Letter to my younger self

A few months ago my therapist set me an assignment of sorts, to write a note to a younger version of myself from the wiser, older me: "If you were to think about this from the perspective of trying to help a friend struggling with a sense of shame, what you would tell them?  And I don’t meet the simple version of “it wasn’t your fault”, but  if your friend was in front of you, looking for your help, and in that moment you needed to dig down and find a gesture, a tone of voice, an expression, a metaphor, that would communicate your concern for this friend and your wish that they were out from under this painful burden, what would it be?  Can you imagine that instead of a friend, this is a younger version of yourself; this is the teenage you? What you want to tell her?"

I'm not going to post my letter in its entirety, but I am going to share parts because I found this exercise particularly helpful (and challenging!). I am still working through some old layers of shame and it feels like this is an important piece in what will hopefully be a 'turning point' for a new level of healing for me. It's been a long time since I've needed to revisit the past in such detail, but the last few months have been a time that I've found myself doing so. So, here is my letter to a younger version of myself:

If you were my friend I would come and sit with you in the corridor of that police station. We’d just sit, and I’d let you have your moment. The metaphor that I would bring would be gravity or relativity.  Trauma is as real and as powerful a force as gravity. You can’t see it, but there is no denying gravity.  And it could keep you grounded, but I would actually take it away.  I would remove the force or the weight that was keeping you there in that part of time and space.

And I would say it is okay that you don’t have all the answers. No one else in this time and place seems to have them either.  And maybe you haven’t gone about things the right way or made the right decisions… but maybe there is no right way.  You’re trying to make these connections and you’re questioning yourself and your choices, but you’re not really questioning the actions of everyone else. Who has helped to keep you safe so far? You should never have been in this position.

You are so outnumbered, so alone.  The things that have happened to you feel unspeakable. You’re afraid.  Your sense of self is so fragile and you believe there is something profoundly disappointing about you. There’s not a single person you haven’t let down. And I don’t know how you will forgive yourself for the possible consequences that your choices may have on others, but what I can tell you is that you have not taken more than you give.

This will be the making of you.  Very soon you’re going to go looking for resources for survivors of gang rape and there won’t really be any. So in just a few years you are going to be dedicated to providing support and resources to survivors of rape and sexual abuse.  Over the years you will connect, literally, with thousands of other survivors. You will make sure that no one that reaches out to you ever feels the way you have been made to feel right now.

You don’t know it yet, but you are already trying to make sense, trying to find your footing after your world has been made very unsteady. Parts of an essay that you wrote in your exams right after your rape are still imprinted in my memory.  You wrote that the character Oriel derived most of her important insights from a position of subservience. That the author had constructed the tent as a symbol of her desire to escape.  The haunted sound of middle C was one of the reasons Oriel moved into the tent and this note was the basis for all harmonic chords, so it represented dissonance as well as her separateness. You wrote about the transcendent elements; how there is no real division between life and death, or the past and present: “I travel back to these moments to wonder at what you’re feeling and come away with nothing but the knowledge of how it will be in the end.”

And I don’t know that it really meant much to you then, but what I wish is that I could go back and give you the knowledge of how it will be in the end.