dan

some people will hear this and think, well it couldn’t have been that bad if you didn’t even know.

but knowing you were abused is not a matter of severity. it is a matter of whether the forms of abuse you’ve experienced have been de-naturalized in a supportive social context, and thus made knowable as something that did not have to happen.

when people list common forms of abuse, many people will be in tags and notes saying “I didn’t know this wasn’t normal.”

it’s sad because this sentiment simultaneously misses and hits the point exactly.

abuse is normal. but what people mean when they say this is, “I didn’t know I was allowed to be hurt by this, to object to this, that anyone would ever recognize how violated, degraded, or dehumanized it feels to experience this.”

all of that is expressed through the word “normal” in these statements of realization because we all must constantly stomach being hurt, violated, degraded, and dehumanized in “normal” life, and we are taught from a young age that if something is “normal” it means we cannot object to it or escape it.

you’re allowed to feel violated by normalized forms of abuse. you are allowed to object to normalized forms of violation.

you don’t have to take on the loaded terms of Survivor and Abuser to describe things if you don’t want to or it feels inappropriate or inaccurate to you.

you can just allow yourself to recognize when people are abusing the power they have over you in ways that benefit themselves at your expense, and to recognize the ways that people with power over you coerce you to give up autonomy over your body.

something does not become less traumatic for being common and normal. the normalized trauma of being dehumanized and violated is part of what oppression is. it’s part of how subjugated classes within a population are constructed and maintained as distinct.

it’s okay to acknowledge it hurts. you don’t have to internalize it as something that was your own fault. you don’t have to suppress it forever.

you’re allowed to acknowledge that who you are was shaped by the people with power over you abusing that power.