Grief Is

This upcoming week marks six months that I have been grieving.

I’ve heard that the first year is the hardest, encountering all those “first” reminders of holidays, birthdays, memories, desires, etc. It’s probably one of the only things that keeps me going at times like this, thinking that next year it might be a little bit easier to breathe.

When I first started my grieving process, it felt profound. I was determined to grow and change through it. I was determined to live in a way that would have made her happy.

I’ve made changes to my life…yes. But reckless ones. There are days when I don’t even recognize myself anymore.

More often than not, grief just feels empty now–a gaping hole of missing.

I’m pissed off at a world that no longer has the person I want to see. I’m angry at a god I don’t believe in. In fact, I’m more convinced than ever that there can’t possibly exist a benevolent, all-powerful god who would allow something so senseless to happen.

In some ways, this disillusionment is more difficult than grieving. I’m so used to seeing emotional pain as a catalyst for growth that it borders on devastating to realize that sometimes it’s not.

I feel like I’ve stepped into a Dr. Seuss book.

Oh the things you will find
as the sacred you mine.
Your grief is a sign
that your love lasts through time.

Except when you can’t
because treasure is scant
when you’ve lost your whole soul
to that motherfucking cancer.

Bad rhymes aside, I’m having to realize that not everything can be silver-lined. Grief is not always filled with wisdom and life-changing moments of expansion.

Sometimes, it just is. It hurts, and there’s no way around that.

Maybe next year it will seem less bitter and more sweet.

 

Falling Apart is a Delicate Art

I’ve lost a lot of people over the years, but over the last couple of weeks I’ve been contending with a loss I haven’t experienced since I was a child—that of losing someone who is dying.

Much of my healing since leaving the cult has been centered on learning how to grieve, but I’m finding that the grief of death is an entirely different matter from the griefs I’ve experienced before. Rather than the emotional turmoil being spaced out over years as my subconscious gently guides me from layer to layer, they’re all there at the same time with an intensity that is nothing short of breath-taking.

There are days when I’m okay–when the routine of life makes me feel like I’m practically normal. I laugh, catching myself off guard. I get excited about my upcoming school year, work on crafts, and enjoy being with friends and chosen family while the pain of my heart recedes into the background for a time. I welcome those days because they help me get through the others, the days when I’m not okay–when I cry and rage and hide in bed, watching Netflix until I can’t feel anymore.

On some levels, I feel as though I have been building up to this moment, that the purpose of my life has been to learn how to grieve increasingly devastating losses.

Society tells me to buck up, hide my tears when I go into the grocery store, and tell people “I’m fine” when they ask. “Be strong,” they say. “Keep it together.”

Society is not comfortable with grief.

But I know better. I know by now that shoving down the sadness doesn’t make it go away. I know that putting on a brave face only helps to isolate me in my sadness and that trying to escape from the intensity of my emotions creates a recipe for crippling depression and stagnation.

So I surround myself with those who can tolerate tears. I allow myself to be utterly shattered. I am not interested in looking functioning right now. To what purpose? Because I think that others might be uncomfortable with the snot dripping down my nose and my red, swollen eyes? My grief is not about them.

Being shattered doesn’t mean I stop living. I am intentionally living each moment of this process, allowing myself to feel it in every corner of my heart.

“Grief is about letting yourself be destroyed,” my therapist tells me.

Her words offer the relief of permission, but I know there is a truth even deeper than that. I will be destroyed whether I wish to allow it or not, but surrendering to the destruction allows it to be a gentle annihilation. Over the last year with my physical therapy, I’ve learned that when there is pain, the best response is to release into it. Surrender removes the edge of resistance, allowing the pain to ebb and flow naturally.

When people tell me to “be strong,” I want to tell them that I am strong. Crying and “falling apart” aren’t signs of weakness. It takes strength to allow myself to be consumed and know that I will resurrect in the end. I am strong enough to feel the devastation of love.

 

 

If Virginity is a Myth, Then What Did He Take From Me?

Trigger Warning (obviously): Discussion of sexual abuse and purity culture. I promise I’ll have something a little lighter the next few weeks. 

Purity culture taught me that my virginity was the greatest gift I could give my husband. It taught me that losing virginity made me discardable—like used gum or dirty water. It taught me that my value lay in my purity.

Purity culture also taught me that I was responsible for men’s sexual thoughts and actions towards me. It taught me that I could prevent rape by being pure—and if I was raped, it was better for me to die than to live with my tainted purity.

When I rejected purity culture years ago, I also rejected the concepts of virginity, purity, and sexual innocence along with it. I needed to in order to begin to come to terms with my sexual abuse. I needed to be able to believe that they were just constructs—myths—in order to slough off the guilt and self-hatred that I felt over having been violated.

More recently, I’ve been trying to give myself space to access some of the deeper veins of my grief around my sexual abuse. But I found I can only name that grief with the very constructs I rejected.

Innocence. Purity. Virginity.

Certainly the innocence I was taught I’d lost is not the innocence I grieve. Feminism has done its job. I do not feel culpable in any way for what happened to me.

But there’s a different kind of innocence whose loss I feel intensely.

I’ve come to think of it as the Peter Pan innocence.

It’s what I lost when I was forced into an awareness of sexuality—a violent understanding of affection and love—at an age when I could barely understand that some people had different body parts from others.

It’s the innocence that allowed me to believe that those who claimed to love me were safe, the innocence that gave me a sense of autonomy and belonging to my body, the innocence that assured me that monsters were make-believe and nightmares weren’t true. And it was ripped away from me when I was five years old, leaving in its place a shattered little girl who convinced herself that she was bad in order to continue to believe that her spiritual leaders were good.

And just as I know that I’m not responsible for what my abuser did, I also know I’m not bad because of what he did. But the purity that I lost has nothing to do with good or bad.

It’s the purity of separation.

There are days when I feel like I carry my abuser with me wherever I go, like an invisible residue. No amount of assuring me that I’m not dirty is going to take that feeling away because the “dirty” doesn’t stem from me. It’s his dirt, his perversion. I know that, but I’m still tortured by the visceral sensations.

Sometimes it feels like I share my marriage with him—the unwanted third-party who lurks in the corner waiting for an opportunity to pop out again and remind me that my first sexual encounter was traumatizing and invasive. The beauty of consensual sex—that amazing experience of soul-sharing—is so easily interrupted by flashbacks, as if my abuser can walk into our bedroom and whisk me away to my childhood whenever he wants.

It tears me up that he was the one who stole my virginity. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the value judgments society tries to place on being a virgin or not being a virgin. Virginity, to me, has nothing to do with the hymen. It’s not an object. It’s just pre-sexuality, like pre-menstrual.

I envy the choice that others have to end their virginity.

Beautiful, romantic, irresponsible, silly, uninformed, embarrassing—I’d give anything for my first sexual encounter to be any of those—a stage of growing up and discovering my sexual self. By rights, I should have been able to choose when to end my virginity, where, and with whom. I’m sure I would have made mistakes, but at least they would have been mistakes from my choice.

But I didn’t get that choice. The end of my virginity was forced on me. My first sexual experience was forced on me.

It doesn’t matter that the patriarchal value of innocence, purity, and virginity is bullshit. What I lost goes deeper. It’s the loss of a childhood naivety, the loss of discovery, the loss of choice, and the loss of first times.

I can’t get those back, and to make matters worse, I find that I can’t even properly grieve them without the words that were used to blame me for their loss.

Perhaps one day I’ll be able to find a way to turn that grief and loss into something positive. Grief has always been a Phoenix process for me, and I’m sure this one will be the same. But right now, all I have are the tears, the rage, and the emptiness. All I have for myself and my readers this morning is the rawness of truth telling without any flowery ways of making it sound okay.

This is the grief I wasn’t allowed to feel when I was five.

Book Review: The Program by Suzanne Young

Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and suppressed memories

In a future that isn’t too different from our present, suicide has been declared an all-out epidemic among teens. In a desperate attempt to “cure” them, the nation has developed a treatment program that involves the involuntary confinement of anyone “at risk” of suicide (including those who know someone who committed suicide). The treatment involves altering the brain to remove painful, traumatic memories . . . or as Sloane learns, any memories associated with “dangerous topics.”

After Sloane’s brother commits suicide, Sloane and her boyfriend James (who was also her brother’s best friend) do their best to hide their grief in order to avoid being flagged. Unfortunately, their plan doesn’t work. Shortly after her boyfriend is taken into the Program, Sloane is deemed at risk and taken too. She emerges with her memory wiped of her brother’s suicide and of her entire relationship with James.

However, unlike what the Program promised, she’s not given a fresh start and a happier life now that her memories are gone. Instead, she finds herself overwhelmed with emotions that she doesn’t understand, a grief that seems to have no place, a love that seems to have no object. Her body remembers what her mind can’t, and it tortures her as she struggles to put the pieces together.

This is an intense book—so intense that I had to take multiple breaks from reading it. Not five-minute breaks. More like month-long breaks.

But it’s fantastic. I almost think it should be required reading.

Despite being set in the future, I feel like Suzanne Young was referencing more reality than speculation through most of the book.

Memory wipes, for instance, are already in the making. A couple of years ago, one of my psych teachers showed the class a video discussing the new “hoped for” treatment for PTSD that involved preventing traumatic memories from forming and blocking already formed memories. They had already even had a few test subjects.

I’m not sure if Suzanne Young based The Program off of this developing “treatment,” but she definitely understands the drawbacks to which the developers seemed to be blind. Memory isn’t just held in the brain. Muscles hold memories too. Even now, I can sit down and play songs on my violin that I can’t consciously remember the notes to because my fingers remember the way the movement feels.

And yes, my body remembers my abuse even when I can’t consciously recall the details. It’s terrifying and confusing to have my body react to something that I can’t see or even fully remember. My vagina doesn’t care if I can pull up an exact image of my sexual abuse or not. It spasms just the same. My bottom doesn’t care if I can recall how many times a belt was drawn across my bare backside; the muscles clench anyway when I’m exposed to triggers.

For someone who has spent over twenty years with patchy memories, the most terrifying thing I can imagine is a treatment that removes my memories. If I were to imagine hell, hell would be knowing something bad happened but not being able to remember it. People live that hell every day, yet science thinks they are offering a solution to pain by offering to put people in that hell.

But memory isn’t what drives The Program (It may be what drives the sequel, but I’ll have to wait to find out where she takes that).

Rather, the main thrust of the book seems to be about the way society responds to depression and suicide. Perhaps it’s exaggerated a little, but not a lot. Even today suicide risk is one of the things for which a therapist is required to break confidentiality. Friends and family members are encouraged to report if they believe someone is contemplating killing themselves.

And the response? The same! Lock you up; take away your autonomy.

Now if that isn’t a recipe for desperation and isolation, I don’t know what is.

In the book, Sloane and James are afraid to even cry in genuine grief. They have no one to confide in about their feelings except each other, and even then they have to be careful about where they confide to each other for fear that someone will notice them looking “sad” and report them. They have a school therapist, but the therapist is all but useless because…how can they trust someone who has the power and responsibility to flag them for what they are feeling?

The bottled up emotions don’t dissipate. They become stronger until even normal emotions seem overwhelming. They are drowning in their emotions, but it’s the only choice they have because the alternative is to lose themselves entirely.

The Program directors try to make themselves look good on the television and to parents, but amongst the teens it’s pretty well understood that the Program isn’t a cure. It’s an erasure. The “epidemic” of suicide grows because teens would rather die than be taken into the Program.

I felt as though Suzanne Young were pulling back the veil on our own societal stigma around suicide—a topic so taboo that most people can’t bring themselves to talk about struggling with it, leaving them to flounder in their emotions alone.

Those who do talk are given medication that may not erase memories but certainly deadens their emotional response. They’re shamed and treated like they have a horrible disease, often hospitalized whether they want to be or not.

And perhaps because we view depression as an illness that needs to be cured rather than something that should be worked through, we encourage people to assume that once “infected,” they can’t think rationally. They start to act as though they can’t think through their feelings, and it all becomes a rather tragic self-fulfilling prophesy (or group-fulfilling prophecy).

Ultimately, despite the lives that are saved by drugs and bed restraints, I don’t think our solution is any more effective than the Program is. We make suicide the problem rather than the symptom. We treat those who struggle with the desire to kill themselves as though they are broken rather than autonomous, rational individuals who are in pain.

In essence, we create a war against those we are trying to save. 

I think Suzanne Young wanted to make us think about what it would be like if, instead of punishing and shaming those who feel depressed and suicidal, we supported—genuinely supported—them with resources that empowered them to navigate their own emotions and thoughts constructively rather than locking them into a destructive pattern of fear and reaction.