Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

by Sarah Polley

“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!” “—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.” “I’m sure mine only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember things before they happen.” “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked. —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

The working title of this book was “Living Backwards,” inspired by the Queen’s suggestion to Alice that memory can work more than one way. “Living Backwards,” though, sounds like a memoir that covers the scope of a lifetime. If this were a memoir or an autobiography, it would be woefully incomplete. I am both far luckier than these essays would imply if they were read as a map of my life, and I have experienced more trauma than I have given chapters to.

The past was affecting how I moved through the world, while present life was affecting how the past moved through me.

I’ve been acutely aware that my childhood experiences inform my current life. I have, until recently, been less conscious of the power of my adult life to inform my relationship to my memories. When I was lucky enough to have experiences in adulthood that echoed pivotal, difficult memories, and to have those experiences go another, better way than they had in the past, my relationship to those memories shifted. The meaning of long-ago experiences transformed in the context of the ever-changing present.

The past and present, I have come to realize, are in constant dialogue, acting upon one another in a kind...

When I first met concussion specialist Dr. Michael Collins, after three and a half years of suffering from post-concussive syndrome, he said, “If you remember only one thing from this meeting, remember this: run towards the danger.” In order for my brain to recover from a traumatic injury, I had to retrain it to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered my symptoms. This was a paradigm shift for me—to greet and welcome the things I had previously avoided.

As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.

They are about the transformative power of an ever-evolving relationship to memory. Telling them is a form of running towards the danger.

“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly: “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

It was a dream that I frequently found myself in, where nothing anyone around me said made any sense and it was all hostile: hostile towards my common sense, hostile towards my youth, hostile towards my growing up. I knew I didn’t want to be a child; I wanted to be a queen but I didn’t want to be left alone, or tested, or made fun of or to do all the things that seemed to be necessary to become a queen. I would follow corkscrew paths. I had to run in order to stay in the same place. People would scream in pain before they were hurt. There was a mint in my mouth for good luck. I wanted to kill myself.

I hate stories in which people can’t get to where they’re going.

“I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day. —Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I knew that I was free to keep twisting and curving and sloping and that nothing, ever, would stop me. There was no adult who could force me straight.

It somehow made sense to me to be told that I wasn’t straight, that my spine was curving nonsensically to the right at the top and to the left at the bottom. My world had started curving out of shape the previous year, and my own body curving alongside it gave things a logical symmetry.

all of us waiting to hear how badly we’d been bent out of shape.

When my mother had cancer, I felt as though I was suddenly transformed into a sallow child of tragedy, imbued with a kind of magic that only children close to grim events can be. I was comfortable in this role, and delighted to help move the play forward, saying the word cancer in a hushed tone with an accomplished look of dread, reporting on my mother’s latest surgery or round of chemotherapy with my eyes downcast and bashful in the face of the enormous attention it garnered. It helped that I never once really believed my mother was going to die. It allowed me the space to focus on other people’s reactions and to delight in the special place I had earned in their hearts. I knew I was exaggerating, making it up. Deep inside, I believed that my mother had something very innocuous dressed up with a scary word, and I was just using the drama of this disease to get attention. I believed this until her actual death, which, for a long time, some part of me felt I was responsible for. By playing the part of the child with the dying mother so convincingly, I believed I had summoned a bad ending.

“How did I get it?” I asked the doctor. She told me it was genetic. Since no one else in my family had scoliosis, I decided that it must be grief, the sadness I couldn’t yet feel about my mother’s death, bearing down on me until my spine bent, forcing me to feel it any way it could.

Living in a body that changed suddenly and unpredictably with puberty required some doing, even without being strapped into a hard plastic brace.

My father, after my mother died, had fallen apart. It’s possible that he was always apart, and my mother had just, for many years and with great effort, held him together. Or perhaps he fell apart in a manner that many men of his generation would have after the woman who had done every practical thing in their lives for them for years died. His falling apart didn’t seem to cause him concern. Or perhaps it did and he just couldn’t fathom what to do about it. And so he did nothing.

When it came to learning—or indeed any activity of any sort—my father believed that everything must be for the sake of itself rather than some greater ambition.

There are certain people from whom you can immediately intuit that their fiercest expression of warmth is brutalizing honesty.

I didn’t give up on words before they were completely said.

By this point, it may be obvious that a nervous breakdown of epic proportions was in the offing. This dichotomy between my womanly body, which was in a kind of collapse, and the oddness of experiencing a sort of reversal of puberty and hard-won independence, twisted with the knots of a story written by a likely pedophile that contained echoes of my relationship with my father, was a powder keg for my subconscious.

I dealt with all this by wielding the only power I had, which at the time felt very real and potent: I could mock these men to their faces, I could say whatever I wanted, I could be as mean and bad and hurtful as I pleased. Because we both knew that, as a child who had felt their desire, I had something on them.

A part of me was homesick for myself—the

One thing felt certain to me. If I went back on automatic pilot, or let my guard down ever again, I would fail. I would fail spectacularly.

It wasn’t a lack of love, I don’t think, but a habit of being passive, of avoiding conflict, of letting go every day in a way that still provokes both admiration and fury in me.

(Her daughters did the same for her in those last months of her life. She was rarely alone, and the perfectionist-level care they gave her was full of insight, creativity, calm, and intelligence. It is a learned art, this virtuoso caregiving, and she had taught it masterfully.)

I had spent years fearing a conversation whose only threat was to heal me. When I told her how sorry I was for faking so much pain, she said, simply, “You were in so much pain.”

Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. “Can you keep from crying by considering things?” she asked. “That’s the way it’s done,” the Queen said with great decision: “nobody can do two things at once, you know.” —Through the Looking-Glass

Why do we write things about ourselves? To absolve ourselves of guilt? To confess? To right a wrong? To be heard? To apologize? To clarify things for ourselves or others? I’ve wondered all these things as I sit down to write this.

It seemed inevitable, to many outside the legal profession, that this would end with the satisfaction of seeing a once powerful man facing consequences for his violence. But while a great, unstoppable movement of women sharing their stories had begun, and it seemed that wide, systemic change would be an inevitable result of this momentum, the women, when they took the stand, were subjected to ridicule.

It can seem perplexing from the outside, this pull that many women experience to make things better for those who have hurt us. The impulse to smooth things over to keep ourselves safe, as well as the constant messages many of us have received in our lives to “make things nice” no matter what harm has been done, can be so deeply rooted that it often results in behaviour that can later appear nonsensical to an outside eye. (The betrayal of oneself that results from this “making things nice” with an attacker can also make one bleed on a subterranean level.)

“Some sexual assault victims may continue to date their assaulters in an effort to neutralize the trauma or regain some control over an event that left them powerless. In fact, many reach out to their attacker again specifically to try to regain power in the relationship. While others explain that they believed he may acknowledge what he did and apologize.”

At some point in the interview I talk about why I think we tell stories. I say that I think it is necessary to create stories to make sense of our bewildering lives, to create a narrative around them, to have something to grasp onto in the chaos. When I watch myself give this answer now, years later, I imagine that my subconscious is working on something: it is working on the story of what happened with him that night, it is working to make sense of it, it is working to normalize the current moment, and it is also working to hide the true story from myself.

If I tried to defend them with the notion that many women who are assaulted may not tell the whole truth to cover up some embarrassment or, more likely, don’t remember some of what happened during or after the assaults, I was met with variations of the argument that “to lie is not a good starting point. We can’t just look at these cases with the starting premise of ‘People lie.’ It’s not a good premise.” But people do lie. All the time. About all sorts of things. And I don’t believe lying is the right word for the kind of inconsistencies that are common when someone tries to remember and relate the experience of being traumatized.

What, then, are we to do with the uncomfortable fact that people who have been traumatized do not often have a handle on the whole truth or are covering up some surrounding details of an assault out of shame or embarrassment? Are we trying to wedge the unruly reality of responses to sexual assault to fit into a rigid idea of truth in our criminal justice system? Is there any way to make room to accommodate the truth of the nature of this crime and the impact it has on people? What if lying is a sometimes unavoidable byproduct of what happens when someone experiences this kind of trauma? And what if much of what we are interpreting as lying is actually the blocking out of traumatic memory? Can our criminal justice system make room for this erratic but common human behaviour? All I know for sure is that we all occasionally have difficulty with the truth—especially when we are ashamed or traumatized. To say that we can’t start from the premise that people sometimes lie even as they tell the truth is to ignore an important truth about human nature.

It was remarkable, seeing the lawyer brains overtake the human ones

The burden of proof must be very high if we are to contemplate taking away someone’s freedom. Of course I agree that no one should face so dire a consequence as going to prison if they are not proven to be guilty beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt. My question is: do women who come forward in sexual assault cases need to be destroyed in the process of our looking for those shadows? It’s a genuine question.

Elaine Craig, in her book Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession, quotes a woman who, after a year-long trial that resulted in the conviction of her attacker, said, “The bulk of my rape trauma is not the result of the sexual assault itself but of the brutality of the legal system. This trauma is difficult to understand for those who have not lived it.”

Later Craig writes, “It is of course true that the adversarial nature of our legal system, and constitutional protections such as the right to full and fair cross-examination, mean that testifying as a complainant in a sexual assault trial will likely always be psychologically challenging and unpleasant. The criminal justice system is not designed to he...

Most of the lawyers I have spoken with insist that nothing should change in the way that sexual assault cases are tried, that defence lawyers generally behave very well in courtrooms and in accordance with Canada’s very progressive rape shield laws (Craig’s book disputes this claim), but that they would, once again, never advise a woman they loved to come forward in a sexual assault case. Ho...

described the experience of being on the stand as excruciating.

In a case that is entirely dependent on the reliability of their evidence standing alone, these are the factors that cause me considerable difficulty when asked to accept their evidence at full value.”

Later the judge writes: “The harsh reality is that once a witness has been shown to be deceptive and manipulative in giving their evidence, that witness can no longer expect the Court to consider them to be a trusted source of the truth. I am forced to conclude that it is impossible for the Court to have sufficient faith in the reliability or sincerity of these complainants. Put simply, the volume of serious deficiencies in the evidence leaves the Court with a reasonable doubt.”

Grief and anger from the supporters of the women followed the verdict. But while a not-guilty verdict is not the same as proclaiming someone innocent, this is often how it is interpreted by the general population. “Not guilty” quickly became conflated with “innocent” for many people after the trial, and some now ascribed guilt to the wom...

People don’t like ambiguity, however much it may hold a place in, and inform, their own lives. People like answers. The verdict served as an answer for many.

She had started an organization called Coming Forward, to support survivors of sexual assault and to educate complainants on how to prepare for the court system—something she didn’t feel she’d had the benefit of.

Telling the Story If I had told my story publicly at the time, here is what I would have wanted to say: I blocked things out, I hid things, I was ingratiating towards him, I didn’t behave in any of the ways a “good victim” is supposed to behave. I don’t remember a lot. A lot of the details I have laid out here I omitted at various points along the way. But I remember his hands around my neck. I remember him causing me pain. I remember saying no and trying to resist and that not being enough. And that, despite all my other lapses in memory and faults in my character, I know for sure.

My memory may be unreliable on some of the details; my story has likely changed in increments I don’t even notice over the years. But I know that he hurt me and I didn’t want him to. I know that I asked him not to. I know that he didn’t listen for a while, but I don’t remember how long that while was. I know that I spent time trying to pry his hands off my neck and it didn’t work until I was in a lot of pain. I know that I was a teenager and that he was much older. I know that I didn’t call it assault at the time, or for years later, and neither did anyone else. I know that I was nice to him, always, after it happened, even ingratiating, and to watch my interviews with him in the following years is a humiliation.