This is probably the most personal and vulnerable thing I’ve shared, but here goes. I cross-posted this to my Substack. [You can subscribe to that here!]
***
[as the title implies, these are very much rambling thoughts that could one day transform into a proper essay or two, but I share these raw—very raw—thoughts as a way to get some of my truth out there, as a public accountability of sorts, that I have a story, that I need to tell it, especially now that I’m truly beginning to better understand just what the story is. So, yes, there are tense shifts galore here, but this is not meant to be polished; this is meant to be in the moment, it’s meant to be as imperfect as I am. And mostly, meant to be shared on this specific day, to mark my thoughts and feelings as they came. It probably belongs in a diary, but here I go.] cw: sexual assault
***
It’s been 30 years since that day.
That teenage milestone of a moment.
And that’s how I thought of it, nearly every June 30 since.
Like September 13, 1991, the day of my first kiss:
just a teenage hormone anniversary.
But there was only one teenager there that afternoon.
And it took me into my early 30s to even realize the gravity of that.
[I didn’t actually realize it; I needed to be told.]
Flashback: An early draft of my coming-of-age memoir, when I knew that event was important in my life, but was certain its importance was simply that it was just a rite of passage. Part of silly teenage antics of a traveling sales crew full of friends who were escaping homes or helping keep their homes afloat—or both.
It was a “help wanted” sign that started this, and it’s help I’ve needed ever since.
It was a “help wanted” sign that started this, and it’s help I’ve needed ever since. I just didn’t know it. Sometimes I had an inkling, maybe. But I ignored it.
I retreated into myself.
I retreated into school.
I retreated into work.
I retreated into alcohol.
I retreated into men.
I retreated from myself.
***
I’m lying in bed. I can’t sleep. I check the time on my phone, and that’s when I see that the 29 is gone from the homescreen; a 30 in its place. It’s now June 30, 2023.
I always remember the significant event that happened on this date back in 1993, of course; but something is different today. My thoughts are racing, but my cat is lying between my legs and my husband is sleeping next to me, and I don’t want to move. But in my brain, it’s a mile a minute. I know my mental notes, the ones I’m so sure I’ll remember, will disappear as soon as the drool hits my pillow. So I get up, go to the camper living room, and grab my laptop. And then I go back in time.
***
In the cafeteria at Wilkes University, where I was working on my MA in creative writing, I was talking to my mentor about my memoir project. This is 2009. I told her some of what I wrote above, the nature of that milestone moment. That, you know, maybe the person was slightly older than me. That this hot older guy and I, well…
I can’t even type out the words today, here, now. I want to be subtle, like my writing so often is.
I want others to read between the lines because the reader is smart and savvy and they will glean what they need to glean; restraint is a powerful technique. Overwriting, telling the reader what they just read, isn’t always the most effective route.
However, am I subconsciously hiding in subtlety?
My sharp mentor was definitely reading between the lines, and I’ve only repeated what she told me maybe a half-dozen times. Usually to other writers when I mention an “aha!” moment that could change the course of my story. It was an aha moment, indeed; but it never changed the course of my story because I could not write it.
I’m stalling here, just as I have for 30 years. Just as I have since that day in the Wilkes cafeteria. OK. Breath.
My mentor told me—reaching her arms across the two-seater table, placing her arms on mine—“Donna, you were raped.”
It took me years—YEARS—to truly accept what she said. I consented, after all. It truly wasn’t until the #MeToo movement that I really began to understand what grooming was and what it meant—and that maybe I had been. And why certain types of girls were targeted: poor, broken homes, in need of someone to pay attention to them.
It took me years—YEARS—to truly accept what she said.
Resilient is the word that many have used when they read early drafts of my story, and resiliency is definitely what’s kept me alive. That is a good word to use. But can resiliency fade? Yes, yes it can.
Now, here in 2023, on the 30th anniversary of the event that would impact the rest of my life—again, an epiphany that I wouldn’t have until much, much, much later—I am putting some pieces together.
In 2011, my mom died at 51, of lung cancer, and I haven’t fully grieved.
I was already numb, I think. I attributed that numbness surrounding her too-early death to anticipating her too-early death. And while there’s certainly truth to that (because she was never without a cigarette, and I would say, “except when she was sleeping,” but she’s definitely fallen asleep with one, likely out of sheer exhaustion for how hard she worked.)
But I now believe I was already numb because of things I didn’t have the words for all those years ago (or even until recently): trauma and abandonment, for two.
I said it earlier, and I’ll say it again:
I retreated into myself.
I retreated into school.
I retreated into work.
I retreated into alcohol.
I retreated into men.
I retreated from myself.
Much of my 20s and 30s were a blur. I did some good things—because resiliency—but I wonder what I could actually have achieved if I’d known I needed help.
So today, here in 2023, I realized how that teenage trauma (well, and probably some much-earlier childhood trauma, but that’s for another time) is very likely compounded with the grief for my mom. No, no. The YEARNING for mom.
I never told anyone about what happened on June 30, 1993, until my early 20s, and it was only one person. And I didn’t speak of it since, not until I wrote about it in a shitty first draft of a memoir in my early 30s.
But tears streamed down today when the thought came to me: that I wished I had told my mom about it. Would she have been mad? Would she have been mad at him? Would she have been mad at me (because, back then, society would have said it was my fault)? Would she have been OK with it because she was a rebel teenager who married and had me young (and why I was already on my third dad)? Would we have cried together? Would she have told me to get out? Would she have cheered me on? Would she have asked if he wore a condom? Would she have taken me to get a pregnancy test just in case? Would she have taken me to a clinic to get tested for an STD? Would she have smoked a cigarette? Would she have offered me one?
I did not wonder these things until today. I’m 44. I haven’t had a mom in 13 years, almost the same amount of years I was alive when this event happened. Why did I not know 14-year-old me needed more from my mom than I was getting; why did I not wonder about that, why did I instead go through the motions of being a daughter?
My mom was absent a lot growing up, but she’s absent now, forever. I never opened up to her about anything. It was an aunt I first told when I got my period, and even then I couldn’t say the actual words: “perverted punctuation point” is what I said. I clearly felt shame about anything below the belly button even before I lost my virginity, so the shame would only worsen.
Despite the shame, I was promiscuous. Promiscuous as hell, but only drunk and in the dark. I know now that I didn’t want to be seen or loved, and I know now that whatever happened to me on June 30, 1993, is likely what made me want to give myself so freely: because that’s what people wanted, that’s what must happen at the end of a drunken night. As if it was part of a bar’s closing time checklist. Wash the barware in the special three-bin sink. Wrap the cherries and lemon and lime wedges and put them in the fridge. Put the stools on top of the bar. Mop. Fuck whoever’s still there. Wake up and attempt to put the pieces together, after you figure out where you are.
I rarely had sex sober. I didn’t do it to feel. And I did it this way for nearly 30 years.
I didn’t let myself be loved, I mean really be loved so much so that I could really love back, not until I reunited with an old college friend. Before that, I had a few relationships that I called serious back then; but I was still healing (and didn’t know it at the time).
Not long after my mentor said something so shocking to me—something that others would also probably pick up on (if only I had told anyone)—she also told me something else, perhaps the best writing advice someone could give me at the time: you’re not ready to write this memoir.
And I wasn’t. I finished a thesis. There were pages. There were chapters. There was an effort. But the truth is, I didn’t know my truth yet. It was in 2009 that I heard those words, when I first faced part of my truth, when I was given a new perspective. Now, here in 2023, I realized I’ve not only been carrying this weight for 30 years, but also that this weight has been burgeoning. I didn’t just lose my mom, but not long after, in the span of two years, I lost a brother, an adoptive father, a grandmother, an aunt (who was my age, practically a sister), and a beloved uncle and close cousin.
I hid behind that loss, though: If I didn’t keep on smiling, someone might ask, “What’s wrong?”
Maybe because I never dealt with—or even acknowledged—the trauma of my teens, the grief for my mom was added to the queue of a long-paused data processing center in my brain. Enter the pandemic, when the world turned upside down for everyone, I finally hit what seemed like rock bottom. Resilience was still kicking from within, but only spurts. Survival mode. Bare minimum to live. I disappointed people. I disappointed myself. If my go-getter 24-year-old self had the power to travel to the future, 2022 would be the year to which she’d need to travel in order to prevent me from doing something drastic. While her 43-year-old self would never contemplate taking her own life, she did think, often, that being dead would be easier. [I made the mistake of saying this aloud once; I assured him I was fine and vowed only to think this thought moving forward.]
If I didn’t keep on smiling, someone might ask, “What’s wrong?”
Several years ago, I realized I hadn’t celebrated a birthday since my mom died. (Nor have I decorated for Christmas.) But it was more than that. Had I lost so much hope that I didn’t want to see more dreams come to life? I was surviving, but the reason I became self-employed in 2015 was to write more. (Remember, I hadn’t really touched that draft since 2009.) I was throwing myself into work and side projects that made me happy, but I wasn’t putting any energy into the thing I wanted—needed—to do for myself. Only upon reflection did I gather that I wanted to make my mom proud, so badly. But since she’s not here to be proud of me, I just stopped giving things my all.
Deep down, I know I don’t want to stop trying. And this “someone to be proud of me” thing has been on my mind for a few years now, but it hit harder during the pandemic, and it’s hitting me hard tonight — can I even call it “tonight” since it’s really 3:30 a.m.? What is time?
And speaking of time. As I’ve let people down these past few years, I’ve told myself and others that I have a time management problem. While that is true—and while it’s also true that I’ve been diagnosed with a sleep disorder and ADHD and anxiety—the root of my issue(s) is likely very much a whole big bunch of stuff: dots that haven’t been officially connected, lines that haven’t been drawn back as far as they should have been.
Can you lie to yourself if you don’t even know the truth?
In 2008, I made a trip to Oklahoma, where I lived as a teen, to do “memoir research.” I thought being in the physical places during those pivotal formative years would help stir memories. It was effective in many ways. But as I rewatch a video I took at my old apartment complex—a little tour on camera to help me remember later—I see myself prance up the steps to a second-story, one-bedroom by the pool. I hear my cheery voice say, and “And this was where [he] lived!” In that moment, in 2008, there is only fond memories of that place, that time, that me.
Thirty years have passed. He’s gone. My mom is gone. So many people are gone. But I’m still here. While I might not have an answer for “what even is time anymore?” I do know that there’s never enough of it. I need to use what’s left of mine more wisely.
It was a “help wanted” sign that started this, and it’s help I’ve needed ever since. I just didn’t know it. I know that now. I wasn’t ready to write a memoir, because I did not yet know what I was writing. I’m more aware now.
I retreated. And retreated and retreated, and did not recognize I was doing so, not until I became unrecognizable to myself. But I recognize it, and me, now.
Robin Smail