I am tired of saying "me, too".

The #metoo meme on Facebook started last week in response to numerous allegations of yet another powerful man sexually harassing and assaulting women who he worked with. The idea, as I understand it was to 1) Help survivors feel less alone and 2) To raise awareness of the extent of this problem and potentially call men into action.

(While sexual assault is absolutely a problem for other genders and is also committed by women, this blog post is going to focus on women harassed and assaulted by men. The #metoo campaign was designed to raise awareness about issues that women have, and I would like to talk about my own experience as a woman. Other related issues can, and will be, talked about in other ways at other times.)

While Goal #1 above was accomplished for many, I found the overall campaign to be frustrating and a bit overwhelming for myself. The truth is, I and many (most?) other women ALREADY KNOW the extent of sexual harassment and assault for women worldwide. We live it and we talk about it on an almost daily basis.

Personally, I don't know any women who haven't been at a minimum sexually harassed at some point in their life. I also know a ridiculously large number of women in my personal life who have been sexually assaulted. For about 7 years I worked with youth involved in the foster care system in Arizona. A majority of them had been sexually assaulted in some way during their time in the system.

At this point in my life, I assume that all women I meet have been sexually harassed or assaulted until they tell me otherwise, and this informs my interactions with and treatment of other women at all times.

The thing is, women have been talking about this for a long time. We have been trying to tell the world that this is a problem. We've been silenced and not believed by family, spouses, co-workers, therapists, doctors, and police officers.

We haven't just been saying Me, Too. We've been giving details, dates, times, reliving the experiences in detail in order to try to get help, to put a dent in the epidemic, to feel less alone.

For me, this #metoo was overwhelming. It just reinforced what I already knew. I spent the week marinating in my own thoughts and memories- in both the sexual experiences themselves and the aftermath: the money spent on therapy, the effects of not being believed, the burden placed on my romantic relationships, the anger.

This wasn't a helpful campaign for me. This just reminded me of how vast the problem is and how hard the problem is to solve.

I don't know what the alternative is to #metoo.

I do strongly believe in sharing stories and being heard, but not for the sake of people who have been given ample opportunity to listen and haven't responded. Sharing stories and being heard can be therapeutic when done in the right way.

I do strongly believe in my career, in my ability to help people heal from sexual trauma and to potentially work to stop future trauma.

I do believe in education; that as society progresses rape culture and the protections that men have that allow them to continue harassing and assaulting will be better understood and more often called out.

I don't know what the alternative is to #metoo. I just feel angry on behalf of myself and all of the women who have been yelling ME. TOO. for centuries and haven't been heard.

It's time for people to start listening and acting; for someone else to step up and make the changes we've been asking for throughout all of our lives.

I just want to live.

There's a lot going on behind the myriad facets of my blood and medical phobia: in seeing others' wounds there's over empathizing with their pain; in witnessing a medical emergency there's a fear of being unable to help; in getting an MRI there's a feeling of being trapped.

I've been in therapy for a long time dealing with generalized anxiety, depression, and some trauma related stuff. What's interesting is that, as I've healed from the wider reaching problems, my panic in relation to blood, injury and all things medical related has become significantly worse. There are two reasons that I can currently think of why this might be: 1) I'm becoming more in touch with my feelings overall and 2) I really, truly, wholeheartedly want to live as long as humanly possible in a way that I didn't during the first 20 something years of my life.

In some kind of comedic timing, my improving mental health was also met with worsening physical health, peaking with a current diagnosis of fibromyalgia. In the larger scheme of things, fibromyalgia (or at least, my version of it) is fairly mild, manageable, and generally not life threatening. Combined with a phobia, however, the symptoms and effects of this chronic illness are maddening.

In these early stages of examining all of the symptoms to make sure that there really isn't anything more sinister at play, I find myself reflecting frequently on my own mortality. When I'm short of breath, I begin to imagine that I have tuberculosis. When I have trouble falling asleep because of my pounding heart, I'm convinced my heart will stop while I'm sleeping. When I struggle to push my stiff body into a standing position, I expect to hear my bones crack irreparably.

All of this comes together into a constant, electric cacophony of anxiety over which I scream, "I just want to keep living". 

I've been convinced that I don't want to die ever since a near death experience I had about 8 years ago. Before that, this belief was questionable. I tended to waiver between indifferent, wanting to sleep forever, and being okay where I was that day.

Comparing this past to my current situation sometimes makes me furious: I finally really, truly want to live and I am suddenly daily reminded of how fragile life is.

I believe it's finally time for me to face this phobia head on: to lower it's volume so I can hear the more subtle notes in the discord. Underneath the daily balance of life and death that we face as humans, I think there is a beautiful waltz; a delicate dance of being able to appreciate what I have without obsessing over losing it; of seeing this chronic illness as life changing but not life ending.

In movies and books a serious illness tends to lead to the story's hero taking some kind of life changing adventure that inspires them to live better. All I really want from this fibromyalgia experience is to find some grounding in reality; to be able to acknowledge the changes in my body without sensationalizing them. I'm strong. I know I can handle this. I just have to convince the rest of my body that it can, too.

The Thing That Did Not Kill Me

NaPoWriMo 2017 #19

It held on as a blinding tumor
Clouding my right eye for two years
Before I ran off to the desert
In search of healing.

When they removed the tumor
What I saw stopped my heart:
A flash, all at once, all of it,
I understood the gift
Of being half blind.

I'm thankful for the fake re-death
Induced by merciful drugs
By angels holding bed pans-
I'm grateful for gradual re-awakening
In this starched white hospital bed.

Women

NaPoWriMo 2017 #11

This is common but somehow still unknown:
Pain so much a part of the body that it
Becomes an extra organ,
Another thing to care for with tired limbs
While looking for instructions in pages on pages
Of experimental notes with no obvious patterns.

This is the way I am now.

I've joined the many without wanting or meaning to.
Suddenly the lifelong waiting room scenes make sense;
I'm starting to see clearly through the fog
What only my body can remember.
I'm crawling along with the crowd on sore fingertips and knees
Calling for answers with hoarse voices.

This is the way I am now.

We will keep showing up in hospital gowns
Demanding to be taken seriously;
Using our burning bones to light the way
With scars and rashes and graying hair
All of our evidence marked as exhibits,
We know there are answers you haven't yet tried hard enough to find.

This is the way I am now.

Are You There, Anger? It's Me, Emily

Memories aren't always reliable, so maybe I'm exaggerating, but I remember being angry and not really knowing why for most of my childhood. I think my fourth grade teacher once called me "sour grapes" and I have photographic evidence that, when my group of friends in middle school decided to dress up as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there was no question among us that I would go as Grumpy.

As a young adult I got tired of this reputation and tried to swing to the other extreme of letting go of all anger and empathizing with those who I felt had hurt me. Unfortunately, I didn't quite make it to letting go of the anger and instead only managed to turn it inward for a while.

Now, at the ripe old age of 31, I'm finally trying to find the balance; the place between assertive, constructive anger and turning the other cheek so many times that I am flipped inside out.

I've talked about this a lot in my own therapy, and I am still confused. That dude hollered at me from his truck- I have a right to raise both middle fingers, yell, and then stew about it for the rest of the day, right? My co-worker crossed my boundaries again- I get to assertively tell him to leave and then tell his supervisor, right? This for-profit corporation made decisions that make my job harder and might be unethical- this is when I speak up and tell people why they're wrong over and over again for weeks, right? I'm totally being the assertive adult I've always wanted to be and I'm not overdoing it at all, right?

In order to complicate things a bit further, I decided to jump back into Social Work School and become a Therapist. Now I have an Empathy Problem. I know too much. I can find a reason behind most of the things I experience that bother me. (No one taught them that that's not okay, he's anxious and wants help, it might actually work out pretty well for our clients, I'm reacting because this triggered something in me and if I take time to process it I will feel fine.)

I am an adult, and I still feel very confused sometimes about when and how to be angry and assertive in a way that is productive and healthy and prevents me from becoming a doormat or an ogre.

How do YOU decide?

Bomb

#14/30

Woke up this morning with

A bomb in my belly and my skin

Was a quivering wick. I almost

Wrote you all letters: exactly what

I’ve always wanted to say to you,

In succinct honesty.  It’s probably better that

I slept in instead; went for a jog;

Took some medicine, let the rabbit  

Bite me when I tried to pet her. It’s

Probably better, for once, that I stopped

Unlocking the cage around my voice and

Let the anger simmer down into something

My audience can swallow. Where would we be,

Then, if I had struck pen to paper? In pieces,

Spread over 3,000 miles, mouths agape.