Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

I had never thought about the word weep much before. I’d considered it for wounds, perhaps—something unsightly. Nobody I knew wept. When we were upset, we cried. We sobbed. We blubbered or bawled, we got hysterical, we freaked out.

weeping needed protection—but the joyous too? I considered the notion that good fortune was tender. It soothed me to think that compassion might be aimed at the lucky. Maybe it gave me a way to feel I mattered.

The trick was to never know how close you were, because relief was the killer of drive.

Eutrophication

Pietà

If a person with a heart had been kind and then cruel, had chosen me… We were people on this earth. This life was all we had. It was all we fucking had, and life, my life, could not be determined by cruelty like this. It could not be allowed to stand.

baroque

matriculation.

the obligation of the school, which is first and foremost in charge of the care of children, is to react—immediately and generously—to prevent further harm.

The verb “confessed” is useful, nestled in the pages of this caring clinician—not that she thought I was guilty, but that she anticipated the guilt I was feeling.

anthropomorphism.

“Sure. You’re devastated. They stole your self-respect and ruined your sense of boundaries. It’s natural to take some time to get those things back.”

The law, it turns out, anticipates naivete, or at least allows that when a child and an adult engage in a sexual act, power will occupy so much of the province of desire (if indeed there is any) that wanting would be inauthentic. Consent is not possible. No matter what anyone else claimed, the law said it was not my fault.

I learned that while the fallen woman may keep her unloved door plain and her drapes drawn, her circle small and her fire low—if she’s wise, I suppose, she will—the path to her back stoop will be well-traveled. I guarantee it.

guileless

To risk the rise of indignation or even sympathy would be to experience all over again the powerlessness of the girl who was told that the lawyers were ready to destroy her.

Sontag writes, “Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.”

“The denial by the listener inflicts…the ultimately fateful blow,” Brison writes. If nobody believes you, part of you cannot survive.

between what they did and rape, between terrible things you should put behind you and truly hellish things no one would expect you to bear—allowed me, for many years, to restore that third person in the room in my mind.

subsumes

It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time. First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice.