Peony

Is a
    peony a
            rose?

Does it
         matter?

Sparrow

She stormed out of their shared apartment, keys to their flat between her sweaty fingers. The sun beat down on her shorts clad legs from its zenith, drying tears in sticky limbo on their way to her chin. She was disoriented by the fight she just had with her sister, about her dad's lung disease, need for a transplant and decision to be buried immediately without a funeral if things went south. "It's selfish of him, it's about our closure, not his!", she screamed. Now she stood in the middle of the hot tar road, amidst a collection of Dutch-Victorian houses and quickly stumbled onto the side walk as a car approached from the short-right to her rear. She sat down in the dirt, next to a succulent garden - the overly manicured, yet unnoticeable suburban type - and her eyes fell to a series of three stones next to the pole of a street light.  She was taken back to the day she left the flat with her last boyfriend and they found a baby sparrow, freshly dead, fallen from a nearby nest. Soft tears filled her eyes then, and they decided to dig a tiny grave in honour of its short lived life. She picked up the soft body and handed it to him before he placed it in the shallow hole. They marked it with the three stones they used to dig it. Now, as the sun blinded her, she looked up, paused for a moment and patted her cheeks before walking back up to the flat. A smile on her face.

Pepetrator

Kin -

Cast
webs of
wrought
iron links
over you by
spewing
garbage
from their mouths.

Catharsis

Sometimes
carthasis
   crystalises
out
of insufferable
moments of
   time dragged
           on
and a distracted
mind
         trying to
            pull
all you are
   out
 of the
present.

White Light

My soul, a
wisp, met
yours.

They entered
a storm in
which they
twirled together,
but were
pulled apart
by force.

After seeking,
searching,
pining and
resigning

themselves
to a fate
lost
in a white
wilderness.

They grazed
passed each
other, adrift.

And reunited
one night
a thousand
and five
years later.

To begin
their
eternity

in unison.

Surviving life - as a survivor

Navigating life as a survivor of abuse is one of the hardest things any individual will have to live with. This TED talk for instance highlights how childhood trauma has knock on effects on the rest of one's life, with specific focus on the medical consequences thereof.  It also highlights how we box off abuse as a social or mental health issue where it is something that is truly all encompassing. I write from the perspective of someone who has lived through intense childhood trauma, but the same logic applies to survivors of any type of abuse - emotional, physical, sexual. 

Basically, with abuse, what happens is that a survivor is primed to exist in fight or flight mode. They are as a result of their experience, untrusting of the world and of people's motives, and this is compounded by a profound sense of internalised blame and a strong imposter syndrome. This means that they see their circumstances as if it is something they had a conscious choice in creating, and see their successes as flukes that are not attributable to their hard work.

With these as the backdrop of what it's like to live as survivor,  rising above the challenges of daily life requires so much more. For instance, daily tasks become fraught, since the base level of trust in other people that survivors have is much lower. There is an anxiety that surrounds interacting with people they do not know intimately,  in fact just meeting people on their level requires an extra degree of trust that takes a substantial amount of emotional energy to fork out. Emotional energy that survivors do not have, since positive emotional space is in short supply because of trauma.

The crux of the matter is that being a survivor never ends. In other words, no matter how you cut it, your conditioning in childhood and learnt behaviour that the world works through the absence of trust follows you throughout your life. This is not to say that you will never trust people. Instead, what it means is that to learn to trust takes longer, or can manifest by lapses in judgment. There are behavioural patterns learnt that basically keep manifesting themselves in  the life of a survivor over and over again.

The most common way that these patterns manifests can be illustrated by the trope of a woman who subconsciously chooses an abusive partner. I am not sure this is because of an inherent belief that she is unworthy of love and respect as much as it is because this is what she has been conditioned to understand love and respect to be.

Ponder on that for a second.

Can you imagine how hard it is to break the cycle of abuse when your internal reality is one in which being treated in a way that undermines your humanity is what you have been ingrained to understand as normal. This results in a threshold for triggers that is both lower and higher than that of the ordinary person. Lower in the sense that because an ordinary person would not have been exposed to abusive behaviour (especially emotional abuse) when they are confronted with it, it goes over their head and they are somewhat immune to it to a certain extent. The trigger threshold is also higher because of uncertainty surrounding when trauma is going to strike - there is a constant anxiety over being attacked and this makes interacting with ordinary people all the more harder. 

This complex existence is reality for survivors. Here are a list of spaces where they come out most strongly. In these spaces the abused person is at a disadvantage because the power structures of society do not recognise or even legitmise their internal struggle. 

1. The workplace. See this post. 
2. The most intuitive - romantic relationships, this can be long term relationships or short term flings. In the former it can be the case that the abused person settles for a narcissist or a person that either explicitly or subtly undermines them, and in the latter it is a series of associations with partners who undervalue the person and lack respect for them. 
3. Friendships - learning who to trust, and how much to open up to friends can be challenging for a survivor. You never know whether they will truly accept you once they come to learn of your history, and while you should not care, it is almost inevitable that you do. 
4. Social situations with acquaintances - social anxiety is a common response of survivors. 
5. Authority - Survivors, of abuse, and especially emotional abuse and neglect, struggle with authority since it was an abuse of power in the first place that led to them being victimised.

With almost every part of interacting in daily life jaded by the shadow that is being a survivor, the hardest part about all of this is that it is a lonely process. South Africa is a nation of serially abused people, in particular black people, women, and children. It is almost debilitating realising that after a life time of letting people treat you a certain way, that there is something not right about it, and that the power lies with you to make them stop or to walk away. How can you walk away when at the base of what you rationally know is the right way to be treated, you have a belief that abuse in its complex forms is almost normal? It's not like you are choosing it in the first place, you didn't ask for the trauma, you didn't ask to be inflicted with the harm that caused you these patterns. It then becomes even more debilitating realising that there are patterns in your life perpetuating the cycle of abuse - and at this point it turns into self-loathing. You hate yourself for allowing this but again, you don't know any different. 

All the while the rest of the world is oblivious to this. The person inflicting you with the pain is probably unaware of it too, and there is almost a guarantee that their behaviour is not going to change. Your friends and family can probably see the pattern perpetuation, and are only too quick to tell you that you need to leave or change but don't care to acknowledge that no matter if you do leave, the propensity for you to keep manifesting it in different ways will carry on throughout your life. 

This is where therapists and cognitive behavioural therapy come in. But not everyone can afford this, so what are those who are without resources supposed to do to cope? And for those who do manage to afford it, it is often the case that therapists can be harsh and "hold up the mirror" without any true understanding of how all encompassing this existence is. 

In the end the only true remedy for it is self-love and self-care, but as a survivor living with a heart that is perpetually tightened in your chest, it is impossible to know how, when or where to start with this. And the cycle turns inward. You become both the perpetrator and the victim. And this is the hardest part to live with. I wonder, how do I survive knowing that this is what I am creating for myself? Even if I see a pattern, it makes me feel helpless, resigned to a fate that will keep me in emotional turmoil? For me, as a survivor I will say that there has been no catharsis - there's been denialism and judgment by friends, spending of large amounts of money on therapy and only a slow improvement over time, but always a coming back to the same repetition over the course of a life, mired by periodic slips into depression and a hope - blind faith (ironic as an atheist) - that things will get better eventually.

Reflection

Face, teeth, mind,
hair, hands, nails,
eyes - pupils -, gait.

Perception fused
 with deception. Delicious
reflection, of a
  connection

that is empty.

Ghost

I want to have
   all of it with you.
      But only because,
I can't have any of it.

What is this
   affliction? Confusing
my mind (and soul) into
  not knowing if it is you I want,

or simply
    your ghost?

Glory

I want
  you to share
in my
   glory.

I am laying
   out a feast
and I want
   you to come
eat.

Summer Concerto

Your
    gaze, pierces
me in soft and sharp
    places, perfect.

Summer night
     shadows somersaulting
in the juncture of my
     thighs.

Oh, pick at the
      strings of my violin
with your
      pretty bow, tonight.

Fatima

Born in the
green hills
of Valencia.
(No, not Spain,
just Nelspruit).
Her mother, a
shop clerk, her
father the manager
at the local Spar.

Her life was the
envy of every
teenage girl. Wild
parties, sex at fifteen,
early birth control
that made her
skinnier
than the rest.

She was a little bird,
her sweet voice cooing
to the whims and needs
of the men around her.
A particular favourite
of every lascivious uncle.

She met him at fifteen. They
fucked upstairs in his parents
mansion. His father was a
pharmacist, so he stole a
number of drugs for them to
experiment with.

When he left to Jozi, for varsity
she found solace in the maternal
side of her family. Then her
own mother was the first to go,
kidney failure. It tore her apart,
but she was redeemed when
the big city killed his spirit
so that he came back that summer
and they were wed.

She lived in the same mansion they
first fucked in. Thinking she was the
beneficiary of a higher gift, the luckiest
girl in the world, the apple of her father
in law's eye. She cooked meals during
the week nights, and in the week days
stood behind the counter at the pharmacy.

There was only one way they could
entertain themselves on weekends,
and that lasted, until like her very own
mother, her kidneys gave in, and she
was eaten alive.