on survivorship, radical repair, & healing trauma

Jan 19

on survivorship, radical repair, & healing trauma

content note: discussion of abuse, stalking, sexual violence, & cptsd. please read with care.

people who i cared about, called friends or comrades, & in some cases, even loved were SO quick to side with my abuser, post about how i "made up" my r*pe to "scam people," & share my abuser's violent & defamatory smear campaign to even more people, in both my local/IRL & online/URL communities.

the extent & impact of harm: how enabling abusers amplifies traumatization

the harm my ex-friends & comrades caused extends far beyond enabling my abuser, as if that wasn’t bad enough. their actions have harmed me emotionally, socially, psychologically, & financially. their choice to support & enable my abuser also amplified the impact of the ongoing trauma i was experiencing.

a few examples, just a few, include...

💔 community spaces & zine fests banning me, including while i was on a 12 hr train ride to MA feminist zine fest (which i missed my only sibling's wedding for)

💔 losing countless friendships, access to mental health support spaces & disability communities,

💔 wondering if i'm losing my f*cking mind bc so many people are believing & buying into my abuser's BS

💔 having panic attacks when i get social media notifications due to constant harassment, abusive messages & comments, hate-following, stalking, & surveillance

💔 zine distros, like wasted ink, sending all my zines back after agreeing to sell them bc they believed my abuser

💔 losing paid work opportunities as a disabled nonbinary queer survivor experiencing financial precarity

💔 acrl/ny, an academic librarianship conference, canceling my conference presentation, after celebrating me with an early career librarianship award the year before

💔 acrl blog, an academic librarianship professional organization's blog, which i wrote for as a first-year librarian blogger, an extremely competitive mentorship, refusing to highlight my work alongside literally every other blogger that year

💔 emboldening my r*pist to harass me with legal threats, again, after his lawyer was told to (& agreed to) cease & desist several years ago

💔 exacerbating my existing cptsd to a place where KMS felt like the only solution & to have people frame this as an attempt to "avoid accountability" instead of a desperate, intentionally isolated, & chronically su*c!dal r*pe survivor with cptsd who was actively being traumatized (& retraumatized) on a daily basis.

some of these experiences may seem minor to folks on the outside. consider that every time something like this happened, again & again & again, it was another crisis-inducing retraumatization, ripping a wound open that never had the chance to heal.

a few people have “apologized” (calling their words an apology is generous, tbh) for their role in all of this ... always privately & through DMs. this is interesting to me because these folks were “friends” yet they were so quick to publicly harass a survivor - & also are unwilling to make actual amends beyond a generic “i’m sorry if i caused you harm” DM.

(re)imaging repair: what could radical repair look like?

what could radical repair look like? how might practices of radical repair center survivors & honor our self-sovereignty? how could radical repair account for the various types of harm one caused (i.e. emotional, community-based, financial, psychological, social, etc.)?

what would it look like if we understood radical repair as a collective responsibility, an commitment to practicing community care, & nonlinear process, rather than an individualistic, private, & singular event?

i don't want to relive all the ways i was traumatized, over & over & over again, tbh. but i do want the harm that was done to me to finally be acknowledged & for people to actually take ownership of & responsibility for their role in that.

what would radical repair look like to you?