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What is history anyway? A story: The last man standing holds the pen. A sense of place: I am on this path that is hardly comprehensible. A birthright: I may be from, but I am not of that world.
What does no mean? What do we accomplish when we
speak it? It is a refusal: I do not accept this dubious gift. Self-protection: You will not violate my sovereignty. Denial: I am not these things that you name me. Children learn the word at a young age, as they test the limits their parents set for them and the boundaries the physical world imposes upon them. As frustrating as it is to accommodate the child’s no, that word is essential. No functions in a way that please don’t never has, in a way that tears and cries never will. It took me
Words were weapons, just another form of violence that I hid from. I hid myself deep so that on the surface, people would see quiet and good girl. I thought I could control their understanding of me, keep my inner torment a secret—it seemed like another sin to be so angry—but I did not realize how much my sense of self was controlled by all that hiding.
It is remarkable how good I became at hiding my feelings. I learned to keep my face blank, hold back tears, lower my eyes, and to lie when it really mattered. You would think this kind of skill would come in handy later in life—I could be an expert poker player, or an actress, or maybe even a politician. But still, I felt things too deeply—the hiding never
never felt safe to defend myself or to claim any right to be treated differently.
felt powerful, for a brief moment, when I refused to speak, when I realized that I could refuse to speak. I could withhold my truth and protect myself from the betrayal I knew would follow if I made myself vulnerable to them.
I realized I did not know how it felt to be them. In my isolation, I wanted them to have to listen to me, and I wanted them to wonder how it felt to be me, trying to bear their cruelty while I was trying so hard to survive my home, to endure being in my body.
relationship. I had learned to listen and be quiet, to not make any noise. I never responded to people who were cruel or condescending, but I wrote words down. My voice became
adept at self-protection, as I said one thing and meant another, as I remained silent and thought everything. My silence had at once kept me safe and made me vulnerable in childhood. That silence was a large part of my self-sabotage as an adult.
Still, parents can’t help but be associated with their children’s trauma; after all, the parents are there—or noticeably not there—the whole time.
For much of my life, that thought made me sad, but now I can see myself as another person born into this world, born to people unprepared and possibly unable to love me, to fully see me. Maybe if I can make sense of it, I can make it mine. But the hero of the story is always the storyteller. The storyteller is the one with power.
It would be a long time before I felt like I deserved a love that didn’t hurt. That word—love—how does one begin to define it? For the longest time, I relied on the power of definition through negation. I am not in love. I could never love a child as a mother should. Now I tell my son of my love for him, how it will outlast us both. He asks me about my family—don’t I love our family as much I love him? I tell him no, I love him above all else.
Suffer enough, and if we are lucky, you and I decide something has to change, and somehow, sooner or later, it does.
it. If there’s one thing you learn growing up as a girl in the country, it’s
not to air your dirty laundry in public.
mother if her decisions don’t meet their standards, if she doesn’t control the story told about her. I finally understood that so much of what I did looked ugly to the people around me, and they were happy to accept whatever a man decided was ugly.
When I was little, my mother and my favorite cousin both called me selfish at different times. I didn’t know why they thought that, and it hurt to hear it from them. I had always tried to show them that I deserved their love, that I would be good to them. Now I can see that when we are struggling to survive, a lot of things look selfish from the outside—we cling to the things that we believe are keeping us alive, and there is
them in. When I was with her, I felt like she saw me without trying. Like she understood me without me pleading my case before her, working so hard to show her how much I deserved to be loved.
She loved me before I understood that I deserved it, and I was grateful without understanding why.
I knew I had every right to be angry about the things I had experienced, but I also had to find a way to undo the damage that had been done, so I would never again choose the things that were bad for me. So I could stop being haunted by nightmares that belonged in the past.
revision, I understood that although many people had quieted me, even whipped me into silence, I still had words they could not take away from me. And while my words were in part the defiance and anger I had always been too afraid to voice, they were more than that, too.
wrote myself and found myself. I wrote nearly all the words I had swallowed for decades, passion transmuted.
I taught myself to apologize when I had wronged them. I taught them to apologize
stories do matter—they tell us who we are, give us history and context that help us define ourselves. Some stories serve as a warning, while others are an endless source of hope. And there is always more to be written.
think of my little-girl self, who is surely still inside me, and know I could tell her that she is good and that everything is going to be okay. I would tell her there are angels and spirits who have loved her since before she was born, and they have filled the forest with treasures that only she can find. I would tell her that everything she longs for is also looking for her, yearning
