That's some crazy strength.

Neko Case has a new album out. I love her, so I bought the album the day it was released. The next morning, I was playing it as I got ready for work. All of the sudden, track six, “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” came on, layers of a cappella singing ringing round the tile and mirrored room.

Hey, little kid that I saw at the bus stop one day.
It was nearly midnight in Honolulu.
We were waiting for the shuttle to take us to the aeroplane
when your mother said, your mother said,
like I couldn't hear her, she said,
"Get the fuck away from me!
Why don't you ever shut up?
Get the fuck away from me!"

I was struck silent and still by these lines. There was something so painful and familiar about those words. I can't remember if those exact words were ever said of me. I'm missing a lot of time. But I know the sentiment was there, often enough, in both my parents, when I was a kid.

Recently, I was talking with someone who seemed not to understand what it means to be haunted, literally, by your own past. To be stalked through your dreams by loved ones trying to kill you, reliving moments that are like something out of a scripted nightmare or a gritty after-school special. Even today, I live with a hyper-vigilance, and it isn't against my triggers anymore as much as it is against myself.

I am constantly afraid of my own body, of the way a song or TV show will cause my breathing to catch or my hands to shake or my body to shudder out of control. In that moment, my own nervous system will betray the cool, calm, collected professional exterior I manage ninety-nine percent of the time and I won't even be able to breath, tears rushing down my face and words I don't want to say aloud tumbling from my mouth. I can't stop it when it happens. I have to just sit there until I calm down. Sometimes it takes a while. And the whole time, I wish for nothing more than for it to stop.

I live with the constant fear that this will happen in public. That it will happen in a movie theater. In a restaurant. At work. I am sitting in a coffee shop in Nashville right now, and as I write this to you, I am crying. I wonder what the lady sitting across the table from me thinks of the tears I can't contain as I write this.

Well, I just want to say that it happened,
'cause one day when you ask yourself,
"Did it really happen?"
You won't believe it, but yes, it did.
And I'm sorry.
And I'm sorry
'cause it happens everyday.

There is a tendency, particularly in people complicit in abuse by their silence, by their ignorance, or by their reluctance to intervene, to deny its reality. Though they are doing what is natural, protecting themselves from the brutality of the world, their denial gives them a role in that abuse. They contribute to its perpetration, its perpetuation, its prevalence in the lives of otherwise bright and hopeful beings, sometimes long after the abuse has ended.

This denial of what has happened has a tendency to eat away at survivors. Our abusers are already skilled at crazy-making, brilliant liars and manipulators whose strength depends on communal silence in the face of horror and our isolation as victims. It takes a lot to admit what has happened to us. Our abusers condition us to keep our mouths shut, to deny it if asked, and society furthers that effect by its tendency to ignore and marginalize. That those around us, even years later, will minimize, deny, or otherwise ignore the truth of our past compounds that pain, makes it difficult for us to name the ghosts in our heads, in our hearts, even after we've long since accepted and acknowledged the truth of them.

They won't believe you
when you tell them.
They won't believe you
when you say, "My mother, she did not love me.
My mother, she did not love me."
No, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no.

If you are ever confronted with a survivor, do us a favor. Don't pretend it didn't happen. It happened. You don't have to like it, or like your role in it, but don't pretend it didn't.

Also, don't pretend you know what we've been through. If I've learned anything from my own abuse, it is that this kind of horror is deeply personal. Even two people – a mother and child, a brother and a sister – experiencing the same abuse, won't experience it the same way. Don't assume that your pain looks or feels like what ours looks like.

Just accept what we tell you. Say it's horrible. Say you're sorry it happened. Say you're proud of who we are now. But don't deny us, or say you know how we feel.

You don't.

And I, for one, am glad you don't. I wouldn't wish my bad days and terrible nights on you. I don't want this kind of suffering for anyone.

Some days you feel like a cartoon
and people will rush to make excuses for you.
You'll hear yourself complain
but don't you ever shut up; please,
Kid, have your say...

I recently dropped something about being an abuse survivor in passing conversation to someone I thought already knew my backstory. We've known each other for the better part of a year now, and I just assumed it had come up already. When I realized I'd just dropped a bomb, I gave him the shorthand run down. “I had no idea,” he said. “I would have never guessed any of that.”

I hear that a lot. When I left the DV unit at the DA's office, I sent out a thank you to everyone in my department. I'd been there for over nine months and I'd never told most of them. When I wrote that they'd helped me heal and that I wanted them to know that there was at least one survivor who saw how committed they were, how hard they worked, how much they tried, and was grateful, some of them were shocked. “We didn't know,” one said, surprised etched across his serious face. “We had no idea.”

Of course not. You'd never know it to meet me. You can know me for months and months, maybe even years, and never know. Not anymore. I'm glad of that. I'm glad that you can't always tell just by looking anymore. But just because you can't see it, that doesn't make it any more or less true.

The friend I told recently speculated in passing that being survivor had shaped my feminism. “Of course,” I said. “How could it not?” Truthfully, though, it shapes everything. I don't always say that it does, but I know in my heart of hearts, the experience is indelibly imprinted on who I am and how I see the world as much as those unseen bruises used to be.

I've occasionally run into people who are curious as to why I would ever tell anyone, especially when I can hide it if I choose. They ask: “Aren't you passed it?” and “Don't you want to be passed it?” and “Aren't you worried that continuing to talk about it continues to allow it to victimize you?”

No.

God, yes.

Absolutely not.

The truth is, I can be healthy. I can be happy. I can be a functional, contributing member of society. I can be, by any measure of the word, a success in life. But I will also always be a survivor. I will never stop being a survivor. And there are a lot of us out there. I have lost count of the amount of my smart, successful, educated friends, most of them women, who are all those things despite being abused and assaulted by someone they believed was safe and trustworthy, someone who was supposed to care for them. I can tell you that when I tote up their numbers, the survivors outweigh those that aren't, and that's just the ones I know about.

The truth is, we are all around you, every day, and you may never know it. And as an adult with a happy life and a healthy relationship, I write these pieces because I know how scared I used to be of my own voice. I know how many people ignored all my not-very-subtle cries for help. I know, from working with survivors first-hand, how many of them feel like I used to: feel crazy, feel ignored, feel like no one will listen, and even if they do, that they still won't believe.

I am an educated, upwardly mobile, full-abled, cis-gendered, relatively young, relatively attractive white woman in the first world. I live in a privilege position now, socially speaking, and talking about my experiences is one of the ways I take what happened to me and I make something good out of it. I speak for those who right now cannot speak for themselves. I speak for those who are still too afraid to. I speak so that we are not invisible, and in the hopes that someone else will hear me and know they are not alone. That they know they will be believed if they talk to me. That I am here, and I can help. That they can get through it and get past it and make something fine from their lives.

Every time I do this, I don't feel revictimized. I feel empowered. I feel my own strength. And those ghostly shadows in my life grow a little smaller compared to the truth of what was then and what is now. And by talking about it, I also acknowledge the ways in which I am still a work in progress, and the areas I still have to work on. It keeps me humble. It reminds me that there are still miles to go. And, I've found, far more people believe me than I ever would have imagined. Far more people love me despite my flaws and my fears and my demons than the abused little kid I once was ever would have believed. In acknowledging the truth, I find acceptance. I find a kind of peace.

'Cause I still love you
Even if I don't see you again.

“That's some crazy strength,” my friend concluded when I had finished telling him my story.

“Yep,” I replied, because that's the truth.

That's some crazy strength.

Every survivor I know has it, whether we feel it every day or not. I have it. You have it. And we are successful despite everything that has happened. That is our true secret superpower. We are not defeated, and every day that we get up and keep going, we are demonstrating a kind of super-human strength.

So if you're reading this, and you feel alone, or broken, or lost, know this: It really happened. It may still be happening. But you are a superhero. Every day that you go on breathing in spite of it, you are a success. You can get out. And, in spite of it, you will be okay. Even when you're not. You will still be okay.

Because I believe in you.

And I did it.

And you can, too.

And I love you
even if I don't see you again.

"They smell to me quite sinister:" What Scent Smells Sinister?

Neko Case - Red Tide (Live)
There's a smell here that stands my hairs on end
dog hair in the heater, gas pumps and cedar,
and jackknifes on the nine and seabirds choked on fishing line...

I am lately obsessed with Neko Case. Her albums have been in heavy rotation in my car and on my mp3 player for several months now, and I don’t see it stopping any time soon.

I saw her live a couple weeks ago, and she was stunning. The thing that impressed me most, and there were quite a few things to be impressed by, was how she stood. Neko Case stands like a singer, a real singer. Her arms hang free at her sides, her feet are shoulder width apart, her knees are loose, and her microphone is level with her mouth. Then she opens her mouth, and she just…sings. She just sings, and it is so beautiful. I almost never get to see people really sing like that. Even from pretty far back in the venue, she just blew the doors off the thing.

That little girl from Tacoma is one helluva talent.

There's a smell here of gravel and cigarettes lit
when the match made them sweet
when the engine turned over and beat up our street
Oh, that was the day to remember...

One of the songs I find myself coming back to over and over is “Red Tide.” The reason I getting stuck on it, in fact, is that the entire song is more or less about scent. Being a perfumista, that means I hear it and I think perfume. Over and over I keep thinking, what perfumes smell like the red tide Neko Case is singing of? A smell that stands my hairs on end. A smell of gas pumps and cedar, of gravel and cigarettes lit when the match made them sweet.

What things smell like that? What things smell “to me quite sinister”? A sinister perfume, one that is like the scent of the fires that leapt from the caves of the things that have not happened yet, bad and mysterious and dangerous things of an ominous future, a bad turn around a dark bend.

L’Artisan Dzing!? No, it’s quirky, but not sinister. Carmel corn and sawdust and animal sweat could be sinster, but only if it felt like a cheap circus tent set ablaze with every person and animal simultaneously stampeding toward the exits in panic. This is more like an elephant balancing a ball on its nose in a cute way, a  Disney-esque take on circus life.

I dug through my boxes a few days ago, still in search of something sinister. The original DKNY Black Cashmere  packaging certainly has the makings of a sinister perfume, all black and smooth like the obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the scent is wrong, too cozy and full sparkly top notes.

I tried several slumberhouse scents because they are so weirdly wonderful, and the closest was slumberhouse Vikt, but it didn’t have quite the right ratio of attraction and repulsion to be sinister to me.  It was too polished, to smooth.  It lacked the ragged edge of fierceness that says "I scare you, so come here."

So what smells sinister? What smells like that dark and murky feeling that haunts you when you are just freed from your ugliest dreams? In other words, what smells like this:

"The good Dale is in the Lodge, and he can't leave.
Write it in your diary."

I remember because of the fires that leapt 
from the caves of the things that have not happened yet
when I think of it now they smell to me quite sinister.

For me Olympic Orchids Gujarat fits the bill quite like nothing else I have found so far. And I don’t mean since I started thinking about this song or even since I started in with perfume. I mean since I could smell things, because this is high up there on things I now think of as attractive and yet sinister. The lovely Ellen Covey described the scent as follows:

A spicy, smoky oriental, Gujarat is made with just about every spice you can name and some you probably never even heard of, softened and sweetened with tropical flowers, supported on a base of smoky woods, resins, and balms, and garnished with a dash of chili and a twist of lime.

Gujarat is available as a parfum extrait or EdP and features notes of saffron, tulsi, lime, tagetes, jasmine, rose, cardamom, cumin, fenugreek, ginger, curry leaf, turmeric, mango, spikenard, olibanum, vetiver, patchouli, choya loban, black agar, and sandalwood.

The scent is dark and voluptuous, sweet and earthy, full of pitch and tar and whatever else you attribute to the part of a darkness that attracts you to it. The sweet is sticky like sweat and forbidden things and signs that say "Stop!" and "Turn Back Now!" It is strange because it’s almost so full of the night, with its dangerously attractive qualities, that I might think it was unwearable. Instead, it’s beautiful. It’s lovely and soft and wicked and dangerous.

And pretty freaking fantastic.

What about you, dear reader? Got any thoughts on those scents that when you think of them now smell to you quite sinister?