“Thank you for sharing these moments and your monologue. As always, I admire your courage in saying out loud and publicly what so many of the rest of us do not. I am glad you’ve found a community on which to lean on, even down in OC. Sincerely…”
Today, a friend from high school recently posted his experiences with sexual assault via his Instagram. I clicked through the link in his bio to his own blog and started listening to the audio on my way home. It cut in and out, my cell phone reception spotty as I traveled down the 710. When I got home, I inspected his blog to find the direct link to the audio clip and listened a couple times to the way he finished his audio essay, pained but declarative and affirmative in the kind of response he would be able to receive. It took me a while to think about what I wanted to write, what I could say in a public forum, how to keep the focus on him while not being careful not to sound like I was pitying him, and I settled on the above. I was not surprised to learn that he had been sexually assaulted, it seems all too common amongst men, especially queer men of color.
Another young man, also Latinx, had recently shared his own experiences with sexual assault and I listened to him and let him know that I understood and that what had happened to him was not right. He seemed aggravated as well, declaring that he hated sharing his experience because he did not want any pity. I kept my emotional distance, acknowledging that I had once felt the same way, but did not share with him my pain. This young man ended up crying and I felt validated knowing that sharing my sharing my own experiences with sexual assault would only distract him from the hurt he had not yet processed. When he brought it up again over a private message, I again said I was really sorry to hear how hurt he had been. He asked me to stop saying that, as it made him feel bad, and he only wanted to feel good when he was around me and tried to turn the attention to our sexual encounter. I asked that he stop trying to police my emotions, pointing out that all I was doing was having a legitimate reaction to the topic he kept bringing up, that it was serious and deserved professional attention, but that I wouldn’t push him into anything he didn’t want to and wouldn’t bring it up anymore if he didn’t.
This week’s reflection is on a recent experience sharing my trauma and experience in therapy, as well as a meditation on why when showing that vulnerability, we feel that we must avoid pity as a response to sharing traumatic stories.
My cousin interviewed me this week for one of his courses, the topic at hand being something like health in the queer Latinx community. For his interviewees, he was reaching out to yours truly and to a mutual cousin of ours, also bisexual, but undocumented and cisgender female. On questions of physical health, it was easy to point out to my careful diet, forced upon me by a series of stomach issues and social anxieties, within which I gave myself the pleasure of indulging, as well as the ample physical activity keeping me sane throughout the week. On mental and emotional health, I shared that I had been in therapy for some time in grad school and was looking to go back, to work on specific issues which I couldn’t detail yet. I shared instances of self-harm in my past and of the years of my life I spent depressed and contemplating suicide. I pointed out that a great amount of shame came from homophobic family members, including his own mom, my blood relative. I could tell by the look on his face that he was feeling something strong, but I didn’t question him on it and continued to answer truthfully, allowing a silence to hang in the air between us when I wrapped up a rather painful thought or memory. It was clear sometimes he was uncomfortable, but that was completely fair and a valid response to some of the uncomfortable moments I had shared with him. Toward the end of our interview though, I did ask him to consider how these same questions might affect our cousin, who has had less access to resources than I have had to help deal with these issues. I don’t know that she has been sexually assaulted herself, but I had told him that it felt that my sexuality added an extra level of pain from the intolerance around me growing up and that it was only now that I had so much help accessible to me that it finally felt like I was zeroed out, more in control of my emotional state than not, and that I was finally able to receive other’s legitimate reactions.
On those portions of the interview where it was my turn to share grief, pain, and suffering, I did not find myself wondering, more out of intellectual curiosity than anything else, how he might be reacting to my story, but did not find myself sanitizing my pain to ease his consumption of it. Not in the same way that I used to, because I know that there was a time when I felt ashamed to share my own stories so as to avoid a pity party. I remember the first time that I told my therapist of my own sexual assault, a twenty-two-year-old reflecting on his time as an eleven or twelve-year-old. I told that him that it was difficult to place that memory in time, as I had instinctively tried to suppress it and reject its occurrence in a time that was my past in order to refuse to carry it into my future. I remember that he got quiet, dabbed his eyes with a tissue paper, and he said, “I’m sorry that happened to you.” I recall freezing for a bit, processing the scene in front of me and wondering why it was that he was crying but that I only felt a calloused indifference to my own suffering. Our sessions for the rest of that year continued in much the same way, me sharing instances of trauma and abuse, detailing them in ways that had only been written down, only once before spoken aloud and never to someone who was not also sharing their own trauma, with my therapist allowing himself to be visibly upset and me maintaining every nerve and muscle under strict, practiced ease. I doubt I fooled him, nor was it the intent to fool him, I just simply was not ready at the time to feel sorry for myself or to acknowledge that my inner child was still hurting from the violence.
That time has come and gone and with it the sense of shame as if I was responsible for things adults had done to me as a child. It is not that I feel sorry myself now for surviving my childhood abuse and the resultant echoes into my young adulthood. It is that I understand now that pity is not anathema to the healing process and can sometimes be a genuine reaction to complex and disturbing situations. The top definition that Google brings up for pity is “the feeling of sorrow and compassion caused by the suffering and misfortunes of others.” I would not wish any of the trauma I endured onto others, therefore, I acknowledge that it is suffering and misfortune. Similarly, when I see it in others, I do feel a great sorrow that abuse is all too common and remind myself to be compassionate to the individuals in front of me, wherever they may be on their own journey. I know that back then I did not want to experience other’s pity because I was not ready to admit just how much I had been hurt. This twisted itself into the insidious phrase, “It is, what it is,” which I found myself thinking about others around me as well.
See, what inevitably happened was that as I found myself denying that I was deserving of pity I began to create a baseline that had to be overcome for me to feel pity, compassion, or anything other than cold indifference and left me emotionally crippled, unable to really express my feelings, I was utterly unable to acknowledge the negative events that had happened to me and thus unable to acknowledge when those around me were hurting. This conflicted with my desire to help others, to find ways in which I could contribute to society, a desire itself deeply rooted in my low self-esteem and the need to feel accepted within society. This problem continued to grow, as I spiraled into a denial of my past and of what could be happening to others around me. As I’ve said before, I have at times been rewarded for being able to set aside emotions and apply a cold logic. Those positive responses to my suppressing my emotions cause me to shudder in imagining who I would be had I never stepped into that counselor’s office and asked for help.
Whatever it is, the instinct that drove me to desire a kinder, softer world won out and I began to work on my ability to create a space for others when they needed a friendly listener and allowed myself to accept that I truly needed a therapist. From there, I have begun to work on allowing myself to feel that same compassion and pity for myself, to allow myself to acknowledge how that pain has shaped my life, and therefore, to accept that other people may feel pity towards me when I share my stories. In truth, they may feel any sort of which way and that those reactions to my pain are as much, if not more so, a reflection on them as they are on me. After all, not everyone can be a fully trained professional, versed in the best methods to react to different traumas, which is totally fine. But where it is coming from a place of love and kindness, a reaction of pity is simply an acknowledgement of pain.
In that words are limited in their ability to capture broad spectrums of human emotion, it is worth acknowledging that pity can also be “used to connote feelings of superiority, condescension, or contempt,” as per the Wikipedia article on Pity. I understand that false compassion as a way of contrasting the object of pity from the clearly wiser subject expressing pity. This type of pity is anathema to the healing process and has often been the sign of someone who could not allow healing in those around them. As I have grown, I have learned to distance myself from these people, to create space and strengthen boundaries from those who want to see me down as away of themselves feeling elevated above. But it has been a difficult process and it wasn’t always clear from whence this type of pity came. Although I do still try to avoid those who can only interact with my pain through a condescending superiority, I know that this isn’t the type of pity that I was scared to receive when I first started telling others of my pain. After all, toxic and controlling behaviors would not have been new to me then, what was new was gentleness, love and understanding.
In continuing my own journey, I seek to remind myself that it is ok to feel down, it is ok to feel overwhelmed and deserving of some pity. It is ok to feel vulnerable and incomplete. On days that the despair wins out, I allow myself the rest and consider that my life isn’t over and I’ll try again tomorrow.
