Green

Please, if you’ve been having a difficult time with all the news surrounding the Me Too movement/Why I Didn’t Report/the Kavanaugh farce, don’t read this post. Take care of yourself, and come on back next week. Really. The content herein is of a sensitive nature that may be distressing for certain individuals. So, off you pop, lovelies, and go engage in some self-care. You’re beautiful, amazing creatures, each and every one of you.

For those of you who have chosen to stay, well, here goes. What follows is true and accurate to the best of my memory.


***


I was ten. So was he. It was summertime, and we were out of school. We had known each other and played together for years, so the invitation to ‘camp out’ in his yard in his new tent wasn’t anything out of the ordinary--in fact, it sounded like a great new game! No one thought twice about it, and why should they have? We were ten, for goodness’ sake. And so two or three nights that summer I packed up my gear, climbed the fence, and we ‘camped’.

It’s just that camping included this...other thing. The other thing involved getting me on my back, shoving my extra-long t-shirt pajamas with Garfield’s giant, grinning face and my sports bra thing (whatever a ten-year-old girl wears when she’s not quite ready for the real thing yet but still needs something) up under my arms, yanking my underwear down, and keeping me still by holding the blade of a large Swiss Army knife against my neck while I stared at the ceiling of the tent and tried not to think about what was happening below that blade resting on my throat.

Now, generally speaking I was a fairly scrappy kid. I didn’t have too many qualms about making my opinions known, and was a serial shin-kicker/’Indian burn’ giver/back-of-the-head-thwacker. There had always been something about this particular boy, however, that had given me pause. He had a dangerous edge which, most of the time, made our games a lot more fun, but there had always been moments when even my own bull-headedness had been cowed by his sudden fits of aggression. The few times in the tent that summer were definitely among them. The terror overtook any capacity I had to fight back, and afterwards there was the overhanging worry of, “If he’ll do this now, what will he do if I tell?” I got stuck in a self-defeating cycle--I couldn’t fight him off, I was too scared to tell anyone in case he did something worse, and I was stuck going back a couple more times for ‘camp-outs’ because if I said, “No, thanks,” then someone would ask why and I couldn’t answer that question because I was afraid of him even thinking I’d told someone.

He wasn’t the only problem. As with any situation like this, there were the factors of shame and embarrassment and--being ten--the fear of getting in trouble myself.

So I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t say anything for the next couple of years, until (for some reason I can’t remember) I made an off-the-cuff remark about it and my 6th grade teacher heard it and dragged in the school district psychologist and called my parents and generally did all of the things a teacher is absolutely supposed to do in these circumstances but, being the cavalier sort of kid I was, I covered up the shame and terror at being found out with an attitude of, “What’s all the fuss about?”

At this point I should explain that, though my parents love me in their own way, they are Very Not Good at Feelings-with-a-Capital-F, and as a result, were just as uncomfortable as I was with the whole sordid affair. That evening at home there was an extremely awkward and uncomfortable half-hearted attempt at a discussion which, if I remember rightly, mostly consisted of me avoiding answering anything or just saying, “I don’t know,” and “I don’t remember.” None of us wanted to be there trying to have that conversation, and after that exercise ended a miserable failure, it was never brought up again.

But the trauma didn’t go away.

I mostly forgot about it--or at the very least tried not to think about it--for years afterwards. It didn’t occur to me until well into my twenties that my reactions to certain actions from my partners in intimate situations were a direct result of the manner in which I had been restrained in the tent that summer. It’s worth noting here that not one of my partners has ever held a knife to my throat--what I mean is that if I start to feel trapped I panic. It doesn’t matter how much trust there is in the relationship, if you put too much weight on me or I get tangled up in the sheets or a piece of clothing I go into fight-or-flight mode instantaneously. It doesn’t stay in the bedroom, either. I remember being at a party my senior year of undergrad and flirting with a guy I liked in the kitchen. I was leaning against the counter, and he put one hand on either side of me, effectively pinning me in, and I actually pushed him off when the adrenaline exploded into my system. I had no idea why at the time, but I do now.

I don’t like to talk about it--who does? Talking won’t change it. It happened. This is where it’s got me. It’s a part of me, and it will never go away. It’s still terrifying. It’s still shameful. I’ve actually spent time berating my ten-year-old self. “Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you tell someone? Why didn’t you just not go back?” It doesn’t help. Those are all obvious options to me now, but when you’re ten, you’re ten. The world is full of stuff that doesn’t make sense to you yet, and you deal with it however you can--which sometimes means not dealing with it at all.

So, dear Ten-Year-Old Me, it wasn’t your fault. You were doing the best you could with what you had. No one should have expected you to deal with that situation like an adult. Adult You knows that now, and she’s really sorry she spent so much time being angry at you for not doing things differently. You did fine. By some miracle, you’re still here. You pulled through despite the lack of recourse to support because you’re a scrappy little so-and-so and life can bend you, but it can’t break you. And no, you will never be rid of the vivid memory of that blade pressed against your neck while you looked upwards at the green ceiling of that tent and tried to will yourself dead from the shoulders down, but it will fade enough to be manageable. And you will finally be able to stand up and say “This happened to me, like it happened in different ways to so many other people, and that doesn’t make any of us any less worthwhile.”