Good Morning Starlight,
What’s your favorite way to drink coffee? I love a flat white, which is just a sloppy cappuccino. I missed you last week. Listen, today my posts includes sexual assault and abuse, and because you never know what to expect from me, and you show up here trusting the journey, I just feel like, god, it’s Sunday morning, and I need to let you know ahead so that you can choose to take a pass.
….
When I was seventeen years old, my hair was growing back from being shaved to the scalp. It had reached my neck by the winter holidays and was shaped like a soft brown bowl cut. That summer a person stopped living at my childhood home. They had resided in the hallway closet that became a makeshift bedroom between the bedroom I shared with my younger sister and the other bedroom where my two smaller sisters slept. They slept on a twin bed squeezed into the long canal, pushed in inappropriately. I had called them my boyfriend and sometimes my brother, but they were not my real brother or my real boyfriend.
That winter, I graduated from public high school early. During winter break, I was a passenger in a drunk-driving car accident. We drove into a tree. My head hit the vehicle's ceiling and swelled like a marshmallow. As it healed, my face looked like a toasted marshmallow with discolored brown and olive-colored bruises from the internal bleeding. I moved from Martha’s Vineyard to Boulder, Colorado, as a self-supporting teenager who looked and felt mushed up.
I moved into a studio apartment my high school friend was renting. This friend we will name Carrie. Carrie and I had become friends during my freshman year at an elite boarding school. During her sophomore year, she was expelled for smoking. I didn't return back to the school after sophomore year, not by choice. Instead I moved back into my childhood home with the person who slept in the hallway. Carrie had also graduated from public high school early and invited me to join her in the mountain town where she had her own apartment.
Carrie picked me up from the airport with long, raging red hair, oversized maroon raver pants, and a manic mood. She told me some heavy shit had just happened. She told me somewhere between the airport and her apartment that, her good friend out there, Danny, had a dream and woke up remembering that her brother had raped her and had told Carrie about it. Carrie's friends' remembering triggered Carrie's own remembering of her father's sexual abuse of her and her sister as children. Carrie's father was living in Boulder. Carrie had confronted him and her mother. Carrie's father admitted it and pleaded for forgiveness. Carrie's mother denied ever knowing anything about it. Carrie told me she hated him and hated her mother too. I didn't know what to say about any of this. I couldn't understand it. I wasn't sure I believed it. She also said we would have dinner with her father that week. She said she was going to make him pay. I sat across from him and his girlfriend at some Asian restaurant with Carrie by my side. She stared at him with piercing, hard, crystalline eyes. If she said anything at all it was something humiliating him, with malice and a smile. I didn't know if I should thank her father for paying for our meal.
….
It took thirty years for me to wake from a nightmare. Before then, I was blinded. Under a spell cast onto my fifteen-year-old self by a predator who shared a roof. It’s befuddling. Starlight, please don’t ask.
….
Revision is something I'm thinking of in the sense that we have the ability to look at something again and see something different. Ability is not the most accurate term because we cannot always willingly see things from multiple perspectives. We can be blinded. Disabled. We can be blinded by trauma, and we can be blinded through mind-fuckery.
….
I am thinking about this in our current global affairs, specifically regarding the Palestinian genocide led by the Israeli government supported by the United States.
….
I know very few who are in support of the Israeli government's continued massacre of the Palestinian people, but I do know some, who call it something else. One such person is a friend from when I was fifteen at the elite boarding school. I have not unfriended them, nor have they unfriended me on social media, and as a result, I have a window into their narrative and them into mine. I don't know if it's appropriate to still call one another friends, but we do.
A few weeks ago, they posted a story that made me cry. It was the story of my friend walking into a bakery, and the woman behind the counter asked my friend's daughter if she was Jewish because of her name. My friend bristled with concern when she heard the question. Then the counterwoman showed my friend's daughter that she wore a Cross and a Star of David because while she was not Jewish, she wanted to show solidarity with Jewish people as she had read about incidents of antisemitism rising due to the Oct. 7 attacks. My friend expressed how this act of acknowledgment brought her to tears as she has felt continued terror these last months.
I cried because I knew that the terror she feels is real, not necessarily real, in that she is experiencing a real threat of termination in her very privileged life. But real, that she really feels terrified that she might.
I cried because of the power of kindness the woman with the cross and the star woven together on her breastbone extended to her.
I cried because there was no gold Islamic moon and star hanging from the woman's neck.
I cried because it is easy to want to wipe this friend away for being terribly and terrifyingly wrong in their continued support of the Palestinian genocide. Which they call by another name.
I cried because I know that we are, at times, powerless to change our minds when we have been indoctrinated with beliefs or have trauma overlays.
I'm crying now.
People are being murdered brutally in Palestine, hostages are still missing, and I am here in New York, drinking coffee.
….
I read about cults voraciously and have since I was an adolescent.
It was through observing a young woman in a documentary about a local cult in my mid-forties that my own revision began. Seeing how a man took control of a particular young woman's mind, he was then able to take control of her body and behavior, and she had no conscious awareness of what was so evident to an outside observer.
I saw through her what had happened to me when I was fifteen.
When I woke up from the reality I had been living for thirty years, my first somatic response was the heaviest exhaustion I'd ever felt. I couldn't get out of bed for three days. It's been a slow resurrection.
I've since learned that, like my friend Carrie or her friend, we have the eerie ability to dissociate from trauma so that we can advance forward in our lives. The memories are hidden and camouflaged as if they did not happen until they come hurtling back one day.
Trauma and PTSD are complex and distortive forces on our minds and behaviors, and healing is a slow, painful, and messy process.
….
I hear my inner voice say, "I hate," when I read or see the sickening news and images of genocide. I hate that there is evil in this world and that it is contagious. I hate that people cannot see beyond limiting beliefs that hold them hostage and manipulate their behavior. I hate that we keep hurting each other.
….
It is a time for revision.
….
May we all heal.
….
May we all live in peace and love.
PS. Starlight, if you made it here, I’m sorry if any of my story or my thinking upsets you. I don’t know how to safely talk about confusing and charged things. Yet, I think we need to share space for confusing thoughts and feelings. We all have them.