I'll Show You Mine When You Show Me Yours

At the drag show, my new friend from work drunkenly references her high school boyfriend, the restraining order she filed against him. Though I want to, I don’t quite say that I know exactly what she is talking about. While high school is years behind us - perhaps almost a decade - I know that the fear of that man coming back to haunt her never quite leaves the back of her mind. We laugh and exchange dark knowing smiles, and continue to dance. 

When I say I know what she means, it is to say me, too. It was more than a possessive boyfriend and a lovesick teen, and the growing pains didn’t quite stop at the breakup. 

For a long time, the growth was just processing, remembering things that my brain and my body kept hidden from me. Was healing the same as growth? It didn’t feel like it. It actually felt like I was breaking apart. 

I resent those years, late teens and early twenties. It feels unfair to have gone through, but I guess everyone around me at the time was going through something, too. 

Sometimes I carry my story like a secret. Where I used to spill it over any and everyone who did or did not want to hear it, now I meet people and think they have no idea I am a survivor. Even when I tell them about the work that I do, they often see it as a charity act, something I, separate, am doing to help them, survivors. I think people are too afraid or embarrassed to consider that perhaps that experience belongs to me, too. Sometimes I clarify and say “Well, my work is based in my own experience as a survivor.” Sometimes I just say “The work is really healing.” 

Cognitively, I know that I have nothing to be ashamed of, but somehow it just isn’t that easy in real life. When is the right time to say, “Hey, have I mentioned that I was sexually abused as a teenager?” Probably not at dinner, or in the dressing room at work, or at the drag bar. And yet, Lacey mentioned her story, the restraining order and her high school boyfriend as we danced in a neon sea of queer bodies, basking in the safety and the sensuality of it all. I shrugged and said “mine went to jail”, and we grimaced and laughed and had a great night. 

These stories are so heavy we drop them in punchlines, casual bypass mentions, and wait for someone who gets it to signal that they really do know what we’re talking about. 

It’s funny because sometimes I feel so alone in my story, but I hear snippets from others all the time. We throw each other glimmering hints of sadness, faint, hardened clues to piece together, saying “this is a part of my story, and I want you to know that I choose you to hold it.”

This work was originally published in Beneath the Soil Volume iii, a collaborative zine featuring artwork from queer survivors of sexual violence