Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

“The creative adult is the child who has survived.” —MISATTRIBUTED BY THE INTERNET TO URSULA K. LE GUIN IN A BLOG POST RESPONDING TO THE MEME ATTRIBUTED TO her, Ursula K. Le Guin spoke of her: aversion to what the sentence says to me: that only the child is alive and creative—so that to grow up is to die. To respect and cherish the freshness of perception and the vast, polymorphous potentialities of childhood is one thing. But to say that we experience true being only in childhood and that creativity is an infantile function—that’s something else. Le Guin’s post “The Inner Child and the Nude Politician” frees me from the anxiety generated by the meme: that only those who remember their childhoods—to the extent of preferring childhood to adulthood—can be creative adults. To extend creative adulthood to only those who had halcyon days in which the “vast, polymorphous potentialities of childhood” were realized and can be remembered speaks of white middle-class cisgendered privilege. Acknowledging Le Guin’s critique, I can reread the misattributed meme with the emphasis on “survived,” rather than “child.” I am an adult (and alive) because—however she could—the child I was survived the terrors of childhood. The child I was is dead, over and over again. It’s true. That child is under Ballard’s knife, that child is the object of this essay, opened diagrammatically for your consideration. I am the child who survived—to become the adult who can speak back. Teach me the word for my ...