When The Brick Wall Comes Down

You tell your therapist about the brick wall. “There’s a place inside my mind that I can’t access. There’s
something my body knows that I don’t.” 

Your therapist suggests you read How the Body Keeps Score. 

In the introduction, Bessel Van Der Kolk, like any good writer trying to appeal to a general public, grabs the
reader’s attention with a story. A story of one of his patients - a veteran, who couldn’t talk about his trauma. 

Your step-father is a veteran. You try to not think about this as you read, try not to link the two in your mind. Until you get to the part in the story where the veteran rapes a woman in a village in Vietnam. It undoes you. You think about your step-father again. How he raped your mother. 

It’ll be at least a year before you read the criticism of Van Der Kolk - how he centers abusers. But for now, you’re lost in the trigger. You don’t know how to keep reading. 

For days, you cry and drink, unable to return to the book. 

A week later, you pick up Love with Accountability. You bought it because your friend is a contributor, not because you’re a survivor. 

You read three pages and the flood of tears begin. Something inside you is opening and you’re not ready. You close the book. 

You have lunch plans with June, a friend, and in the midst of your breakdown, she texts, “On my way.” You wipe away the tears, wash your face. 

As you change your clothes and get ready, everything feels underwater, or like you’re watching yourself from the outside in. Your phone buzzes. It’s June. “I’m outside.” You go to your kitchen, grab the tequila bottle and take a shot. Then another. Then another. Until you feel you can breathe again. 

In the backseat of the car after the “hellos,” you say, “I’m reading the anthology X is in.” In your ears, your voice drips of desperation, a clawing despair. 

“How is it?” June asks. 

“It’s interesting how trauma manifests itself in the physical body through pain.” You pause. “I have a friend who was telling me about her niece and how she started getting migraines. No one could explain why.” You don’t know why you’re saying this, but you don’t know how to stop your intoxicated tongue. “As a child, she was a model. I wonder if something happened to her… You know, it’s Hollywood.”

You’re at the gas station now and June is filling up and you’re talking to her through the open window as if you can’t stop. Because if you do, you’re terrified the silence will unbreak you. 

She nods. “Yeah, that’s terrible.” 

Your head is too big for your body. You are going in and out of reality, like a flickering VHS tape. You don’t remember what happens next, the haze of tequila blankets it all. 

A few days later, in therapy, you say, “The introduction to How the Body Keeps Score triggered me.” 

“Oh,” your therapist replies, concern shadowing her face. “What part?” 

“The introduction,” you say accusingly. “Have you read the introduction?” 

She shakes her head. “No, I’ve only read parts of the book.” 

You’re annoyed she recommended a book without reading it. You also know that people don’t have this need to read a book from cover to cover the way you do. You always start at the beginning. 

“After I read it, I couldn’t get out of bed.” You don’t tell her how you started drinking. “This happened with another book.” You tell her about Love with Accountability. “I still haven’t finished it. I think it fell behind my couch.” 

Sometimes you start rambling in your therapy sessions. You started therapy because you wanted to re-connect with your mother and you knew that you would need the emotional support of a trained professional. This conversation about triggers and the brick wall is you avoiding talking about your mother. 

“Have you ever been sexually abused as a child?” she asks you. 

You start to shake your head. “No.” You hesitate. “Unless you count the time, I sat in my step-father’s lap and he kissed me on the lips.” You shrug. “But that wasn’t a big deal.” There are emotions attached to this memory, of disgust, of shame, of something you can’t quite put into words. You hate telling your therapist about this, you find it irrelevant. You’re here because you want your mother back in your life. 

Your therapist replies slowly, “If you’re telling me, that your step-father made you sit in his lap and then kissed you on the lips without your consent, that means,” here she stops and tries to make eye contact with you through the Zoom camera, tries to soften this, “that means you were molested.” 

The brick wall you’ve built cracks. Behind it, you see your inner child. No head, no eyes, no mouth, only rows and rows of teeth sprouting from a neck. 

You begin to cry, wanting so badly for this to not be your truth, your hands trying to push back the falling bricks.

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