fundamental weakness, a sense of enslavement, a sense of total unreality with an underlying tone of fraud - all taken onto my own self, as if I had caused it all.

But this is not just about me, so here is a catalogue of some of the losses. This will inevitably only scratch the surface:

If we are women who were assaulted or raped or coerced explicitly or implicitly into what were somehow framed as "affairs" as tiny children up to tweens, we never have a sense of our own bodies, of any basic agency. We are dissociated. Usually we have been told not to tell, or that we are imagining what happened or that we somehow caused it or are inherently evil. So our reality is damaged, too. We cannot only not trust our bodies, we cannot trust our minds or even souls.

If even with all of this we find an art or career or something outside of ourselves to focus on and succeed, we will run into men in these fields who are either angry and ignore us or try to hit on us; and if they are in power and we accede then we are considered whores or sluts or "sleeping our way to the top" or if we don't we are considered "bitches" "cunts" "ice queens." This assessment includes all men who engage in non-consensual sexual touch or talk from bosses to some guy on the subway trying to get our attention to male relatives or whomever - men who want us to do what they want us to do and if we do: we are prey. If we don't: we are a threat to be neutralized.

If we somehow find a way to create a tough enough skin to navigate all of the above, our intimate relationships with men suffer, badly. How can we drop that tough shell to allow any kind of intimacy? Or, if we do, how will we know who is healthy and what level of vulnerability is OK versus who is gaslighting us by telling us we are "too hard" and then abusing any trust we allow ourselves? Or maybe we even end up in an actively abusive relationship and can't tell the difference because it's so much like home. Then maybe enough of this finally erodes the career we may have wangled, or maybe we want to succeed badly enough that we never let anyone near us. So we lose any real human connection.

If we try to have children and can't or can, any number of consequences follow, too numerous to begin to even list, but given how motherhood is framed in this country, there is literally no way to do it right. You will be considered either cold or smothering or helicopter or uncaring or whatever, and if you don't have kids you have to justify it to everyone over and over and over and over again, even if you had miscarriages and other events in your life no one in their right mind even wants to know about, so you create a cover story and that cover story sticks and...

This is the biggest lost of all: basic reality, because in all these cases - abuse, harassment, childlessness, motherhood, being single, being stuck in a bad relationship or somehow not able to give yourself what you need to create, you tell yourself and others cover stories to protect yourself, and those cover stories make your life in some fundamental way a lie and you know that and you may go to zillions of years of therapy and go to every workshop ever known to human kind and still have that feeling, because until such a point as you are allowed - as John Lennon sang - to "feel your own pain" you will never be close to your reality, but...

If you Do finally feel your own pain and then you try to talk out loud about it, woe betide you, woman. Because then All Hell Breaks loose and people get very, very. very angry indeed because your reality does not accord with theirs and/or threatens theirs and you are shut down in many ways great and small, from either writing or talking or being published so this can be seen or if it is published someone will claim you are lying or stole it or are a vindictive bitch or whatever...

And meanwhile, too, there are all the subtle ways as an adult you are policed, by men catcalling you or not catcalling you, by men paying way too much attention to your body or none at all, by being seen as meat or seen as nonexistent - and these are usually the choices when dealing with everyday sexism and misogyny. (And no it's not all men, but it's a lot, so if you aren't doing all this, that's wonderful, and we're probably friends, but please don't decide you have to tell me that, because all that means is you are acting like a decent person and frankly I, we all, need more than that. We need you men to speak out against the sexism and misogyny and harassment you see. We need you to be John Oliver talking to Dustin Hoffman. We need that level of ally. I welcome you all. I sincerely do). But so, perhaps you dress in sack cloth because invisible is easier or you dress in a more "sexy" (according to whatever standard - usually not female) way but then have to negotiate all the attention you get for this and suffer being blamed if any sexual harassment occurs or if you are the sack cloth variety being disbelieved if you tell anyone sexual harassment occurred, because you aren't considered "sexy" and on and on...

If you are raped as a child or adult, you live in fear of men for the rest of your life basically, and even if you weren't raped, you live in fear of being raped - and perhaps upon hearing a story of how someone was raped, you start judging that woman for being drunk or out late or wearing sexy clothes or walking alone in a park or at night or breathing too loud or whatever and what you are doing then is delineating the walls of your own prison wherein you are not allowed to do these things without consequence, so much so that if Someone Raped You it would be your own damn fault for dating, getting in a cab, walking in the dark or just wearing a skirt or pants or again you know breathing while female.

Which leads to the biggest loss of all - our sense of self with agency and without a seemingly bottomless well of guilt and shame wherein we drown every day because no matter how abusive or horrible anyone has been to us in a relationship or at work or some asshole on the street somehow it is Our Fault. And nothing - literally Nothing - in the larger culture says otherwise...

Until now.

Until #metoo.

Until a powerful man and then men begin to lose their jobs because at least some women are believed and some of the damage is exposed and some reality is revealed and you think for a second - maybe two - wow, maybe someone will believe me. Maybe there is a place for me here after all, as I actually am.

My real life.

But then once that sinks in, you start to cry and cry and cry, because you are, say, 54 (or 68 or 75 or 42 or whatever) and you realize How Much Of Your Life You Have Lost, and if you are an artist How Very Much You Have Lost in terms of time, depth without fear, alacrity, any kind of effortless connection to authentic creativity, to the confidence to put your vision out there, to somehow exist without the constant drum beat of self-effacement, poverty and the inability to inhabit your own work, whatever it is - or even if you can for a time, some part of you is failing failing failing and if not propped up by some external structure just fading out - in part because if you are my age or older you got no mentoring in school because all the professors were men and hated you or hit on you or just plain ignored you in favor of their young, male proteges and you can't say any of that of course because then you're just an Angry Woman or a Bitch, etc. and no one likes that so you sway and twist and cajole or sometimes fight but all the energy expended ust to get maybe 1/4 of the resources and 1/8 of the exposure, but you are told you are Equal so you feel like an asshole because if you are Equal why aren't you measuring up and then the constant level of harassment or fear or being ignored as you go out into the world and and and...

This is what we have lost: millennia of women's voices, creativity, vitality, and love - yes, love, because real love can only come from freedom not slavery - and what you probably think of as women's love isn't love, it's a learned response to save us from being hurt. It looks like love and nurturance but it is bred out of fear. Not all love of course, but a lot of what we are told to think of as love - all of us who have been injured since children anyway, it is almost torture to contemplate what it might mean to really love. You need freedom to love. You cannot be living in fear. I know very few women who don't live in fear. So...do the math.

We find ways, we are resourceful, but some essence needs to be freed, and now IS being freed and here is the thing, my male friends especially I hope you can hear this:

It Will Not Be Pretty.

This is a tsunami of pain, secrets and lies - lies told out of self-protection - of either the abused or abuser - that is coming out, it will wash away many things and be indiscriminate. It is not now - nor should it be - about "scale" or - the last refuge of scoundrels -"nuance" - it is about Millennia of repression being unearthed and it must happen.

I honestly believe this is the only hope for our future on this planet, no joke. Think of it: over half the population enslaved - not to mention all the intersectional issues that I just can't address here but know exist - in terms of race and class and how that impedes so much and hurts in similar ways and intersects with this sense of slavery and fear. But right now I want to talk about sexual harassment and abuse of women and how that intersects with the bedrock of misogyny in our culture.

I beg of you all - including women who I sense have a desire to put a stop to this for whatever reasons - either people you like are getting hurt or you are afraid of facing your own damage or pain or rage - I don't know - you have to let this unfold - go where it goes, take its course.

I entreat everyone to take the time to mourn what we have lost. Stop minimizing it. Stop deciding some victims are more virtuous than others or some assault and harassment is "real" and some is "no big deal." It's not true. You can't be a little bit pregnant with this. Your body knows when it has been violated, and most violators know exactly what they are doing, even if they try to subsume that awareness in elaborate self-justification or garden variety denial.

This pain must come out, we must see the extent of the damage, we must not look away, No Matter Where it Leads.

We must face what we have lost: the beauty, the creativity, the intimacy...and give that loss its due and then only once we have accepted that, really accepted that, will we know how to rebuild. Only then do we have a prayer of not rebuilding it in this way. I know this sounds utopian but I actually think this is necessary for our survival as a species.

On a personal level I hope I can honor all the damage. I cry, yes, but then I stop myself, afraid of the depths of the pain, the rage, all of it. I pray for the confidence to allow for it. I pray for you, too, for all of us.

We have a chance here. A real chance.

I hope we take it.