\nSo what is the other<\/i> response? Tell me please. Parts of the world containing millions of people are going to hell in a handbasket, and I skip merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes as though they were flower petals. But what’s the other response? …the one that does not dwell so tenaciously on tragedy?\n<\/p>\n
\n(Let’s see if i can do this without ‘dwelling tenaciously on the tragedy.’). \n<\/p>\n
\nFocusing away from the point-at, gasping, horror may not be the same thing as denying it is there, but it feels that way to me. Pretending everything is OK is charged for me, supercharged emotionally. As you may know, when I was two years old, I experienced a horror that has not yet ended. But that event in itself is not the point. The thing that makes it difficult for me not to scream (figuratively), even when screaming has been done to an annoying excess (like I have done in this blog), is that the two year old’s screams were deliberately ignored. The choice was made to ignore what happened, to pretend everything was OK, because in 1961 nobody wanted to put my father’s brother in a mental institution, which would have been the course at the time, and nobody knew how to handle the rape of a child; nobody even wanted to admit that it had happened. \n<\/p>\n
\nSo it didn’t. My screams all drowned in the sea of denial around me. And my reality rejected my experience. My going-on-three-year-old life in Northboro, Massachusetts became stunningly and tragically unreal when parents, family, extended family, and even family friends, all rejected my experience as if my story<\/i> were the problem, instead of the horror it was reporting.\n<\/p>\n
\nSo, the image of skipping merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes as though they were flower petals, captures in some way the absurdity of my experiences?perhaps the absurdity of everyone’s experiences. \n<\/p>\n
\nAnd screaming, …well, I don’t know when to stop because I have been taught to believe that I make no sound at all. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So what is the other response? Tell me please. Parts of the world containing millions of people are going to hell in a handbasket, and I skip merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes … Continue reading