CW abuse

It is apparently talk about abuse season (again), so I thought I would share some thoughts I went through in talking about abuse, mostly because I spent maybe eighteen months thinking about and writing my statement when I did.

What I say may not be relevant to anyone thinking about speaking, but it also might be helpful to others, and so...

I figured there are people out there right now looking at their watch and asking “do I go now? or no?”

Context: I published this December of 2017.

http://www.courtneymilan.com/metoo/kozinski.html

So first and foremost, NOT THAT I HAVE ANY SAY IN YOUR LIFE, but if you need to hear it: You have absolute permission to hold to your own schedule. To speak or not speak, as you feel safe and comfortable.

To say as much or as little as you feel comfortable with. It is your story, and nobody else owns it.

Even if other people eye roll and say, “come on, drop names” or anything.

This absolutely belongs to you and nobody else gets a vote.

It took me ten years to speak, and I needed every one of those years.

The thing I most wish for everyone else who has dealt with an abusive situation is that you get the time and love you need.

(This may not happen; sometimes circumstances suck. But I still wish you could have it, because you deserve it.)

Second: Let’s say you’ve decided to speak.

Let us talk about the fallibility of memory and how abuse impacts that, because if your abuser has any power at all, this is going to be used against you.

A thing I learned coming from a large family of many siblings who have 1.5-3 years between each child is that even without an abusive relationship, nobody ever remembers the same thing exactly the same way.

I had siblings that are relatively close in age, so we had some intense arguments (yay sibling rivalries); because there were 5 girls in the family and we split either 1 or 2 rooms, those fights *almost* always had a lot of witnesses.

*Nobody* remembers them the same way.

And this is in a family that is functional and loving (except for normal dynamics that you expect with kids close together in age who share rooms).

So now let’s talk about what happens when you deal with abuse. Obviously, this varies from person to person.

I found that abuse meant that some memories were *incredibly* sharp. But other things—entire months—felt like cotton.

This is a very normal way for brains to function under chronic stress.

If you think about how 2020 has felt—how time is both slow and very swift, without anchors, how weeks happen and then fall away—this is kind of the same feeling.

It is hard to piece together a coherent narrative when your brain has fog blown through everything, obscuring half the memory of your landscape.

A few weeks after I got the email from Kozinski I mention in the piece I linked above, I started writing something which sat on my Dropbox for a while, which I titled ”A Thing About Kozinski.”

At first, I was writing it for myself, not anyone else.

It went through many, many iterations, as I confronted the fog in my memory. Those iterations veered through wild accusations, then back through wild self blame, and so on and so on.

Threaded through all of this were my fears: I was a *romance* author. I wrote books with *sex scenes*. I talked openly about my mental health.

He was a federal judge, the previous Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit, and he could only be removed from his job by Congress.

I was worried about getting sued; I was worried about being vilified. It was...a lot.

I was worried because over the course of my clerkship, I had fallen apart and I was a *bad clerk*.

I’m a smart, type A person. It was *humiliating* to have to face how much I had fallen apart.

Abuse works—especially abuse for smart type A people—because you’re too ashamed to admit that it happened to you. You want to believe you’re too smart for it, and you aren’t.

The thing I always found, over those eighteen months of iteration, was that flinching from my fears did not make for a better statement. I had to be as unflinchingly clear about myself and how I’d responded as I could be, and to work through all that humiliation.

Like I said—I want you to have time.

It takes a *lot* of time to work through the shame and the defensiveness and whatever other emotions you’re holding on to.

The other thing I found was that for me, it helped to have a good grasp on deep point of view when writing the statement.

By “deep point of view,” I mean that I could not write the statement from anyone’s point of view except my own.

I did not know what my co-clerks thought. I did not know what Kozinski thought. I could not attribute thoughts to them.

I could say what I heard. I could say what I experienced. I could say what I felt and what my mental state was.

My experience of what happened to me had to be enough.

I was lucky in a way, in that I had spent years writing about abusive experiences (in many different flavors) in deep point of view, almost as if I were practicing for this time.

Maybe I was.

And I was lucky in that my abuser had power on paper, but was convenient for almost nobody.

I don’t know if it helps anyone to hear this—that shame and fear and anger and fogged memory are often a part of the process, and that time is valuable and you are allowed to have it.

But here we are.

This is a hard moment to stand in, for those who are holding on to these stories. I know from experience what it’s like to wake up every day and google the guy you’re afraid of speaking about.

Treat yourself like someone who deserves to be loved.