até

“Stop thinking about saving your fragile face. Tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp. We will not blame you if your words go down in flames and nothing is left but the raw-scald. We will not blame you if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the red places where blood might flow. We will not blame you because we know you can never do it properly: once and for all. Passion is never enough. Talent is never enough. Skill is never enough. But try. For our sake and yours. So. Forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, so blessed with occasional blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

“When making love and having a memory, I asked myself, Is the abuse happening now or did it happen in the past? I turned my attention, gently, from the memories to the sensations in my body or to seeing myself or my partner or the room I was presently in. The memories came up less and less often. What I did was a twofold process. First I noticed myself thinking thoughts like: Here comes another memory. It’s going to destroy this whole evening. It is going to ruin my life. I’ll never be able to have sex. I would see this mental process and say, oh, that’s just a mental process. It isn’t necessarily telling me the truth. I didn’t spend much time with the fear because when I noticed the thinking, I would bring myself to what was real in the present moment, such as a hand touching my arm. Its realness was more compelling. Of course, I had to choose other times, when I wasn’t making love, to stay with the memories themselves, giving them the attention they needed. If I hadn’t also been doing that, I don’t think I could have let them go during sex times. I didn’t practice meditation to get rid of the memories. Doing anything to rid myself of the memories always backfires. To this day I have to be open to knowing that memories will arise sometimes during sex. I still have them, but the frequency has been drastically reduced. My attitude now, many years later, is when memories come up, they come up. Sometimes it means I have to let go of making love and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the memories go away after a moment. The key is the openness to it.”