I’ve been trying to think …

I’ve been trying to think …

I’ve been trying to think …

I’ve been trying to think of a sentence that would grab every reader’s attention to introduce you to my friend Claire, but I can only think of her face—her Cheshire Cat smile, dark, voluptuous eyebrows, and skin as white as a winter storm—and how much I wish you could see it. I close my eyes, and I’m looking at her looking at me, and she’s smiling coyly. She had such a delicate yet striking face. From the moment we met, she always greeted me with a scrunch of her shoulders and a half-smile. I remember the first time I saw this half-smile like it was yesterday, except it was 2014. Claire and I happened to be in the same Spanish 101 class. We sat on opposite sides of the room, but every day, our professor instructed us to form a circle with our desks so we could see everyone’s face and more readily communicate with each other. It was a few days into the course when the professor asked us to go around the room and introduce ourselves in Spanish: Me llamo [your name] y soy de [where you’re from]. Me llamo Sara y soy de Ithaca. My name is Sara and I’m from Ithaca. Claire looked up from her desk and smiled at me when I said “Ithaca.” I surmised she must have been from Ithaca, too. Claire and I didn’t immediately become friends; it wasn’t until the following semester, when we were, again, coincidentally, in the same Spanish 102 class that we hit it off.

Even after we exchanged cell phone numbers and started texting frequently and hanging out sporadically, I was a bit skeptical of her enthusiasm for me and our friendly rendezvouses. Every time I saw her, I got that half-smile. I figured she kept her full smile for people she fully liked and that she was still on the fence about me. Especially considering we only ever saw movies together. I’d invite her to my apartment for a drink, and she wouldn’t decline, she’d just not answer. She’d eventually share with me that she was sober, and I felt guilty and embarrassed about my assumption that everyone drinks alcohol. After years of friendship, I realized her halfsmile was a signature of hers, and I grew to admire it deeply. Over the years, our dates would expand to lunch or dinner, Easter brunch at her parents’ house, piercings, and drinks (Diet Coke for her) at the Argos Warehouse in Ithaca.

Claire was a hard egg to crack, and even after years of platonic intimacy, everything about her is still enigmatic to me. I think that’s what I love most about Claire. She kept a part of herself for herself, and I envy that. Claire’s sadness was subterranean. I always wanted to pry, to see if her sadness mirrored mine. To see if her sadness outshined mine. I felt compelled to know who was sadder.

I envy not lusting for everyone I get close to know about how fucked up I am. I envy not needing to externalize my fucked upness in new relationships immediately so as to fall back on it if the relationship sours. It’s easier to blame the trauma that led to my fucked upness as opposed to my identity (but, I suppose, trauma is and will always be a part of my essence). Claire was private and humble and unassuming, everything I am not.

I’ve called upon my trauma for the majority of my essays as an undergraduate student at SUNY Cortland. I tell myself I’m merely forcing my audience to empathize, but it isn’t empathy at all. I want other people to feel my pain, but I also know they’d never feel it the way I did and still do. I’ve fooled myself into believing that if I could just understand my pain well enough, I can make it go away. Also, too, if I can make someone else understand my pain well enough, they’ll know what to say and do to make it go away. I project these hopes onto them, and when they don’t offer me an escape, a way out of myself, I reject them and feel defrauded. Your love was supposed to make it all better.

I’d never claim to begin to understand the particular pain of others, so I don’t know why I beg others to understand and disburden me from mine. Pain functions like a loop, its initial effect is singular in the way that it shocks and destabilizes, and that singularity is reinforced every time you display your pain–implicitly in your actions and emotions and explicitly when you share the source of your trauma–for others only to realize your pain is untouchable by them. And then you pull it all back in and it sits heavy on your heart.

Over the summer, I came across a short Twitter thread that perfectly explained why I became obsessed with studying politics and gender relations that I had never been able to articulate until now:

@mspowahs

therapist: i’ve noticed that you use universalizing language in a way that obscures your own agency and distances yourself from your feelings and motivations me: as one does

@NoahTzedek I feel seen. My therapist is like “you intellectualize instead of feeling” and I’m like “well that’s very common with trauma survivors. Learning about trauma and abuse is like exposure therapy and helps create a feeling of control over chaos that we can’t understand.”

Aha! A breakthrough! I’ve finally unearthed the motivation for my scholarly zeal:* I intellectualize my pain instead of feeling it.* But what does that mean? What does it mean to feel it?

I remember discussing something adjacent to exposure therapy with Claire, i.e., how it could be possible that I’ve been raped not once but several times in my life, and by several different men, and she sent me a journal article about the correlation between trauma survivors and revictimization (due to an increased likelihood of survivors seeking and/or placing themselves in risky situations as a way of trying to reclaim control). The classical conditioning that occurs when a child touches a hot stove for the first time and subsequently learns to avoid the red hot coil in the future doesn’t apply to the psychological phenomenon of rape victims being revictimized. I wish I still had the original article that she sent me so I could explain such occurrences in a much more scientific way, but I’m hoping you get my gist.

For years, I felt that I elicited this abuse—being (too) flirty, drinking too much, suggestive attire, hanging out with the “wrong” crowd, etc.—and while this new information didn’t absolve the entirety of my guilt—how do you get raped the first time, and then “allow” yourself to be raped subsequent times?—it did help me feel less alone. This is a known thing that happens to others. I may have a deep understanding of how the patriarchy and rape culture work, but it takes constant work to subvert decades of learned and internalized behaviors and attitudes, and even with constant work—weekly or bi-weekly therapy being a huge chunk of that work—an upheaval of that magnitude is hardly realizable. Trying to resist the structural dominance of rape culture on an individual level, i.e., not being reduced or erased by it, is hard enough, but trying to extract empathy from others, from the collective psyche, a psyche untouched by the direct effects of it, is like getting blood from a stone.

Claire and I intellectualized our pain together. Where her understanding of the effects of trauma may be murky, I’d illuminate it for her, and vice versa. But obviously there were fissures in our understanding that neither of us could fill for one another. Claire was pivotal in my growth as a student, a woman, and a rape survivor. And I’m reluctant to use the word “survivor”: surviving trauma is not as simple as it may seem, it is not isolated to merely (physically) surviving the incident.

Claire was a rape survivor until she wasn’t.

I’ve been trying to think …

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