Meanwhile, a few staff members were fast approaching burnout. Being a Marine did not help me navigate this well. I was used to supervising folks who conquered every challenge that was thrown at them. I forgot that the real world didn’t run by the same rules to suck it up, or sacrifice yourself for the greater good. The veterans on my staff were used to dealing with everything life threw at us, all the while taking orders from assholes and sucking up a dozen other different headaches. Our civilian counterparts never had to play by these rules, at this relentless pace, with these kinds of pressures. I had no patience for my staff’s fragility, because I had no patience for my own. I was focused on changing the world. I didn’t realize that I couldn’t do it without taking care of myself first. And I couldn’t do it on my own.
Trauma has a way of multiplying. When vicarious trauma happens on a staff, it is something that requires complete attention. I chose to press forward, for the cause. My staff was handling legislation influenced by relentless congressional timelines and media dictated by breaking news. Some of them were ready for this onslaught. Many were not. Had trauma not been the air that we were breathing, the substance of our work, and the thing that connected all of us, this might have been doable. But that’s not how trauma operates. The growing pains were excruciating. Fissures that exist in every young organization became gaping holes. I was learning, fast.
In one moment of despair, after handing in her resignation, one staff member asked me how and why I would ever choose to do this job. Several of my staff had lost faith in why we were doing the work anymore. Moreover, they felt a palpable sense of frustration with me. I couldn’t protect them from the emotional onslaught in the community. I couldn’t protect them from my own pain. And I couldn’t help the women and men out there who were spitting venom every which way, mostly because they were hurting. I felt like I had failed everyone.
The Times column was a turning point. Our organization had little to no experience handling security threats. The civilians on our staff were freaking out. By the time our second summit happened, a couple of folks had simply broken down.
• • •
At our second summit on military sexual violence, with our staff burned out and overwhelmed, we hired undercover security. It had come to that. We rescinded or denied invitations from people we thought threatened the safety of the event. The staff was concerned I might be attacked. I was worried that a veteran might attack a member of Congress. Indeed, a fight between two veterans had to be broken up at the second summit.
I was tired of feeling upset and scared of the women who tried to tear me apart. It was important for my sanity to see these veterans as whole human beings, and not as enemies. These were supposed to be my sisters. We were all supposed to be supporting one another, weren’t we? This was hard to remember when we were mired in individual she-said, she-said dynamics.
One day, a veteran compared me to Jesus. Even, unbelievably, offered to walk my dogs. Three months later, she hated my guts and all I stood for, and tried to get everyone she knew to hate me, too. I suppose in retrospect it was a method of asserting control in her life, particularly given that she must have figured I had so much control over mine. I’d used this method myself when I’d felt lost, battered, or unsupported by unjust circumstances way beyond my control. I barely knew another woman who hadn’t. But knocking another woman down only made me feel more miserable and less in control.
In the world of meditation halls and yoga studios, where I was spending increasing amounts of time, I practiced being joyful for other people, especially when I felt jealous. I practiced forgiveness when I felt hurt. I practiced generosity, even when I wanted to withhold kindness. This was no Pollyanna, can’t-we-all-get-along bullshit. It was often harder than hating everyone. But it felt so much better than living in fear and resentment. And it was working. I couldn’t control how these women felt about me. But I could control how I responded to them.
I largely kept it together in front of the cameras and in high-stakes meetings because of this personal work. I tried to see people as fully human, capable of good and bad, kindness and cruelty. At the same time, my healing was being threatened on a daily basis because I was handling hostile people, with very little support, while still in the limelight.
Reliving the worst parts of our lives for our work while also keeping some semblance of wellness was a delicate balance and a risky proposition. I knew this intimately, because the more time I spent with the media or in congressional offices, the more toxic and damaged I felt. I was absorbing the community’s emotions and my staff’s frustrations while having little time or space to deal with my own. I was sometimes so busy and overwhelmed that I completely forgot that this work was not only difficult, it was personally triggering and retraumatizing for me. Veterans needed to take the lead in policy work if it was to have any meaning or impact, and yet few people seemed to be caring for our welfare or longevity. I needed to take my life into my own hands.
• • •
Some of the board members who knew social justice history seemed to think I was facing the challenges every woman-of-color activist stepping into white- or male-dominated roles had ever faced. It was not lost on me that I was one of few women and usually the only person of color in the rooms I was walking into—House and Senate offices, Pentagon chambers, cable-news greenrooms. This is what power and influence looked like. In the national security world, my Brownness and my gender were so loud and obvious in a sea of white dudes that it often felt like I was screaming even when I said nothing. The Marines had prepared me well for this.
But as a Brown female activist, I was the object of unfair expectations. I was supposed to be a healer, caretaker, and savior at all hours. My body and my time were expected to be public domain. I was not even entitled to my own joy. This was the hustle, but it was no way to live. No person could be this for other people. Selflessness was a hoax, something that just exhausted us out of caring for ourselves and others. I rejected this role, and very likely offended a great many wounded veterans because of it.
Like most women, I needed to say no more often. It was my parents’ lack of boundaries with me, and then men’s, that made saying no a radical act in my life. The white men I knew rarely had to wrestle with saying no. They were never expected to be all things to all people. Boundaries were their gift. But saying no was causing some kind of existential rift among survivors who expected me to be therapist, friend, fixer, and changemaker. It was an unfair and impossible situation for me to be in. And still I was a hopeless empath, incapable of truly shutting veterans out. Other people’s pain weighed me down constantly. And what’s worse, I felt the burden of guilt as old as my ancestors every time I established a personal boundary. This, too, was unfair.
I wasn’t just facing hatred from women veterans, though theirs felt the most vicious. Military men wanted a piece of me, too. The hostility against me was often most visceral after a media hit. After one television appearance on MSNBC, I found myself glued to my laptop, neck deep in a Twitter backlash. I had more enemies than I knew how to deal with. Sometimes they were individual hell-raisers. Other times, they were well-organized groups. Military men were particularly aggressive after my Fox interviews. I was chickenshit. Stupid. And the worst insult of all: ugly. I really missed just being someone’s disrespectful little terd.
I believed in civil conversations. I was convinced that despite the abyss of technology between me and hate-spewing veterans on the Internet, that we could find common ground in the basic humanity that we shared. I even wished attackers well before signing off. I was so naive.
Three hours after one Twitter storm, I was sitting on a therapist’s couch, shaking, hugging a pillow, crossing my legs so hard I was cutting off circulation. He asked me as I clutched the pillow, “Do you feel safe?” He wanted to know if I needed to call the cops, or the feds. These were legitimate questions. Some of my feminist colleagues had had to move out of their homes after trolls had threatened th
em online. The only difference here was that my trolls were members of my own community. The truth was, in the military, “I got your six” was usually employed only for the straight white men among us.
I felt like trauma was ricocheting around in my body on repeat.
“Sure. Yeah.”
Three minutes later, sinking into the couch, I had changed my mind.
“No, I don’t.”
I was not equipped to defend myself on social media against gangs of older, conservative military men, most of them desperately, hatefully holding on to the last vestiges of the military they once knew. Nor was I prepared to defend myself against hordes of traumatized women who had turned me into their favorite punching bag.
I was an ex-Marine. I was one of Bristol’s protégées. But nothing the Marines taught me prepared me for the onslaught of hatred spewed by veterans. I was terrified of my own community.
• • •
My gentleness had been a subject of some debate in the years I was back home, fighting the good fight with my organization. Many folks found me fierce. This was generally intended as a compliment, but I found it harsh, and out of sync with who I remember being, and who I wanted to become again.
I remembered a me before all of this Marine madness happened. I was kind and loving, and yes, even gentle. But I no longer knew what or who I was.
In 2014, I decided to leave SWAN. Later that year, I decided to leave Greg. It was a lot to leave at once. For ten days, I was practicing mindfulness meditation and compassion at a silent meditation retreat in Barre, Massachusetts. I paid close attention to everything I was doing and feeling: physical sensations ranging from the minor itch on my elbow to the merciless throbbing in my upper back; a head-banging narrative of emotions, thoughts, and extremely convincing monologues. My breathing. My boredom. My bitter, protesting knees. The endless supply of unwelcome people from back home—some uppity woman in my building, a jerk member of Congress.
The heartache, doubt, and emptiness were overwhelming. I’d ended a twelve-year relationship with Greg so I could find out once and for all who I was in the world and if I could actually survive on my own without the Marines, without Greg—heck, without anyone but me. I was desperately unsure.
We may have been in silence on these retreats, but there was nothing remotely quiet about it. My thoughts were often paralyzing. I was relieved no one could read my mind. You’re not good enough. You’re never good enough. You’re wasting your time.
Insights came in meditation without warning, like an ambush, or maybe a blessing.
We were encouraged to avert our gaze from other practitioners, in order to focus more on the inner world of our minds and bodies. I looked up at some point and noticed a white guy on my left, walking at his own pace. With otherworldly speed I took in the length of his toes, the wrinkles in his shirt and stubble on his cheeks, how his head drooped forward and his hair stood on end. I looked to my right. Another young man, tall, shuffling along, with a different stride and pace and set of peculiar sounds. Beyond him, another man. And another. And another.
I was the only woman in the room. Lost in my own universe, I’d been walking parallel to these dudes, all of them white, all of them, like me, absorbed in an effort to focus on the now of simply walking, back and forth, and back again. And I found myself suddenly overwhelmed, my belly warm, tears on my face, and now the sound of me crying softly mixed with the sound of me picking my feet up and placing them on the wooden floor again.
In their careful, quiet stepping, none of these men even remotely posed a threat to me, to themselves, to each other. Their harmlessness, and more than that, their deliberate effort to take ten days away from booze, bottom lines, Tinder, jerking off, and god knows what else to tune into the realities inside them, and maybe to even make themselves kinder, gentler people, suddenly blew me away. It was possible for men to value things other than violence, killing, and the manipulation of women. Wasn’t it?
When did I start scanning the rooms of my life for danger? When did every man in my path become a potential threat to my safety and sanity? Surrounded by white men, I was completely outnumbered. But I was okay.
I was okay.
When I checked in with my senior teacher hours later, she sat facing me in a chair, her reddish-brown hair loose and wild across her shoulders and back, her feet firmly on the ground, hips and legs comfortably wide, exuding such a solid power that I wanted to stay there for hours, witnessing her strength. This power I sensed was coming entirely from her tuning into me—my pain and sorrow, my capacity for joy. We barely talked. We didn’t need to flesh out the details of my history, because she was listening more deeply than that. This was no magical hocus-pocus. She’d practiced this kind of listening, with full attention, with complete compassion, without talking back, without judgment, for decades. I realized this is what it felt like to be truly seen for the first time. And I realized I wanted to do that for other people.
• • •
It was inevitable that Greg and I wouldn’t last. Working together at SWAN was hardly the reason I let him go, but it was a catalyst. I needed to fully recover from the Marines, and doing this without him seemed necessary. I broke his heart when I left him. My own heart shattered into pieces as well. No one had ever been that loyal to me. He was now family, but I couldn’t depend on him if I wanted to heal completely. I was not a whole person. I needed to put myself back together, on my own.
Letting go of the weight of fear and releasing the desire to fight others meant that even in the saddest moments, I was now looking for joy. If you’d asked me what I did for fun a decade ago, I would have said Nothing. Now I sought and embraced meaningful activities that I would not confuse with self-harm or ego. I discovered the healing power of open-water swimming in the waterways of New York City. I threw myself into flying trapeze. Joy returned to my life, slowly.
I returned to dating, announcing to my parents in an elaborately constructed email—a second coming out—that I was open to exploring relationships with women as well as men. But in my early forties, out of practice, and navigating a creepy online landscape, dating was hard as hell. When a firefighter dumped me a week after Uma died, a year after Shiva had died, I spiraled in a downward depression so fast and hard I figured I might never get up again. I felt like I’d lost everything. I didn’t know what my purpose in life was anymore. Beating myself up became my new mission.
The despair felt existential. In Indian terms, laid out by patriarchs and mothers-in-law throughout time, being forty, single, and childless meant my life was worth nothing. It seems the independent life I’d chosen to live had gotten me nowhere, because somewhere existed only if you had a husband and children. On some level I knew this was garbage. But the cultural indoctrination was deep. I could feel a herd of Indian elders screaming, I told you so. I was grieving so much I could barely see straight. I felt like I had no reason to live.
I called Eli one day, crying my brains out, and she flew out from California for an intervention. Eli told me that I needed to like what I saw in the mirror. I needed to practice liking myself, the way I was already practicing feeling the emotions and sensations in my body and witnessing my thoughts. Petrified, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, unable to look up. Damn, I thought. This is how little I think of myself.
I lifted my chin upward and dared to look.
“I like my eyes.” Yes, but that was easy. I had Furby eyes, after all.
“I like . . . my nose.” Who was I kidding? I hated my nose, the nose that connected me to my father. I went on. It was agonizing. But when I was done, I was still breathing. I continued.
“You’re beautiful.” I could hear Baughman saying, I can’t hear you, Bhagwati!
With some oomph, I said, “You’re beau-ti-ful.
“I’m beautiful. I love myself. I. Love myself. I love you. I love myself.” Goddamn, this was exhausting. And it was less than 100 percent authentic. But some of the terror and weight of staring at m
y face in the mirror had shifted. So I made this a daily routine that followed my meditation practice. I wouldn’t leave the apartment in the morning until I’d recited my self-love schtick. I was slowly believing my own hype.
• • •
There’s a controversial treatment in trauma psychology called exposure therapy. Rape and combat survivors report mixed results. Some women veterans I know vehemently discourage it. Essentially, you’re asked to retell—and, therefore, relive—your most traumatic experiences under supervision of a mental health expert. Sometimes trauma symptoms can multiply, making life feel horribly worse.
My entire time serving in the Marines and advocating for service women felt like this. I rarely felt safe enough to let my guard down in front of military personnel or veterans. Many thought I was fearless. As if. I was just extremely high functioning under stress. There was only one place where I felt safe exploring my issues with men in the military: teaching yoga to veterans.
In 2008, before I’d started SWAN, founding a yoga class for veterans in NYC felt like a calling. My classes were packed with men. I was not so sure about this. Exposing the softer side of myself to veterans after doing so much personal work to heal from my interactions with them was a risk, for sure. I was terrified they would reject me, as the Marines had done. Despite this, I felt it was important to try.
Sure enough, in my first few classes, testosterone was thick in the room, and I felt myself withdrawing into a familiar shell. But ego wasn’t an asset in yoga, and I think most guys discovered that muscling through class got them nowhere. As the teacher, and often the only woman there, I was able to control boundaries for the first time with military men. It seemed that most were willing to trust me, and were there to heal whatever needed healing. This was unique for me, and for the first time in a long time, allowed me to see men in uniform as capable of deep reflection, even transformation.
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