Happy 3 Year Remission (Happy Holidays!)

Look, I find some of what you teach suspect

Because I'm used to relying on intellect

But I try to open up to what I don't know

Because reason says I should have died

Three years ago.

-RENT 'Life Support'

My Father is in My Bones

When I was a child
I nearly killed the only friend I had.
I almost strangled the life out of her body
in broad daylight
on a public road.
And the most terrifying thing
wasn't that I nearly killed her--
it was, that when I finally let her go
and she screamed at me
to explain, to think, to understand
why I tried to force her contain me--
a girl who shared food
from my table
slept in my bed
played with me
spoke with me
trusted in me
I could not explain
why a benign denial of gaze
triggered--I'm not sure exactly what...
And I knew that, if I had killed her
I would have felt nothing.  Or cared.
Or at the most, I would have felt
glee?  But only faintly.
Mostly, I vividly remember feeling
blankness--
emptiness--
numbness--
not a sorrowful vacuum,
but a freedom, a liberty from feeling,
a thrill in the way her nails dug into my forearm--
that I felt nothing at all--
and a relief that I was truthful
for once in my life.

It wasn't until later--I'm not sure how much later--
that I realized
I finally understood
what drove my father to violence.
It was the same impetus that
made strangling this girl
as natural as breathing--
a natural reaction
to standing in the middle of
group of kids that I did not belong with--
present, but invisible, while
existing in a family I did not belong with, while
enduring a school filled with children
who told me I did not belong with.
She was supposed to fill all of that vacuum
because she had been strong enough to love me;
because she was the only one who had looked at me

she was supposed to be looking only at me.
I was starving, empty,
trying to ignore the
crippled
stunted
feral side of me,

just like my father,
who never recovered from the humiliation
of being abandoned with two boys,
by his beautiful first wife
who he tried to beat into loving him
in a strange land
speaking a strange language--
because even all of that could not fill
the chasm inside of him--
and then,

still despised by his second wife
capitalized upon by his first son,
merely tolerated by his second son,
reviled by his daughter,
a useless dotard in society
it's a wonder he didn't use his fury more--
perhaps he was gelded by age and disease--
but it was enough of a taste
for me to recognize the
birth of perverted power within me--

the waking of my father in my bones,
and how I could--
must--decide every moment of every day
to never give in to his nature--
a nature struggling to manifest itself
in my being,
for I could never extricate myself
from the blood I was born of
from the hate I was born into

my only option was to starve it
never give it air
never give it water
or exercise
to never underestimate
how little attention it needed to thrive--
just a drop of love,
a second of freedom,
for it to revive and strike and kill.

I live a life of unflagging self-discipline
of self-abhorrence
and self-flagellation
made easier to bear by shame
and fear and disgust,
chanting the mantra:
I will not be him.
I will not be him.
I will not
               be him.

It has been the only thing left--

my only unsettled account

even with the threat of death ticking towards me.
I was--
am
--too ashamed to ask for forgiveness.
What words can there be--
what can I say to her?
What is there to say
when I still do not understand myself?
How dare I burden my victim
with needing to forgive me?
How can I forgive myself?
Can I forgive myself?
Perhaps not,
for in doing so,
I would first have to forgive the parts of me
that are my father.

Ayo

There's a smile--the smile that other people
who have had to wear this smile, recognize, because
there's a masquerade that survivors like me are accustomed to--
more than a veneer, more than a charade.
It's the smile, and the hug, that is so convincing
that people are utterly confused when you suddenly perceive a threat
and pull stakes and vanish,
because they thought you loved them.
And you learn that you just leave a trail of
broken hearts in your wake,
so you learn to give just enough
and yet nothing at all--
and to be wonderful
and totally forgettable all in the same instance,
to control the damage you leave
when you leave.

This smile--
it is a mitigation of the panic that we--that I--
have learned to live with
all my life--
a mechanism to tamp down the instinct to run
a practised hand at masking the desperation that
crawled up from the bowels and wrapped around your heart
when home was a cage where a monster who was supposed to be your leader
supposed to be your protector
was waiting to take his misery out on you.

The worst thing was the lulls between,
when things were fine,
when there was peace, and the violence came so
few and far between that you could fool yourself into thinking
maybe that was the last time.
Maybe he changed--
just
maybe, this was love winning.  Finally.
I was enough.  He wanted me enough.  He loved me enough.
He valued me enough.
That I could lay down on the dog,
and he wouldn't kick me just so he could kick the dog.
That he would love me enough that he would stop
taking out his anger on those weaker--
that my body was enough--
that he loved my body enough--
to make him stop
the beating.

I was never enough.

And this house.
And my mother.
And none of it, was enough.
And I didn't have enough
money
or strength
or self-preservation
to leave.
So I stayed,
and made myself believe, in those lulls
that it was going to be okay,
and learned to smile--
I learned to smile so well
that to this day, my patients say
they love it when I work because I really smile
--I smile in a way that even my eyes smile.
Even if, that smile was placed on just before I tipped my face up to look at them.

So now, when you're grown and have found yourself
yet again
assaulted by a man,
when the panic finally set in
hours after the fact, it twists up through your gut
bubbling up the esophagus into
a manic smile and giggle
and your eyes--they twinkle--
even while you chew your lips to try to get the feeling
of his mouth off of yours,
and rinse your mouth in a medicine cup
as if water could ever sanitize the
viruses and bacteria that have transferred from his tongue to your teeth--don't swallow.
And you think, "You've infected me.  You.  Infected.  Me.
with insecurity
and self-doubt
and indignity
and victimhood
and fuck you
I was kind to you
and compassionate to you
and gave you time--my time
and my respect
and my inquisitive nature.

I know that you are here, by yourself
from a different country
immigrated just a few years ago
with no family
and no friends,
in a time when Trump tells us all immigrants are
here to get you and rape you and kill you and
steal your dignity from you
I chose to show you kindness,
and give you my story.  My compassion.
And I would have given more--
all you had to do
was ask--but instead
you decided
to take this mind and this body
that my friends--my real friends
my chosen family-- laboured for over a decade
to coax this feral soul into trusting
to be able to sleep and believe that her bed was a safe place,
to be able to walk without swivelling my head,
to be able to set aside a deep-seated mistrust of humans,
and that maybe kindness was just kindness,
and stop looking for the pitfalls and the tripwires
and the proverbial strings that be attached
just enough to connect
and love humanity
and maybe, just maybe allow herself to be loved
and to be touched
and maybe, after a decade from her last assault
finally be ready to let someone make love to her again

you decided to take what wasn't offered.
You decided to swing that pendulum back
into the opposite direction.

You tore apart all of that work.
You destroyed the labor of all of that love.
In less than a minute.

You make me cry three times in the fifteen minutes it takes
to drive from my home to my gym
because the though of my trainer touching me at all now
terrifies me, because I may hurt him
because I'm not in control.
Because I bit a friend for grappling with me within a year of my first assault,
and I had no idea I had done it.
Because I asked him to teach me to grapple
because I wanted to be able to cause damage.
And it is so easy, once you know how to hurt people
to slide into my father's shadow
and just...destroy everything, so that you're alone,
because being alone means no one can hurt you.
Because you turned me back into that ... mangey bitch
with the grin
that is more teeth than smile,
and eyes that flash
with hatred.
You did that, Ayo.
You."

Thank you, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford

Thank you, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, for freeing me.  For years I've struggled to label my experience
-because it was with someone I knew both very well and not at all
-because I had felt safe with this person prior to the assault
-because I had felt safe with this person up until the moment of the assault
-because I had been strong enough to fight him off, so it was a short, interrupted assault which I feared did not qualify and would open myself to critique and public shaming.
-because he did not attempt again after I fought him off.
-because I had stayed with this person after the assault.
-because he had been contrite after the fact.
-because he begged me not to leave afterwards, and I didn't.  I comforted my attacker simply by lying still as a board as he wrapped his body around mine and desperately whispered, "I'm sorry," and,  "Please, please don't leave."
-because, even now, I recognize that something in me still wants to protect him, and protect his family, but that doesn't mean I didn't experience what I experienced.
-because I was afraid that the above bullet points would somehow invalidate my experience.
-because sexual assault comes with preconceived notions of dark alleys or drunken parties or roofies, and not holding and withstanding and surviving and comforting and nourishing someone you loved and trusted.
-because eventually, I left him, not because of the sexual assault, but because of the day in, day out emotional isolation and gaslighting and neglect that made me doubt the validity of my own feelings and my own reality.
-because for some people, being alone is worse than being with an abuser.  Because the emotional abuse wasn't consistent--and that's the thing that no one understands about domestic violence or abuse from loved ones.  It doesn't have to be consistent.  In fact, the nature of its inconsistency is why some victims never leave--because you always hope the person you love with change.  You always hope it will be over.  You always hope you can move on.  You always hope that that was really, truly, the last time.

I'm not saying this because I am seeking attention or want to out anyone.  I'm not bandwagoning.  I am writing because 1) You do not have to be penetrated to be sexually assaulted.  This is what Dr. Blasey Ford taught me.  This is what set me free.  I will say it one more time: You do not have to be penetrated to be sexually assaulted.  The biggest lie the rapists told you was that your victimhood did not qualify in comparison to others' victimhoods.  2) There is more than one side to a person--to both a survivor and to the perpetrator.  The world is not black and white.  People are not black and white.  It is possible to be both a good person who did bad things, or a bad person who does good things. You can be a nice guy in all the other aspects of your life and still be a perpetrator of sexual assault. The sooner we can understand this, the sooner we can move beyond the doubt and character assassinations that comes with believing survivors.  I do not doubt that Kavanaugh seems like a good guy to some people.  People don't run around with neon signs on their foreheads flashing "I am an abuser!"  Most people look like good people, and it can take years and years of living with someone before the other person emerges from within.  I do not dispute that Kavanaugh may live a run of the mill, coffee, work, home, and occasional social gathering life like anyone else.  I also do not doubt that in that person exists another person capable of doing the things he did to Dr. Ford.  I do not doubt Dr. Ford.  And 3) sexual assault survivors experience the fallout and continue living in a myriad of ways.  Sometimes, survivors continue to maintain a relationship with their abuser.  You do not get to judge them.  I write this because I lived with several different types of abusers, and I -- to a different extent in each case -- loved them.  It is a strange sensation to love, or want to love, or to feel like you should love the person who attacked you--but this dynamic exists and you do not deserve to be derided for coping with your situation in whatever way you must.  There are people out there, walking around, existing with you, working with you, grocery shopping, and going about their lives who experience living with and continuing a relationship with their abuser.  Yes, technically it is their choice--to not leave, to not report, to not out their perpetrator.  You cannot--you should not judge these survivors.  Unless you have lived their lives, you cannot understand why they made those choices.  (Sometimes even they aren't aware of the logic Rube Goldberg that drives their instincts.)  Unless you lived with abuse, and unless you were the object of abuse you do not understand abuse.  You do not understand at all.

My name is Lydia Yeh, and I am a survivor of sexual assault, and domestic abuse.

Jim and Bette

They think I am suffering because I am without God, and that I am suffering without realizing how much I am suffering.  What they don't realize is, I am most free, and most happy without Him, and it's infuriating to have to keep insisting people stop trying to save you when you're not only perfectly happy, but also perfectly capable of saving yourself even if you're not.

I Don't Know How (Living Without Hope)

I don't know how I survived cancer.
I absolutely expected to die.
I can't even explain why I bothered
with chemotherapy
(when I did not believe it would work).
I suppose I did it to comfort my mother.

Perhaps it was because I have had
a life of disappointment--
or rather, a life in which I had decided
no longer to acknowledge
the disappointment that was knit into my being
from conception.

My father married my mother
after his first wife abandoned my brothers
and ran away with a plumber,
after he had moved them all to America
with the hopes of opening a restaurant.
He never opened a restaurant.
He was the garbage and dish boy
at a restaurant for twenty years.
Disappointment.

My mother lost faith
when a married Christian mentor--
a deacon, an elder,
who she admired
asked her to run away with him.
He promised to betray his oath
to a God she believed in--
that she thought he believed in.
And then (she never said this, but I suspect)
it is likely he assaulted her
in a moment if obsessed desperation.
To see him tumble off his pedestal--
to see that no man could be as godly
as God--
Disappointment.

My parents married each other,
for twenty-one years--
with no love
no affection.
Only resentment, suspicion,
longsuffering, disgust.
I remember the day I said to my mother,
Mom, I wouldn't be here if you
and dad didn't get married,
but, it wasn't worth it.
I look at you, and I see all of this
wasted life.
If I could trade my life
for you to have a second chance--
for you to have had a marriage
full of love and joy,
even if it meant I would never exist,
I would make that trade.
Disappointment.

I was born into a marriage built upon disgust
into a home embroiled in debt.
A house in total disrepair,
infested, molded, leaking,
In a neighborhood fraught with violence
and poverty and squalor,
and a simmering fury at injustice
over the sweaty stench of desperation.
Parents raising children in a world without hope--
with an understanding that
they were inheriting a life
where they would work to eat, and eat to work.
Living a life where practicality superseded dreams
and survival superseded purpose,
and vacations were imaginary things
that you heard tell
but you'd never been on.
You worked because you woke that day
and you slept because you must work tomorrow.
Sleep, eat, work, sleep, eat, work;
a world without flavor
a life without hope.
My entire life has been a practice
of living without living.
But I am alive;
I just don't know how
or why.

Xiao-bai

To this day, I don't think I have forgiven my parents for not telling me my dog was sick and dying. There is a special bond between an only child and her dog; a debt that a woman could never repay to the furry soul that taught her how to be a good and decent human. I don't think I will ever stop being furious that she was taken by a stranger to the vet to be put down, alone, scared, in pain. She should have gone in the arms of someone who loved her. She should have been kissed into eternal sleep. I would have left school. I would have come home for her if I had known. It was a cowardly thing for my parents to keep it from me. It was dishonorable to think that such a faithful friend did not receive the dignity to die with the person who loved her the most. I never even got to say goodbye. It is strange to think, that of all the things I have lived through, the death of a dog would be the thing that still hurts the most in my 31 years of existence. My friends who are parents--never do this to your children. Let me disabuse you of the idea that you are sparing them any pain by keeping them from a dying loved one. All you are doing is stealing from them their chance for closure.