6 Years Later
*The 6 year anniversary of my arm injury.
I made a video I posted on IG if you’d rather listen to the story.
TW// SA & SH
“I don’t know what forgiveness is but sometimes I imagine myself, hand on my scar, thanking it for holding my skin together. I imagine waking up, and not hating myself for all this violence I enacted on my own body because of violence I was forced to move through. I imagine a pool of grace and I am submerged but not drowning.”
I heard the whispers. People say a lot of things when they don’t know what to say. I know I do.
But I wasn’t trying to die. I swear.
This is six years later. I have a body that has been maimed beyond complete repair but remains insistent on trying to keep me safe.
This is six years later and one hand is still on the hilt of the knife, the other facing its paralyzed fate. We never really left the site of the crime. Not really.
This is six years later and I’m at my own grave mourning. It should never have come to that. I should never have been that close to the edge of the blade. But I was.
I didn’t get up that October morning and decide to stab myself with a knife at midnight. Promise.
Chronic pain was an arrow pulled back into the past but never released.
Medication was the catalyst.
Normalization of violence set the stage.
In surgery I was a thing on a table prepared to be dissected. I was a thing. I was dissected from the wound-in. I was not prepared. My eyes opened. I was still on the table. I was in surgery staring at the bright lights and alarmed faces. I was choking. I was choked. I was fighting. I was losing. Anesthesia didn’t care that I was an insomniac. It didn’t care that I didn’t know the names of any ancestors to welcome me home.
It wouldn't have mattered much anyway.
I didn’t even have the voice to call out for my parents down the hall.
I didn’t have the mind to do anything but wordlessly panic.
Then I woke up confused. I woke up broken. I woke up traumatized.
I woke up after.
I woke up.
I know we love a good comeback story. This isn’t it.
I’m the crime scene. The victim. The perpetrator.
I’ll save you the grisly details. I’ll save you the complete horror.
But I refuse to save you from the truth.
Life isn’t a series of events done to me by others. I make choices too.
I paid for this in more than just a severed nerve and permanent disability.
I’ve been trying to wash myself clean of the blood ever since.
Sometimes it’s easier to be a victim of yourself than it is of others.
Sometimes the crazy catches up and it’s welcome.
Sometimes the worst day isn’t the first but it’s all the days you learn to blame yourself.
That’s the thing with shame– you can scrub yourself raw and still feel dirty. We don’t like to talk about this part. I don’t like to talk about this part. I’d rather swallow my past. But I’m full. I’ve been full. I swallowed the medications. The abuse. The childhood angst. Adolescent mess, baby tears, and everything else I could devour. I swallowed the memory of him, unwanted in me. I didn’t swallow my apology to him. I couldn’t fit anything more inside.
Sometimes the context hurts more than the break.
Sometimes I forget that though a version of me died in my room, I’m still here.
I can tell you how my friends loved me so hard I didn’t want to let go of life. How the pastor told me I should be ashamed and I listened. How my teachers let me sleep in class. How I would wrap around myself like a fetus and my dog would curl up next to me under the covers and stay. How my surgeon died and I didn’t feel bad because he put his hands on me and I was too scared to say no. But my physical therapist always asked for my permission before he worked on me. I can tell you that I finally apologized to myself. I know sometimes sorry isn’t enough.
I also know sometimes it’s all you can offer besides your breath.
I got a lot of rage in me about all of this. I have a lot of grief. I am learning I have to let go of the rage in order to be free. I am also learning that rage doesn’t have to be banished. I am multitudes. There are versions of me that are consumed with memory and pain. There are me's that are sinking under the weight of all the honesty I ask them to face. And there are versions of me that understand freedom doesn't mean forgetting: I wake up.
When you see my scar I hope you don’t only see a wound but you also see how I was put back together. This too, is the legacy of my healing.
Here’s to all of us that carry the remnants of violence in our bodies and commit to staying even when existing feels like a crime. I hope you honour the versions of yourself that are free just as much as you validate the versions of you that are bound in places you can’t thrive living in.
Endless gratitude to everyone who understood they could not save me but they could hold me while I saved myself. You know who you are and what you mean to me.
ART GALLERY on arm disability: How To Live With It