All of this leads me to understand that we need to question what “good” boys and families truly means.
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According to RAINN, perpetrators of sexual violence are more often white and know the survivor/victim personally. She highlights that white boys, especially with wealth, are viewed as “good” and therefore not potential perpetrators. Here, Gay is talking about how danger and violence are silenced by privilege. Roxane Gay writes, “The final nail in the coffin of my yearning was their worry that the city was too dangerous, a concern that frustrated me, immeasurably, because I knew where danger really lurked – in the woods behind well-manicured exclusive suburban neighborhoods, at the hands of good boys from good families.” (Gay, 86) As trauma survivors, we know what it means to be “other” and to have our experiences challenged. Privilege gives us the ability to believe mistruths and play devil’s advocate by turning people’s pain into hypotheticals and debate challenges. This illustrates the disconnect between how we perceive safety in cities and the realities of violence everywhere. It was confusing to me, even at 12 years old, why my parents would point out violence there when I had already seen so much in my own neighborhood. People often challenge this story by asking,“Well, weren’t they legitimately worried about your safety in a statistically unsafe neighborhood?” I explain that there was so much violence happening in my own neighborhood (domestic violence, sexual violence, drug abuse, suicide). I tell this story to illustrate bias – race and class bias, but mostly racial bias because my family knew what it was to be poor. They made a point of telling me to be “safe” there. There’s a particular story that I tell in most trainings about how my parents would lock the car doors every time we drove into neighborhoods predominantly occupied by people of color and working class families. I provide trainings to teachers, students and non-profits about diversity and inclusion. Related: 10 Gifts to Comfort Someone Who Has Experienced a Trauma We’re always apologizing for things that are not our fault, but mostly apologizing for existing as we are. There are so many examples of Gay’s response to trauma that resonated with me: lack of sleep due to nightmares, avoidance, short- and long-term memory gaps, change in eating habits, change in sexual desire and never feeling that we’re enough and on “thin ice.” There is a heavy burden of our trauma symptoms, our bodies that have been labeled as disgusting or as an object and our difficulty in communicating all of these thoughts inside our heads that are already too much for us to digest. I was tormented by terrible dreams, memories really, of those boys, the woods, my body at their lack of mercy.” (Gay, 100) Gay shares a symptom of her trauma when she says, “I barely slept because it was in sleep that I was forced to confront myself, my past. The anxiety pulls us toward the past and the future. She then asked: “What age are you now? Where are you? Who cares about you? What is today’s date?” Our brains, when they have been traumatized, have trouble identifying our true age. She asked me: “Where were you when you were 12 years old? What was happening? What was wonderful and what was terrible?” She continued on with several other milestones – 15, 18, 21 and so on.
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My therapist taught me a grounding technique related to age. Related: What You Can Do for National Adoption Month It is difficult to remember our true age. All of these feelings (of age) are temporary. We know there has been growth, distance and reflection. And again, we feel 20 years old (or our actual age). We feel suspended in that moments of life-changing trauma that shaped our self-perception, our trust of others and our hope. And with that, there’s this duality of seeing beauty and purity clearly too, yet we feel we’ve lost those things and so we envy it in others. We know so many terrifying truths of the world. Innocence can be taken at such a young age that by the time we are 20 years old, we feel as if we are 100 years old. This captures so much of what trauma survivors can experience. I knew nothing but thought I knew everything.” (Gay, 99) You know when you read something and you are so struck because it sounds exactly like you? As if you could have written it yourself? This quote did it for me: “I was twenty years old and I felt like I was twelve years old and I felt like I was twenty years old and I felt like I was a hundred years old.
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Related: What Intergenerational Trauma Feels Like Regardless, I can’t help but make connections between the experiences of other survivors like myself and the perspective of Gay, which was shaped by being sexually assaulted when she was 12 years old. She does not use that label here, and I’m not sure if she claims that diagnosis for herself at all. Like I said, this book could be an account of PTSD but she does not frame it that way.