‘Startlingly intelligent, disturbing, profound and moving, I Choose Elena shows us that the #MeToo movement has grown roots, and that for survivors of rape and sexual assault the revolution is just beginning. Osborne-Crowley gives us darkness wrought in light and the hope she offers is as palpable as it is hard-won.’ —April Ayers Lawson, author of Virgin and Other Stories
‘Thank-you Lucia Osborne-Crowley for writing I Choose Elena, for your bold and precise testimony on the devastation of sexual violence, on the body’s extraordinary and destructive compulsion to contain its own trauma. Every one of the insights you share is extremely hard-won, and I am so grateful to you for putting them into this incredible book.’ —Rosie Price, author of What Red Was
‘This book burrowed deep under my skin. A searing, potent testament to the vital necessity of articulation in the struggle for women to own their bodies and find a language to talk about violence and trauma.’ —Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater
‘A fierce, eloquent meditation on trauma, #MeToo, the body, pain and memory.’ —Sinead Gleeson, author of Constellations
‘Beautiful and sad and moving and too real in the finest way.’ —The Irish Times
First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2020
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Mood Indigo,
an imprint of The Indigo Press
Copyright © Lucia Osborne-Crowley 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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ISBN 978 1 76087 807 8
eISBN 978 1 76087 377 6
Cover design: Akiko Chan
Cover photo: iStock
To Elena, who taught me to love without suffering
CONTENTS
BEGINNINGS
ENDINGS
ABSTRACTIONS
DISAPPEARANCES
RECOVERY
REVELATIONS
REFLECTIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In order to rise
From its own ashes,
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.
Octavia E. Butler
I
I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her. But she is still there, somewhere.
Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
BEGINNINGS
Growing up, I was a gymnast. The serious kind. By the time I was ten, I had represented New South Wales at the national championships and won. At age twelve, I represented Australia at the world championships.
By fifteen, I was preparing for my second world championships. I trained relentlessly.
Every morning I drank raw eggs mixed with protein powder and milk. I was training so much that my body had started using my muscle mass for energy, which could result in my muscles atrophying. That’s what the raw eggs were for: I needed to be consuming as much protein as possible to keep my muscles intact.
Weakness was the one thing we were all taught to avoid. I took this lesson seriously. No amount of eggs, protein bars, crunches, toe-points, handstand push-ups or weightlifts could deter me. I would push my body right to its limits, then further.
The kind of gymnastics I was doing required immense mental precision. I needed to synchronize wholly with my body, to pick up on every signal it sent me. I needed to master a very particular kind of mindfulness in order to step onto a velvet floor on a world stage, with five international judges ready to pick apart my every movement. My mind had to be so still that it could communicate with every pointed toe, every carefully balanced leg, every finger.
I had to be perfect, and it had to seem effortless. I had to be strong and powerful and graceful and light, all at the same time. I had to smile. To do all these things at once takes a kind of mind–body alignment that I have been dreaming of regaining ever since I stepped off the floor for the last time. My body and my mind, it seemed then, belonged wholly to me.
I was obsessed with this feeling. When I wasn’t training, I took ballet classes to fill the time.
We called the gym our second home. For some of us, at times, it felt like a first home. Each year when we qualified for the national team, we would go on week-long training camps during which we would wake up at 5 a.m. to go for a long run, then do three training sessions throughout the day before crawling into sleeping bags placed atop crash mats on the gym floor. When we were slow to wake up, my coach would play Rihanna’s ‘Pon de Replay’ on the gymnasium’s enormous sound system.
I would be thrown in the air by another gymnast and do a double somersault and land perfectly. Sometimes the somersaults would be in the pike position, or the layout position, so you had to jump high and hard enough to rotate your stretched-out body twice before reaching the floor. Sometimes we did triple somersaults. Sometimes we did double layouts with a full twist in the first rotation.
We balanced our handstands on the hands of another gymnast and then morphed our bodies into overarch – a move in which you arch your back so much in the handstand that your feet touch your hands – while the gymnast holding us up slides into the splits. Sometimes we did the handstands with only one arm.
These manoeuvres are not just complicated but profoundly dangerous – gymnasts have died or been rendered paraplegic by a missed landing. We were all okay with danger; we were fearless. But the thing about staying safe as an athlete at that level is that your technique must be perfect. You need to know exactly how to jump; where your arms need to be at each point in a double somersault; how to hold your legs, your chest and your fingers so your handstand is unshakable.
I knew every inch of my body so well, could feel every tiny sensation, could always tell if something was even just a little bit off.
Once I messed up a skill during training and I told my coach I hadn’t slept well the night before; that I was nervous about a speech I had to give at school. His response was: If you are the athlete I know you can be, I should be able to wake you up in the middle of the night and you should be able to perform your skills, half asleep, with no warning.
I’m not sure if this was intended to be a metaphor; one he was using to teach me that at this level of the game, there is no excuse for mistakes. But I took it literally: I started waking myself up in the middle of the night and making sure I could hold a free handstand for three minutes straight.
The only time we got a day off was when a big competition was approaching. They call this ‘tapering’: a way of giving the body and the muscles a chance to recover from weeks and months of intense training so that all are in peak form for competition day. Sometimes these days were the hardest of them all; without training – the thing we spent the majority of our time doing – we had all these leftover hours to spend getting nervous about the competition.
During these tapering days, we were told to focus on mental preparation. We were taught by sports psychologists from the age of nine o
r ten how best to use the mental technique of ‘visualization’: a process in which we sit still, close our eyes and imagine ourselves – really imagine, including the sounds and smells and stomach flips – performing our routines.
During visualization, we would focus on the tricks or parts of the routine that frightened us the most, and we would make sure that we performed those elements flawlessly.
We were told to close our eyes and recall exactly what perfection felt like: the angle at which we left the floor, the feeling of the balls of our feet as we did our run-up, the sense once we were in the air of knowing that we had managed the jump and the rotation just so, the sense of knowing long before we hit the ground that we will land perfectly.
I learned so much about mindfulness, about muscle memory, about the wisdom of the body so early in my life, only to have it all taken from me, stored in some dark, dusty corner of my mind that I would not be brave enough to enter until a decade later.
Competition day would arrive. My Irish-British-Australian parents had bought a tiny gold four-leaf clover to sew into each of my competition leotards for good luck. I would wake up on the day of a competition and eat exactly what my coach had always instructed me: melted cheese on white rice. Carbs and protein, he would say. Nothing else.
We pulled on our competition leotards, sprayed our hair with bottles and bottles of hairspray to keep it in place, covered our faces in make-up to match our intricate leotards and our routines that told stories. On the warm-up floor, usually out the back end of an auditorium, I was always a mess of nerves. But then my coach would say, It’s time, and we’d start the long walk down the corridor to the competition arena. During that walk, each and every time I did it the nerves would disappear.
During that walk I knew I could do what I needed to do. I knew I could do it perfectly. It’s a feeling I have never been able to replicate.
We were always told to smile at the judges to get the best scores, told to smile even if we were hurting, even if we were exhausted. But for me, it was effortless. You couldn’t stop me from beaming on that competition floor if you tried. I’m told that the top national judges called me the smiling girl.
During those years I never needed to manufacture my smile. I was one of the best athletes in my sport in the country and I knew it. But the thing about being a teenage girl is that at a certain point, the outside world intrudes on this narrative and it reconstructs your perception of your body without your knowledge or permission.
We wilt under the predatory gaze of men who turn us into objects for public consumption. We become so conspicuous in this light that we start to think it is all we are. In this light, we wish to be invisible.
In this light, we dream we will disappear.
In Elena Ferrante’s quartet, now known as the Neapolitan series, she tells the story of two young women, Elena and Lila, best friends and confidantes, growing up in Naples in the 1950s and 60s. The novels narrate the truth of a friendship: its love, its envy, its complexity, its nuance.
The story begins at the end, when Elena, the narrator, is in her sixties and Lila has gone missing. She receives this news as if it were a report of the morning weather. Because, she tells her reader, Lila always wanted to become invisible:
It’s been at least three decades since she told me she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means. She wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found.
Any person who has moved through the world with the body of a woman will know what it feels like to wish to be invisible. In the end, Lila never escapes this feeling. She finds a way to disappear.
I don’t blame her. Overcoming this feeling is one of the hardest lessons a woman can learn. It is an ongoing act of survival.
What I am about to tell you is a story about unlearning this desire to vanish: about insisting on inhabiting my body, about giving myself form and shape and substance. It is a story about learning how to be seen.
II
Why would anyone want to leave their body? he laughed, And in this moment, we had nothing in the world in common.
Blythe Baird, ‘For The Rapists Who Called Themselves Feminists’
ENDINGS
It was August 2007, a rainy winter’s night in Sydney. I was out on a Saturday night with three friends, at a dingy karaoke bar that smelled of must and damp and sweat.
We drank vodka cruisers and sang nasty songs about boys who were playing hard to get. I sang a truly awful rendition of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Cry Me a River’ and, with no subtlety, tact or poetic integrity, inserted the name of the boy I was chasing into the end of every chorus. My friends joined in. It felt so good to find a space in which we could safely scream about the boys who had wronged us with no one we knew watching.
While gymnastics took up a great deal of my time, I had another life too. The life of a regular teenage girl. The life of a girl trying to figure out puberty and femininity and sex and alcohol and everything in between. When I wasn’t training, I lived an exuberant double life as a high-achieving, extroverted high-school student surrounded by loving friends.
I played handball with the boys at recess to prove that I was chill. I was audacious and confident. One high-school friend tells me that the first time she met me, when we were eleven, I was lecturing my classmates about the differences between communism in theory and communism in practice.
I fell hard and fast for boys who had no interest in me and dedicated my time to signing in and out of MSN Messenger in the hope they would notice I was online. It never worked. Here’s a hard-won lesson from my twenty-six-year-old self: if you have to remind someone that you exist, they are not worth your time.
In Year 8 I got my first boyfriend. He was in a band, liked all the same music I liked, and I was completely besotted. I can’t remember if we ever really did anything together, but I do remember brimming with pride as I sat on his lap and held his hand at house parties in front of all our friends.
But then he was spotted kissing another girl on the bus. I was heartbroken. My dearest friend threw a basketball at his head.
I was elected vice-president of the student body, which, in my high school, was a big deal. I was hyperactive in the school community and spent time organizing Valentine’s Day rose drives and school dances. I was thriving in every sense of the word. I studied hard. I made friends and I kept them. I would call their landlines from my landline every night after training, and we would talk for hours, even though we would see each other again the next morning. I scribbled Kelly Clarkson lyrics in my school diary during maths, while the boys in the class passed around notes rating the girls on a scale of one to ten for attractiveness and personality. Being a teenager is cut-throat.
The same year I was elected vice-president I befriended the boys in the year above me. I started going to their parties and standing outside nervously for twenty minutes before walking in, vodka cruisers in hand, ready to ingratiate myself with the in-crowd. One of these boys, of course, was the one I was singing about that night during ‘Cry Me a River’.
At about 9 p.m. that night in 2007, we decided to leave the karaoke bar because we had run out of money. Emerging at the top of the creaky stairs, we found ourselves in the glow of Sydney’s Pitt Street. In front of us stood the towering McDonald’s on the corner. We were hungry. We crossed the road towards it.
A group of four grown men approached us and started talking to us. Purposefully, I realized later, they distracted my three friends as a fifth, out of nowhere, appeared behind me and slipped his hand into mine. Come with me, he whispered.
The four other men closed in on my three friends and no one noticed us leave. He was gripping my hand so tightly I thought he might break my fingers. He marched me into McDonald’s, towards a door on the left-hand side of the room. We went up one flight of stairs, where the public bathrooms were. He kept going.
He walked me up another flight of stairs to a dus
ty, disused bathroom. Perhaps it had once been for staff, or perhaps it was just an extra men’s toilets the franchise no longer needed. It was empty, and deathly quiet.
He took me into a stall, locked the door and assaulted me, again, and again, and again. I had never had sex before so I had no reference point for any of what was happening to me apart from what I’d seen in movies, but I knew for certain that it was the sharpest and most severe pain I had ever experienced.
If you’ve read about trauma you will know that the human body’s autonomic nervous system gives it three options in this kind of situation: fight, flight or freeze.
I lunged once at the latch of the stall door but he moved his body in front of it and didn’t move from that position. Flight, my body instantly recognized, was not an option.
Fight. The man was about thirty-five, and made almost entirely of muscle. He looked like he had spent most of his twenties at the gym. I was still just a little over 40 kilos, true to my athletic dreams.
I tried once to push myself far enough away from him that I could reach around him for the door. At this point, he pulled out a Swiss army knife and held it against my throat. Fight was also out of the question.
When the first two options fail and the danger is still present, the autonomic nervous system sends a signal to the brain that death is imminent and the body begins to prepare itself.
The body releases its most powerful natural analgesic and cuts off signals from all major nerve endings.
The brain then enters a state of dissociation. In these moments, one feels distinctly as though one is floating above one’s body, patiently watching, waiting, feeling nothing at all. The feeling of calm dissociation spreads from the mind to the muscles and veins themselves, right down to the bones.
Another element of the freeze response is referred to in trauma literature as ‘collapse’. This also occurs the moment the body realizes that death has come for it. The collapse response involves all the muscles shutting down, becoming limp, no longer needed for escape because escape has been deemed impossible. The body stops fighting. It gives in. Once entirely loosened, the muscles will cease to resist whatever is trying to hurt the body and death will come faster. More mercifully.
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