Writer's Note: I started this post back in late July; I don't know whether I ran out of time and saved it, or saved it because I wasn't sure anymore where I was going with it, or what. But, upon today's reread, it seems worth it to post it even in its unfinished state.
I've been reading, from time to time, a blog by the daughter of a former Sunday-school teacher of mine (or one of them - two ran the class). When I was in his class, back in what I think was the eighth grade, his eldest daughter, K., was something like six years old. Now she's just graduated from college.
Thanks to her dad having linked it, I've been reading her blog, too. Where my former teacher's is funny - witty, punny, wry - hers, though not without humor, is heartfelt, raw, vivid, inspiring, and heartbreaking. What she writes about most is what it's like to be recovering from depression, self-harm, an eating disorder, and the sexual assault she suffered in the eighth grade, when five boys violated her in a school bathroom because she wouldn't go out with one of them.
I don't know what it is about the past year-ish, but I've been hearing a notably elevated number of sexual-assault/-abuse accounts. Most of them happened in the past, when the now-women were younger (sometimes quite young), although at least one of them was more recent. To say that it's tragic is so obvious as to be meaningless.
What it makes me wonder, often, is how many of my students it's happened to. Somewhere at school once was a poster with a statistic about how many girls have been sexually abused (or maybe assaulted, which seems like it would cast a wider net because we often use it to mean a broader thing?) by the time they reach adulthood, and it was some horrifyingly-high percentage, something like 1 in 7, or maybe 1 in 5 - in any case, something that, God forgive me, I had thought on first glance couldn't possibly be accurate. By now, my mind has changed on that.
I myself haven't suffered any form of abuse or assault, by the way, sexual or otherwise. My experience has been so different, in fact, that I wonder how much of my present self-confidence I can chalk up partly to having been spared that horror. But I learn well through first-person accounts, and I've scrolled through a lot of K.'s:
The most common question I get is, "What you were wearing?" As if that makes a difference...I was wearing jeans and an extra-large hoodie if you must know.
The second most common question I am asked is, "what did you do to provoke him?" Nothing. Unless you count him asking me out and me saying, "no," because he was a jerk who slammed my locker shut every day, who used to pull my hair because he liked the way it curled.
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The people who know me best ask me, "On a scale from 1-10, how much does it hurt today?" I live my life at a 7...[but] the weight of the number changes...Imagine this: 7 bowling balls are heavier than 7 eggs. 7 microwaves are heavier than 7 bowling balls. 7 elephants are heavier than 7 microwaves. Some days I’m 7 elephants. Some days I’m 7 eggs.
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Depression has this way of making you see the world differently. People with depression see the cruelty, the joy, the pain, the compassion, all at once. I look at a person, and I see their capacity to hurt and help, and I’m always wondering which one they’ll choose. I see the world as it is, how it was, how it could be. I see my life the same way. Nothing is black and white. Sometimes, the weight of all this seeing is overwhelming, which is the cause of the pep talks in the morning, the faith trusting the floor will hold firm beneath my feet.