I was covered in bruises and something had cracked inside me. In moments, I lost the thing I had spent my whole life building. I became a visitor in my own skin. I ran and ran and it took me ten years to find my way back. It took me ten years even to try.
But slowly I realized that getting better meant being brave enough to occupy my body again. To be brave enough to feel the pain of it, the weakness of it, to bear witness to how broken it had become. It was only once I started to do that that my body and I started to understand each other again.
The psychologist Elizabeth Waites describes trauma as ‘injury to mind or body that requires structural repair’. I had spent so long pretending I hadn’t been hurt, but I had. I needed structural repair and nothing less than that would help me.
In my first job as a journalist, I covered issues of women’s safety – primarily sexual assault and domestic violence. When I was twenty-three I reported a story about some of the physical impacts of rape. I went back to my notes from the piece and started following my own leads – a trail I had left myself long before I knew where it would take me. I spent whole evenings scouring the internet to try to figure out who could help me. I started reading books about post-traumatic stress. I investigated its treatment, its telltale signs. When I had read enough to accept that it was possible this was part of my story, I called therapists and physios and specialists and told them I needed to see someone urgently. To the tune of looped hold music, I silently begged for someone to answer before I changed my mind.
I found a medical psychotherapist who has supported me more than I could have imagined. He has led me through sessions of a painful treatment called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: an intense therapy using rapid eye movements that forces the brain to recall a memory in a safe environment, after which it can be processed as something already lived through. This therapy allows the past and the present to finally let go of each other.
I learned to identify the sensations that enliven the fragments of the memory in my mind – the sound of a glass bottle smashed accidentally at a house party, the smell of a particular mix of whiskey and cigarettes on a man’s breath, the echo you hear when you inadvertently knock an elbow against a wall in a public bathroom. The devil, it turns out, really is in the details.
I found a sex therapist who has dedicated herself to the sexual health aspects of my care. During my first appointment with her I told her about my assault and she told me I was brave. I cried. She asked me who else knew. Hardly anyone, I said. She looked heartbroken.
You have been holding this assault in your body, all on your own, for over ten years, she said after a few moments.
I didn’t know enough about the physiology of trauma back then to know what she meant, but now I do, and I am so grateful to her for recognizing what had happened to me months before I would be able to recognize it myself.
She taught me about a condition called vaginismus, which is when the vaginal and pelvic floor muscles become so frozen from pain that they stop functioning altogether. She also told me about the way an attack can cause the body to shut off nerve endings in particular parts of the body altogether to prevent pain, as a kind of ever-present analgesic.
Together, we worked to try to make me feel safe enough to inhabit my body again, to tell the parts of me that had run away that it was okay to come back. That I would listen to them when they were in pain. That I would be gentle this time. She taught me to do exercises with hot packs and cold packs on different parts of my body, so they could get used to experiencing physical sensations again.
During one session, we did an exercise called ‘waking up the hands’. She gave me an object and asked me to hold it and pay attention to how it felt in my hands, underneath my fingers. What did my fingers like the most on this object, she asked. I asked my fingers what they liked, which parts of the object they wanted to touch, and I listened when they answered. I think it was the first time in over a decade that my mind and my body were reunited.
My gynaecological surgeon referred me to a highly skilled women’s health physiotherapist who specialized in dealing with the physical effects of severe sexual assault. She has been using internal and external manual therapy techniques to release the muscle dysfunction this experience left me with. Through breathing exercises, stretching, mindfulness, pelvic floor ‘down training’ and massage, I have been retraining my body not to freeze up every time it is touched.
This process has been painful and exhausting, but it’s working.
My physiotherapist specializes in sexual assault and during our third session, she examined my genital muscles. This is an internal examination. Lying there, feeling comfortable with her, I did not dissociate. The months of learning to reinhabit my body were working and instead of floating away, I stayed there, and I listened. Without this dissociation – as soon as I had learned to allow my body to tell me what it was feeling – every single touch in that part of my body was excruciating. She tried to examine my pelvic floor muscles by putting a finger inside me and the pain was so sharp – like a Swiss army knife – that I cried and cried and we had to stop.
If this was how my body reacted to the slightest touch, I couldn’t imagine what I had put it through while I was gone.
On days like this, when the true cost of my assault became apparent to me, I wanted to rewind. To return to the body of the girl who had not acknowledged the gravity of her experience.
I imagined myself approaching one of those big red signs on Australian single-lane highways that says: wrong way, go back.
But every time I came close to giving up, I thought of the comforting words my best friend offers me when she notices that I’m in trouble: the only way out of it is through it.
So I kept going.
As I was trying to heal, I learned to turn all of my energy inward. I spent hours and hours alone. I never knew who or what might upset me in public, so I perfected the art of leaving the party without saying goodbye. I would slip away before anyone could see me break down, slink into the safety of an Uber, comforted only by the unexpected kindness of the stranger behind the wheel. In the back seat, I would have the uneasy sense of being both frozen and melting: half terror, half tears. I would call a trusted friend and ask them to meet me at home and stay with me until I fell asleep.
I moved into a house with one of my oldest friends and I finally felt calm again. I stopped going out and drinking too much and learned to spend hours and hours alone with my thoughts, no matter how painful they were. I still wanted to die but I was getting better at resisting the pull to act on that feeling.
I started getting massages once a week to relax my muscles and to help them recover from the intensive physical therapy I was undergoing. I started stretching every day to wake up my muscles to movement after years of being frozen still by fear and pain.
I promised my body I would not subject it to sex until it was ready. This is a promise I have kept, and my world is so much safer for it.
I forced myself to spend an hour every day writing poems, no matter how clumsy or heavy-handed they were, as a way of grounding myself. I learned to meditate, and slowly, I regained the mental stillness I used to deploy so skilfully on the gym floor.
After years of hating and avoiding doctors, I told myself I must go to every single appointment. No excuses. And I did. Each Friday, I would see all my specialists, one after the other. No matter how much I didn’t want to. No matter how scared I was. No matter how exhausting my recovery had become. I kept showing up, week after week.
I went on antidepressants to help with the suicidal thoughts enlivened by reliving the memories. I started taking muscle relaxants to help my body calm down. I started eating turmeric every day to settle my body’s inflammatory system. For the first time in my life, I was good at taking care of myself. I got better at accepting help when it was offered to me.
I started reading books again. When I needed a break from the memories, I would read whole novels in one sitting.
I sat in the bath for hours, listening to my favourite poems on repeat, lying motionless until the water grew cold and my fingers turned to raisins.
Crohn’s disease and endometriosis are lifelong illnesses. They can be managed, but not cured. This is a theft for which I will never be compensated. Living with that reality has been a difficult process, but I have come to accept it. It is no longer a source of anger, or fear, or resentment. It just is. It took more than ten years, but I have finally released myself from the need to pretend this assault hadn’t happened to me, hadn’t changed me. I have finally relinquished the fantasy that I can go back to the body of the girl I used to be.
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
My recovery has not been easy. It has been slow, at times excruciatingly painful and demoralizing. But I’m making progress. I have finally placed this memory into the narrative of my life in a way that makes sense to me.
In one of her now-famous ‘Dear Sugar’ columns, Cheryl Strayed recounted the following anecdote when giving advice to a rape victim:
I have a friend who is twenty years older than me who was raped three different times over the course of her life … I asked her how she recovered from them, how she continued having healthy sexual relationships with men. She told me that at a certain point we get to decide who it is we allow to influence us. She said, ‘I could allow myself to be influenced by three men who screwed me against my will or I could allow myself to be influenced by Van Gogh. I chose Van Gogh.’
When I read these words, I thought of all of the women writers who kept me company during the darkest moments of my recovery. The women whose strength pushed me ever on, convincing me that there was a world out there that was beautiful and kind and safe, and that it would be waiting for me when I was ready for it.
I thought of my favourite author, Elena Ferrante, and the way her stories of female friendship showed me that women can be soft and powerful; that tenderness and strength are not antithetical, but equivalent. It takes vulnerability and resilience for women like her protagonist, Elena Greco, to overcome their dangerous pasts and possess their own narratives, in all of their complexity. In all of their vulnerability.
I can choose to be influenced by a violent man in an abandoned bathroom or I can choose to be influenced by the strength and honesty of Elena.
A few months ago, I went to a ballet class for the first time in years. It was devastating to see how stiff my body had become in the years I’d neglected it, how profoundly damaged it was. But it was also an unparalleled joy to be reminded, even for a moment, of the feeling of being strong and powerful and poised and graceful and beautiful all at once.
I went to a private gymnastics lesson with one of the athletes I used to compete with. As she watched me relearn my tricks, she scanned her eyes over my body and I heard in her words the echo of every coach, every athlete and every judge I’d ever trained with. They had noticed the same things she was noticing now: my impressively high arches, my hyperextended knees, my stubborn hamstrings. She promised me everything would come back to me quickly, and it did. The memory of how to move like I used to was still there, in my muscles.
My body had kept everything in its rightful place, waiting for me to come back to it.
VI
Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.
Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child
REVELATIONS
That same weekend I had returned to the gym to start training again, the weekend I decided to dust off my high arches and get back to work, I was doing some grocery shopping at a supermarket called Banana Joe’s in my hometown when the memories hit me like bullets.
During the exhausting process of attempting to piece together traumatic memories, I had, by this point, recalled what I believed to be most of my encounter with the man in the empty bathroom. But something else was happening, too. Other memories. Other fragments. Unsayable. Perhaps even more so than the story I had finally pieced together. The one I had finally voiced.
Memories of a man in our gymnastics community who sexually abused me as a child. A man I adored.
A man I admired. A man who had hurt me, again and again and again.
Of course I already knew this. The part of me that froze in that moment was full of every memory of inappropriate contact he made with me; full of frozen moments during massages that went too far; frozen moments during cuddles that didn’t feel right. He had crossed many boundaries that I had pretended to ignore but in this moment, I no longer could. He had groomed me for years; a fact I knew in my body, in my muscles, but had never accepted in my mind. In that moment, it felt as though the whole world would collapse. Instead, I did. I fell to the floor and sat there, frozen, crying, confused, in the middle of the condiments aisle.
Everything turned to glass and shattered: the fragments of my life, my childhood, lay strewn around me on the floor of Banana Joe’s. My vision blurred. The shelves of jams and chutneys became fluid and every solid boundary around me dissolved.
I don’t know how long I sat there. I don’t know how many people asked me if I was okay, if I’d slipped on something. I don’t know what happened next. I don’t know how I got home but the next thing I knew I was lying in the bath, fantasizing about drowning myself, about how painful and difficult it would be, about how much I would deserve it, how sweet the relief would be when it ended, how maybe I could drown the vile part of myself that attracted abusers, again, and again, and again. The shame enveloped me like the bathwater and I stewed in it for hours.
I then had to rethink every formative aspect of my childhood; I had to transform a powerful young athlete into a victim. An easy target. Nothing made sense any more and I wanted to die more than I wanted to live with this revelation.
I have reached out to some of the gymnasts I used to train with. I am not the only one he hurt.
I know what you’re thinking: gymnastics was the positive part of this story. How could she ruin that for us?
I know that’s what you’re thinking because that’s exactly what I thought in those moments. But my duty to you is not to comfort you or provide you with a narrative that is clean and uncomplicated. My duty to you is to tell the truth. Because the truth matters, and telling the truth matters. Even when it is easier not to. Especially when it is easier not to.
And the truth is this: once you are vulnerable to trauma, once it gets its claws into you, it plays out again, and again, and again, like a broken record, until you confront it.
The truth is that other teenagers on that night in 2007 would have run away screaming at the first sign of coercion by an unknown male predator. Because I had been groomed as a child, I was adept at the freeze response, and I switched it on like a light when he took my hand and led me away. The truth is that my rape and my childhood abuse are not separate instances of bad luck; they are deeply and profoundly connected to one another. The truth is that if a frog is placed in boiling water it will jump straight out, but if it is placed in tepid water that is gradually boiled at an imperceptible pace, the animal – having proven at all other evolutionary junctures its capacity for survival – will boil alive.
The truth is, also, that gymnastics did make me powerful. It did give me a sense of embodiment that most teenage girls never get to feel. It did make me feel invincible, and it still does now, when I train. None of that was a lie; none of that is rendered untrue by the fact of my abuse. The two exist alongside each other, in a strange and uncomfortable union: the institution that made my body strong and powerful and autonomous as a teenager was the same one that primed me for the ultimate act of violation that would leave me physically disabled, forever.
The shame that kept me from reporting the childhood abuse is the same shame that kept me from voicing its sequel, and the same feeling that kept me from getting the help that I needed until it was almost too late.
In 1986, a young medical student named Larry Nassar joined the staff
of USA Gymnastics as a trainer. While completing medical school, Larry ascended the ranks of the top gymnastics team’s medical staff. In 1996, he was appointed national medical coordinator for USA Gymnastics, a position he would occupy for eighteen years.
He trained some of the best athletes in the country. He was a mentor and a father figure as well as a doctor. His reputation was unassailable.
In 2017–2018, Larry Nassar was convicted and sentenced to 175 years in prison for the sexual abuse of gymnasts in his care. The court found that he has abused more than 260 women and girls. Under the guise of medical treatment, he would bring young girls alone into his treatment room and put his fingers inside them, inside their ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old bodies. His penis was erect as he massaged them and as he violated them.
In a state of total freeze, they lay there and waited for it to end.
When Olympian McKayla Maroney was an athlete, Nassar gave her sleeping pills on an overseas flight they were taking to a competition. She woke up alone in a room with him, receiving one of his medical ‘treatments’.
I thought I was going to die that night, she told a court eighteen years later.
She was fifteen at the time. When the abuse started, she was thirteen.
Chelsea Markham was ten when she was abused by Larry Nassar in one of his treatment sessions. The following year, she had a major fall at a competition. He was in the audience, she said later, and every time she saw him, she said she had flashbacks to the assault and lost her balance. It was the last time she would ever compete.
He hurt me, Chelsea told her mother in the car on the way back from the appointment during which she was molested by Nassar.
He put his fingers in me, she said.
But no one believed her. She quit gymnastics and never looked back. In 2009, Chelsea Markham committed suicide. Her mother blames Nassar’s abuse for her death.
I Choose Elena Page 7