âOne of the biggest ways the Survivor Industrial Complex manages all those messy, powerful survivor emotions and truths is by deploying the idea of the good or fixed survivor. The Good Survivor is the survivor you see on a talk show or a soap opera, the one who received three months of therapy and is all better now. The abuse is a vague memory; there are no visible scarsâphysical or emotionalâand they donât talk about the invisible ones. Theyâve moved on. They donât talk about abuse in an ongoing way, ask for accommodations, get triggered during sex, have a new memory, or figure out something else about their trauma years later. They donât ask that survivorhood or trauma be talked about or held in our movements, communities, or queer scenes, or insist that understanding those things could strengthen those movements. They donât bother you with âtheir dramaâ or âtheir stuff,â and they know that talking about it for sure would be a bother. The Good Survivor is someone Iâve never met in person, because they donât exist. But their archetype haunts me and many other survivors I know. We beat ourselves up for not being them. And often, unfortunately, our partners, friends, co-workers, and comrades want us to be that good, quiet, all-better survivor too. In contrast, the bad survivor is the one whoâs still âbroken,â still freaking out, still triggered, still grieving, still remembering. Still making you remember. They have a panic attack during the action, they think they can perform a certain sexual act but disassociate or throw up anyway, they tell you terrible stories that haunt your dreams, theyâre pissed off at the local rape crisis center for being racist or transmisogynist or just fucking inadequate. They havenât forgotten shit. Bad survivors see the secret insides of rape culture every day, and talk about it. Theyâre the femme with baggage you scroll past on Tinder because they look like too much drama. Theyâre the survivor who kills themself and who is described later in sorrowful tones as âbroken, but now at peace.â Theyâre the bitch, the hysteric, the dyke. And often, as survivors, we donât want to be them, because being them means being not healed. It means that weâve failed at surviving. These archetypes are binaries. The world reinforces these stereotypes in a million ways, but we also repeat them to ourselves. We torture ourselves with them, and alsoâletâs be realâtheyâre seductive. They make things feel simple. If we believe that some survivors are just too annoying or bitchy, too out of control, we can feel better about ourselves by promising weâre not like that and then distancing ourselves from those high-maintenance bitches. And if the promise of ease is a possibility, maybe someday we can achieve it.â
â Not Over It, Not Fixed, and Living a Life Worth Living
Healing from sexual abuse and trauma isnât a journey with an end point. An excerpt from âWhatever Gets You Through.â
By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
