Monday thoughts #6: dishonest harmony

15/07/24: witnesses to our pain, continued

My Mum told me recently that when I was seven, I cried every day for a month because I realised I was the youngest in my family and was ‘going to watch everyone die before me’. Apparently, all the adults in my life didn’t have the heart to tell me that you can die at any age.

One of my earliest memories is going to a graveyard in an old, ruined Abbey and after glancing at a tombstone, asking my Mum how old someone was when they died. She said, “nine”, the age I was, at the time. I vividly remember the moment I realised you didn’t only die when you got old.

Why am I talking about death? It’s more the fact that I’m very much alive. Recently, I’ve been an absolute flood. I used to apologise continuously for this. Someone once told me I was ‘apologising for existing’. They told me women often do.

Today, I sat in my favourite park, and the rain trickling onto my skin was really soothing, and I realised how healing that felt. I realised that I love that about myself (crying, not apologising for existing, lol). I truly feel things, I go through them. Grief sucks, but I would rather process it now than have it spin out wrongly onto others later.

I saw a friend for coffee, the other day, and we spoke a lot about inherent worth. That’s my big thing at the minute - inherent worth, letting people know they are worthy because they exist.

“it’s a trap” “creature” “I’d die if I was caught with her” - the first two, comments on all my band’s socials from 2017-2019, the latter, a comment from my teens. Everything anyone has ever said to me spins around in my head until it comes out as my own voice, at myself, and I think that is the real grief of life. That when someone says something cruel about or to you…if you listen carefully enough, it’s really what they say to themselves. And then that gets passed on. And on. And on.

When Another Sky put out Chillers and performed it on Jools Holland, I got a lot of abuse surrounding my body/looks/voice and how I couldn’t possibly be a woman. It has really badly affected me. It hurt so bad, mainly because it re-triggered years of being bullied in my teens, and also...because a man in a position of power over me basically emotionally abused me, and others, mainly women, for years, and that was my life up until 2020, and everyone totally accepted his behaviour, which in turn, made me believe I deserved it. And everyone accepted his behaviour because we live in a society that does not value inherent worth.

I don’t want to recount what happened, so here’s some lesser things that happened outside of it, but still hurt. I turned up for a video shoot once and was expected to get naked without warning. Once, a ‘fan’ cornered me outside a bathroom and kissed my hand, and I ran away, too scared to tell anyone in case I was told I was ‘overreacting’. I’ve been thinking about what I read recently - ‘trauma is the absence of an empathetic witness’.

All I needed was some camaraderie and for people to say, “you didn’t deserve that”. Even just a bit of laughter over it! I honestly think that’s all people need. We just want to feel like we’re here, like our voices and experiences matter, like we are all in this together. I don’t think it helps at all when we tell people, ‘that’s life’, or, ‘that happens to me, so you should get over it’. Yeah, but why? Can it…not be life? Can it not happen to any of us? Can we not want better for ourselves? Can we not want to change the world?

I am accepting I probably need a PTSD diagnosis, and I am accepting my body is in pain and I need to really try to heal it, and that means my life is going to look different to most people’s. I am trying so hard to be self-compassionate towards my own maladaptive behaviours that have surfaced as a result of everything I’ve experienced. I am growing more comfortable with letting people know I am mentally unwell, mainly because it’s becoming too exhausting to pretend I’m not. I’m becoming more comfortable with accepting this means I will move through the world differently. I’m becoming more comfortable with the knowledge that a lot of people will never understand.

I’m becoming more comfortable with the fact I can’t engage in the world in the same way a lot of people do. I’m becoming more comfortable with showing up everywhere as I actually am. Sometimes, I think that’s all we can do. Just keep showing up as we actually are. Sometimes, I think that’s what good, and I mean really good art is. The one space that doesn’t shame us for showing up as we actually are.

Years ago, when I told a friend about this abuse, she said, “you need to go dance somewhere else”. At first I felt extremely invalidated; was my anger not just? Needed, even? But let me tell you how this is the best advice that exists.

If you’re in a shit situation, try it. Try going somewhere else and dancing. People follow joy. As soon as I followed her advice? This was when the abuser didn’t have me as a scapegoat anymore, and his mask cracked and crumbled. And I was somewhere else, dancing.

I’m becoming more comfortable with the fact I’m probably never going to get a proper apology from some people (oh, I don’t expect or want one from him, I want him very far away, forever). Because when these abusers do their dirty tricks, the one thing that can really make a difference is people around them not accepting it. I knew something was wrong. I knew his brain didn’t work, I knew it was actually much worse to be him than us. It was the people around me accepting it that made me question my reality.

I did get an apology, recently, and it meant the world to me. Apologies actually repair a lot, but we can’t sit around and wait for them.

I am noticing the people who are supportive, kind and there for me. I am also noticing the people who are willing to tell me the truth, and am trying to create space for my friends to tell me the hard things, even if I only process and listen months later. I am stopping myself from playing ‘the character’, the character that spills out from my body and fills a whole room, the character I created to try to stop the abuse, to try and be perfect so the abuse would never happen again.

I’ll never understand why I was treated the way I was. Everyone deserves to be alive and really, truly be here, as themselves. We all deserve to step outside of the game, to step outside of hierarchies. Everyone deserves to feel comfortable, nobody deserves to feel pain every day of their life, pain that can be avoided. Everyone deserves inherent worth and to feel safe. We all deserve to feel safe.

Well, we’ll probably never live in that world.

What I can do is wake up each day and try to give myself the safety I didn’t get, or can’t always get externally. Swim. Cook nice food for myself. Really look after my body, for me, in a world that wants me to hate it. Accept all I cannot control. Grieve the endings that need to happen.

I know I have to face these endings so better days can come.

Anyway. Hana Stretton played Songwriter’s Circle and it was ridiculous (so were all the other artists):

Sam from the Howl and The Hum did a gig in Dalston and it will stay burned into my brain forever (in a good way):

More Songwriter Circles coming. More Another Sky stuff. More solo gigs. More taking care of myself, mainly, though.

x