I haven’t been writing much lately, for a multitude of reasons. My days have been filled with preparing to leave one home and establish another, as well as with work as a lactation consultant and with a two-week online training to become a sexual assault nurse examiner. I have been taking a lot in, and have had little energy at the end of the day to reflect on the content of my life as it is at the moment and put those thoughts into words.
The SANE training (taken from this program) both put a lot of information into my head and took a fair bit out of me emotionally. For the most part, I found myself very well able to cope with the content. There was only one really hard day in which we spent 8 hours looking at graphic images of anogenital injuries in adults, adolescents, and children (all the way down to infants). This is the worst of the worst of the worst (seriously, what level of awfulness has a person experienced in their own past that would cause them to rape a baby?!?), including some postmortem images. It was heart-wrenching, not because it re-triggered my own trauma history (surprisingly, it didn’t too much) but because I know how much work it takes to come back from something like that. It isn’t just that that is one of the worst days of a person’s life; violence fundamentally changes the way that you see the world and people in it. It alienates you from your own body. It leaves you with broken pieces of your life that need time and space and support and healing to reassemble.
Going into this new line of work, I don’t have any illusions of saving my patients from the horrors they are experiencing. I cannot rescue them. But I can go to the places they are and provide them with dignity, care, compassion, safety, and hope. I am flooded with awe and gratitude that my journey has turned me into the person I needed to have there with me when I was assaulted. I have become, in many ways, my own sexual assault nurse examiner. I know how much of a difference your care providers can make (for better or for much worse) during this awful time. To have someone believe you, listen to as much of your story as you care to tell, treat your medical and emotional concerns as well as collect evidence that could help if the case goes to trial, and empower you to make decisions all along the way about what you do or do not want done to your body: this is important.
One of the things I learned in this training that most resonated with me was the concept of “disastrous response.” The idea (and research supports this) is that the way the first people who you interact with after an assault respond to you can have huge long-term impacts on how your trauma unfolds, for positive and for negative. The severity of the assault is not as strong a predictor for long-term problems afterwards as the quality of the response you get when you tell. Having people blame you, judge you, treat you in an undignified manner, threaten or frighten you, and/or not take you seriously can cause huge problems later on.
I want to be one of the people who believes my patients, who gives them control back, who reconnects people with the land of the living. I cannot save them from what they are going through, but I can sit there with them in it for the time we are together and I can offer them hope in the midst of it all that it will not always feel like this. It is unspeakably awful, but not forever.
There are some things I wish I could tell myself 10 years ago about the aftermath, the early healing period:
- You need support people. Collect as many as you can find. Talk to them. Get your story out of you. You’ll be surprised who will listen.
- Get out of bed. Every day. Put on clothes. Go through the motions. Do what needs to be done, even if you don’t feel like it right now, even if that is the last thing you want to do. Inertia only makes it worse. Push through it.
- Reconnect with yourself and your dreams. Set a big goal, and take baby steps towards it, even if it seems impossible now. You will amaze yourself with your own courage.
- Get a dog. Or a cat. Or several of each. Let the creatures heal you.
- Drink tea. Take hot baths. Walk around in nature. Breathe.
- Create something every day, no matter what it is. Color with crayons. Make crafts. Paint. Write. Design your life and make it beautiful.
- Let yourself fall in love again, with a person or a song or a beautiful sunset. Life has broken you open, and this raw state can be one where deep beauty knocks your socks off.
- It won’t hurt like this forever. Seriously. There will come days where you don’t think about it at all, as impossible as that sounds right now.
- Don’t ever ever ever ever give up. There are people you can call and ask for help. Don’t be too proud to ask. Let them help you through it. Then you, in turn, can help others.
Mary Lambert, one of my new favorite artists, has a beautiful song called “I Know Girls” about loving your body. The concept of sexual violence and subsequent self-harm is part of the song. Some excerpts:
I know I am because I said, “I am.”
My body is home…Lay your hands flat and feel the surface of scarred skin
I once touched a tree with charred limbs
The stump was still breathing
But the tops were just ashy remains
I wonder what it’s like to come back from that because
Because sometimes I feel forest fires erupting from my wrists
And the smoke signals sent out are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen…Your sexiness is defined by concentric circles within your wood
It is wisdom
You are a goddamn tree stump with leaves sprouting out
Reborn
To help me process the intensity of my training (and to avoid eating every cookie in the world to stuff my feelings down), I have been spending time in nature. On my lunch break at work last week, despite prohibitively chilly temperatures, I walked around outside barefoot and delighted in the sensation of the cold mossy earth beneath my feet. They were screaming with the cold and the sharp rocks and pine needles, but I felt so very alive. I wandered through the trees, breathing them and being breathed. I greeted the robin birds and felt so gloriously present. I took a picture of my bare feet and my tattoos (note the purple scrubs!), claiming my existence in this place, in this moment.
There is something about moving that triggers my deep thoughts. So much has happened while I lived in this little studio. The Robin that moved in here is not the same person I am today. I have grown up a lot, faced some of my biggest fears head-on with compassion and courage, and found strength I wasn’t sure I possessed. I was married when I first turned the key to this apartment door; I will walk away independently. I was neither a nurse nor a midwife; now I am both. I wrote my thesis in this place, following my grandmother’s story back through time and bringing her legacy alive. I had so many wonderful study sessions with my friends in my little living room, practicing skills on each other (everything from IV starts to clinical pelvimetry) and on my wide variety of low-tech simulation equipment. As happy as I will be to have twice as much space and my own laundry and a designated place to park my car so I don’t have to park four blocks away when I get home from catching a baby at 2:00 a.m., it will be bittersweet to walk away for the last time.
I walked home from work through the Seattle University campus this afternoon. I said goodbye to one of my favorite trees in the world, knowing I can return whenever I want. I took one of its pine cones home with me and will bring it to my next place as a reminder of the shelter my tree-friend gave me during my time here. I noticed in several places where branches had recently been trimmed that the tree was bleeding red, and I touched the wounds gently. I sat under this tree and finished up a journal I had started writing shortly after catching my first baby last year.
I hugged one of the low-lying branches and felt how solid the tree was, how firmly planted in the ground. I asked the tree if everything was going to be okay, and I got a simple, one-word reply: “Grow.” This is what trees almost always tell me when I ask them a question. They answer not audibly (obviously), but with their entire being. Growing is what trees do. Beginning with their tiny seed-selves, trees have in their DNA to sprout and plant down roots and reach eager buds towards the sky. Buds sprout leaves and stretch outward, becoming branches and stalks. Bark forms a protective coat around tender insides, shielding the channels that bring nutrients from the soil to every part of the plant. Photosynthesis happens (science!), and trees create food for themselves. Eventually, as the tree matures, it puts forth more seeds and sends them out into the world to make more trees, wrapped safely in fruit or pine cones or some other clever mechanism.
The tree grows according to its own inner code. My favorite redwoods could never turn into apple trees, and similarly, apple trees were never intended to live for millennia, towering over all the other creatures on earth.
When I stood under this mighty creature and rested against its branches, a beautiful pine cone in my hand, I felt the life energy coursing through it, and this, in turn, connected me with my own vital force. I have imprinted on my DNA what I am to grow into, as well. I am a Robin, and a damn good one. I am not any other person who has ever existed, nor should I be. I have a big calling, and big work to do. When I spend time in nature, I am reminded that I don’t need to try to make myself into anything. I just need to allow myself to grow into who I already am and be as wholly myself as I can in any moment.
As I walked away, I heard the refrain of a song playing in my head:
Oooh, follow my tracks
See all the times I should have turned back
Oooh, I wept alone
I know what it means to be on my own
Oooh, the things I have known
Looks like I’m taking the hard way home
Oooh, the seeds I’ve sown
Taking the hard way home
–Brandi Carlile, “Hard Way Home”
I’m not sure if there is an easy way home, to be honest. My journey has been circuitous, not linear. Every stop along the way has opened new doors and closed old ones. This will be true for the next few months, as well. I will begin working as a sexual assault nurse examiner and a midwife, from a new home base in a new city (not too far from where I currently live, but it will be an adjustment nevertheless). I am glad to have friends, furry and otherwise, to keep me company throughout the transition. (This particular friend is more than happy to help me fill my moving boxes!)
So there. I did it. I got some thoughts out. Now it is time to close my eyes for a while and let dreams teach me new things. Much love to all. I couldn’t do this work without you.