Personal Statement - Going and Staying
Going
I spent my twenties as an educator and an advocate of
women and children outside of this country. During that time, I became
accustomed to a few things that were good for an educated, white American girl
of perceived beauty, regardless of the harms and hurts I myself carried: I was
always the wrong note, as it were, the extra shoe-- the mistaken face, the one
who couldn’t move right, do it right, say it right, see it right. I was
entirely the wrong size and sound, making for a nearly
unrecognizable gender. (I was too big and too loud to possibly be a woman)
Still, of all the humbling gifts given in the going from
the Maori women’s healing gatherings after a rape or murder, going to
the aboriginal children of sex workers under the stars in
the Ghost Inhabited Time
going to the trafficked women of upper Burma and the
foothills of the gods which seemed to have forgotten them all, going, going
I learned
what it means to pick out of the seemingly innumerable
injustices the exact events that we will call crimes—to name wrongs in those
contexts had none of the shame I sometimes hear in the pejorative tone towards
the word, “victim, for godsakes.”
Rather, I learned that act of naming harms moved
individuals’ worlds to the assertion of a positive right to be free of
them—raised us both from the chained bed of The Way Things Are to the
commanding front of “I Am More Than This.”
Going and going gave me that.
Staying
I came to Vermont to stay. As it turns out, I ended up
going. But staying the decade or more there, working among all of my
colleagues, and the victim/survivors whom we serve, gave me the things that
only staying could. Whether they knew it or not, I gained from them a great
deal of strength as we learned side by side.
If I were to gather some of those powerful flowers
together and make them into a tincture I could dispense, it would be a
tincture called Possibility and it would be for all survivors of violence.
I imagine the me who I was, shortly after
surviving/witnessing abuse as a child, surviving domestic and sexual assaults
as an adult and drop by drop, I serve her this tincture—each drop
says,
It is possible
To grow a new heart. Like a womb that has carried a baby,
it will secretly be bigger.
It is possible
That the cement and stone that has become your body will
crumble softly, the doors will open, the light and air quietly dancing
through.
It is possible
That though the lion is long gone, you can stand on the
tongue in the mouth of the one that still lives in your head and say, “You
can’t bite me anymore.”
It is possible
To laugh again, with the brand of humor that honors
everything outrageous and absurd about our losses—like the woman in shelter
surrounded by her worldly possessions encased in Hefty Bags who remarked, “At
least I’ve finally got matching luggage.”
It is possible
though it is a bargain no one willingly strikes To have wisdom where innocence once lived
It is possible
To accede to ethical leadership without losing your
freedom
To taste the sour fruit of mistakes but to remain at the
feast, knowing there’s still a place at the table for you
To hold up to the light the prism of an opposing
viewpoint without feeling the press of moral vertigo against your person
And finally, it is possible
To find gratitude, as I feel so often now—
so that I can say,
When our paths have crossed,
Thank you for releasing my faults and accepting my gifts.
Thank you for letting me do the same with you.
These gifts from you are staying.
And for us, survivors among us, all of us
Let us keep going
Keep going
