A Bigger Cup
There’s no question that self-hate severely limits
one’s capacity to love fully and wholeheartedly.
Capacity and desire are not the same thing
especially in discussions of love.
-Tarana Burke
*Trigger Warning - In this post I share some personal experiences with statutory rape.
I just listened to an interview with Tarana Burke about her book Unbound. It is an autobiography of her sexual assault as a child and how she chose to help other brown and black girls in similar circumstances to be heard and empowered through what became the Me Too movement.
At a certain point in the interview, she describes a conversation she was having with one of the 12-year-old girls in her leadership program about who was coming to pick her up. The girl responded, her boyfriend. When an adult man driving a car arrived and she said that was her boyfriend, Tarana sent him away and explained to the girl that he was an adult and it was statutory rape. I burst into tears.
I lost my virginity just after I turned 12 in a non-consensual situation with a boy I thought was cute. He was in fact a 19-year-old. He became my “boyfriend” for the next year and a half. During this time we had sex almost every day, all of it non-consensual, never instigated by me. Oftentimes, I was the only girl in a house with his friends drinking, doing drugs, watching pornography, and he would take me to another room where they all knew what was happening. It was humiliating and completely disempowering. I was in way over my head and more often than not in a total freeze state. I didn’t say yes or no. I oftentimes just went through the motions and then when it was over, I returned to my body and could have “normal” interactions with him. When I heard Tarana talking about how she stood up for this 12-year-old girl, I realized just how much I am still blaming myself for not saying no. Despite the years of healing I have done, there it was again. This unintegrated trauma bubbling up to the surface with the question, Why didn’t anyone say No for me?
Many other memories came flooding into my mind from my next “relationship” at 14 with a 24-year-old who I had limited sex with and eventually told him I can’t do this to the 35-year-old neighbor’s friend who took me for a ride when I was 13 and sexually assaulted me (to name a few.) I again could feel so palpably the messages of how I acted older and looked older, so therefore I was expected to behave and receive all that comes with being an adult. The number of unwanted advances, kisses, touches was a lot in those first few years of my teens.
My son turned 12 a couple of weeks ago. It was just after my 12th birthday that I lost my virginity and entered into this dark scape of becoming a sexual plaything for an older man. I take a moment to imagine my son being victim to an adult sexually manipulating him and him navigating a relationship like this for the next several months. It is unimaginable to me.
I am reminded today upon listening to Tarana’s words that desire and capacity are not the same thing. I know my family loved me and had the desire to fully love me and protect me. I also know that their capacity was the root of their silence. This interview shed light on the areas where my own capacity is limited in relationship to love and my children because of the shame and self-blame I still harbor around these early sexual experiences. It has inspired me to delve into the next rounds of integration and healing, and also to talk with my son about the meaning of rape and consent specific to sexual relationships. As Tarana said, we may have limited capacity AND we can ever expand our capacity to love even more fully and more wholeheartedly. Continuing to face the spots of shame that we harbor within, that we shy away from for fear that what we say about ourselves may be true, is the pathway to letting more love and more joy in. We cannot avoid these pains without them having a serious impact on our relationships and our children.
Where can you bridge the gap between the love you desire to give and receive and the capacity you have to actually do this?
Dare to Desire!
Kristen