Love letter to me on my 30th birthday.

As many of you know, I’ve been dealing with the aftermath of getting forced out of a job due to sexual harassment. It’s been a pretty difficult couple of weeks, as well as a difficult birthday. I’ve been writing to try and figure out some of the ways I feel. I’m going to post it here, but I’m gonna warn that it is a LOT about sexual assault and grappling with it (as well as quite long). I’m restricting it from some of my family, etc. Sharing it in hopes it can be helpful to someone else. Here’s to knowing ourselves and healing. All I can wish for on this 30th birthday

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A few months ago, I wrote about restaurant work:

There is a view held by these men we work with (for, statistically, far and away, they are men). There is a view of people like me, people who do my job, as expendable. Ultimately interchangeable. That if you really break it down, the best server is simply not a hindrance to the kitchen. That since servers are so easy to come by — since so many middle- and working-class people out there need a job that will get them a quick paycheck without expensive and time-consuming degree requirements — an exceptional server is nice, but ultimately unimportant. That having those exceptional people represent your food and your concept might be ideal, but as a chef, it’s not really your problem, and at the end of the day, all you really need is a body who can smile, take orders, and not fuck up anything major.

There is a view that we are expendable. That we are replaceable.

Two years ago, I was in the basement of a fine dining restaurant I worked at, in an area with no cameras, when a chef at that restaurant came up on me and tried to force himself on me.

It was not my first experience with sexual assault, and it was not my first experience in a situation where I am expected to alert the authorities if I am to be believed or treated with sympathy. I was 27. I was already well practiced in the mathematics of survival, the equations we calculate to decide how much we can handle and how much we are willing to, which losses to cut, which people and institutions it is too costly to trust, what is is we actually need versus all the things we will never be able to get.

The man who attacked me was a sous chef, for a world-renowned company that had just opened its first restaurant in a world-renowned hotel. I was just a server. I did the math.

The rest is not worth getting into. Or rather, it’s not a story that needs telling because it’s already been told so many times. We kept working together, he kept threatening me, etc. it went how these things are set up to go. The whole mess came to light, and HR spent weeks questioning me, scheduling and canceling meetings with me, tried to paint the image in my head that this was a slap-on-the-wrist kind of incident, had me keep working the same shifts as my attacker. I’m so bored writing this, so tired of women’s stories always inevitably including this chapter, so exhausted with how unsurprising this is, so weary to the bone of retelling a story whose most willing audience is all those who don’t need to hear it because we already know it by heart.

I’m not dumb. I knew what was happening. They were trying to sweat me out. Hoping the problem would go away. If you want to have an optimistic view of people, maybe they thought what had happened was horrible, but that nothing could take it back at this point, and that the unfortunate but practical reality was that they were running a business, a business in its first few months of life, and that to lose a chef might kill that business and put so many others out of work. And so they did their own mathematics, and made their own decisions.

There is a view that we are expendable. That we are replaceable.

My story may sound extreme. Personally, I am a believer in the idea that extreme or powerful examples simply highlight realities that are no less true or present in their less dramatic illustrations.

There is a view that we are expendable. It gets demonstrated to us in a million different ways. And there is a part of me that believes it.

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I know a femme whose survival is

Dissolving into water

I know a femme who makes friends out of vultures at bars

Who smiles so sweet you’d never know it’s cuz she

swallows down all her teeth

I know a femme who doesn’t fight cuz

she ain’t got time for that.

A no-nonsense chick who’ll simply turn away.

I know a femme who listens

Just sits and takes it in

She says people think she’s submissive but

I know better

I’ve seen what shapes her silence can make.

I know women

Whose silence teaches me

Whose water humbles me

Who make an art out of looking like what they’re supposed to

while existing as exactly whoever they are

I know soft women

and they are my greatest teachers.

I know

yelling is a privilege

and anger is a luxury.

I know my fire sometimes burns me

And my teeth often slice open my own skin.

I know my fire looks brilliant to my friends who are water

Like flames that consume anyone

who dares come too close

But I am tired of being lonely.

I am tired of being flame.

I am tired of being a balled fist, always ready for a fight.

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People are always telling me I’m strong.

People call me “strong” and it doesn’t feel like me. People call me “strong” and my roots don’t drink it in.

The truth is: strong is like a leather jacket I wear when I’m out, strong is like the needle-sharp wing I draw with eyeliner, strong is like the scowl my face settles into when I walk down the street, like a stop sign you can read a mile away, like a layer of black ice to coat me like a warning.

You can’t call me “strong” without calling me my trauma.

“Strong” is my resting bitch face that is never really resting, but always alert, ready for attack, ready for a fight. “Strong” is the face that says “no” a mile away, draws a line so they don’t get close enough to try. The wall I wear between their eyes and my body. The way I make up for the times I couldn’t keep them off. The “no” I grew into out of all the “no”s I didn’t say. All the ones they didn’t hear. And tell me, what’s the difference anyway?

“Strong” is what I became so they can’t tell me I had it coming. “Strong” is what I became because it’s what I tell myself.

People call me “strong,” but I’d rather be undamaged.

(People call me “strong,” but I’d rather have been safe).

I don’t know if I’m strong so much as, I don’t have a choice. I don’t know if I’m strong so much as, my body won’t give in. Even on the days I don’t understand why. Even on the days I don’t want to be strong. Even on the days that strong is a shell, and everything that lies underneath is broken.

Some days “strong” holds me together. Some days “strong” walls me in.

People call me “strong” and I smile to myself. Know that “strong” is a flimsy word for someone like me.

I am continents of pain and love and memory. I am heart and sinew barely covered by flesh. I am every thorn that ever pierced my skin, a collection of wounds, the connective tissue between them. I am the ancient ache of human longing, the lonely wolf howl of all of my dreams. I am the stars tossed into a night sky, scattered across galaxies, yearning for connection. I am the waiting. The belief in the constellations. The hope in their prophesy. The vulnerability in hoping. The need to believe there is more to come. More for humanity. More for me.

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I was born an open heart in a sandstorm of a world.

Forever too sensitive, forever too soft, I learned to scab but never to grow a shell, my flesh always exposed, always soft, always imprinted by the shape of whatever pressed into it.

The child that I was: I wounded easily and mended slowly. I ached at my own ache, I bled questions without answers, like “why,” like “how,” I heard silence in response, I heard winds howling through it. But still I could not stop asking.

I never learned how not to be like that.

I am 30. I am sharp-tongued but tender-hearted. I still hurt for the ways I hurt. I still hurt for the ways we hurt each other. I am still open. And it makes living hard.

When I was 17 and had just been kicked out of the house, I met an adult who made me memorize a poem:

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.”

I am a soft animal, born into a hard world. The first half of my life, spent learning what that meant, spent feeling the soft animal of me freeze into terror.

The last five years, spent slowly crawling back, figuring out how to come back into this body, how to coax the soft animal out of hibernation, treat her with love and patience, how to sit with her in stillness, to know that there is no replacement for time and consistency when it comes to feeling safe after terror. Figuring out how to feel safe in this body. How to be one with this body. How to be in this body and pay attention to what it feels. What it loves. How to listen and move towards that grace.

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To heal, you have to hold what hurts.

Many times our fight to make the world right is really a struggle to unwrite those stories in us that we never authored. The messages carved onto our bodies without our permission.

In the days since reliving one of these stories — the forced resignation from a job where a man saw me as a place to deposit his pain — the involvement and failure of authorities never meant to protect me — the confirmation of messages I have written novels to overwrite — I have carried a lot of heaviness in my body. As the leaden depression threatened to weigh me down, I searched desperately for a fight to be had. I’ve gotten a lot of praise for exactly this quality — the readiness to fight — but the truth is I’m no different than rescue dogs that bark and snarl at strangers. It’s all survival mechanism, all trauma — all reactions of a mammal unable to forget what happened when it couldn’t protect itself.

I have reached for my anger because that is how I survive. I have clung to it with all I could, because anger is a stronger place than devastation. But my anger is an armor over more tender matter. The shadows of pain I’ve traveled miles to outrun. The voice I try to shout over with my fights.

To heal, you have to know where the hurt lives.

Parker J. Palmer writes, “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is.”

You’ll be a traumatized dog barking scared at strangers your whole life if you don’t reach underneath your anger and find out what’s there.

As I geared up for yet another fight, I read Ronan Farrow’s 2017 piece exposing Harvey Weinstein. What struck me the most was how all the women blamed themselves. They didn’t fight hard enough, they shouldn’t have been in those situations. What hurt the most was hearing those voices and hearing a part of me agree with them. What stuck like a thorn I couldn’t pull out was hearing my voice in the echoes of those women. Feeling the home that shame has made in me

Today, on my birthday, I have asked myself why I hurt. I dug deep into the soil of myself and what I brought up from it in my cupped hands is this: a part of me still believes I deserved it. That every time. I had it coming.

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This is what I find underneath my anger:

I am 11 and the men who worked at the strip mall behind my house wolf whistle at me. It makes me uncomfortable but it also excites me. It scares me but it makes me feel powerful. Something about me is good enough to command attention. I want what we all want: to feel wanted. To feel loved.

I want more of that attention and I begin dressing in tight clothes and short skirts. I feel uncomfortable every time men stare at me but I paint it over by telling myself it’s power. It never lasts. I always need more. It is like a drug addiction. At home, I am terrified and powerless, never knowing when the next explosion will come. I want what we all want: to feel powerful. To feel valued.

I am 16 and dating my first boyfriend. I hate my body but I like it in the moments he wants to touch it. Nothing we do feels good but I always say yes, yes, yes. I think the point of sex is to be good at sex, and the way to be good at sex is if the other person is happy.

I am still living at home. Sometimes people tell me I sound like “Daria” from the MTV show, because I speak in a monotone, because I’ve stopped having feelings. One day I tell myself: I can’t control my guardian, can’t control their feelings or what they will do, but at least I can control this. At least I can feel nothing of my own. Take up as little space as possible in a place where nowhere is safe. I’ve never known what it means to belong to myself. To be a person who exists all on my own, separate from other people’s feelings. I have no idea of all I do not know. My own world does not contain a space for me.

This is what I find underneath my anger:

I flirted with the first man I could say raped me. The first time both my body and my mouth said no. I had a crush on him and I hoped he would kiss me. I asked him to drive me home to my house.

My body is used to humiliating sex, to painful sex, to all kinds of sex I am still unlearning. As a child I was someone else’s prop; as an adult I’ve been attracted to men who would treat me that way. I have wanted men for the sense that they would devalue me. I have been attracted to what I sensed was unsafe. I’ve loved men who have hurt me beyond my comprehension, and a deep part of me knew how to do that. How to fit in as someone that someone else would hurt.

I can’t call what they did to me rape.

This is what I find underneath my anger:

A part of me is alive and well that still doesn’t believe me.

A part of me is alive and well that won’t let me be whole.

A part of me is mad at me for every time I had the nerve to act like I didn’t deserve it. Like I was allowed to feel things and they were allowed to matter.

A part of me has settled into these things happening.

Sometimes my fighting feels like running from the truth. Like shouting over my fate.

Elisabet Velasquez writes: “my past is the only thing that has loved me long enough to keep coming back.

[…]

Secretly I want people to remember me and not my damage.

Secretly I want my demons to know they are worthy of a God too.”

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“this body has never left me,

even though I continuously choose to leave it.” — Key Ballah

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The summer I was 27. When I was assaulted by a chef at the restaurant where I worked.

I nearly suffocated in the heat of that summer. The lack of air. That’s how I felt every time their hands have found me. Like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the air around me. Like I was sealed into my my own pocket of the universe, like I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t shout out to anyone around me, like the dreams where you yell and yell but no sound comes out, except it was all real, all relentless, all crushing me with the unbearable heaviness of it.

That’s how I moved through the world at 19, at 27, at every age when I was suddenly cast out. Cut off. Unable to breathe but doomed to keep living.

I nearly suffocated that summer, slogging through the thick days, dragging my body along like the hostage it was.

I can’t tell you how it lifted because the truth is I don’t know, the truth is in those days each breath was a dagger, the truth is my body felt like an unbearable weight, one I no longer wanted to carry.

The truth is: when I think about it, I don’t know why I’m still alive, and I can’t make much sense of it, except that this body must love me, must want me and want life even when I don’t, must love me and loves this earth too hard to leave us.

One day that sticky summer, I saw a graffiti scrawled across a South Philly building on the street where I played soccer:

“Breathe. You are alive.”

I never believed in magic till I thought about survival. I never bought into mysticism til I thought about all I’ve lived through, all the times I’ve wished for death yet still I’m here, without really understanding how. That’s magic if you ask me. A force beyond my understanding. Why do you think so many of the people who love astrology are women, queers, people of color? People with trauma as structural as it is personal? How do you survive obliteration without a means of creation? How do you live in depths of unknowable darkness without a belief in forces of unknowable strength?

Breathe. You are alive.

I am alive. I am here. I am in this body. This body that they have touched, hit, entered without permission, left for collateral damage, this body they have used as a vessel, as a tool, as a place to deposit their pain. This body they have used as a thing, as though there wasn’t anyone inside it. But I was. And I am.

This is still my body.

This is still my body that has refused to abandon me, though I have continually abandoned it. I am still breathing in this body. This trespassed body. This betrayed body. It still breathes for me. And every breath I take in is also a breath out. Every breathing is also an undoing. An unwrite. Of their hands on my body. Of the death they made me into.

Breathe. You are alive.

I am alive and it means that every moment they spent in this body without permission was just a moment, I am alive and it means that there is more to me than what they did, I am alive and it means that every second I breathe into me there is more of me that is not them, more space in me where they have never lived, never touched, that the land they stand on in me becomes smaller and smaller against the growing vastness of all I contain.

You are the treasure mined from the ruins of what they did to you.

You are that beautiful, hard-edged, delicate, breakable, resilient, shining, invaluable material. A home for life. An ancient truth. Made of earth. Made of mineral. Made of salt. Water has shaped you but never dissolved you.

You are all of these things, you are hard and you are soft, you are stone and you are flesh, you are strength and you are pain. You are history and you are heart.

You are you. You are precious. The world needs you as badly as you need it.

Breathe.

You are alive.

You are you.

You are sacred.

You didn’t deserve it.

You didn’t deserve it and even if you don’t believe it, you need to keep telling yourself. That is not your birthright.

Breathe.

You are alive.

You are alive and you are full of possibility.

You are vital.

You are sacred.

There is still more to come.