Anonymous: Tornadoes and Volcanoes
We met over ten years ago when we were both pursing post graduate degrees. He seemed sweet, confident and arrogant, all at once. He was popular and loud. I fell in love with his ability to command the room on the very first day I saw him.
He’s always had issues with control and temper, but in the beginning I found it endearing and sexy. I was a different person at the tender age of 24 than I am today. I’m not sure why those things mattered, but they did. I looked for what I knew. I grew up with a larger-than-life father, I thought I needed the same in a spouse. I am personally somewhat of a tornado of energy. I was (and remain) often afraid of the intensity of my emotions. I believe that I probably felt the need to be tempered by someone who appeared even stronger.
At some point in the past decade however, his control issues grew into something more. He grew angry.
He has become a tightly coiled spring that releases at the most random of times. Sometimes the coil unfolds during one of our fights, sometimes the coil unfolds during a random drive downtown because someone forgot to turn on their signal light. But always, there is such venom in his words, such violence in his outbursts. There is true hatred and anger in his heart. This anger now seems to rule almost everything he does and every interaction he has. I started to notice it about 5-6 years ago and it has grown to the point that everyone around us sees it, too. I have stopped making excuses or trying to explain. I usually just change the subject when it comes up in conversations with other people. It’s about all I can manage to do these days.
We argue, a lot. We are explosive. We yell, we fight and then we retreat into our corners. There is never a winner. Neither one of us knows how to back down. We are trained in the art of fighting. We do it well, we do it ruthlessly and we do it with calculated cruelty. We have become experts at finding one another’s weak spots and twisting the knife deeper into the wound. Not a week goes by these days without tears and yelling and, lately, violence. Is this what Eminem means when he asks what happens when a tornado meets a volcano?
Last night it was really bad. He yelled, screamed, punched the bed… and then made a crack in the wall with his fists. This isn’t the first time he’s broken things. In the past he’s broken garbage cans, toys, and various objects around the house. I can almost time the precise moment when it will happen. His face gets all red, he starts to softly hyper-ventilate, he tears up and then the pressure valve opens up swiftly and violently.
So far, it’s never been directed at me, nor at our son. But I wonder how long it will be before it is. I don’t really question, at this point, whether this is possible, it’s more of a question of ‘when’ than ‘if.’ We’ve had all of the proverbial ‘I’ll leave if this happens again’ conversations. I hope that I have the strength to leave if it ever gets worse. I feel like a walking cliché. A few people know about his violence but no one knows the depth of this issue.
I see myself reflected in the pamphlets that are handed out at domestic violence centers. I’m am educated girl, and you would think that I know the signs of a domestic violence cycle when I see them. Yet I somehow can’t leave, not yet, because I have hope. Is it stupid to have hope? Can volcanoes and tornadoes ever live in the same house?
My question for you, if you’ll indulge me… as survivors, and former abusers, how do we cross the bridge to break this cycle? How do I translate hope into change? Is that even possible? Ever?
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Prozac
It had been over a year since my first rape. My rapist was gone, off to Germany with the Army, and I was feeling… if not confident, then definitely better than I had for quite some time. I decided that I wanted to start dating again… nothing too serious, just something to play around with. Maybe that means I deserved what I got.
His name was B. We weren’t dating — not at that point. We weren’t even fuck buddies, really; we were just two people who had had sex repeatedly, no strings attached. He made me nervous. The last time I saw him, he’d hit me when I’d refused to have anal sex with him, so I knew he was violent.
I don’t know what I was thinking, going over there again. I genuinely thought everything would be okay if we just didn’t have sex, if we just talked, if I didn’t make him angry. And at first, it seemed to be working. We were standing in his kitchen, and we talked, and he explained that he had anger issues and sometimes he had trouble controlling himself, but he didn’t mean to hurt me and he was very sorry, and I accepted his apology. And then I started hinting, you know, oh look at the time kind of hinting, so I could leave. But then he said, why don’t we go back to my bedroom and I’ll make it up to you? And I was thinking, I told him over the phone we weren’t going to have sex this time. That was my one condition for coming over again. So I told him that, and he got angry. Very angry. He said, you can’t come over here expecting to get everything you want and not give me anything in return. And I was like, trying to be reasonable, so I said, I’m not having sex with you. Maybe next time.
I saw his face change. It was the creepiest thing; one minute he was just… I don’t know, pissed but normal-looking, and the next minute he was… filled with rage. His face just twisted, and his eyes narrowed. I saw him approach me as if in slow motion. I may have backed away. I don’t remember. But I couldn’t escape him. He hit me, twice. Open-handed, but hard, hard enough that I fell down. I landed half on the carpet and half on the linoleum, so my head didn’t get hit hard or anything. I started to get up, and I was screaming, stop it, stop it! But before I could get up he was on top of me, pushing me back down on the floor. He sat on my chest and started unzipping his pants, and I was… begging, I suppose you could say, although I don’t like that word. I was just saying, stop it, please, stop, and he wasn’t even listening to me. The anger had left his face; now he looked… incredibly calm. Impassive. He wasn’t fazed at all. And my mouth was open from screaming, so he just shoved his fingers in there and pried it open further, and I grabbed his wrist but before I even knew what was happening he had shoved his penis in my mouth. And he kept pushing it in further and further and I was choking and gagging and could barely breathe.
He knew exactly what to say, too. You are mine. I own you. You are nothing. Fight back and I’ll kill you. And while looking back I don’t think he really would have killed me, at the time I believed him. So I did what I do best during rapes and just tried to stare at the ceiling, but all the while I could see his eyes, his bright blue eyes, laughing down at me. Which is stupid because eyes can’t laugh, but you know what I mean.
He didn’t get off in my mouth, which is probably fortunate. Instead he seemed to get bored, and he pulled out and I could BREATHE again, and so I was just laying there gasping for air when he started fiddling with my pants. I remember going limp at that point… I was numb. I almost felt like I wasn’t in my body anymore. He had trouble getting my pants off. I was wearing these tight, stiff black jeans, and he had a hard time pulling them down, but he finally managed to slide them off and then he pushed down my underwear. He put his hands between my legs and pushed them apart – I guess that’s how I got the bruises I had afterward – and then he penetrated me and raped me. I could hear his heavy panting and see the horrible grin on his face…
Finally he finished inside of me, and then pulled out and stood up. As he was zipping up his pants he looked down at me and said, “You should get dressed. And then leave.” And then he walked away and went into the bathroom.
I was instantly mobilized. I didn’t waste any time at all; I stood up and got dressed, grabbed my keys and my purse, and I left. I remember stumbling down the stairs and groping my way into my car, and then I turned on the car and left instantly. The drive home is still a blur to me; I’m fortunate I didn’t get into an accident. I remember getting home and crawling into bed and attempting to sleep, but my mind was reeling…
Since then, I have been struggling with recovery. I see a psychiatrist every week, and he helps, but he can’t stop the nightmares. Or the flashbacks. Or the body memories.
The sick part is, B and I dated. AFTER he raped me. He called me after it happened, see; sweet-talked me, convinced me he was harmless… I was an idiot, looking back. I dated him for about a week, until he hit me again, knocking me unconscious on the floor. After that I ran… and I haven’t looked back.
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Prozac writes at Flirt with Suicide. Her original Violence UnSilenced post appeared here in 2009.
Arvan
I was 12 or 13 years old, back in ’72 or ’73. It was summer. I played outside with my friends and did whatever young boys do, with time on their hands and no supervision. My friend Bob and I were outside goofing around. We ran into Jimmy, a man that lived in the neighborhood. He was tall, thin, had a mustache and long hair, in his late 20′s or early 30′s. He often said hello to me as he walked by. Bob and I saw him and we got to talking. There was a forest preserve across the street from my house, where I often played. As we walked along talking, we entered the woods. I had no reason to be suspicious. I was always in those woods.
Somehow, Jimmy and I became separated from Bob. We were alone in the woods. He told me that he wanted to tell me a joke, but that we should go further up the hill, away from the path. Once we were away from the path by a good measure, he told me that he wanted me to “do him a favor.” I had become nervous, but I was too frightened to move. I feared that I might upset him if I did. I began to think in my mind as to how I might control this situation. But, I was not the one in control.
By now, he had a hold of me and was pulling me to the ground. He said that he wanted to “lean on me” I didn’t know what it meant, but I was terrified. He pulled me down and his grip was very strong. I remember thinking of what I might be able to say, to make him think that I was not going to run and at the same time, get free of his grip. I remember pleading with Jimmy, begging him to stop, to let me go. He was still trying to get me to lie down and was taking off his shirt or something. I remember him loosening his belt and pants. I remember him dropping his pants. It was all happening so fast and I didn’t know what to do. I was crying and asking for him to stop, but he wouldn’t stop.
Then, I think we heard Bob on the trail, looking for us. Jimmy still had me, but now he was asking me to promise to keep this a secret. Not to tell anyone. I was so frightened but I was so relieved that I might be able to get away from this place in the woods. I promised him that I would. Suddenly, I was aware that I was free from Jimmy’s grip. I felt as if I had come back from the grave. I saw light returning to the forest. I could hear things… birds, cars, planes.
I found Bob, and Jimmy came up right behind me. I didn’t tell Bob anything right there. He looked at my eyes and we just got out of there. We separated from Jimmy and he asked me what the hell happened. I told him and he said that he thought as much. We discussed what to do… go to the police, tell our parents…what? We didn’t tell anyone. We were pretty sure that we were the ones that would get in big trouble. I was sure that I would. We told no one. I told no one–for years. I think that I told my parents about 15 years later, when we were all liquored up one night.
I was lucky that a friend came back to find me. If he had run into another pal and taken off to do something else for a while, I might not even be here.
I saw Jimmy around the neighborhood a few times more and then not again. Bob and I stuck together for months. I never went outside without knowing for a fact that Bob was around. I felt lucky that my parents and nobody else knew. I was a skinny kid and the common insult back then was ‘fag.’ I didn’t want to be called fag for the rest of my school days. I didn’t want to be in trouble with my parents or police or have Jimmy come looking for me, if he found out I had told on him.
I pretended that it never happened, but it did. It took me years–over a decade–to admit that I was not the guilty one. When I could bring myself to think about it, I was clear that Jimmy was not gay. He was a child molester. They are not the same thing.
My rape story is one that has some lucky breaks–I lived. My story is a survivor’s story. It has colored my world view. I think that it allows me to stand one step closer into someone else’s shoes. Thousands of children go up into the woods every day and do not come home. Children are raped and killed in every country in the world. Children, barely able to think for themselves.
At the top of the human social ladder is .01% of the population running empires of weapons, oil, drugs, finance and bureaucracy that exists only to make them richer. While at the very bottom of the pile, being starved, raped, mutilated, burned and murdered, are hundreds of thousands of children whose lives are forever shattered every day.
I don’t know how the world gets fixed, how the economy turns around, how jobs come back and how we fight terrorists. I don’t know how anything gets solved. I do know however, that I don’t know how to fix all this crap, all the lies and all the cruelty. I do believe that until the children are safe from the absolute worst of humanity, we have accomplished nothing.
Arvan writes at Sex Gender Body.
Joelle
It bothers me that I remember so little. I don’t remember what bathing suit I was wearing or who else was in the hot tub with us. I don’t remember what day of the week it was or how long it lasted (it felt like hours) or what finally got me away from him. I don’t remember the smell of chlorine or what fear that intense tastes like. The only thing I remember vividly is his hand. Not his face, not his body… just his creeping, crawling, fucking disembodied hand. And his wrist, the bone sharp against my fingers like it was the only real thing in the whole world as I pushed it away again and again…. There was hair on his wrist and the back of his hand, a premonition of manhood on a boy. The memory of that hand makes my flesh crawl. It makes me want to hide, alone, where no hands can touch me ever, even the hands of people I care about and trust.
Especially the hands of people I care about and trust. Why should they touch me when something like that has touched me too?
I remember just enough to make me feel sick, and wrong, and victimized, and vile. I think his hand only got all the way down my bathing suit bottom once, and then it was just a struggle underwater, a constant push and pull. I remember that he tried to make me touch him, and how my arm shook with the effort it took to pull away from his grasp. I remember saying no, it’s awkward, stop; he argued and just kept going. I remember the fear, how it paralyzed me, how my legs didn’t feel strong enough to get me away, how I just sat there, frozen and praying to a god I’ve never believed in that it would stop, oh please, just make it stop. I remember going home and feeling disgusting, only disgusting isn’t a strong enough word for what I felt. I felt like my skin was slime and everything was too tight, and I sobbed as hard as I could in my bedroom, pacing back and forth. That was the one and only time I cried about what happened to me.
And all of that is awful to think about, but sometimes I torture myself with all the details I don’t remember. Like, where was my friend L? I vaguely remember her being pissed off all evening because I was swimming and sitting on D’s lap in the hot tub and she was jealous and miserable. But I don’t remember where exactly she was when all of it was happening, or how I got home that night. And what about K? Did she know how badly I wanted to escape? I left the hot tub at one point shortly after it started, blabbering that I needed to make sure K wasn’t mad at me because she liked D too, even though I didn’t give a damn if K was mad at me because K was an annoying brat, but then I went back into the hot tub. Why the fuck did I get back in? Did I think he’d be a good friend? Did I think he’d just give up? Did I forget all the times I went with B to get drunk at his house because although he was our friend, I didn’t trust him? I don’t know, I really don’t. And then there was an empty water bottle, but how long had it been bobbing around in the tub before I secured it between my legs to block his hand? A fucking barricade, that’s what it took because he. Would. Not. Stop. And we moved at one point, too, from one side of the hot tub to the other, but why? Because of what? And if I could move that far, why the FUCK didn’t I get away from him?
S. doesn’t understand why I want to remember every detail about this awful event. It’s complicated. I hate how helpless this memory makes me, and I don’t even have the power of knowledge on my side. I lost all control, even over my own memories. It goes deeper than that, though. I’m afraid if I can’t remember everything–what I ate for breakfast that morning, what time it was when it finally stopped, what his face looked like–then I can never completely accept what happened and move on. And, deeper still, I want to remember in order to do one of two things: justify it to myself (it was a big deal, really) or get over it (it wasn’t as bad as I thought). I want to remember because how can something that played such a huge and horrible role in my life be something I can’t even remember? I want to remember because the NOT KNOWING is somehow worse. Like my body is trying to protect itself, like my brain isn’t working right for a reason, like it actually was so terrible that I NEED to not remember, like the full memory of what happened could destroy me and I want to prove that NO, it can’t. But then again, what if I’m wrong? What if I NEED to tell myself it’s stupid to feel this way after six long years, because what if it’s not? What if I dig deep enough and finally believe that what happened was sexual assault and it did happen to me and I did not deserve it and it was not my fault? Would that be easier to live with, being a victim, admitting my own powerlessness? Or is it better to just feel stupid, or to push it away entirely?
The first time the reality of it really hit me (aside from right after it happened), I was a senior in high school. Nearly four years had passed since that night at the party–four years of being single, and dreading flirtation, and putting up walls, and being as intimidating and honest to myself as I could, and cringing inside when my friends used the phrase “hooking up.” I was in my English class and we were watching the movie “Crash.” There’s a scene where a cop gropes a woman, and my teacher paused the DVD there and said,
“We all understand that’s rape, right?”
Everything inside me turned cold. Rape. It’s such an ugly, violent, unforgiving word, and it was being applied to a woman who was only touched. Years of me belittling my experience slapped me in the face. For years, I hadn’t thought about it. For years, I pretended all the guys around me were totally uninteresting and immature, and although most of them were, that’s not why I avoided them. I was scared of them. I had never been raped, I would never claim to have been, but I had learned and adopted a very straightforward philosophy: Tell a guy you like him, and he will try to rape you. He won’t listen when you say no. He won’t stop. He won’t care about you one bit, he wants one thing and he’ll take it.
After that movie, I allowed myself to think about it and what I felt was revulsion. I wanted to tear my skin off, wash and scrub myself until there was nothing left. I literally felt ill. Dirty. Tainted and worthless. I blamed myself; how could I not? He hadn’t drugged me, he wasn’t holding me down, he didn’t tie me up or lock me in somewhere. We were outside, surrounded by people. I could have gotten up and left at any point, and instead I just sat there. I sat there and LET this happen, as tough as I believed myself to be and as intolerant of bullshit as I’ve always been… I didn’t hit him or tell him to fuck himself or simply remove myself from the situation. I JUST SAT THERE, feebly pushing his hand away over and over, uselessly bleating the word “no” because it’s supposed to mean something, right?
I drove myself crazy over the details I couldn’t remember. I looked up the definition of “rape”–every one I found mentioned penetration. I couldn’t for the life of me remember if there had been penetration. I tried playing it over and over in my mind–there was the crawling hand, it crept across my belly, I felt self-conscious, it disappeared into my bathing suit bottom, I worried about if I should have shaved and immediately was appalled that I could worry about that, NOW–and then everything goes dark until I grabbed his wrist. Was there penetration? Was it rape? What the hell did that bastard do to me? I found statistics. One in three women has been sexually assaulted. I thought, Shit, I’m one of them. I felt like I was losing my mind and STILL, I couldn’t remember.
By a terrible stroke of chance, D sat next to me on the bus the next day. This was a guy who I’d known since third grade, a guy I used to be friends with, a guy I’d seen every day on the bus and at school for the past nine years. And he was also a guy who had sexually assaulted me. But seeing him every day had never bothered me because I’d never thought about it. That night after the party, as I wept alone in my room, I buried it. I blocked it out. I forced it to go away because it was too much. But there we were, sitting next to each other exactly as we had been in the hot tub. And his hand–fuck, it was the same. I sat still and listened to music and sweated and tried not to show I was dying inside. I highly doubt he remembers. To him, it was a time he’d gotten turned down six years ago by a girl he hadn’t even liked. It didn’t affect his life at all, and I’m angry about that.
Accepting what happened might mean I never forgive D for what he did. I’m okay with that. However, I do need to forgive myself. I was fourteen years old. I was just a kid, a scared kid. I thought “hooking up” would be what it was like on TV–not sitting in a crowded hot tub with a guy trying to finger me before he’d even kissed me. I was confused and young and frightened. However I might feel about the situation as an older and wiser almost-20-year-old, I need to put the blame where it belongs. I do not blame that fourteen-year-old kid, the girl who felt too much and tried too hard. I do not blame her for being attacked, for not knowing what to do. I feel only pain for her, what she went through, what she was PUT through, and I also feel pride because I know what she doesn’t: I know where she’ll be in six years. In a good guy’s arms, in a wonderful relationship, happy and safe and in a state of mind that knows that being touched when you want to be can be incredible, and that what happened was not her fault.
I can finally see that it’s not about being a victim and weak vs. shutting down and being strong. It’s about being brave vs. being a coward. It’s about the fact that being a victim also means being a survivor. If I could, that’s what I would say to my fourteen-year-old self. We survived. We fucking thrived.
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Joelle blogs at Embrace Your Name.
