I’m Still Standing

A note before you read: this piece touches on surviving abuse, though it spares the specifics. If that's heavy for you today, take care of yourself first. I’m going to add this to part of my “Live Like Elton” series because he is the one who got me through what I hope I can do for others today.

There's a version of my story that's just a list of horrible and terrible things that people should never have to go through. A catalog of things that were done to me, by people who should have known better, by people who were supposed to protect me, by people who had power and used it the way power gets used when no one is watching. While I scream and plead for salvation from schemes, set-ups, and violence. I could lay all of it out. Name every category of harm caused by the likely scenario of monetary value for the abuser, I would assume. Partly the reason I’m scared of money and fear it today. Also, why I’m not so good with it. A crazy thing to fear, right, money? I have lived through more kinds of abuse, violence, and trauma than most people will ever hear about in a lifetime, and thankfully, you’ll never have to endure it. But in the end, it all goes back to money. The value of someone or something, a skill to be traded.

But that list isn't the story I want to tell anymore. It hasn’t gotten me anywhere in the past, so why keep beating a dead horse? While I have been living under a constant state of fear for the last 5-6 years or so, I beg the question of when I can finally just be? To exist as I am is a treasure, for what is likely the greatest gift anyone could ever receive. Humanity, that is. But that list is what happened to me. It isn't who I am, is it? Maybe it’s because of this list that I am who I am today?

For most of my life, I thought surviving meant getting through the thing on the basis of fear of failure and not losing the feeling of being loved or belonging. You take the hit of self-reservation and doing the thing you don’t want to do because it’s not who you truly are, then you stand back up, you keep moving, you don't let them see it land between the feeling of safety making it to tomorrow and fear of the next challenge. I was good at that, to be honest. I built an entire identity out of endurance, out of being the one who could carry more than anyone thought a person could carry and still show up the next morning with the work done. I wore it like proof of skill set, while grimacing, I'm fine. Look how fine I am… I’m just hiding all of the bruises, scars, and trauma I experienced to make it here today because I can’t let you down, ever.

It took me a long time to understand that surviving isn't the same as healing, and that being unbreakable is not the flex I thought it was. “Men don’t show pain” doesn’t give parents the right to abuse their kids, no matter their age. Being unbreakable just means you never let yourself put the weight down, and you never let the abuser show how heavy it was. They’ll never know the callous formed in my heart unless they want to see it, which they never will, because recognizing mistakes is weakness in their eyes. But when an army goes to battle, they don’t practice their downward strokes; they practice the upward swing to improve their weakest throw and perfect where they have missed the mark. An obvious metaphor for people who value strength but only when it comes without sacrifice, I suppose.

Here's what I know now, on this side of my story.

I know that what happened to me was real, that it was not my fault, and that no amount of working harder was ever going to get me out of it. That last part took the longest. When you grow up believing love and safety are things you earn through effort, abuse rewrites the math in the cruelest way. It tells you that if you just performed better, gave more, became more, endured the abuse because you deserve to suffer in order to receive grace, the harm would stop. It won't. It never had anything to do with whether you were good enough. The people who hurt you made a choice that was about them meeting their needs and does not reflect anything about your worth.

I know that I am not the worst thing that was done to me. For years, I let those events, the lies, the gaslighting, the violence, the complete succumbing to a timeline that I finally allowed myself to believe because I was told it was true… it would draw the borders of who I was allowed to be. The space that I was allowed to exist in, because, after all, I didn’t actually exist in the space that I remembered to be true, I had made it all up. Damaged. Marked. A cautionary tale for those who don’t listen to their parents. But a thing that happens to you is an event such as this, is it’s that is not an identity I have to carry. I am not the abused; I am the one who survived, and I am going to make sure it never happens again. I will be the person still standing in a room that they’ve tried to empty, but damned me if I don’t fill it again because nobody deserves to lose access to human rights.

I know that softness is not weakness. I actually believe our weaknesses are what make us stronger. The hardest part of coming out the other side of my story, well, when I do come out of it, I suppose, hasn't been the strength. Strength I had in spades, I suppose. It has been the ability I have of letting myself be gentle with the person who went through all of it, the person I have to leave behind, the one I had to bury. He died. Learning to speak to myself the way I would speak to anyone else who survived what I survived. With some grace. With some tenderness. With the basic decency I extended to everyone except me, because I am so embarrassed that I allowed things to happen, or that I didn’t fight hard enough. Maybe I didn’t scream loud enough. Maybe it was the hope I put into the idea that maybe my story would be told and that someone would do something because I had nothing. I was tired of fighting it. Reality, love, my appearance. I was tired of fighting to survive. 

And I know that telling this, even in pieces, even without the specifics, is its own act of taking it back. I had once said that if I could just pick up the pieces of my heart again and put them back together, things would be fine. Even if all the pieces weren’t there and they didn’t fit exactly the way they once did, it would still be better than having no heart left to give to anyone. For a long time, other people held the narrative of my life. They decided what was true about me, said things that weren't, and used silence and shame like a leash. Writing my own version, in my own words, on my own terms, is me picking that leash up off the floor and deciding I don't wear it anymore.

I'm not going to wrap this in a bow. I am not "all better." A part of me feels like when you drop a piece of dough on the floor and pick it up again, maybe brush it off, only to put it back together with full kneaded dough, as it holds dirt to the surface. The more you knead it, the more dirt gets spread through the unbaked good, and there’s nothing you can do to remove it. You can always put the piece back that fell to the side, but it will never go back to the way it was before that piece was dropped, touched, or allowed to succumb to the dirt. You’ll never be as you were, neither will I, but you have something worth sharing.

Healing isn't a finish line you cross once and get to stay on the other side of. It's a practice. Some days I am solid. Some days, something small knocks the wind out of me, and I am back inside a feeling I thought I had moved past. I had thought I had escaped this and didn’t have to go back again and experience that pain. Then, like a train hitting a roadblock, you realize that it's not allowed, and you’ll always hit that roadblock. That is not failure. How you handle that roadblock is the real story. That is what being a real person carrying a real history actually looks like.

But if you are reading this and you have survived something that doesn't have clean words for it, something that lives in your body more than your memory, I want you to hear the one thing I most needed someone to tell me: you are not what was done to you, and there are two sides to every story. You are who you choose to become in the aftermath. And choosing to share your story, even slowly, even badly, even on the days you don't believe it, is always the right thing.

I spent my entire life thinking I had to earn the right to take up space. I don't anymore. Neither do you.

I'm still standing. That, it turns out, was never the ending of my story, because surviving was always the true victory. But when I can finally live again. When I can just be. That’s when I will know it’s done, and my life can begin. And this time, honey, I want the whole fucking fantasy that goes with it.