Father’s day and the weeks surrounding it have never been an easy time for me. This one was made harder than others because I’ve been harrowing myself about finishing a book for my work book club. It’s called “Educated,” and it’s by Tara Westover. I cannot recommend it enough. I’ve had over a month-and-a-half to read it, but I’ve not been able to get through more than a few pages at a time without crying, or having a senseless fight with my partner that’s really about the discord in my soul that the book played like a fiddle.
Tara would recount hearing endless lectures about the Illuminati, the brain-washing ways of conventional schooling, or the sacrilegious frivolity of the lives of everyone other than her family; she would write about dodging her father’s volatile moods, experiencing in denial her older brother’s bullying, verbal and physical abuse and feeling betrayed as her mother (primarily) and other family members flip-flopped between resisting and perpetuating the dark environment she lived in-- and as I read her words, I would collapse into a pain I find impossible to describe.
But even while the eerie familiarity I felt towards Tara- despite my wildly different cultural and racial circumstances- struck hard and heavy in the moments that she recounts the traumatic events, ideologies and emotional realities that she lived through, the time she spent uncovering her inner dialogue and intellectual journey hit much harder. As I read the book, it was difficult reliving the trauma of a teacher kicking me out of a level of math I somehow tested into when she found out I lacked the ability to perform long division in eleventh grade (after a spotty history of formal schooling). However, it was really gut-churning to relive the cognitive process of unlearning self-loathing through intellectual exploration.
Tara gravitated to historiography to relearn her own learning of self in much the same way I exploded when I was exposed to the study of epistemology. I believe it is not coincidental to surviving abuse that I cannot fathom studying any discipline, no matter how perfunctorily, without engaging in a critical history of it. Tara’s angry emails to her parents as she learned about the neurocognitive damage her abusive childhood had left her with are not dissimilar to emails I’ve written, and phone calls I’ve had. Sadly, neither is her raw and eternal yearning for a less warped love from her parents and siblings; her immutable desire to fit into the topographic, familial, cultural and whole history of herself.
For me, that is what is at the core of the pain of domestic abuse-- it forces you to divorce your own self, and you have to walk a steep and treacherous path back to first knowing, and then loving the person you really are. The damage of an abuser is never just the damage of one person. People often forget that especially with childhood abuse, it takes a village of bystanders and suppressors to perpetuate the abuse. Countless people neglect, gaslight and abandon you when you are abused. They cast so much doubt on you, that you doubt yourself and fear forming real beliefs. They fail to remember things they have seen, or they support you in one moment only to turn their backs on you in the next-- and so, one after another, the countless enablers of the abuser decimate your belief in humanity and eventually, in your own self. Sometimes, you can rationalize the actions of your abuser because you see them as victims of abuse themselves. But seeing all these other people enable the abuse is almost never comprehensible. You really should read the book. Tara goes through this in so many of the same ways I did, and reveals it more emphatically and eloquently than I can. Even as I type these words, the enabling voices ring loudly in my ears “don’t air your dirty laundry in public.”
But I have something to say to all those voices today: “SHUT UP. You are wrong.”
Tara airing her dirty laundry in public is what is restoring the faith in humanity that you took away from me when you didn’t say or do anything about the abuse you witnessed. She is the one who reminds me that for every auntie who chose to stay quiet as she witnessed evidence of abuse as a five-to-eight-year-old me bathed with her daughter, there is a Tara somewhere who will not be afraid to speak up. That for every tuition teacher who stands dumbfounded and watches me get flung across a room by someone who should be protecting me, there is a Tara somewhere who will call what she sees out. Tara speaking out about how her battered, neglected and devastated inner child stares back at her from mirrors, causes her to rage at her parents and have panic attacks and mental breakdowns in her mid-late twenties is what is helping me accept, nurture and heal my own inner child, who wonders why this is so hard, even when I’m so old and so far away. Tara revealing her own imperfections during this journey are allowing me to forgive mine. Receiving empathy is often a foreign experience for survivors of abuse, especially when it comes to empathy for our own selves; and my empathy for Tara is fueling my empathy for me.
Something that all of you who blithely advise survivors of abuse to “forgive,” “let go of anger” and “release negativity” should understand is that none of this happens without facing the grave reality of abuse. Tara, recounting a college lecture on Isaiah Berlin gave an instinct buried within me words in her book: “negative liberty… is the freedom from external obstacles or constraints. An individual is free in this sense if they are not physically prevented from taking action...Positive liberty...is freedom from internal constraints...it is self-mastery, the rule of the self, by the self.” To release negativity is an incomplete state. Neutrality is nothing to aspire to. But, to embrace positivity, we have to come face-to-face with our realities, and those realities include our realities of abuse. To let go of our anger, we must see change. To see change, we must generate it. And that will never occur in silence.
Today, I am at a better place with forgiveness than I have ever been. I am not angry as I write this. I have empathy for myself as I accept that I have had both perfect and imperfect reactions to the abuse I survived. That has manifested into peace. I feel like I’m doing my part to effect change. I don’t want those who have abused me or enabled the abuse to eat crow. Absolutely not. As I have mentioned, the sad yet liberating reality of surviving childhood abuse is that it doesn’t erase your love at all. If anything, it amplifies your need for receiving and expressing it. I’m writing today to send that love out to those who need it. I’m writing to remind others that we are out there, and we need you to use your voices and resources to be our allies. I’m writing to ask you to be kinder to the people you encounter because some of them are going through a whole lot. I’m writing to tell you that we can do better than simply eschewing negativity by actively generating positive change. I’m writing to tell my friends and family who need someone to stand by them as they climb out of a dark pit that I am here. I believe you. I want to hear your story. I know you deserve better. You are loved.
