A few months ago, I registered for “The Story Workshop” at the Allender Center in Seattle. Primarily aimed at helping survivors of sexual abuse find the purpose and weight in their fractured personal narratives, the conference promised to be intense but deeply healing.
I don’t know exactly what I expected. I was naively hopeful that I would get a few good writing tips that would enable me to beautify my past and approach it like one of Aesop’s fables—third-person fiction with a perfect little moral at the end of the story.
Hating the Little Girl I Once Was
That’s not what happened. One of the pre-assignments was to write 700 words about a painful childhood memory. I was surprised at the one I chose. It wasn’t a heavy hitter, so to speak. I wrote about a Polaroid picture I kept re-discovering in a shoebox at my parents’ house, and my inability to figure out why looking at it made me want to rip it to shreds.
I’m about ten years old in the picture, with scraggly hair, pale skin, and a vacant expression. I’m wearing my mom’s oversized knit sweater and Oxford shoes my dad had bought me. In my hands is a piece of green felt I’d cut into the shape of New York for a school report about a U.S. state. Coincidentally or not, New York is the place my abuser had recently moved. I think I wanted to be closer to him. Don’t try to understand it. I still don’t.
My small group dissected the story with grace and insight that could only be offered by those who spoke the same horrific language of shame and rage and grief. I felt nothing as I spoke about it. “It is what it is,” I remember saying, committed to my ambivalence. My group leader brushed away a tear and said, “Kaeley, this story breaks my heart. Why do you hate the little girl in that picture so much?” I couldn’t access her understanding or her empathy. I recognized the accuracy of her assessment, but I didn’t know how to change it.
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3 comments:
Kaeley Triller Haver is either an extremely disturbed person or a deceiving one. Her own rape experience which she seems more fuzzy about than clear was apparently not by a one time experience with a transgender person based on her writing. It seemed more a repeated relative attack, maybe her father. It is hard to known if what she is writing is true or one of those myths that will travel the internet until the end of time. It reads more like one of those myths to me.
I think the whole point is the way women/girls are being set up by this; not that some 'trans' is going to rape them, but that some pervert taking the opportunity to gain access through this law will.
Political Correctness has de-volved into pure insanity.
You can thank democrats for this crazy bill.
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