by Emilie Pine
At some point during these years, my mum took me to a family counselling session. The two of us sat with a therapist in her basement room. She asked me if there was anything I wanted to say to my mum, and I shook my head. My response to every question was to say I was fine. I had, of course, so much that I needed to say and perhaps if I’d been in the room by myself, I could have said some of it. But, mostly, I think that I lacked the vocabulary. I could not say ‘I’m lonely’ or ‘I’m unhappy’, or, what it all came down to, ‘I am worthless.’ To put my fears into words seemed not only emotionally impossible, but outside the range of how I could talk about myself. Not having a language, or a voice, to articulate what it was that made me feel so alone was catastrophic. And because no one else used these words either, or intervened to help me say them for myself, the silence was complete.
At seventeen, I started to have panic attacks. The air would disappear from my lungs. I’d gasp and try to run outside, desperately seeking oxygen, and then I’d faint (always with the fainting). During one attack, at a concert, I was pulled by security from the crowd and into the backstage area. A medic listened to my chest, my frantic heartbeat and ragged breath, and gave me a shot of adrenaline. It stopped the hyperventilating and then it made me retch. I told people, worried people, that these episodes were asthma attacks. One person accused me of attention-seeking, but I really couldn’t breathe.
I turned eighteen. And I gave up drugs. The speed I was taking was increasingly messing up my insides. I couldn’t sleep or sit still for cramps. I shook. I felt ravaged. I woke up one morning and, before I got out of bed, I took a hit of acid. This isn’t right, I thought, even as I did it. So I faced a choice: all or nothing. I chose nothing. At first, friends thought this was brilliant. They would say about me, almost bragging, that ‘Emilie has given up drugs.’ But without the drugs – surprise, surprise – the rest wasn’t so bearable. The warehouse raves that I’d moved on to, and the squats I stayed in, were desolate places while straight. And the novelty wore off for my friends who didn’t want someone so sober hanging around. I made them paranoid.
Besides, my core group of friends had dispersed. Some who had loved indie and grunge clubs just didn’t enjoy the raves. Some had realised they had to study if they wanted those famous ‘options’ beyond school. Others had already dropped out and, too young for proper welfare benefits, were living on what they could beg and, eventually, income from dealing. Some had been moved to stricter foster homes. Some had got pregnant. I started staying home on Saturday nights. I was back to being the not-popular girl. But at this stage I knew that loneliness was not the worst thing.
A close friend tried suicide by overdose, unsuccessfully, several times, though her bulimia nearly did the trick. A girl I met at a club told me that when her parents found her cutting her wrists, her mother put salt in the wounds to dissuade her from trying again. One friend had taken so much acid he had no short-term memory. Another wandered off from a party one night, disappeared for several weeks and, though he reappeared at a squat, was never the same gentle boy he was before. At least he was alive.
Because not all of us made it. This is a screaming, painful, shitty fact.
Not all of us made it.
A girl I knew at school, who was bright and funny and kind and generous, was also unstable and unhappy, and she was sectioned by her parents. At some point during her incarceration, she hanged herself. A boy I’d known since I’d first moved to London was abandoned to foster care when his father left the country and never returned. When this boy turned eighteen, and was released to live in a halfway hostel, he took a fatal overdose. Among my friends, their deaths were cried over, whispered about, experienced as a physical shock. It was said that my school-friend’s parents had not visited her once in the psychiatric unit. All I could think about was the last time I’d seen her, laughing on a night out, and talking about a band we both loved. I hadn’t really seen the boy in years, but I sometimes spoke to him on the phone. He’d call when he felt lonely, though the foster home limited the calls to five minutes. Their deaths were the most and least real things I’d ever known. I’ve never really processed them. I still expect to see them someday, to catch sight of the backs of their heads in a crowd.
THERE ARE OTHER THINGS that I have not processed.
When I first moved to London, and was still going to school like a regular fourteen-year-old, I would get the Tube home every day, during rush hour. One afternoon, standing in a crowded train, I felt a man rub himself up against me. I was shocked, but found a way to say, quite loudly, ‘Please stop touching me’. He stopped, briefly. But then, after the next station, he started again and I started crying. I wasn’t crying quietly, I was really sobbing. I was a child, in school uniform, and surrounded by adults, but not a single person said or did anything. At the next stop I got off the train, pushing past those silent commuters. I stood on the platform of Gloucester Road for a long time, trying to stop the convulsive tears, to catch my breath. No one said anything.
By the time I was eighteen, I had heard the statistic that one in four women will be raped. I looked around. Were my friends and I included in this figure, or were we all miraculously exempt? I thought of the Tube event and all the other times men had made unwanted advances. I thought of times I had not wanted sex but I had complied. But I had never been raped. It was not until I was thirty-nine and in the audience at a feminist event where women were encouraged to tell their personal stories, that I rethought my certainty about that statement. I had never been raped. I sat in that crowded hall, listening to accounts of serious sexual violence, and suddenly two very clear memories surfaced. Overwhelmed, I left the hall and stood crying on the street outside. Because I had been raped.
The attacks did not happen on a dark street, as I had been trained to think of all rape. I knew both the attackers. I talked to them afterwards. I got up and walked away. Apart from a few bruises I was left physically unscathed. And I did not go to the police. So for all these years I thought of these two assaults as just those times I was forced to have sex against my will. The two times that I did say no, and it didn’t matter.
The first time, it was my boyfriend. He was two years or so older than me, maybe seventeen. One night after a club, he walked me back to my friend’s house. I let myself in with a borrowed key. It was winter and cold so he asked if he could come in too. I told him to go home, that I was only going to bed, but he pushed open the door and stepped into the house. Then I told him to leave, but he just smiled. So I said goodnight and went upstairs hoping that was the end of it. He followed me. He pulled me into an empty bedroom. And then he forced me onto the bed and pulled my tights and pants down and pushed himself into me. I said no. Actually, I said, ‘Don’t,’ but the meaning is the same. He had his hand on my throat, making it hard to breathe or speak, but I didn’t want to call out more loudly anyway in case I woke the other people in the house. I thought they would be angry with me for letting him in. As he thrust harder, I gasped and cried and asked him to stop. And then I just gritted my teeth, tears flowing silently, knowing that it would be over soon. When he was finished, he wasted no time, just pulled out and zipped up and walked out of the room. I heard the front door slam. I dragged up my pants and tights and wrapped the duvet around me. I had had sex with this boy before, consensual sex. So this couldn’t be rape. I continued to see him for another few weeks before he dumped me for another girl.
The second time was a couple of years later. I went to a friend’s flat and had dinner with him and his houseguest, an older man, who was visiting from Ireland. He and I bonded over a bottle of red wine and our shared experiences of anti-Irish racism in London. When my friend went to bed, we stayed up talking. But then he forced himself on me, all six feet-plus of him, holding me down with his forearm across my chest, and his hand pushing my face into the sofa cushions. When he went to sleep I pulled myself out from under his bulk and crawled into my friend’s bedroom, lying on the floor till it was light and
I could escape.
At the time, I rationalised both of these assaults not as rapes, but as the inevitable outcomes of my actions and my lifestyle. Though I would have been horrified if anyone had ever said to me that a short skirt gave a man a licence to rape a woman, in effect this was what I had internalised. I took my punishment because I had a strong sense of having done something wrong, having knowingly broken the good-girl rules. I denied what had happened to me because it was the only way I knew how to survive.
I still struggle to know what to do with this personal history. I struggle with how to categorise the experiences, and even whether to use the term ‘rape’. I am wary of minimising the violence done to other women during rape, and I’m still not sure that I get to claim that experience, not sure if I suffered enough to deserve the label. Added to that, I feel guilt at not reporting these men in case my silence enabled them to do something worse to someone else. But who, really, would I have reported them to? I had no sense, whatsoever, that I would be believed or taken seriously by anyone. I still don’t.
After the second rape I asked the man why he’d done it. He turned his head, and this I remember, crystal clear, The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ was playing on the stereo, and he said, ‘It’s just something about you, a vibe you give off.’ I kept that damaging explanation with me, inside me, for decades. It was something about me. I cried at the feminist meeting all those years later when I realised that the ‘vibe’ I gave off was simply being young and vulnerable and female.
I WAS DAMAGED, but I made it through. I did my end-of-school exams. I got a place at an Irish university, where I finally felt at home. I went to lectures and seminars and met people who thought, like I did, that reading and talking about books was a good way to spend your time. I kept some old habits, drinking oceans of free beer during the open-bar events, but rapidly ditched the others. And I started to play a new game, or rather a new variation on the old game of fitting in. This game’s rules consisted of pretending that I had not, in fact, spent years going clubbing, taking drugs, and going home with random men. My new friends seemed so much more innocent, so I played along.
What college really gave me, though, was a form of control over my life. I was where I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do, and as this knowledge took hold, the need to control my eating lessened. I started eating two, then three, meals a day. I would like to say that I never regress. But it’s easier to write about an eating disorder in the past tense than to actually be past it. Even after years, now, of eating normally, I live in a house without a full-length mirror, or a weighing scales. I am unable to face my body. I hate this fact, even as I admit it here. I hate that it undermines my sense of recovery. I hate that it connects me, backwards, to my younger, pained self. I hate that it expresses a persistently negative relationship between my body and desire.
Desire. That word has changed its meaning. To own my body, my skin and nerve-endings, as a site of pleasure – my own, and not just someone else’s – and to have agency has been a long transformation, and one that still feels radical. Once, in my twenties, I was at a family-planning clinic to get a repeat prescription for the pill. The dispensing nurse smiled and then talked to me about foreplay, and the length of time it takes for women to climax, and she told me that most women can’t achieve orgasm through penetration alone. I endured the consultation, blushing every time she talked about sexual pleasure, but this was life-changing information. Sex, it turns out, is meant to be – it is – fun. It does not shake the whole wide world, or revolutionise anyone else’s sexual politics, but this different attitude to my physical self, only fully discovered in my thirties really, has shaken my world and, often, my body. I am very much here.
IF IT WAS HARD to find the beginning of this story, then it’s also hard to decide on its end, and harder still to decide if there’s any helpful lesson buried in all this experience. A very large part of my current self wishes that my younger self had eaten three meals a day, stayed home doing word puzzles, and gone to school like clockwork. I wish I hadn’t smoked, done drugs, got so incredibly drunk, or run away. And I really wish I had not lost my virginity at thirteen. But underneath all this wishful thinking, I wonder – if I had not done these things, would I have been steadier, or happier, or safer? I don’t know if I can ever answer that.
And perhaps the smoking and the drinking and the destruction are not the full story anyway. Perhaps a body of years should not be judged on the distillation of its most extreme moments. Perhaps I should have written about the tamer times, the TV nights, the family holidays, all those school essays I composed about Hamlet. And perhaps I should also have told you more about my life as it is now, to put it all in perspective, to show that I haven’t just barely made it through – I have flourished. This is an important fact to know. My life is different now, and it’s a good life. And so when you asked me yesterday how I was, and I said I was fine, that I was happy, I wasn’t lying. I really meant it.
But I haven’t told that story, and I haven’t couched the story I have told in a cheerful context. I’ve only given you the bad bits. And in writing it this way, the bad bits become the whole story. So I pause, again, in the task of writing. I look at the notebook page, now so full of words, and crossings out, and wonder if maybe I could write it differently? My internal critic says, ‘Enough with the negativity, Emilie.’ But then, just as I have that thought, I know that this has to be the story’s shape.
These pages cover a period of about eight years. They contain many events and emotions that I have never told to anyone before, or even admitted to myself. The experience of writing them out has been very painful. That I cannot, or have not, avoided this pain by choosing not to write the story is due to one simple reason: the urge to write this feels not only dangerous and fearful and shameful, but necessary. I write this now to reclaim those parts of me that for so long I so thoroughly denied. I write it to unlock the code of silence that I kept for so many years. I write it so that I can, at last, feel present in my own life. I write it because it is the most powerful thing I can think of to do.
Finally, I write this because I can’t time travel. For a long time I have had the recurring and sentimental wish that I could go back to the early 1990s and just hold onto my younger self, tightly, the way she needed, and not pay attention to her protestations that she was ‘fine’. Because I know what I would say to her. I would embrace her and I would tell her that I know she is lonely, that I know she feels lost, that I know she feels worthless. And then, because she is not me, and because she is me, I would assure her that there is something about her, something amazing, something lovable, something special, something beautiful, something fragile, something strong, something worth fighting for.
THIS IS NOT ON THE EXAM
GROWING UP, I HAD NO BICYCLE. Coincidentally, I had no friends either. And, just as I pretended I was fine hanging out by myself, I pretended I didn’t care that I couldn’t ride a bike. Then I got too old to start learning, too big for the baby bikes, and so that was it, I didn’t learn. While other kids used their bikes to go out into the world, I stayed home reading. If I had to go somewhere, I walked. I told anyone who would listen that I didn’t mind because I loved walking. I convinced even myself.
Then, in my thirties, when I moved by myself to another country, I thought I might revisit the whole bike thing. After all, if I failed, it wouldn’t matter because no one would know. So I went to the local cycle shop and, in a tiny voice, asked if I could rent an adult bicycle with stabilisers. As soon as I said it, I wondered if such a thing even existed. But the bearded man behind the counter just nodded and asked me if I wanted to sign up for their adult learners’ course, starting the following month. I blinked. I found it hard to imagine that there were any other adults who did not know how to ride a bike, let alone enough to run a course. Even so, I didn’t want to wait. I asked again about renting a learner bike. The guy shook his head at stabilisers – but then he offered to give me one with the pe
dals taken off. I said I thought bicycles needed pedals to work. ‘You need to learn to balance first,’ he said, ‘then graduate to pedalling.’
So I took the pedal-less bike he gave me, found an empty car park – with a slope – and started pushing myself along, first taking one foot off the ground, then, scarily, both. I did that for the whole morning, going round and round the car park. Once I got good at that, I pushed the bike a bit further up the slope. I turned. And then I halted, hands on the brakes, feet welded to the ground. It looked less like a slope now, more like quite a steep hill. Maybe I’d done enough for one day? Maybe I didn’t really need to learn at all? But I knew the real failure would be to not even try. So I let go. And I glided, for the first time ever, I glided and I felt the air whoosh past me and the ground move under me. At the bottom of the hill, I skidded to a halt, terror giving way to amazement, amazement to pride. Then I pushed the bike back up to the top and let go again. All I did for the next two days was push myself and the bike to the top of the same small hill, letting go over and over. I was happy. I taught myself to ride a bike. I practically taught myself to fly. I recall that feeling of gliding and flying and whooshing now, and I wonder what was I so frightened of? And why can’t I do that – just let go – more often?
WHEN I REALISED that I wanted to work as a university lecturer, I hoped that I would be the kind of teacher who would change students’ lives, who would be profound, who would teach them things that would not be on the exam. I have tried to realise some of these ambitions by making my classroom a safe (and equal) space in which all of my students can take risks. Sometimes it seems that the biggest risk they can imagine is to say something out loud. I know that they are afraid of saying the wrong thing and being laughed at. But I want them to speak despite this fear. Because I worry that if students are quiet about their ideas in class perhaps they will be quiet about other things too. Things they should not be quiet about. If they cannot talk in class, how will they speak out if they get harassed, or discriminated against, or hurt?