The Secret of Survival

In one of the most terrifying things I've ever written, I share some of how I've been telling my own secrets.

(Content note: This post includes references to multiple kinds of abuse and eating disorders.)

The worst secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves. 

I spent years keeping one so well that I never guessed it. Lips zipped, hushed into a silence that spanned the count of years. I didn’t tell a soul— least of all my own. 

It was like stained glass in the negative, splintered darkness streaming through the fractured panes. I never pieced the whole frame together. I walked with stealth through the shadows cast by the unlight.

Until the secret started telling itself, unspooling like a scream.

I may never fully understand why it’s easier for me to starve myself than it is to say out loud: “I was sexually abused and assaulted.” 

The way I have tried to erase my body is my secret’s way of telling the truth: that I was already erased, already destroyed, already made into absolutely nothing.

“The term sexual assault refers to sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the victim. Some forms of sexual assault include: Attempted rape. Fondling or unwanted sexual touching. Forcing a victim to perform sexual acts…” 
— RAINN

In the years I’ve been working with survivors of sexual exploitation as a professional in the anti-human trafficking field, I’ve heard vastly varied stories. But one trait is almost universal: most of them don’t believe, at first, that they’ve been abused. 

When I started my job at this nonprofit, I was still adamantly telling therapists and treatment centers that I hadn’t actually been sexually abused. After all, I had been an adult. After all, it didn’t go as far as rape. After all, I felt tremendous empathy and understanding for my abuser. After all, I had said no, but what if I should have said no MORE?

What I have gained through justice work, interacting with overcomers of so many shades of violence, is the courage to face my own history head-on. My survival story might not be the same as the trafficking survivors I work with. But I do have a story. 

“So our records say that in addition to the emotional, physical, and religious abuse, you’ve experienced significant, sustained sexual abuse— but that if asked, you would deny that that is true.”

A pause from the clinician on the other end of the phone.

“Does that seem accurate?”

I grimace. “Sure. I mean, yeah. I guess.”

I couldn’t exactly deny that I would deny it. But I was taken off-guard that this was what the chart said.  

I can surmise what led to those notes in my records. My primary therapist while I was receiving a past episode of care had a still, clearly-lit soul. In her presence, I found some measure of safety. 

So during one session, we sat outside in the clean western sunlight. I was curled into a ball on a deck chair while telling her stories. She sat perfectly still, intent as she asked clarifying questions. I twisted my hands, gripped my wrists until they bruised. 

I can mark to the day when my anorexia exited its fragile multi-year remission and came crashing back into my life: May 2, 2019. Half a decade ago now. I have not had more than a single day outside of a treatment center without disordered behaviors since.

It’s easy to see this thing as another interloper, another threat. But the truth is that I owe this cold, perilous sickness a kind of gratitude. On that May morning years ago, I had just been through another round of abuse that I was untelling myself. 

So the anorexic part of me that was a secret weapon held in reserve for emergencies quietly suggested: just skip lunch. Just this once.

It was the first meal I had intentionally skipped in my years of tenuous recovery. And like a switch being flipped, I slid into the harrowing dark.

But that dark was speaking. It was telling the truth, finally, the same way it had first told the truth when I was a little girl: something’s not right. You’re being violated. You’re going to die.

It screamed my body all the way into a hospital gown, heart failing, weak lungs heaving. It screamed the truth until I had to believe it. 

"I thought good guys get to be happy
I'm not happy
I am poison in the water and unhappy...

I'm tired of you still tied to me
Bleeding whenever you want
Too tired to move, too tired to leave."
— Ethel Cain, "Hard Times"

The deep relapse into my lifelong sickness was my canary in the coal mine, letting me know the soot-black air I’d been walking in had turned noxious, unbreathable. I had to get out.

My anorexia and the resulting health complications have almost killed me several times in the past few years. But this sickness has also told secrets. It has forced all my shame to the surface where I have to meet it. It’s the reason I broke away from abuse. It’s the reason I had my reality named. 

It has both killed me and saved my life. 

I am still learning how to survive that paradox. I am still learning new ways to tell the truth, to write with a pen rather than with punishment. This is part of why I have centered writing in my life this year with renewed intentionality. I am trying to remind my own shaking soul: you have ways of speaking so much safer than using your skin.

I roll a mouthful of coffee
over my stillborn tongue,
trying to scald it into speaking. 
But even this
tastes like you
and all the moments you silenced me,
spellbound by your static fury. 

I want to drink
just one sip of something new,
no blood in the water,
no taste of you.
When the sage passed down
his oracle,
his inditement,
that there’s nothing new
under this sun—
dear God
I hope he was wrong.
I’d dig a well in a desert just to
have something inside me you’ve never touched.
— A poem written in my journal during a hospitalization

Often, I am asked how I can do the job that I do given my trauma history. Anxious, tender-hearted loved ones wonder if the stories of trafficking survivors swallow me whole, drag me into the belly of my own hurt. 

One doctor who tended to have a rather pessimistic view of my case tried to get me to quit, wrote in my chart last year: “I think her current job is a constant trigger for her of her traumas that she will not be able to get through with the constant reminders.”

She was wrong.

The surprising thing about the work I do is that I have experienced far more vicarious resilience than I have retraumatization. Every single day, I read devastating case files full of abuse, exploitation, and assault. And every single day, I bear witness to the most astonishing souls surviving that torture, transmuting it, alchemizing death into resurrection.

Working with survivors of trafficking has not taught me that the world is a terrible place. I already knew that. It’s taught me that this terrible place is survivable. It’s taught me that the absolute worst things a human being can experience, things so much uglier than any story I’ve lived, cannot overcome the impossible light in us. 

On the days when I flatly tell my trauma therapist that I’m ruined, that I’m already dead, so why does it matter if my heart finally fails? I think about the precious girls in Thailand who made me coffee, talked about clothes, showed me their home, the ways they’re patching together all their splintered hope. 

I think about the teenaged survivor in a slum in the Philippines who compared tattoos with me. 

I think about the survivor leaders I have had the privilege of learning from in the anti-trafficking field, the policy advisors and speakers and advocates who know what it is to hold both your pain and someone else’s. 

And I think of the survivors of exploitation and assault in my own life, the people who propel me forward in this work. 

My own suffering is placed in perspective. I am not healed yet. But my survivor siblings show me that someday, I could be. They’re leading me, trailblazing the way into something on the other side of the untold secrets.

It has taken me three months to write this. Three months to eke out a harvest of articulation, grown from the worst of the past several years. 

I’ve felt it important because these parts of the portrait of me are foundational for everything else that has happened, gory and glorious. It’s the black I’m trying to sift gold from. It’s the push and pull of secret and speaking, the backdrop to every day of travel, of hospitals, of rock shows, of loving and losing and learning. 

I am lucky enough to have people in my life who echo back the same words I have told others but never dared believe for myself. So if you need them? I offer them now to you too. May they light your path with the glow of truths told— no longer secrets.

I believe you.

It wasn’t your fault.

You are not bad for the ways you learned to survive.

You didn’t deserve this.

You are more than this.

You can make the horrible things into something holy.

Whenever you’re ready—

you don’t have to rush.

Take my hand.

We’ll do it together.

We can survive.