Blowin' in the Wind

Reads fic:

“Victims wouldn’t write something so graphic to cope.”

“Real coping would mean writing about recovery.”

“If you’re getting into the graphic details, you’re just writing smut.”

“Something so graphic is just retraumatizing yourself.”

—

Fuck off.

Being raped doesn’t fade to black.

The reality of what I lived through doesn’t skim neatly over the details.

I don’t get the luxury of only thinking about what happened in polite implications and next-morning scenes. It happened the way it happened and it wasn’t clear, it wasn’t neatly narratively structured to indicate who was right and who was wrong. I don’t get to forget what his spit tasted like, or imagine whatever level of resistance or violence makes me most comfortable with what happened. Real life doesn’t make tasteful fiction.

But when I don’t have the option of not remembering, at least, at least I can bleed it out into something, maybe even something better, maybe something pleasurable. Maybe I can take the physical reality of his hangnail scraping my labia and make something fucking poetic out of it. At least maybe I can tear the memory out of me and make something from it and be done, be just a little more free.

…. I discovered at a young age that writing helps me bleed out poison.

I discovered that, for me, writing about being torn open was nearly as good as doing it again and again and again, the way I wanted to all the goddamn time. I discovered that the same vivid sense memory that made me so prone to flashbacks had a use. I discovered that writing was a way to scratch that ever-invasive need to go over it again and again and again, and that if I just wrote it, if I just said it all the way straight through and somebody heard me then I could finish it and stop seeing it on repeat. I couldn’t finish being traumatized but I could finish a story about it and I discovered that was almost as good, that small bit of closure. I discovered that I could write it and then close the book, and when I needed to I could open it and see it again. And the alternative wasn’t not doing this, the alternative was nightmares and cutting and debilitating flashbacks and panic attacks when I smelled sweat or somebody brushed by me, all day, every day. I discovered that the thought spirals that ruined entire days could be broken.

And after a few years, the need faded.

I stopped being afraid of the memories and I stopped remembering them involuntarily all the time. I was able to put my trauma in a journal and close it. When it got bad again, when my brain started screaming the same thing over and over and over for hours on end, I could open up a page, an entry, take two fictional ideas and tear them apart and then put it all away and be done.

To be clear: there’s a million ways of coping. This is only mine. But god damn it, it worked. It kept me reasonably sane and intact, it let me live my life without constant invasive thoughts and flashbacks, and over time my brain built new connections that helped me feel safe and in control of my own trauma. I thank god that I had a supportive community that let me feel like I could do something productive, something interesting with this horrible toxic dump of memories. Thank god I wasn’t trying to recover in the current climate.

Double fuck that. Art is communicative, and there are untold people out there who can relate to this sort of trauma but can't find the means to express it for themselves, or may not have even thought prior to reading something so unvarnished and graphic that they even can express it for themselves.

Trauma from sexual violence is *isolating*, deeply isolating, and finding evidence that you're not alone, that other people understand, can do a lot to help you.

This fandom police* perspective that the only ethical path is to work it out in privacy and silence until you're done suffering crosses beyond stupid to me and makes me genuinely PISSED.

passive aggressive sarcasm Stans.

Commission of an original Gravity Falls character!

1. Dipper in “Overboard” for @brynnethedino 2. Mabel + Waddles in “Eternity” for @transformersg1fan271 3. Stan in “Cheap motel” for @pizzadeliverypriest + @rum-and-shattered-dreams 4. Ford in “Never again” for @eregyrn-falls 5. Wendy in “Wildfire” for @scientifically-improbable 6. Pacifica in “Just leave” for @gerridoesnthear 7. Fiddleford in “Soft boy” for @siriuslymeg 8. Stan twins in “Past times” for @smutjenenu

Someone please help me find this funny video……. I know someone drew a sheith parody of it 

featuring the lines “But what about oral?” “I only receive.”

“But you’re small and skinny! You’re a twink! And twinks are bottoms!”