strangerdarkerbetter:

Cure promises wholeness even as the world pokes and prods, reverberating beneath our skin, a broken world giving rise to broken selves.

         All my life, I’ve rebelled against the endless assumptions that my body-mind is broken. I’ve resisted. I’ve ranted. I’ve turned my back on brokenness. Occasionally I’ve tried redefining wholeness to include that which is collapsed, crushed, or shattered. But mostly I’ve just flat-out refused brokenness and the perceptions of weakness, vulnerability, and tragedy that come with it.

                          I dream of a big pottery bowl painted in intricate patterns.

         But however much I refuse and, in those refusals, tell an important truth, I have to say: I am also profoundly broken. My father and the cell of perpetrators to which he belonged shattered my body-mind. The violence they inflicted winds through me. I could quibble over words and call myself damaged. But the starker, blunter broken calls to me. It speaks of fragments and shards, an irrevocable fracturing. And fracture me they did, using sexual violence, physical violence, and mind control that I can only describe as torture. I won’t write the details or try to capture the terror and pain in words. But believe me: what they did broke my body-mind. It shaped every part of my life. This is not hyperbole, not a claim to perpetual victimhood nor a ploy for sympathy, but rather an enraging truth.

                               I turn the bowl in my hands, lose myself in its patterns.

         Twenty years ago I walked through the world detached from body-mind and emotion, skittish, fearful of human touch, hearing voices and seeing shadows, plotting suicide. When it became clear that I had to deal with this damage or end up dead, all I wanted was to be cured.

The ideology of cure would have us believe that whole and broken are opposites and that the latter has no value.

         I spent years in therapy and bodywork. I practiced self-care and built a support network. I found community. I dug into shame. I helped organize Take Back the Night marches, put together rape prevention trainings, wrote about child abuse. I never spoke directly about my desire for a cure, but really I felt desperate to fix my broken self, to emerge into a place where the twenty-four years of torture I experienced as a child and young adult simply no longer existed. I spent nearly a decade working hard at recovery—recovering lost years, memories, selves—before I knew that I’d never be cured.

                                                           Slowly, slowly the bowl reveals itself—

                                                               shattered and pieced back together.

         My relationship to that violence is different now—my sense of self less fractured; my ability to stay in my body-mind and in the present, stronger. Yet I am nowhere near finished with its aftermath. Not long ago, paper skeletons hanging in the window of a local restaurant triggered an old memory of torture, catapulting me into a week-long dissociative fugue. Three summers ago, suicide gripped me hard, voices filling my head, seductive and terrifying. I didn’t leave the house for a month.

          Those intricate patterns—a spider web of fractures, cracks, seams.

         I’m grateful that triggers and hallucinations don’t grab me in their vice grip nearly as often as they used to. Even so, I know the past will again pound through my body-mind. The voices will again scream in my head, owning me, commanding me to kill myself, self-loathing carved into my synapses. I’ve come to know that there will be no cure. I claim brokenness to make this irrevocable shattering visible.

                                              Splashes of sunlight filter through the cracks.

         There will be no return to the moment before my father first grabbed my body-mind.

           Cure dismisses resilience, survival, the spider web of fractures, cracks, and seams. Its promise holds power precisely because none of us want to be broken. But I’m curious: what might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness?  

[Source: Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfections: Grappling With Cure]

Broken. 

I am broken. 

These words pulse in my mind like the beating of my heart. 

Broken body. Broken mind. 

Broken sense of safety. 

Violation. 

I have been shattered like a bowl slipped through loose fingers crashing to the ground. 

Six years ago, I was a pile of broken shards scattered at the feet of the men who had harmed me. 

Slowly, through the help of other broken people, I have began to piece the shards back together. 

My pieces no longer lay scattered. 

I have pieced myself back together. 

But the cracks still show. 

I have not been made whole but rather am a jigsaw puzzle pieced together. Clear lines showing between the pieces. 

The traumas of my past live on in me. The damage is still visible. 

Broken.

I am broken.

Words that once carried shame and agony. 

Now these words pulse with a different energy. 

I am broken, yes. This is undeniable. Yet, in my brokenness, I have grown stronger. In my brokenness, I have found new purpose and meaning. 

When the pieces of my shattered self came back together, they formed not what I was before, but something new. 

There is no going back to who I was before, nor do I wish to do so. 

I am better than I was, cracks and brokenness and all. 

It is from that brokenness that I have crafted a self that I can be proud of. 

A more compassionate self. 

A more passionate self. 

A more understanding self. 

A stronger self.