make room.

There are some things that just plain don't make sense. I feel as though I say this phrase with every breath lately, and if you're one of the few still sticking around reading this, you're probably sick of reading it here.

But it's true.

___________

In February of 2012, I was raped.

These are words I've uttered only five times: once immediately after, twice to friends, and twice to teachers whose classes I was failing in the aftermath (and I was so very, very lucky for the perfect grace they extended to me). Other than the people who were immediately present, and medical/law enforcement/other relevant personnel who were present with me afterward at the hospital, no one knows; maybe two people. I won't tell my family. I haven't told my closest friends, who, if they're reading this, are reading it for the first time, though they might have suspected as it's been breaking the surface, little by little. I know that this is no way to find out something like this about a loved one (I'm sorry). And here, I continue to depersonalize the experience by disclosing it in a blog entry, rather than to real people who might react in real ways. I'm sorry; I simply can't say the words to you and hear yours in return yet.

I don't have any real explanation for why I never told anyone and have neglected to tackle it. Those closest to me have sensed, as I recover from the stalking situation (which is unrelated), that something else has been going on. Although I'm not, like, a champ about dealing with my most painful issues and experiences, I know better than to suppress them, to try to pretend they never happened. I know it doesn't work that way. I know that trauma is no respecter of steel doors, that it's disruptive and demands attention in order to process it and eventually mainstream it into the big picture of a life.

When I was a kid, enduring abuse, I suppressed it just enough, and just long enough, to get out, at which point I began actively dealing with it; I was starving for recovery. You can almost make such events fit into a framework, when you're that hungry for it; when it happens when you're a little kid, and you have no control over it, and almost no knowledge of what you're facing, then processing it as an adult is a matter of empowerment. Taking control, moving forward, becoming the kind of person you want to be, maybe rushing through it so you can get to "normal," wherever that is. Making it all make sense, because it feels like that's what you should do.

When I was twenty-three and was sexually assaulted by a stranger (a brief, and, for lack of better phrasing, not as "personal" a confrontation), I was personally not as traumatized and didn't feel the need to repress or deny the experience. When you're still a little bit broken from the Sad And Tragic Events In Your History, as I was - I don't know, maybe you can maybe accept such things more easily than you might later.

But this.

___________

In the moments immediately following, the people who were present went into motion: pressed me into a car, drove me to the hospital, walked with me down sterile hallways, sat with me, present and aware and realistic about the moment in which I found myself staring at salmon-and-sea-green cinderblock walls in rage and I swear, in those moments, before I ever got into the car, before I ever spoke the words to anyone, before any contact ever occurred, before he even said a word to me, in the moment in which I realized what was threatening to happen, my entire self rejected the possibility; I simply knew there was no way this man was going to hurt me. Because I said so. Because I got angry. Because I fought. Because powerful and assertive and I call the shots, not you. Because I know that I met his intent with every inch of rage I could, rage that would have terrified any normal person. The assertive, self-possessed parts of me absolutely rejected that this man might cross a line with me; even until today, I'm not sure I've ever moved past that instant, involuntary rejection of what I could not grasp: no. NO.

I never stopped saying no. It coursed through me. It hasn't stopped coursing through me. There are not enough syllables in that word to contain all that it means.

And as I took first shaking steps out of the room in which it happened, blinking and wobble-kneed, like a newborn giraffe - it surged forward and cleared paths, from then until now, with all of the swift and terrible wrath of one whose power has been blasphemed:

No. 

No. 

Every forced step immediately afterward, I rejected. Every sight, every breath. No. I rejected those salmon-and-sea-green walls, the fact that I was sitting there trying not to see them, the intercom voices that bounced from them, the gentle knocks on the door bearing gown, cart, nondescript-looking cardboard box.

No.

I drew deep breaths, shook my head with prolonged blinks at every gentle, concerned word from every nurse, every counselor, even the police representative.

No. Stop talking. 

Shut up. 

Business cards and forms, and promises of follow-ups; they were pressed between my numb fingertips, and I refused to see them or know that they were there. I dropped them in a bag, one of the many.

Shut up shut UP. Heels of my palms against my eyes.

This did not happen. 

I am not here. 

This is stupid.

No. 

___________

The sun was coming up as I got home, sat on the edge of my bed, ramrod-straight, breathing deeply against the settling-in soreness I refused to acknowledge thereafter. And, you know, were I a better writer, maybe I would supply for you better words than rage; maybe I could set for you a communion table to share in the brokenness of a body, to sip from a chalice that offers a deeper, saltier iron-draught of concepts like wrath and abject betrayal.

As I sat on my bed, though, and contemplated putting my day in order for school and job, I would not think beyond:

today's homework isn't done. 
I cannot make room for this. 
do your laundry; you have no aprons.
I will not make room for this. 
you have to work tonight.
I have no room for this.

And as I sat there, behind the steel doors that had slammed shut hours earlier, I knew that God was dead to me; he died, in that room, when I died, when everything I'd worked to become was seen, tortured, and ripped from me as though it had never been. I emerged from that room as something I didn't recognize, and still don't. It scared me, and still does. But I knew I couldn't deny it, as the only thought that gave me comfort was:

if these are the rules to which I am subject: 
then, no. 
I will make my own. 
this will not be for me. 
and this did not happen. 

I don't know what to do with God, or the idea of him. I cannot embrace anything that tells me that my ardor is due a God who will not accept, acknowledge, or dignify as valid my wrath in equal measure. I cannot abide a God before whom I can only crumble and yelp from collapsed lungs why and how much more, God and for how long and why, and expect absolutely no answer; I cannot abide the wrath in knowing that I can be destroyed repeatedly for the sake of a big picture I'll never be allowed to see, for reasons I'm not allowed to know. I cannot abide a God into whose face I am not allowed to scream with teeth bared THIS IS NOT ALLOWED. NO. I absolutely cannot abide anything that tells me this reaction is prideful or wrong or blasphemous; that, to me, is blasphemous. I just can't.

 if God is a God of order, then God knows exactly what I'm talking about.

carrots, karats, showdog crap, and compartmental collapse.

I think the food industry attracts the crazies and the control freaks. I think the potential creativity attracts the crazies, and the grasp of organization and systems necessary to run it well attracts the control freaks, and the potential for creative control attracts the crazy control freaks. Regardless of how we got here, I think the reason why so many chefs and cooks are train wrecks is because ours is an industry, if you're "in the trenches" and working in a hard, stereotypically-"legit", independently-owned restaurant, that isn't able to invest in providing practical care and resources like health insurance for its workers because of high turnover, inherent high risk, and all the other factors that I'm too ill-informed to know anything about. It's a hard industry as a whole, and it takes a lot out of its workers, and when you're already a little crazy, the solution to anything is to push through it, work through it, drink through it, blaze through it, and damn, it is hard. Anyplace I've worked, anyplace I haven't. It's hard.

And sometimes, the result of not dealing with something insidious, like, say, depression or other mental illnesses, or bad experiences, or personal crises - or, more accurately, "dealing" with these things the way you deal with any little stressful day or frustrating customer or my-partner's-giving-me-crap or whatever - sometimes, the result of medicating them with flurries of activity, and creating new projects, and vodka sodas, and blazing to the moon and back, and hiding in your house, and trying to wrap words around something that's already wrapped around you is that, one day, you wake up, and you realize just how bad it's gotten, and you can't drink everything away, because you can't be drunk forever, hello, and there comes a point where you, as a person comprised of neat compartments into which you slide whichever issues you're facing - you realize that this tendency of yours to refuse openness about your pain or problems, or, at least, to accept it only in small doses on your own terms, has affected your standards for what it should mean, and has affected other peoples' standards for how to interact with it, based on what you've allowed, and you feel even more backed into a corner than you were before.

You have - to borrow someone else's wise words - refused to obey your sadness. For a long time. For your whole life, really.

And in a flat calm that means everything in its urgency, you know: you need help. like, yesterday.

But then there's limited resources and no insurance and I'm doing okay, but it's not like I'm made of money, you know? and in the movies, the psychiatrists' offices are filled with many leather-bound books and smell of rich mahogany, and the clientele are slim, shaky, blond women with immaculate bobs and Jimmy Choos and sparkly rocks the size of ice cubes and checkbooks that accommodate throwing thousands of dollars per month at a person who's paid to watch them tear up over a teacup poodle's latest bowel movement.

And then there's the word-of-mouth, this is a great place for free counseling, and, turns out, it's a tiny, rotund German man offering nice talks out of his basement, and those talks are all built around early '80s cliches regarding Jesus Freedom Movements or I don't know what it is, but after fifty minutes of staring at the old hairs wound around the roots of his beige shag carpeting and feeling increasingly irritated, in the enclosed, yellow-lit, dusty haze of his "office" (at the other end of which is a large standing freezer, and it's filled with his brother's venison, he tells you excitedly, because you're a chef) at his relentlessly upbeat refusal to engage with the pain you're trying to dislodge, you walk out the door into blinding sunshine, feeling not at all guilty for tossing his business card on the ground. And that night, you wash all of the clothes you were wearing.

And, alternatively, there are the places that are legitimate, sans freezers, with windows, and degrees and accreditations hanging on cobweb-free, pastel walls, and we should probably meet twice a week, and yes, we offer financial relief for uninsured clients, but we just need copies of your  tax returns for the past three years and FICA? amounts and pay stubs and meanwhile I can neither get out of bed nor remember what's on the to-do list I wrote ten minutes ago, let alone survey the range of boxes in my garage and remember which is hoarding my tax paperwork or begin to dig through them without sitting on my garage floor for way too long before breaking down in tears.

And you can always google, ha. ha. ha. Because people have been googling this stuff since approximately 1923 (yeah, it's funny 'cause it's wrong, I get it), which means there are blog entries and resource compilations and Services Finders coming unliterally out of my literal ass on this subject, and you read them all, like, the first eleven pages of results. And wait, is this recent? oh, from 2009? wait, no date on this one... there's a phone number? we're sorry, the number you have dialed. Filter results by outpatient, multiservice, housing, Kendra's Law? Licensed type programming definitions? Human trafficking? Cultural competence? What the hell is this? Wait.. this is for New York? Is there a Florida one? No. How did I find this one? Wait. What?

And even the simple solutions are not simple when you're depressed. and you fight the urge to write between each paragraph things like but i know it's all gonna be okay, hurr-dee-durr-dee-durr!!! No, actually, I don't. Sorry. And I'm giving it little thought, because I'm dealing with today, and nothing beyond. So it's actually kind of hard, right now, to call one number, to be given another number to call for more info, and then fax this info to this number, oh, wait, it didn't go through, try again.. nope, didn't go through.. one more time... do you have a scanner? No? Well, you'll have to fill it out in person, but we're closed Mondays... you could try this location instead, but the address online is incorrect because they've moved across town.. are you ready to write this down? Just be ready to park and walk, because they're doing construction.. you should probably park at this address and cross at this intersection and the door can be kind of hard to find...

Maybe there's not much point in writing it all down. But writing it down gets it outside you, and you know that for every person who scoffs, there's probably two who understand, whether they'll admit it or not. So you'll make the rounds again tomorrow.

At least it's true that there's a measure of comfort in finally acknowledging, for the first time, ever, that things are bigger than Invincible Me, and watching the rigid compartments rightfully collapse in response.

So far: that is the sole silver lining of the past three years. And it is a bright one.

And oops, bye, 'cause I forgot to pay my car insurance, speaking of forgetting everything I ever have anything to do with, ever, anymore.