* * *
I never know when I’m allowed to feel my pain and when I must put it away for the sake of company. People may want me to cry in front of them initially, to “prove” myself, to make them feel a part of my pain, but they don’t want that proof—or pain—to last forever. They don’t want me to start hyperventilating while we’re watching an episode of Girls that unexpectedly deals with rape. They certainly don’t want me to ruin their outing to Banff’s Cave and Basin by having a breakdown when a strange man pushes past me.
These displays are not cute. They’re not “healing.” They’re inconvenient: intrusions of real-world ugliness that disrupt the collective illusion of perfect put-togetherness. Despite this idea that we as survivors should share, that we should remember and then move past our pain, that we should “deal” with our issues, there are very few places any of us can show our scars without being shamed. If we slip up and accidentally let our trauma overtake us in public or at the wrong moment, we are treated with shock and disdain—as though showing human emotion makes us somehow less than human.
I suppose I should stop being so surprised when we’re treated as less than human. After all, the trial of Cindy Gladue’s murderer was in 2015, and the levels of dehumanization the Canadian courts allowed to take place during it are enough to make a person physically ill. I would rather not go into the details of the sexual assault that led to her death, which are incredibly disturbing. Instead, I would like to emphasize that Gladue was a thirty-six-year-old Métis woman with three teenage daughters. She was struggling to overcome addiction, but she was still a person, she still experienced joy. She liked cooking shows, made legendary apple crisps, loved to draw and listen to Mötley Crüe. She sang Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” to her daughters to lull them to sleep. She was loving. She was loved.
During the trial, photos of Gladue’s dead body were shown in front of her mother without warning, the disturbing image imprinted in her mind forever. Gladue’s vaginal tissue, the most private part of her body, was entered into court evidence and displayed to a roomful of strangers. This was the first time human tissue had ever been accepted as evidence in a trial—an unprecedented move that was apparently required to convince an all-white jury that Gladue, an Indigenous woman who performed sex work, deserved justice when she was murdered. She still didn’t get that justice. Her murderer was cleared of all charges, which meant her body was further violated after her death for no reason. Her trauma was put on display in a desperate attempt to shock jury members into feeling empathy for someone they’d been told their whole lives wasn’t a real person; to remind jury members that her murderer, a white man, the type they’d been told their whole lives to make excuses and allowances for, was deserving of punishment this time instead of more excuses and allowances.
That’s the unspoken truth about these pleas for our stories, and these criminal trials. They’re never just a presentation of the facts. They’re arguments—and one side is much easier to argue than the other. Arguing for a woman to be considered a liar in a society that has hammered in our inherent unreliability is not difficult at all. Arguing for us to be believed is much more challenging.
Similarly, arguing that a manipulative woman is making false claims of rape to get “even” with an innocent man is not hard; it’s merely spitting back up the same ideas about men and women we’ve all been forced to swallow for centuries. But arguing that a woman deserves the right to police the boundaries of her own body—boundaries that are continually, sometimes violently broken by men who have been taught to disregard women’s active, informed consent—is a task similar to Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill, waiting for it to roll back down and crush him. It’s contrary to all that we’ve been taught about women and men. It questions the very legitimacy of Western misogyny, and thus, Western society.
In other words, it’s blasphemy.
People are willing to believe anything that reinforces their unexamined view of the world, no matter how far it strains the laws of physics, decency and common sense. They’ll believe Gladue consented to the sexual assault that ended up killing her. They’ll believe that Knox was a crime-scene mastermind able to erase only her own DNA from a murder scene. They’ll believe that you, nearly blackout drunk and crawling over train tracks minutes before, were in a perfect state of mind to consent to sex, and did. And the only way to even attempt to convince them otherwise is to let them stick their fingers in your bloody wounds. Give them details you’d rather not relive. Let them see. Let them feel. Let them taste. Your comfort, consent and mental health didn’t matter before. Why should they matter now? You want them to believe you, don’t you? Don’t you?
If we aren’t required to give consent or allowed to refuse consent when it comes to recounting our own trauma, what is left for us? The men who carry out this violence against us don’t have to testify in their own defence, yet we have to relive our trauma to prove our innocence. Our innocence is always what’s really on trial, not these men’s guilt.
I suspect men who rape don’t encounter anywhere near as many questions in their daily life about what they did and why as those they raped. They don’t have to watch people evaluate every last detail of their appearance, mindset, alcohol level, sexual history, actions leading up to the assault and following the assault, as they weigh whether or not to believe them. I suspect they don’t have panic attacks or hyperventilate on occasions when people ask these questions. I suspect they don’t even feel any guilt. After all, they were just doing what society has told them they have always had a right to do.
When I advocate for my right to forget about my sexual assault, I’m advocating for the same right my assaulter has been given. I’m advocating for people to believe me with the same blind faith people believed my assaulter. I’m advocating for the right to move on with my life, the same way my assaulter is allowed to move on with his. I’m advocating for the right to be occasionally happy, the chance to achieve my goals, to be considered more than someone’s victim. Had I taken my assaulter to court, his lawyer would have made the same argument about him: that he has the right to be happy, to achieve his goals, to be considered more than someone’s assaulter. That argument would more than likely get him cleared. Even though only the strongest sexual assault cases even go to trial, only 42 percent come back with a guilty verdict. Sexual assault has one of the smallest conviction rates of violent crime in Canada.
When you take two of the same thing and paint one pink and one blue, why does the pink one always cost more?
Here are other morals of other stories: Survivors should not have to live lives of deep regret for other people’s actions.
Another person’s decision to commit a crime against us should never cost us more dearly than it costs the person who committed the crime.
Our trauma is not something we should ever be expected to supply upon demand.
Healing is not the same for everyone.
My trauma is locked inside a room. I want to ask everyone to leave it the hell alone, but I worry that if I even mention it, someone will break open the door and gape at my pain without my permission. Or shame me as “unhealthy” because I won’t lock myself inside that room and watch myself get hurt over and over. Or torture me with the same thoughts I use to torture myself.
Or.
Or.
Or.
I deserve to have the key to my own memories, my own trauma. I deserve to decide when and with whom I share that trauma. I deserve the right to move on—or not.
I deserve what my rapist never gave me: a choice.
CRUDE COLLAGES OF MY MOTHER
haven’t seen my mother in more than five years. I haven’t seen her the way I choose to remember her for much longer. Her unmatched energy, her unabashed goofiness, her unvarnished love. And her smile. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that.
I could never objectively assess her beauty. Her personality eclipsed her features—one of those rare people who is somehow above menia
l things like physical appearance. She radiated outward. In my mind she is forever tinged by orange light—a sunset, perhaps, or an open flame. The further I get from that person, that vision, the more I try to write her into existence—a literary séance I hope will inch closer to catharsis. But words haven’t alleviated my guilt, and words definitely haven’t helped her navigate the systems that have shoved her and held her down. It’s that part of her life which I labour to forget, to my nausea and shame.
My mother has bipolar disorder. I have never liked the starkness of that word, “bipolar.” In three syllables it eschews all nuance and subtlety. A word so strong even I tend to think of her in terms of her position between these two theoretical “poles” instead of as a living, breathing human with a range of emotions. Is she depressed this time, or manic? Sleeping too much, or not enough? In every conversation we have, I attempt to dictate her mental health, or rewrite her history, or diagnose her emotions until they’re mere clinical terms. After all, I’m the sane one.
My mother has so many odd facets of her life and personality that piecing everything together is like viewing a Tom Wesselmann collage: there is a surprised satisfaction in recognizing the disparate parts, a strange contentment in realizing such different parts form such a complete work, then finally an unsettling sense of wrongness once one considers how contradictory those parts are. If I were to make a list of descriptors that could define my mother in order of what I consider to be most important to her, it would look like this:
Mother of eight
White (ex)wife to Tuscarora man (Race supposedly not important to her, but important nonetheless.)
Fervent Catholic (Could explain 1.)
Computer genius (Offered a job by NASA, turned down so my older sister with cerebral palsy could stay at the facility she was in.)
Kung fu master (Sixth-degree black belt, to be exact.)
I could add other things, like her star athleticism and resultant eating disorder in high school, or her contradictory food bingeing and weight gain in married life, or the history of mental illness in her family (her closest brother committed suicide; her youngest brother struggled with addiction for over twenty years; her mother dealt with dementia; I suspect her father had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, since he was prescribed Lithium, but there’s no one left who will tell me). I could bring up the isolation she felt being dragged from America to the Six Nations reserve in Canada without any legal protection or permission. All of those are only parts.
The last time I saw her sick (again those poles! As if she could be simply classified as merely “sick” or “healthy”) she was homeless and had just gotten out of jail. My dad had had her arrested for stabbing a holiday cookie tin and leaving it on the porch, or as the courts called it, “threats” and “domestic abuse.” A restraining order and a week in jail later, she was out on bail and visiting me at work. She approached the lottery kiosk I was working at narrow-eyed, headband pulled across her head the way women did in the early ’90s. Her personal style was like a testament to the time before my dad, a time capsule she couldn’t bury. I could see the illness starting to work its way under her skin, transforming her. Her entire face looked different when she was manic. Her pupils were giant, surrounded by only small circles of green. Her lips were curled in a grimace, wrinkles like parentheses around her mouth, crescents of blue-tinged skin drooping below her eyes. And her jaw always set as if she were waiting for a fight.
Within a week of her release my mom went missing. My sister and I found her charging down the street in downtown Brantford, her lips moving fast as she yelled at no one and everyone. We managed to get her back to my place. Pacing, shaking, eyeballs darting, muscles tensing. I’ll never forget the way she looked at the TV in my living room as she told me someone was listening to us from inside it. There was unshakable confidence in that look.
I’m not sure what she remembers of all this, if she remembers anything. She could argue with surprising credibility that nothing was wrong with her at all, that she just had post-traumatic stress disorder. She’d say it calmly and coolly, as if post-traumatic stress was something a person agreed to during a marriage ceremony with a decisive “I do.” But then I’d mention things she’d rather forget. The time she tried to rip our thirty-two-inch TV from the wall because it was evil. The time she trashed our house with the destructive artistry of an entitled rock star. The time she thought demons were in our trailer. She threw a knife at the couch right next to me in an attempt to “kill them.” If I bring this up with her, she tells me that she didn’t think there were demons at all; she was just really angry; I’m making it all up. I wonder whether she really believes that or if it’s something she has to believe.
Recently I’ve read about people with bipolar disorder experiencing memory loss. One person, a computer programmer like my mother, was unable to keep his job because things he knew before he got sick apparently flew to the farthest recesses of his mind once bipolar disorder set in. The theory is that the bipolar person is too stimulated when manic to focus on what’s happening around them, making it difficult to create new memories. When depressed, the person feels too bad about themselves to see anything but their perceived flaws, thus nothing is remembered but the feeling of worthlessness. But what about good old-fashioned repression? What of not wanting to remember the things you did when you were on sensory overload, or the people who had to tend to you when you were so depressed you couldn’t bathe yourself? Who would want to remember their kids’ muffled cries from another room, their small bodies tense and taut as violin strings?
Most of the time when we talk, my mother and I just pretend nothing ever happened, though the evidence of it is always there. Everything we say to one another bears the weight of our unacknowledged, ever-present, fucked-up family history. I can’t look at her or talk to her without feeling it, darting in and out of my mind’s peripherals like some thick-limbed jungle cat. There’s only so much a person can repress.
Ironically, it has always helped me to split my mom in two: Normal Mom and Bipolar Mom. Whenever I have to interact with Bipolar Mom, I seem to entirely forget Normal Mom, the mom I love, who knew my schoolgirl crushes and laughed at every one of my terrible jokes and pushed aside her steadfast religion to help me through my teenage pregnancy. I think of Bipolar Mom as something entirely other, a beast so terrible that it doesn’t deserve the courtesy of courtesy. I wonder if my mother thinks the same thing of herself, if she compartmentalizes things she has done and labels them “Under the Influence of Bipolar” or “Entirely Mine.” Maybe she doesn’t think about these things at all. Maybe she can’t.
* * *
Kanye West revealed he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder on his 2018 album, “Ye.” Across the cover, over a moody image of mountains and swirling clouds, are the words:
I hate being
Bi-Polar
its awesome
I wasn’t surprised. I’ve always analyzed the erratic behaviour of others, mentally checking off symptoms before confidently, quietly announcing to my husband, “That person reminds me of my mom. They probably have bipolar disorder.” I said this about Britney Spears in 2007, when now-infamous photos emerged of her swinging a green umbrella at a photographer—her head freshly shaved, her eyes dark pits that looked but didn’t seem to see. I said this about a complete stranger on the streets of Toronto asking for change who, when I gave him some of my change but not all of it, started following me, spitting insults with an anger that vibrated on another frequency. I said this about Kanye when I saw him perform live in 2013. Three-quarters of the way through his incredible two-hour-long set he gave a rambling fifteen-minute speech that started with a declaration that, despite portrayals to the contrary, he wasn’t angry at all, that he was “extremely happy.” As his words tumbled out and tangled up, Kanye never worried whether we were following his logic. He didn’t seem to care. “If I say something completely stupid, completely fucked, it don’t matter,” he said. “If I say som
ething that’s completely inspiring…take that with you, apply that to your life.” He spoke with the focus and confidence of a motivational speaker. He spoke until he felt like stopping.
I saw all of these symptoms when my mother was manic: the eyes of Britney, the anger of the stranger, the conviction of Kanye. When she was manic she would talk for hours, usually about my father and all the fucked-up things he’d done to her. She’d talk until her throat was raw and her voice rasping. She’d talk even if it was two in the morning and the person she was talking at was trying to sleep. It didn’t faze her. After all, she wasn’t having a conversation, not really. She was delivering a sermon. We kids were supposed to nod at her accusations and revelations like true believers at church, affirming everything she said as though hers was the very voice of God. If she asked a yes or no question, her gaze fiery and fixed and waiting for our response, and we gave the wrong answer, her voice would become louder, sharper. “Oh, you don’t think he’s irresponsible? Do you have any idea how much money he owes your grandmother? Do you know what he did with that money?” We could either continue to question her account of our father, ensuring we were screamed at for hours, or we could ridicule him, too, hoping that with Mom’s aim trained back on its original target, we could slink away, unnoticed.
This was life with Mom’s mania: the anger, the yelling, the way she’d keep us all up, even on school nights, because the entire world needed to know what was on her mind. Aunts, uncles, cousins, cashiers, neighbours, priests, teachers, police officers—all of them would hear her. God himself would hear her. She made sure of it.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Page 12