Reflections on Christine Blasey Ford

I've been trying to get at why the the Christine Blasey Ford episode has touched me so deeply; here's some writing I did last night and this morning to try to make sense of it:
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For me, incidents of physical abuse stand out against the nebulae of childhood memory as crisp points of light. These stars formed constellations as they were born, a zodiac of spiritual teachers, teaching me to stay safe. And they became secret tormentors, teaching me to stay small, wilted, like a kicked dog. Among their gifts, though, are their pristine recordings of memory. There’s no better time capsule from my Bush and Clinton-era school days than the vivid recall I have around what it felt like to breathe, to hold my body, to wear my face, when I was hit. I remember colors, the feeling of wind on my cheeks, the spread of clouds above.

Here are some memories. In 7th grade, a kid pale as notebook paper, Peter, hitting me on the head in a concrete handball court. Slamming me with rolled up paper in a crowded walkway, under an overcast sky pregnant with drizzle. The feeling of one of Peter’s surprise, hard hits from behind making me lose feeling halfway between the top of my head and my neck. Then the needling sting that hung around for longer. Or a kid named Thomas cornering me in a dark closet, my back squeezed against cool plaster, him pressing a hard comb against my throat, shouting, over and over, that he was going to kill me.

A kid named Mario in 6th grade tripping me to improve his position with a group of flannel clad cool kids while I walked alone and in front of them under a hazy sky. Mario laughing, the others mildly impressed, while I crawled on the grainy concrete in shorts my mom had bought me. Mario tripping me again once I’d gotten up. This by a ratty chain-link fence separating us from a row of suburban houses.

I also remember the face of the kid who pushed me down on a bridge on my walk home from the bus, on a day so beautiful, amidst hills so lush, and clouds so white, I could cry at its grace. Then, the color of the mucus the boy spat on my nerdy corduroy pants after I lay under him and his friends while noticing my bleeding leg. The mucus was white, thick, the shape of a slug. I remember the numb, broken feeling of struggling to get it off with a stick once he’d left. Walking home with a smear of it drying on me.

I also remember verbally abusing my 10th grade girlfriend. Calling her a bitch over and over again, half joking to exonerate myself, but calculating to hurt her in a way that was precision targeted to inflame her tender places. I remember agreeing to meet by some benches after school, not showing up, and then convincing her that we’d never agreed to meet. Telling her I couldn't care less about her as she clung to my shirt and quivered. I can only imagine how much I hurt her in those actions, and others, given the trauma she had experienced in early life and had leaned on me to help her with. I don’t remember whether the clouds were crisp or diffuse, or how the wind felt on my cheeks when I did these things. I don’t know what stars I burned into her firmament or what constellations they made.

I wasn't sexually assaulted. But I know what it’s like to be dominated physically to the point of helplessness. To be laughed at in an act of primal domination. What it’s like to carry that for decades later. To still find the most safety in slouching, because, in my animal body, I know that standing tall, and making strong eye contact, is an invitation to males to put me in my place. I am an expert at diminishing myself to avoid aggression borne of jealousy. At putting people at ease and reminding them that I'm not a threat to evade imaginary attacks. At playing through defending myself physically while in quiet conversation with someone who's quite clearly safe.

I've started to make new meanings of the constellations experience burned into my childhood sky, but they still sing their song of safety in invisibility and vigilance, like the hymns of a religion I was raised in, and that I reflexively believe in. My wilted child’s body is still there, encased like a Russian doll under my father persona, my boss persona, my scientist persona.

I’ve written all of this to try to get to why I feel so viscerally connected to Christine Blasey Ford. Here is a woman who had the courage to reveal one part of her private, sacred night sky to all of us, and to a powerful group of sneering men. I know so reflexively she is telling the truth, by the way she remembers the thump of the music at the party she describes, the feeling and the grace of the bathing suit that clung to her skin and protected her, the cackle of the two boys participating in her violation, her escape to the bathroom, the ping ponging of the boys off the walls as they left.

Many of us have a wilted, dejected child’s body underneath our put together adult personas. Or underneath fallen apart adult personas. Many of us had stars of abuse burned into our skies that became our private zodiacs, never not reminding us that our natural place is to be pinned beneath aggressive bodies, and that our natural protection is to stay vigilant, numb, angry, dejected, even in our adult kitchens and bedrooms. I’m thinking of Christine now, at that table, a thousand cameras fixed on her, and I'm crying. For the act of domination that those old, mainly men, mainly Republicans, repeated, with lying gazes, surrounding her like a pack of hyenas. I'm thinking of the new stars they might have burned into her sky. Of the girls watching who had just been raped. In the same room as the family TV.

What I've struggled to accept, but what I know, is that as adults, our days of being bullied are not over. “I am safe now,” my old therapy mantra, might not be true. We have a leader who is that schoolyard bully whose mucus I couldn't remove from my leg. Who, to our Muslim, Mexican, and Central American neighbors, whispers “I’m going to kill you." And there is his pack of lieutenants who laugh along with him. There are his gaggle of Fox News talking heads who justify and celebrate his every action. In 2018, coming of age is no fairytale where childhood demons fade into the well of memory. They're still here, on the most public platform in the land, in the most hallowed halls of our country, telling a brave woman, who stands in for all of us, to shut up.