Rebel Girl: Weekly Reflections on a Personal Project
Tuesday Reflections on my journey towards a computational model of dissociative amnesia
Week of April 21st to April 27th
Last week, I was struggling to troubleshoot a switch in my densely coded experiment to sparsely coded. The growing irritation and anxiety invited me to take a step back and practice allowing. I’ve often found that sometimes the lack of change in my outside world was a reminder that there things to attend to on the inside that would shift how I navigated the situation. The wind this week was sweet and the sun was bright, so I took a lot of time to wander and lay in the grass. It resulted in a lot of productive shifts in my inner world.
At the beginning of the week, my mind drifted back to the past with the desire to shift into a fresh perspective. Dissociative amnesia disrupted my ability to connect not only to the version of me who went through the trauma itself, but also my high school self who still felt like the same person. I reminisced on how when I was in high school, I started my own chapter for a club called “Silence Hurts” started by a student from another school to raise awareness for gender-based violence. I felt very dorky about it because I wasn’t used to leading anything but I was passionate. We hosted clothing and food drives for women’s shelters. We also hosted awareness events — not on social media. We hadn’t hit the COVID-era Instagraphic crave yet. Instead, me and my fellow students organised which of us would speak about which relevant statistic and they would get up at our morning meeting and share it. It was a small club but the members were very loyal.
It’s vulnerable to speak about but navigating recovering memories in college was very psychologically confusing for me. There wasn’t enough information people out on dissociative amnesia and how it worked and there was much doubt amongst clinicians. Having consolidated my memories later, I didn’t have the same access to my internal experience at the moment of the trauma to use to advocate for myself. So I couldn’t go to the police. I didn’t have a rape kit to show. By the time I was consolidating the memories, everything was about a year old. Because of that, I doubted everything I thought with really intense paranoia.
The situation started early in my first year of college. I became friends with a group that had already met and established dynamics with each other over a summer program. I met them through a female friend who lived in an interconnected room in a shared suite. They were over all the time. They already had inside jokes and building tensions that I had no part in building. I was new and shy and kind of interesting at that point.
I was young and inexperienced. I hadn’t learned to spot red flags yet. So when things started to rapidly speed downhill, I didn’t have the toolset necessary to understand that. I didn’t know that anyone I knew would do something so awful.
My memories of being sexually assaulted that I never repressed or forgot. But I didn’t deal with them how I probably “should have”. It first happened in November of my first year at university. Somebody around us in this whole toxic ensemble of people started pushing us to drink. He was always telling us to take another “half shot”. When we were already pretty drunk, you’d hear the call from the other side of the room:
“Half shot. Half shot.”
People started hooking up. But not me. I had just had my first kiss that summer. The first time I had ever drank or smoked was that August at freshman orientation. I was in no way experienced. And I was a romantic at heart. I want Mr. Darcy. I wanted love confessions. I wanted love letters and poetry and a gentleman. I had a crush on a different boy in the group that I was liking a lot. He was starting to become my best friend and we had feelings developing.
But things shifted when we got back from Thanksgiving break. One night, these two men in the group noted that I hadn’t kissed anyone yet. They told me if I kissed someone at one of our parties "everyone else would join in and the whole room would be kissing”. It would be such an event… because it would be so surprising for me to do anything like that.
I laughed along at the jokes at first. But a few days later it was mentioned again by my future rapist to a female friend.
“You know I’m not gonna do that, right?” I responded. He accepted and the whole thing pretty much blew over.
And yet… at the party a few days later, everyone started drinking. Me and this boy I had a crush on kissed a bit and were just standing in the corner of the room. This rapist, who we will call C, stumbled over drunkenly from another room with Mr. Half-Shot, or B, behind him. “You still didn’t kiss anyone.”
Me and my crush looked at each other. “I kissed him already.” Next thing I know, C is leaning over and pressing his mouth on mine. From behind me came B, who pressed his mouth on mine too.
The party continued on.
The next morning, I thought back to the night and was shocked and confused. Then I was disgusted. Then I was angry. It was a lot to process. Back then, I didn’t have the term “sexual assault” in mind. I was not actually well-versed in what sexual assault was and what it would look like. Because I didn’t expect it to happen to me. I didn’t learn about the ins and outs of consent. I thought this was something that happened in different countries or in backlit alleys or by some evil boss at a workplace. I wasn’t expecting it to be a friend at a party.
In the following days, I started telling my surrounding friends that I was upset and I didn’t like what had happened. I felt used. I told my crush. I told my female friends. They were supportive but no one used the words “sexual assault”. All I knew was that I was uncomfortable. But I was scared of the confrontation with B and C themselves. I ended up letting it blow over, forgot about it. Got a bit depressed and thought I would move on.
Then we came back from winter break. Me and my crush were having a moment at a later party. He went to my room and started crying on the floor because of depression he was struggling with. I started consoling him. And who comes in at random from the other room? C. He opens the door and stumbles in. Next thing I know, we’re leaning on my bed and his lips are on mine. Again. This was in late January.
I was extremely uncomfortable in the following days. I didn’t want anyone around me. People kept knocking on my door trying to get me to hang out and I just told them I was listening to music. I blamed myself. How could that have happened twice when I didn’t like this guy and didn’t want to kiss him? What was wrong with me? But I still didn’t have the word “assault” for it. And because of that he stayed in my life.
Around three weeks later, he went out with my crush and I for Valentine’s Day. In hindsight, I wish I had left. He was making weird jokes, trying to take pictures and making comments that seemed to be to make my crush jealous. That night, I came back to my suite to find my female friend and fellow roommates laughing about something they wanted to tell everyone. They decided to go to C’s room to meetup and talk about it. Before we went, my female friend N asked if I wanted to take a melatonin with her. One of our fellow friends had had insomnia and bought melatonin, which he said worked well for him. She bought it too. I guess the thought was that we would go to his room and have a nice chat and then come home and sleep well. I said, “sure, why not”. That’s a moment I look back on with deep regret all the time. When we got to his room, I started getting incredibly heavy, like I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I was just listening to the conversation passively. My friends started remarking on my exhaustion. N asked C if I could sleep in his room for the night. He said sure. My crush tried to shake me awake a little and asked if I was sure I wanted to sleep there. I was exhausted. I just shook my head that it was fine. So that night I slept in his room and he raped me. That’s when the dissociative amnesia started.
And then came my mental health decline. That period was a complete blur to date. The memories I do have besides what I recovered are distressing and uncomfortable moments surrounding weird and painful thoughts about my body, fear, and general aversion to this person. We were meant to go on a trip to Miami to stay at N’s house for spring break. I didn’t want him to come, I remember that. It was hinted that he might come and I felt total panic, despite not remembering what happened. All I knew is that I didn’t want him around. He was around all the time because he was so close with N. But I tried my best to stay away, despite the memory loss. One of my few intact memories of the time was having my door locked while N, B, and C just kept knocking and knocking asking me to come out and hang out with them. I remember my heart was pounding. I told them I was feeling sick. This was right when COVID was being whispered about in the news. They joked that maybe I caught COVID.
I was incredibly relieved when he was confirmed not to be coming. Instead, me and my friends went all the way down to Miami for spring break before getting word that COVID would be causing our university to close down. We weren’t there more than 2 days before having to drive all the way back up. On my way up, I attempted to figure out my complex housing situation. My mom was at an artists residency she had gotten stuck at because of COVID. My parents has recently separated just months prior and my dad didn’t have a housing situation yet. He was living in a basement room of a family friend and trying to figure out what to do next. Because of that, I got approved to stay on campus. I got up there and got set up in my dorm room, the same one I had stayed in throughout the year. That’s when C and B decided to go back down to Miami with N for a while and quarantine together. I had told them they could stay for a day or two in my childhood home which was partway between NYC and Miami on the way down. Everyone left and then…
I started having an intense panic in my room. The sudden loneliness started to feel terrifying as an 18 year old alone in a pandemic in the aftermath of something I couldn’t remember that was making me mentally unwell. At that time, we truly had no idea how long the pandemic would last. I called N and she and told her I was regretting staying there and she told me to take the bus right then and come down to Miami with them. They were still in my city.
The whole next part is a blur. The trip down is a blur. The stay at her house is a general blur that comes to me at random and hits me when I’m taking a walk or see a palm tree. I’m still processing everything. But we ended up staying in the same house for a while. I can’t even remember how long, maybe 2 weeks, maybe under. We all took turns sharing either the bed or the couch and on one of those nights, he raped me again.
A lot of things I do remember pointed to a generally creepy atmosphere. I was having some issues with my crush because I liked him a lot and he was expressing interest but being a bit noncommital. He sent me a romantic playlist one day, which confused me further, and I started telling B, C, and N about my issues. C chimes in.
“You know what we should do?” he said with his eyes glinting. “We should send him a kiss of you making out with me to make him jealous.”
I was deeply uncomfortable. I didn’t want to kiss him at all. N, who was prone to amplifying the behavior, quickly agreed that I should do it. I was still uncomfortable and saying I didn’t think it was a good idea. They took it to B, telling him their idea and asking, did he think I should do it. Thank God he said that was a horrible idea because I was nervous to get ganged up on in the house I was forced to stay in.
Later on, the three of them were setting up Tinder hookups (yes, at the peak of COVID). I didn’t want to hook up with anyone for many reasons, including that I had never had sex nor done anything sex adjacent as of yet. They tried to pressure me into trying it out.
At one point, C looks at me and says “I don’t know why you’re so scared. Any man would want to fuck you.”
It was not taken as a compliment by me. It was weird. And though I couldn’t remember what happened, it struck me as deeply disturbing and off.
Upon finishing finals and everything, I had more time to think. My time was spent watching TikTok and obsessively refreshing news on COVID vaccine updates in hopes that we would be back at school in September. The friend group had persisted in our own homes but deep tension had been building under the surface. Before we left campus, another student had had a predatory encounter with B. They didn’t frame it like that straight to us, because like me, I think they were still coming to terms with it. But another friend had come to their defence and told us what had gone down. C, B, and N had also created an incredibly toxic environment. They diminished, they overstepped boundaries, they excluded, and they mocked to no end. It was a tense time because people were starting to get upset and a confrontation was brewing.
Around this time, my crush and I finally had a conversation and decided we really liked each other and wanted to date. We had been spending a lot of time trying to understand what to do about the B situation. Around the same time, another older Columbia student had gone viral online for posting their assault story, which we were discussing on the side in the context of B and this student. Leading up to this final confession, we had been getting closer and texting a lot and after a year of back and forth, said we loved each other.
I had been processing this situation about C on the side as well as some things about Miami. I had weird triggers, though I didn’t see them as such. I started watching Big Little Lies and everytime Nicole Kidman’s character had a violent sexual encounter, I felt my heart pouding and deep revulsion and upset in a way that shook up my day. I had one song from Miami that would make me burst into tears. I didn’t know why. It just pulled at something in my stomach and I would start sobbing. I started rethinking my encounters at parties with C and determined that I really felt uncomfortable around him. This was the day after my crush and I had said I love you to each other.
I decided to talk to him about it. I told my crush all of this, along with the three of them had said about wanting to send him a video of us kissing, to explain why my discomfort had grown. He got extremely upset at that. He said that these people were our friends and they knew we liked each other and that it was a very weird thing to do. He determined he wasn’t going to be friends with them anymore and pulled out of our groupchat.
They started messaging, asking why he had left. He had been having a hard time in the group that year because they created narratives about him that he was incredibly dramatic and created issues. Makes sense they saw it that way as he would express his upset or make comments about the toxic behaviors. So very quickly they started asking what melodrama was happening this time.
I responded saying he was a bit upset about certain things. I asked if everyone wanted to have a call to discuss it. I was planning on confronting them about everything. I told my crush I would let him listen in on the call since he couldn’t be there.
In the call, I started to list out some of the issues the general group was expressing. I was a really timid person and confrontation was not my forte back then, so I was really trying my best. I told B that he pushed us to drink too much. I don’t remember what I told C at the moment exactly at the moment. And I told N that people said she was invalidating their concerns and didn’t listen to them. I said this is why my crush had left.
All of a sudden, my crush texts N saying he had been listening and wanted to hop on. Already I was upset because I had just meant for him to listen so he could know how he was being discussed and now the confrontation was getting really intense. He comes in and is upset, saying I wasn’t mentioning everything. He tells me to say what I said to him about Miami. I was texting him as he went in telling him not to mention that because I didn’t want that confrontation. But it was something that upset him a lot and he felt like I was misrepresenting the issue.
Finally, I concede and we pull into another group call with just C and N. He mentions how when I was in Miami, they had tried to pressure me into sending a video of C kissing me, which he found weird and disrespectful to our relationship. He said real friends wouldn’t do something like that. They turned it on me, saying he was speaking for me and if I was really upset I would say something myself. They said they were just trying to make me feel pretty and feel better because him and I were having issues. So they asked me what I thought.
In hindsight, I think I was subconsciously afraid of confronting my abuser about what happened. My heart was pounding and I hadn’t wanted to talk about it. I just didn’t feel ready. But I didn’t have that awareness then. So what did I say instead?
“No, it’s okay. I know you were just trying to be nice, I wasn’t offended."
The energy after that call was tense. My crush was frustrated, like I had thrown him under the bus. He had been getting called dramatic and an overreacter all year and now I had just facilitated another opportunity for that for him. On my end, I was upset he had even mentioned it because I told him I didn’t want to talk about it. I wasn’t ready to confront the situation and I felt put on the spot.
A few days later, another fight erupted. In hindsight, the method seems childish but we were all 18 and in the midst of COVID and had no way of communicating. Another adjacent friend who was already distancing themselves because of behavior they experienced within this group dynamic tweeted something about what I remember to be about rape sympathisers and my crush liked it. I felt triggered because at this point I was lumped in with these three people who were now getting increasingly rejected by my other non-toxic friends. I felt like the rape symapthizer, particularly with what was happening with B on the side. I called N and asked her if she had seen the tweet. She did go look at it and what emerged from that was a nasty and exposing Twitter fight. I don’t remember the exact details now but in defending my honor, I ended up honestly backing the very people who were causing my personal strife in the first place.
I felt irritated and like the details of my story were getting left out of the mix. This whole fiasco had even begun because I was expressing my discomfort towards the assault and it had snowballed into a massive mess. Again, childish means but it was COVID. I made a private Instagram story with only these people in the argument and wrote out the whole story, with all of the parties and all of the uncomfortable moments in Miami.
Incredibly quickly, I got two messages — one from B and one from C. They urgently told me to take it down. They told me they were confused and offended.
C messaged me directly and asked if we could Facetime to talk about everything. Anxiously, I agreed. Seeing his face brought on the same heart pounding sweatiness. He told me to walk through every moment and he would see what he thought. I tried explaining each and every moment I felt uncomfortable and he had an explanation or justification. What he ended up saying, in an attempt at a calm and appeasing tone, was “Everything we did was consensual”. Now I look back and think he obviously could remember much more than just a kiss at a party or he wouldn’t have phrased it like that. It’s a bit of an intense way to say it unless there was a sexual element to the events of the past few months of our life. What is everything? When did I consent? What did I consent to? It’s just a bit too much of a blanket statement, like someone trying to cover an umbrella of experiences just in case I look back at those a little bit too hard and have an opinion.
But I was struck with intense guilt, like this person was a friend and I was trying to throw him under the bus. He kept reiterating the importance of our friendship. What a horrible person I was, I felt in that moment.
The aftermath of that incident resulted in the most horrible mental spiral. I started self-harming. I was wracked with guilt on every possible level, both towards these people and towards the friends I had lost.
I actually think I would have maybe recovered the memories around the time I was mentioning my discomfort to this friend in if not for the added stressor of the fight and being entirely thrown into isolation with this abuser who had then gaslit me. I was able to pinpoint my own theory because I noticed that I only started processing when I was in a situation that was less arousing overall, like a new room or a safer feeling space. And I do think it was relevant that I started to process the experience and speak about it to someone when I was at a far distance in my own home. It was like my gears had just started turning around that point and I was getting a fresh perspective that I didn’t have the safety to at school. But the close proximity and the inescapability of losing everybody delayed the process by about 6 more months, because at that point my only friends left were these three abusers. And what they did was get closer and closer. B started calling me multiple times a day, making me a confidant for his issues. They started sending me presents. They started looping me into work events they were doing.
My guilt was pounding at all sides every day. I felt guilty I was still friends with these people and had betrayed my old friends, particularly my crush who was not just my crush but my best friend in the world at that point more importantly. And I felt guilty that I had “thrown these other friends under the bus” through my “horrible” reflection on my own discomfort that I shared on Instagram. I had “exposed” these people who called me so often, thought I was the best, and sent me presents. My self-harm was fueled by feeling pretty much like the worst person in existence no matter how I looked at it. My goody two shoes, risk-averse, ex-high school Honor-Council member self started not only self-harming, but also shoplifting secretly and constantly thinking about running away from home. It was an extremely out of character period for me. I had anxiety attacks extremely often all summer. During one of them, I called B. He asked me what was wrong. I told him I felt extremely guilty, like I had betrayed everyone. I told him I missed my crush really bad as well. I did miss him so horribly everyday.
“Awww, don’t worry,” B said. “We forgive you.” Forgive me for… telling my feelings about what you did to me? That’s what I see now. Back then, it felt like at least one person could love someone so horrible.
Months afterwards, I was finally able to get some reprieve. We received word that a COVID vaccine was being released and my university would make special exceptions for students who wanted to come back to campus. I was approved, and the other three didn’t come which was internally a massive relief for me. I moved into my own room on campus. I started building some more in-person friends that weren’t these people. And I processed that what had happened first was sexual assault. I started having nightmares about C in November, which was around the time he first assaulted me as well. I cut him off myself, finally texting him that I really did see those incidents as sexual assault and we really couldn’t continue our friendship. He conceded. And two or so months after that, as I was nearing the “anniversary” of the second assault and the first rape, I went on a date and got extremely triggered again. Around that time, my old crush returned to campus for second semester. He knocked on my door at random after seeing each other around and ignoring each other. We had a long conversation about everything that had happened and forgave each other for the fighting. We went back to being normal friends. I finally recovered memories a few weeks later near the anniversary of the first rape.
In my own scientific terms, the arousal wore down and I was finally able to start recovering my memories as the conditions felt less threatening. I was away from my abusers, I had cut off my rapist so I didn’t have the threat to my safety around anymore, I was in my own space, COVID was improving and didn’t feel as life threatening anymore, I had more of a support system around me again as I made new friends and reconnected with old ones, and finally one of my biggest sources of emotional turmoil had concluded through this conversation. And with it being around the time of this trauma anniversary again, it was like I was finally able to piece it together. First came feelings, then images like the curtains and the dark in the room on those nights, and then I was able to remember fragments of what happened. The recurrent excitation was up again.
And then I cut off the other two for good. I think about how they phrased our goodbyes a lot and the mad scramble that went on with the two of them behind the scenes. I cut off N first, who continued to stay friends with C for months after until I got him kicked out of their mutual club, and then declined to speak at my investigation despite being a prime witness as I was staying at her house. Didn’t speak against me. Didn’t defend C. Just declined entirely. Very soon after, I cut off N, I got a panicked sounding iMessage from B which was sticky sweet, wanting to hash things out and wondering if something was wrong before I had even mentioned a word to him. I cut him off very quickly in that conversation. I also mentioned the high school senior he had just started to date about a week or two prior to this conversation as a university junior as an additional cherry on top. In that conversation, B said something that always sticks with me because it was so discombobulated and random and unrelated to anything I said:
“Now you think you can just have any opinion you want and you get to be right. And you’re not allowed to change how you feel about something after it happens.”
This was months after I had already cut off C and he had supported the idea. So what was he referring to? Who’s to say. What happened, B? What did you know? What were you covering up? What did you not want me to change my opinion about? Guess I’ll have to go back to therapy and figure that one out. Dissociative amnesia really make life feel like a mystery to your own self sometimes.
Recovering memories, or consolidating them if we want to be more accurate about it, finally sent me on a path to healing from what had occurred. But the societal context and the process of memory recovery, which was chronically understudied, led to some really awful internal pressure over the years. I was met with plenty of the statements survivors get:
Are you sure?
Maybe you’re just too stressed.
Maybe subconsciously you wanted it and just regretted it later so now you see it as rape.
I had a horrible relationship to my own mind, like maybe deep down I was lying. I would get into the most intense paranoias —what if I’m just psychotic and it’s a delusion? What if I am confabulating? Maybe I’m manipulative. What if I’m secretly doing it for attention? I was scared to verbalise my anxieties in case people took it and ran with it, like I had uncovered the truth about what was really going on inside. So I just bottled it up. I would make connections to anything anybody could possible use to call me a liar and torment myself with those endlessly, further fuelled by the investigation I was in that left my truth in a precarious opportunity for suspicion. I had to get ahead of everything, even what had no relationship, just in case someone else might think that.
So back to my high school club. Sometimes I would look back at the fact that I had run this club for women who struggled with domestic and sexual violence in high school. The paranoia sounds kind of bizarre saying it now, like a touch nonsensical. I would think, “Isn’t it a bit strange that you were running this and now you’re making a big deal out of a trauma, like maybe subconsciously you’re looking for a cause to fight for and you just made up a trauma instead?” And that sounds intense when I write it but these are the kinds of motives people will try to pin on you in a justice setting, even when they’re wrong. So that was the reality I was dealing with and that’s how it manifested for me internally.
Now I look back and what I see is that 1 in 4 women will deal with rape or sexual assault as adults. So really as a female club owner, I had a 1 in 4 chance of landing in that position regardless. It was really just a sort of not-bad statistical chance, not some subconscious confabulation fuel.
And by the time I was running this club, the truth is that I had already been sexually harassed quite a few times, just not to the degree of this event. It was just the small “normal and unimportant” type of harassment we tell women to move on from.
I was around 11 when grown men started asking me questions about the birthday balloons I was holding in the parking lot, and my mom had to quickly pull me away and tell me to stop talking to them. That’s the first time I realised that grown men saw me in a sexual light.
I was 12 when a female friend started making strange comments to me and then groped my breasts in the grass when I was outside for P.E. And I was 12 when I was so uncomfortable that I had to push her away with force when she started nearing me again in the school hallway, making everyone laugh uncomfortably at the intensity coming out of my typically soft-spoken self.
I was 14 when I was coming home from my first day on high school in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and new blue jeans bought to make a good first impression and an adult man started asking me questions in the Dollar General I stopped at. I was 14 when I realised I had made a mistake when I told the man I was walking home from school. I was 14 when I left the Dollar General and he followed me around the corner in his car and asked me if I wanted to get inside. And I was 14 when I made my dad drive me to school for the next month where I would leave school terrified and guilty each day without telling anyone, just wondering if this would be the day the man would be out there waiting for me and it would be all my fault.
So by the time I started this club at 16, I already had a pretty vested interest in the matter.
I was in a debate class in high school when the Kavanaugh trials were happening. We got on the topic and a male teacher and I got into a back and forth about it. I was probably 16 or 17. I don’t remember the full context but what I do remember is him asking why we should believe it if there’s not enough evidence. I started mentioning that I believe it because I’ve had plenty of experiences like that and it happens to women all the time. He pushed back, adamant that there needed to be more information or something along those lines. I was full of intensity about the situation, not knowing how to convey my belief. After class, I went to the bathroom and just cried. I wasn’t that much of an emotional person to cry in school. I wasn’t particularly mad at the teacher and I wasn’t traumatised. But while I was crying, I felt so angry that as a woman, men could not understand. I had scenes flashing from the adult man following me in his car, from my mom’s life and the traumas she had endured… He could not understand that I did not need pictures nor a video to believe. I believed because those are just the odds. It’s just statistics. It’s just our lives. Cases are not lost because people are lying. Cases are lost because of much more complex factors than that.
And what has Brett Kavanaugh gone off and done since then? I think it says just about all we need to know about the situation. He has stripped us of abortion rights. He has gone out of his way to support a pedophile in government. He has done just about everything a rapist would do in the highest position our country has to offer. And that’s exactly what we were afraid of back then, isn’t it? That was the intensity I as a 16 year old girl was feeling back then. It wasn’t the moment in class. It was the fear for my future in a world run by men who just cannot understand. I was already crying for myself and everything I would endure. I just didn’t know it would be me yet.
I love Bikini Kill.
I was actually about 12 or so when I first heard their most popular song, “Rebel Girl”. I was just starting to come to terms with my bisexuality. I was forming my own political opinions for the first time. And I heard that song and it was just like… woah. Obsessed.
I paid for a Bikini Kill record when I was in high school, and then when my little sister got to be around the same age I was when I first heard Bikini Kill, I gave it to her. She needed it. Middle school girls need Bikini Kill.
I fell more in love with punk when I got to high school. You wouldn’t know it by looking at me. I was studious and kind of too sweet and mostly kept my head down. One time a neighbour ran into some kids from high school at a college party and asked if they knew me. They said yes. She asked why I wasn’t there and they apparently just looked at each other and said they didn’t really think it was my kind of thing. I was a little offended when I heard that, to be honest.
“They don’t know me,” I scoffed. Unfortunately they were right but that’s not the point.
But I loved punk. I read all of “Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk” and it changed me forever. I loved The Stooges and The Ramones, I loved Patti Smith, The Velvet Underground which is not really punk exactly but somewhere adjacent. I actually went to a Patti Smith book signing on my own in my first week in New York. She very kindly signed both “Year of the Monkey” and “Just Kids” for me which was not part of the book signing but I was very happy about it.
I also loved Suicidal Tendencies. That album got passed down to my sister too.
(One of my mental health anger anthems)
I loved 90s DC punk culture. And I loved all riot grrrl but especially Bikini Kill who were my pipeline drug.
I had the most intense desire to be in an all girl punk band. I would fantasise about it on my walk home all the time.
When I got to college, I did end up joining a punk band by chance. A friend asked me if I’d be their band’s drummer when we were patching things up post-COVID and I jumped at the chance even though I had no idea how to play the drums. It wasn’t the exact riot grrrl dream in my heart but it did fulfil that desire to a degree.
Listening to Bikini Kill after surviving sexual trauma was honestly my medicine. It gave me such a good outlet for my rage, which I think was their goal in the first place. I would silently scream the music from the confines of my college dorm room and just cathartically release my anger.
(This one especially)
When I embarked on this project, I started to see it as my own riot grrrl moment. It had many of the same central elements: DIY (I had to make my neural network myself from home at free), creativity (my YouTube channel was my own video zine collection) and a whole lot of feminine rage. I also wanted to smash the patriarchy. I wondered where all the other 90s riot grrrls were now and what they were up to. I bet they have regular jobs now. And I bet they still carry that same spirit into their workplace and their day to day. So I thought that neuroscience could be a riot grrrl space too and so could psychology and so could everywhere, if you carry the same spirit. Sadly I missed out on the 90s but I wanted a chance to experience riot grrrl today. In fact, when I listen to Bikini Kill’s music, I realise that not that much has changed since then. I think I’m still pretty much on time.
Over the course of this project, one song has become my personal career anthem. “I Busted In You Chevy Window” is more spoken word than anything but it speaks to my soul and to the reason I’m here in the first place.
I busted in your Chevy window
Because you made me angry
I busted in your Chevy window
Because you made me mad
You called me a bitch, and you didn't even know me
You called me a bitch, 'cause you didn't know my real name
If you would've known me
You could've hurt me
If you would've known me
You might've hit me
If you would've known me
You would have called me by my real name
But you didn't and you called me a bitch and I busted in your Chevy window because you made me mad
I could not bust your weapon because it is your mouth
I could not bust your weapon because it's a part of your fucking goddamn body
But I can bust materials, yes
I can bust a window, yes
I can bust a plate of glass that protects you so all the other girls can throw stones
I can bust in your Chevy window
Because you make me mad
I felt so incredibly dehumanised as a student trying to get my rape case heard at university. I felt like I was being decontextualised in the most misogynistic of ways. I wasn’t called a bitch, but it felt like society was calling me that through the way the system was set up. I knew we would all be sensitive to institutional gaslighting and otherwise until someone could explain why memories recovered the way they did. That was my Chevy Window. I couldn’t change how the case went but I could bust the plate of glass that was protecting abusers and let all the other survivors throw stones.
To me, this song represents seeking justice through surprising avenues and finding what is vulnerable. It represents getting right back up when someone smugly thought they had you down (imagine the look on that man’s face when he saw the busted Chevy Window). It represents the difficulty of tackling the core of an oppressive system and the catharsis of making your way anyways. And dissociative amnesia was my way. I wanted something so tight, so truthful, so unavoidable, so real, that nobody could ever take it away — no government, no court judge, no narcissist, nobody. I wanted something forever and ever and ever. I didn’t want an idea. I didn’t want a philosophy. I didn’t want a mindset. I didn’t want a movement. I wanted an eternity. I never want to let people hide behind this issue like a bunch of pathetic, spineless cowards ever again. I want rapists to be uncomfortable for the rest of time. I want people to be protected forever and ever and ever. And truth is forever. Science is forever. A scientific article radiates and is crystallised into literature for the rest of time. Once it’s used, it’s there for good. You could never hunt that impact down. You could never squash it. That’s what I wanted.
I want more riot grrrls to take this song into their careers. There are lot more Chevy Windows out there to bust.
I sat for a long time on Wednesday finishing up my cognitive psychology paper on how reliable long-term memory is. Translating my experience into science as a survivor in this particular gap has been both rewarding and triggering. I love doing the science and it makes me feel joyful, but sometimes the theme gets under my skin. This paper has followed the same pattern. I spent a long and enjoyable time writing about arousal, memory binding, Synaptic-Tag-and-Capture… and tensely avoiding the part where I wrote about issues like unconscious transference and false memory. It always gives me a bit of an internal shakeup.
I read an article for my paper about a woman who had been convinced by her therapist that her issues were a result of repressed sexual abuse. She lived thinking that for a long time, before finally realizing that she was influenced by a therapist. Yes, it happens.
But what happened in psychology around this theme was incredibly complex. A body of scientists postulated that recovered memories and dissociative disorders like dissociative amnesia were not actual real, but a result of personality qualities they dubbed “fantasy proneness” and “social suggestibility”.
This is a tough Catch-22 because memory can in fact be influenced by psychological factors that can make people more prone to thinking something happened that did not. The term is “confabulation”. It is an unintentional subconscious process often dubbed “honest lying” because people are not intending to state a mistruth. In fact, in my trial, the investigators concluded in their report that they believed I was confabulating unintentionally to win back the favor of my crush and that’s why I had been psychologically influenced to create these memories. They were not people with psychology backgrounds. They were simply Title IX investigators. That was horribly painful to me, as an intelligent and academic woman, because I would never upend my life and invest so much time into such an intense process over a boy I did not even actually date, despite the crush I did have on him. Recovering memories upended my academic career at a school I poured years of my life in high school to get into. It touched every area of my life and killed my intimate world for years. I was struggling heavily with all sorts of mental health issues in the aftermath of this situation. So it was a big claim to make. This person had already been abandoned by everyone else for predatory behaviors, so his pattern was already reflected in their flight away from all of us. I wasn’t pulling from nowhere. Unfortunately while his predatory relationships were “not appropriate” to be pulled into the investigation as to not conflate a decision with a character judgement, my personal relationship was obviously was a fine thing to make deductions about. It was a terrrifying experience having my reality questioned to this degree when I was in the midst of an understudied, stigmatized, and weakly backed traumatic phenomenon.
The stigma of recovered memory, also fueled by foundations which collected aggrieved family members and victims of false memory influenced by therapists, planted a lot of doubt into the sphere of dissociation science. This does not mean that there were not many incredible researchers already doing work with dissociation patients. But they did face skepticism. There were many key issues within trauma research that nobody could sort out a mechanism for. Despite many people having reported experiencing dissociative amnesia, nobody really knew how it worked. How did these recovered memories even happen? Skeptics were unsure of how a memory could be over-encoded, as we know trauma to be, while also being forgotten. And yet it happened. Individuals with PTSD frequently described their experience as fragmented — but nobody could figure out how this fragmentation was occurring. They could not catch it in scans, nor speech. There were many theories — memory binding, repression, high stress. But nobody has truly been able to “catch” fragmentation in an MRI machine or an EEG or anything of the matter. This left survivors of trauma in a vulnerable spot, and more susceptible to claims that their experience was false.
False memories and confabulation do happen. It does not make dissociative disorders any less real. And the irony was that while these stigmas disincentivised researchers from pursuing solutions, I actually think the lack of understanding of how dissociative symptoms worked further fuelled the potential for confabulation. If we know what recovered memories are, then we have a better shot of knowing what they are not. It protects everybody.
Personally, I believe there were a lot of underlying stigmas fueling the false memory panic, as real as that anxiety is. Actually, the issue went all the way back to Freud and the earliest days of psychology:
There are two sides of a coin. False memories happen. And abusers and the justice system can work together to make somebody feel a little bit insane. So when it comes to retracting of abuse stories, I can’t say with certainty but I would be surprised if two things could not be happening at once. People can be impacted by misinformed and predatory therapists, and abusers can utilize systems that will protect them and amplify a story that helps keep them safe. An incorrect narrative can be torn apart to protect people’s sanity for a good reason, while at the same time, other people can have strong feelings and go to arms for a social narrative that confirms their underlying biases about survivors. And both of those potential scenarios would be benefitted by more research. It’s certainly not just one or the other.
The story is also more complicated than we think when it comes to memory. I’ve been writing in my essay about a story we learned in class this year on Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton. Jennifer Thompson was raped by a man who broke into her apartment. While she was being raped, she remembered clearly thinking that she needed to remember every detail of this man’s face so that she could identify him to the police later. She went out to the police station wearing only a blanket to report the crime. Three days later, she began working with the police to create a composite from her memories. The sketch primed her to select a mugshot, and the mugshot primed her to select Ronald Cotton from a lineup. He was sentenced to life plus 54 years in prison.
Ten years later, a DNA test exonerated Cotton, and the real culprit was discovered. When Thompson was brought in to see the man who actually raped her, she said she did not recognise him at all.
In a beautiful turn of events, Cotton and Thompson connected and became friends. They have since written a book together and work in unison to inform people about mistaken identification. While what happened to Thompson that night was real, the way the police primed her resulted in something called “unconscious transference”, where an eyewitness will be unintentionally primed to select an innocent person because they had seen the innocent suspect before, but not as the perpetrator of the crime.
It’s a complicated spot to be in. What happened to Thompson did actually happen. She was not faking it. She did everything she could in relaying the information she had truthfully. Even so, there were complications which influenced the way her memory was used which resulted in an untrue outcome. Memory is tough!
I’ve often reflected this year on how the way our justice system is set up encourages us to amplify our traumas into massive courtroom dramas. In my case, there was incentive to determine an underlying motive when there was none, rather than giving me a simple “there’s not enough evidence” or “we don’t know”. In Cotton’s case, one wrongful conviction led to 10 years of a life robbed. And in the case of false memories, there is pressure to bring a crime straight to the justice system without checks and balances that could occur outside of them.
We could make the justice system softer. We could facilitate processes that are led by trauma-informed individuals that are experts in memory and how to navigate it. We could dole out consequences that don’t result in years of hard incarceration so that when accidents happen, they don’t result in such a massive robbery.
Mistakes happen everywhere all the time, not because people are bad people, but because systems are complicated and humans need the best information possible. People without the proper experience or with an underlying bias can make mistakes. Police officers without a strong and informed structure in place can lead people astray. And aggrieved individuals who have been misled somewhere along the way need experts who can navigate their experience with nuance and a toolbox before it gets to a point of no return.
And that’s a lot more complex than chalking it down to a personality trait or an umbrella statement. Trauma is extremely complicated even in cases where people do remember immediately and jump straight to the police station.
On Friday, I made this post on Substack after countless hours spent troubleshooting my code:
It had me thinking maybe I could reach out to somebody to look at my code. I spent time learning how my code worked, trying to decipher all the issues with my code, and back and forth with Claude with very specific instructions. Nothing.
I ended up pushing my meeting forward with my supervisor which I felt bad about but honestly I’m usually happy to get the extra surprise time in my day from a cancellation so I hope he felt the same.
I put out some feelers on Friday for anyone who might be a bit more knowledgeable and willing to look my code over. I’ve been trying to balance being independent throughout this process and taking responsibility over this opportunity with being realistic and knowing when I’m being hyper-independent about it. I don’t know how to troubleshoot this at the moment. I’m grateful for how much I have learned but sometimes I hold myself to the standard of people who are already experts when I in fact am not. At the same time, I’m way too close to the end to have a realisation that I’m not cut out for this. It was already impossible like 6 months ago, you know? I’m too far in to pull the impossible card so I just have to power through to the end now.
I even made my first graph. It’s not a final product but…
I’m already snowballing to the end. A girl with numbers can’t complain anymore.
I’ve been reflecting on all the times recently that I’ve had a deep need for something in my life. There’s been a pattern over the last few years. It’s like the energy starts pooling. I feel frustrated, out of control, and like there’s nothing I can do. No matter what I try, it doesn’t seem to do anything.
And then suddenly, it’s like something will pull through in my deepest frustration that will skyrocket me up not just in the way I needed but in multiple other unexpected ways and suddenly I’ll be in a whole new situation. I’ve often wondered why. Is it some law of the universe? Something in my astrology or human design? Is that when I dig the deepest and pull something from deep inside?
I don’t know but for years, that’s been my pattern. I’ve learned over time when these moments happen to just surrender and let myself float up, just like I’m in quicksand. And this is one of those times. I just have to let go and expect the unexpected.
This week I’ve been reading…
and reading…
and reading.
“The Piano Teacher” has been getting into Erika’s perversion and I’ve been gasping in pure repulsion. She’s honestly shocking.
I don’t usually fold the corners of my pages. I prefer a bookmark. But I’ve made an exception for this book to add to the atmosphere. It feels like a book a 60s schoolgirl would read in secret, tucking in a neat little corner flap and shoving it under a pillow.
The first peep show scene has me thinking about the current world of the Internet. Jelinek describes the communal atmospheres of peep shows, where men used to go sit in small cubbies and watch the vulgarity in close proximity. As bizarre as it is, I would imagine there was a sort of accountability from being visible to each other. Nowadays, you can get darker and more bizarre from the comfort of your own home. If we don’t put in legislation, people in the future could even make their “entertainment” more disgusting and personalised, bypassing the limits of consent all together.
It had me thinking of a passage from “Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good”, which is a book I’ve been slowly reading for a long time. It’s like a manifesto slash canon of works exploring the political and spiritual dynamics of pleasure from many different angles. One of the leading essays the author Adrienne Maree Brown waves into this tapestry is “Uses of the Erotic” by Audre Lorde, who I mentioned last week. Lorde saw eroticism in a bigger light than most:
There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.
To her, the erotic was so much more than just the sexual. It was about embodying something deep and mysterious requiring total surrender to your inner spirit. As such, she had some hard words for pornography:
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling.
Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
This is a line I wish Erika could read, with her “wooden” parts. She does not touch herself. She does not wear her beautiful dresses. She does not allow herself to be consumed. Erika is entirely devoid of eroticism. She only looks. She does not feel or connect. When you lock that power away down deep, it can come back to haunt you in ugly ways. It reminds me of another quote from Marie-Louise von Franz.
I reflected a bit last week on how TikTok therapists teach more and more complex phrases for how to keep people away in the best possible manner. I’ve also thought a lot about how therapy speech filtered out into the general public has encouraged us to see deviations from perfection and big emotions as dangerous or something to be sequestered away. I wrote this a few months ago:
The current world kills our eroticism like crazy, doesn’t it? Passion and feeling itself is not toxic. Passion and spontaneity with inner-knowing and self-acceptance is a beautiful thing. Tapping into feelings is not toxic. Being human is not toxic. Being unexpected is not toxic. Life does not always follow the rules or behave the way you think it should and that’s the best part of it all. It’s the moments where things deviate from your expectation that create the most beautiful and interesting landscapes in our personal worlds. Trying to wipe the world clean of its dynamism creates a society that has to seek out artificial stories to engage in to feel alive. My favorite moments in life were where someone showed up in the middle of the night without “checking in to see if I had the capacity”, had an outburst of passionate emotion, took me away from my schedule at random, or had some “toxic” emotion that I found really endearing or interesting. That’s punk rock for real. That’s reality in all of its colors.
Personally I’ve learned to find my own limits and ways to embrace people as they are without expectation that they will engage perfectly with me or exactly as people “should” be. I don’t care to control others. I’m worried about accepting them as they are in all of their light and dark and being honest with myself about what our relationship will be around that. The only person whose behavior I care to change or pick apart is my own. And because of that, I’m surrounded by all sorts of colorful characters who have all kinds of quirks and imperfections. And I love them for it. They call me at random. They take me away from myself. They expect more. They do weird things. They make life exciting. There’s not a blueprint nor speech pattern nor script I expect them to engage with me through unless they’re truly being vicious or mean or painful.
I see embracing eroticism as such a deep antidote for our current culture. The pleasure activists said it first but loving yourself is erotic. Having a desire for change is erotic. Having a beautiful and bright vision for the world is erotic. Diversity is deeply erotic. Novelty, change, inner power, these are all deeply erotic. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our current society encourages us to compartmentalise our erotic power and upload it onto the Internet in a controllable way.
The less we are encouraged to express the deep anger and passion and humanity within each of us, the more we drift towards a bizarre and pornographic society where we feel disempowered to change the world. And I do think that’s intentional. I think this beige, “clean”, sleek world is an intentional killer of our own powerful eroticism because it keeps us manageable.
There’s nothing sexual to me about this project. But it’s the most erotic thing I’ve ever done, in an Audre Lorde way. I dreamed the biggest I ever dreamed and I just let the world take me, full deep plunge, full faith. And as a result my world felt colorful and beautiful and powerful again. I felt like I had a sense of agency again. I felt like I could step back and see reality as it was because I could listen to my body again. I rejected the power others pretended to have over me. I started seeing myself as a producer and not a consumer. I didn’t need to stand around and wait for someone to free me in neuroscience or psychology. I have free will. I can start today. I can start with no money and I can start with no experience. There are no rules. It changed my world and transformed me in the deepest of ways. And it makes me feel dangerous and uncontrollable in the best possible way. Nobody can convince me anymore that I’m stuck or that I can’t change my circumstances. It’s like a fire demolishing every single illusion in my life. It’s touched everything inside of me until no part of me was the same as it started.
The impact of this project on me has been massively healing, as has time. Surviving trauma made me lock up every sensation in a box. The idea of being attractive to people made me feel guilty and implicated, particularly as I moved more into early adulthood and into “Leonardo DiCaprio dating age”. Men significantly older than me, even by 30 or more years, started talking to me more at work or out in the world in more forward or pushy ways. I had no idea how young 22 and 23 would really feel alongside being a survivor. I didn’t feel adult yet in the way I thought I would in this period when I was younger and saw people my age in those age gap relationships. But men still saw me as in my prime sexual time and available even when they knew my age. As a result, I didn’t want people to see me. I didn’t want anyone to be attracted to me. It made me feel uncomfortable in my body and afraid. I stopped putting effort into my appearance. I stopped wearing cute outfits. It didn’t stop people from coming onto me but it did make me feel less visible. And I didn’t go out of my way to date because deep down I wasn’t ready to feel sexualised or vulnerable again. Beauty is very complex as a survivor of rape. When I was having my case investigated, I’d anxiously check my webcam and make sure I looked as good as I could before each interview in case somebody would assess me and not think I looked “pretty enough” to be raped. But once I was out in the world, I dialed down my looks as much as it could in case that made whatever happened my fault.
As I’ve shed the busyness of this time in life and gotten near the end of my project, I’ve been feeling my own body again in a way I haven’t in years. The wind feels so sweet on my skin. I’ve been wearing long skirts and frilly tops and laying in the grass all stretched out like I’m making snow angels without a care in the world. My sensuality has felt safe again. I’ve been taking long baths and smelling the incense in crystal stores like they carry a pleasant weight again.
I went into a thrift store by chance this week and saw the sickest heels. I put them on my feet and they fit perfectly. That was erotic for sure. Never happens to me. Bought them without hesitation.
I don’t usually buy heels because I’m 5’8 and it makes me feel awkward to be taller than people I date. I used to spend a lot of mental space making myself smaller and feeling nervous I was going to make people feel unattractive or insecure. But this time I thought “Fuck it honestly, I look hot in these. I want them”.
Reading “The Piano Teacher” has been inspiring me to embrace my eroticism without fear lest I end up like HER. It just felt like time.
Some more erotic moments from this week:
Recently there’s been an uptick in women online who joke about being stupid. I’m not gonna even sugarcoat or be nice about it, I think it’s the lamest thing in existence and we should talk about it.
I’m not “just a girl”.
I’M A FUCKING GIRL. I’M A WOMAN. I’M EVERYTHING.
And don’t get me started on “girl math”. You wanna see “girl math”? This shit is girl math. Girl math is teaching yourself a new subject because no man will sort your issues for you.
And this is girl math.
And this is girl math.
And this is girl math.
And this is girl math.
And this is girl math.
Don’t project your internalized misogyny on me because you think you’re stupid. I promise you it’s most definitely not a “girl” thing.
I’m not “too pretty for a job”. Feminism didn’t “force me to work”.
My contribution to the world is my soul purpose. It’s me becoming full. I’m surrendering to the deepest parts of me. I’m immersing in the most powerful passion of my entire life and it’s definitely not a man. I’m giving birth to new modes of thinking about reality. I’m revolutionising. I’m rebelliously choosing to face the world for what it is even when society will do anything to stop me!!!
I’M ALIVE!!!!
I HAVE FREE WILL!!!
I AM IMPRINTING MY REALITY ON THE EARTH!!!
I WAS HERE!!!
I WAS HERE AND I LIVED AND BREATHED AND I AM REFUSING TO FADE. I AM REFUSING TO BE FORGOTTEN !!!!!
I AM FUCKING ALIVE!!!!!
You get me? Fuck being “just a girl”. “Girl” is the most powerful word in existence. There is no “just” about it.
I reject the stupid Romwe T-shirt bullshit. I reject the cutesy coquette mess encouraging me to be fragile and give up my power to some idiot.
What a waste of life. I reject it!!! Booooooo!
I am divinity expressed through a weird fleshy shell. The fact that we’re even alive is a miracle. It’s rare. It’s unbelievable. Why would I minimize that so someone can treat me like a stupid little baby and I can have two seconds of validation from someone who washes their body with 3-in-1 shampoo? In this short life we’re living? Why would I betray my fellow women by “just”ing them? By calling them inherent idiots? They are not. And I’m not an idiot. I’m not a baby. I’m a woman. I’m a human. I am power.
If you want a cute t-shirt, make a smart one and stop imposing your self-hate on me. That’s yours to deal with. I won’t identify with it.
What I went through was pretty dark. But that’s not the energy I try to center in my life.
I’ve reflected a lot this year on the survivor stories we see in the news. They’re often surrounded by an energy of tragedy and hopelessness. That’s not what I want to be. That’s not how I want to be seen. I think we deserve success stories. Being spiritual has taught me that anything can carry either loss or abundance which will grow depending on your viewpoint. Navigating something dark creates a lot of intense energy. And intensity is powerful if you can channel it right. The energy of pulling through something that should have destroyed you is intense and powerful too. There’s something magical and potent about it.
One of my biggest personality traits is that I don’t like to waste time if I know something is right. I probably could have waited another 5 years to start this project. But it just didn’t make sense when I had the information now. So I got straight to it and worked methodologically to the end. Done in a year. Why wait 5 years to do something I can do now in 1?
I’ve carried that energy into my 20s too. I’m only in my twenties once. Think I’m going to waste that time torturing myself emotionally over something that is not my fault? I already did maybe 2, 3 years of that. My 20s are for fun and for discovering myself.
This whole project has been a means of channeling that negativity into something fun and cool and creative that I can look back on and be proud I didn’t waste my 20s hating myself for something outside of my control.
I don’t want a dark energy. That’s just not me. It just reemphasises the idea that when people exert that abusive the energy onto you, the natural outcome is that you stay down and you hate yourself forever. I’m sure my abusers would love that for me. I’m sure my university will would benefit greatly. Which is why it’s all the better to piss everyone off instead! :)
Every morning I wake up to my 2026 Vision Board.
I’ve loved seeing it play out over the year.
Joan Didion’s presence has translated into my essay writing. I had no idea how much I would be writing this year.
The quotes about rewriting the world have inspired me to reshape my expectations of my own reality more than anything. Nothing “needs” to be any which way. This has been the first true relaxing set of weeks of my life which is why I’ve felt okay to write this story now. As my responsibilities have diminished, I’ve felt like I can breathe better and as a result I’m seeing not only my past experiences differently but also my current life. I’ve been in “pushing” mode for a very long time. I always feel like I have to push my way forward to make things happen for me and that life was this big laborious struggle for survival. Feeling lost with my troubleshooting invited me to step back a bit. There’s no rush. I won’t die if it takes me longer. This project is going to get done no matter what happens, no matter how long this part takes. It’s not a matter of if but of when.
In the beginning, I felt like I had to push for this project all the time. It seemed so ridiculous that it would happen but I just needed it. A lot of this process was pushed not by discipline or intelligence but honestly by sheer desperation. I needed this. Anything I had to learn, anything I had to do, whatever it took, whatever work it took, no matter how many papers, how many hours, I would take them. Being in the situation I was in with my mental health felt like death. I could not live a life where people saw me as a liar. I could not live a life where I had no mental health tools and no trust in my mental health care system. I felt completely unsupported and like the weight of gaslighting was just crushing me from every possible side.
The desperation was also fuelled by the sense of the impossibility. It didn’t make sense that I should able to do this even though I needed it more than life itself. So I was desperate to see it. I wanted to see the point where it didn’t seem impossible anymore. My YouTube was fuelled in part by the desire for some tangible evidence that this was growing and that there would be an end. I wanted something complete, something I could look back on now and then and refer to when I needed a reminder of how much I’ve grown. There are so many moments that are particularly special to me that I look back on and think “You have no idea how good it’s going to get for you”. These are a few of my favorites:
On Sunday, I got an intense craving for Latin American food and went to a neighborhood I knew had a Latin market. It’s an area of London with a large Brazilian population, so I took the opportunity to stock up on Brazilian foods I missed. It's always such a rare treat.
On my walk there, I started reflecting on my mental health journey and it ended up drifting towards my computational model again. Walks are a way that I used to process the world. They make everything make more sense. I would see all the different connections in my life and how everything was all part of one piece. But the more stressed I got, the harder it got to go on walks until the intense amount of stress I was under even made me walk funny. Because it was so hard to even process reality, I had this habit where I was always trying to look back at my old experiences and connect them and make sense of them in a different way in a less organic way, almost manually, when I was healing from trauma like I was trying to embroider all the pieces together so they would make sense. It got harder to see one “me”, or make sense of my experiences in conjunction, so I would look back a lot and strain, like I was trying to make out a lighthouse in the fog.
As the arousal wore down and as I've gotten in a better place in life, it’s gotten much less strenuous. I specifically thought on my walk about when I first moved to London The first two weeks are very intense for me because I didn't have things set up yet. I was staying at an Airbnb and trying to get my new life sorted because I had to leave on a bit of a random note. I was already in such a very high stress mentality before moving that made my whole life feel too bright, too loud, and hard to make out. But at least in London, I had a future and a life to build. I was incredibly nervous having moved to a new city. I didn't have total faith in myself that I could figure it out. I was so nervous everyday that I wasn't gonna be able to make it. And everything turned out completely fine. Especially in my first two or so years here navigating high stress and surviving a new adult life, I would send “messages” back to my old self when I would complete something that she was scared wouldn’t happen, like moving my cat here or getting an apartment so that I could have faith that my future self was where I needed her to be.
The more I've gotten through my trauma healing journey, the less inclined I’ve felt to send the mental picture despite having even more stability and success in the city than I expected. I have much of wanted I wanted from moving here and more at this point. It hasn’t felt as relevant because as I’ve moved into a calmer space in life, I feel more embodied and I know that I'm just “me”. I don't need to send any messages back because there's not another version of me to send anything to. All of “me” is here. But even so, I was thinking about that today in a more integrated way and reflecting on how far I've made it and how different my life is. The more relaxed I’ve felt, the more awareness I’ve had of my mental quirks that were related to high stress and I’ve been releasing so many of the little things that my brain thought because of trauma. It’s helped that I’ve been overall more relaxed and have finally had more free time with which to let things sink in.
That’s what got me thinking back to my “defunct” results. I thought about how not only did I always feel like I was like fighting and working really hard to connect all the pieces of me into me and working really hard to make sense of life, but because my stress was so bad, the way I processed other connections changed. Instead of seeing that I was processing certain connections as just free form free association, it was like my subconscious connections were very distinct and inorganically threaded together all the time. It's a bit hard to really explain it yet in words and it's something that I hope to study later on as I go into more complex issues like post-traumatic psychosis or more severe dissociative disorders, but it was like when I couldn't really connect my own life together very well, every connection I did make took on an intense life of its own. Overall, the way I made connections changed a lot, which had me thinking to how my sparsely coded network was having trouble distinguishing the internal “stored pattern” from the “external” noisy pattern until none of it felt very separate from each other.
I also thought to a time when I had a another period of fragments coming up the following summer after I first recovered memories. I'd just finished the school year. I'd gotten into my own dorm room for the summer. I didn't have assignments bogging me down anymore and I had more time to reflect. That had been an extremely stressful school year with interviews for my Title IX investigation and navigating the school year with severe PTSD. I'd spent that year so dissociated and having so many different mental health issues that I couldn't wrap my head around at all. I was struggling with constant intrusive thoughts and I felt like I couldn’t tell what was coming from inside me and what was “other people’s thoughts”. I was very surprised in my own room one summer night to have more fragments come up and to realize that those symptoms weren't just my new reality and they weren't me being “intuitive”. They were just a way my brain was still covering up my trauma to make the painful thoughts easier to deal with.
I haven't really been able to work through those fragments yet, or had the time to properly revisit them as life has been busy and therapy is expensive. But what I do remember was a time when I I had a strange memory come up that didn't seem to make that much sense. I thought I vaguely remembered a highly specific piece of it being something from my childhood, but it was combined with things related to my college trauma. I thought that I had just completely confabulated the childhood memory but by chance I went home and talked to my sister. She happened to mention this very specific childhood memory and she asked me if I remembered it too. That showed me that while the whole piece which didn’t seem to make sense in conjunction was not accurate, what I had remembered still contained highly specific elements of things my brain had shut down or left behind. They weren’t coming from nowhere.
This thought process had me thinking back on My model that was, to me, defunct, because I was having trouble making it operate the way my densely coded one had. It was just messier and less exact or delineated. But I thought about how trying to piece together your head when stress is up is messy anyways. Not everybody develops a clean total amnesia anyways. I thought more about how my model was operating and I remembered one issue I was having where the memories were coming up completely blended (pictured above). That seemed really relevant to the experience that I had back then. So I thought maybe that in that one sense, it wasn't a failure but actually a reflection of exactly how it was for me when I was recovering memories at different points. On the other hand, I thought about how arousal just makes your brain over-excited anyways, and maybe over-excited with connections. Maybe that sort of over-excitation that I was seeing in my model with too many 1s coming up again wasn't necessarily a failure, but something that I could explain and that had meaning to it for other types of trauma processes.
I decided to take a critical look at my model again this coming week and think about what I needed from it. I want to see what in the messiness I felt was more technical aspect and what I thought was maybe just a natural part of trauma processing. Because at the end of the day, processing trauma is extremely messy — I can tell you that from experience. It’s not a cut and dry process. There's so many different complex symptoms that can come from unprocessed trauma. Arousal does make your brain work fast and hard. It does make your brain over-excited. So maybe the suppression isn't just necessarily creating these really neat fragmentation patterns like I saw in my densely-coded model or total amnesia like I saw in my totally suppressed version of my sparsely coated model but also some medium places where arousal kind of distorts how your brain processes excitement.
This process has really changed the way I navigate failure. A lot of times, we think that something is a failure on the surface but when we look deeper, there is actually something to learn from what we have. A lot of the things that I thought were failures were actually sources of information. Sometimes I jumped to the conclusion that I was failing when in actuality I was just anxious or had too crisp of a picture of what my model needed to look like that I didn't necessarily sit with what I might have found.
Like my life, this part has been a process of relaxing and getting a more nuanced and sort of subtle relationship to the world and to my work. Survival mode will have you thinking that everything is either a failure or a win. Either you’re safe or everything is going wrong. As you relax and get more immersed in your life, you start to see the bigger picture and have more of a fine-tuned relationship to what the world means.
People talk about the idea that that trauma teaches you about reality and that without it, people don’t have the same level of perspective. I think a lot of people with trauma have a complex relationship to that idea. Trauma does teach you a lot about life. I learned a lot about how horrible people can be and how to avoid the wrong kinds of people. I also gained a lot of wisdom about what it meant to persevere and how to be resilient. I’ve met a lot of people who have dealt with a really severe trauma in particular who feel that they have a harder time navigating relationships with people that haven't been through that level of pain or who have had an “easier” life because feeling like your perspective made you uniquely knowledgeable gives you a sense of control over it, among many other thing. It makes you feel like at the very least you're not naive, and that gives you a good enough reason to keep yourself isolated or to avoid getting intimate with people.
But while a lot of people were their trauma like a badge of honor, I would say that having been through a severe trauma, a lot of the things you think you learn are just distorted versions of reality. I think there's more to learn from the healing process and from getting into a gentler space in life again. Trauma has you internalizing these sorts of ideas about the world that are not universally true like that all people are bad that that pain is just a forever reality and that it's better to be guarded all of the time just in case. And it's not. There were a lot of distorted lessons that I learned from trauma that weren't necessarily wrong and they weren't failures, but as I've moved through and gotten into a gentler place in my life, I can integrate those lessons with even more awareness and with even more perspective about the way that stress encourages you to generalize.
One reason I struggled so much when I first moved to London in particular was that I saw life as either a failure or a success. Either I’m good or I’m bad. And yet… many of the “wrong turns” I took ended up in even more success in the long run or being just what I needed.
I can be extremely hard on myself when I perceive failure in myself. I used to look back a lot on my college trauma and just wish that I had the experience or the know-how to have moved through it better. I saw myself as a bad person. I thought something was wrong with me that I could be so naive at 18 that I didn't spot something that I should have seen. I blamed my lack of experience.
“Maybe if I had done more drinking in high school.”
“Maybe if I had gone out to more parties I’d have spotted it.”
“Maybe if I had had sex as a teenager, I wouldn’t have had that weak spot.”
Because of that I obsessively tried to calculate my every move when I was healing. I had a very intense relationship to right and to wrong. I always wanted to get ahead so I could never make another mistake.
I can look back now and see that it was a very complex situation. I had never interacted with people that had that level of manipulative behavior before. It was right to assume that people wouldn't act like that because the average person doesn't act like that. That wasn’t the error I felt like it was. Why would I have thought that that that would even happen to me? Life is so much more than just “was I good or was I bad”.
It's very complicated in abuse particularly. Abuse makes you act in ways that are not necessarily aligned with who you think you are. Obviously, since I was younger I always wanted to stick up for people who were going through a hard situation. Even though I was a shy person, I never wanted to be complicit in people's pain. I cared a lot about people who were struggling particularly with things like domestic abuse or sexual violence. But in that period in time where I was struggling with abuse, I just couldn't. Abuse makes you act in ways that you can't comprehend until you've gone all the way through it, until you've left and you’ve really processed your experience. Because while you’re in it, you're just surviving.
I would be so hard on myself thinking, “You know, well, that's just a reflection of who you are now. When it came down to it and the pressure was on, you showed your true colors. You didn’t stick up for the people you cared about.”
But who you are in abuse is not the real you. It's not a real reflection of what's in your heart at all.
My deep rebeliousness has always been a protective factors in my life. I’m somebody who refuses to accept a collective story imposed on them. I refuse to let other people ruin my life. I refuse to give people the satisfaction of thinking they would get away with suppressing my experience and life would continue comfortably for them. As a result, I’ve forced myself to find wins and happiness from the circumstances I was given, even if it took every ounce of willpower and strength in me to do so.
Unfortunately, a lot of people who landed in my same circumstances have had their academic and financial careers ruined. A lot of people have landed on the streets. A lot of people have struggled to rebound and ended up in and out of institutions or living on disability checks. And because of that, I was not a worthwhile investment for a school like Columbia University. I was not worth listening to. I was not worthy of investing in informed Title IX officers. I was not worthy of protecting when my rapist was taking intimidating actions towards me after landing on academic probation for a single semester for upending over half a decade of my young life.
And the honest truth is that society does not see women as being as capable of contributing to society to the same degree as our male counterparts, no matter if they give us the spots at their school. If Columbia University had believed that they would reap some massive benefit from me or any of my fellow survivors one day, they would have gone out of their way to make sure cases like the ones I am statistically more prone to experience were given the best chance possible.
They know that I am going to go out into the world and the cards will already be stacked against me. I am more likely to be a victim of assault and have my world upended. I am more likely to be a victim of domestic homicide. I am not going to be paid as much, so I’ll have a lot less to donate in the long run. I am less likely to make it into a leadership position. Society is already going to do anything necessary to make sure I fail or lag behind. So when it comes down to supporting me or supporting my male rapist, the decision is quite obvious. Who is statistically more likely to be a good name on an alumni list one day? Who is more likely to do something special or notable? Who is most likely to make a big contribution to society? If it’s going to be a woman, it probably won’t be one of their survivors. It’ll be one of their “normal” women who had the great privilege of making it out safely. They might make it big through some intense grit, effort, or just sheer luck and then great, Columbia can reap the benefits.
But over a third of women rape survivors have contemplated suicide at some point after their assault, and 13% had attempted suicide. Around 41.5% of survivors still struggle with PTSD at 12-months post-rape. We just aren’t the ones to invest in, are we? Better ignore us and get us out of the way so that the “upstanding” rapists of Columbia can continue bringing in prestige. It’s a great business strategy at the end of the day.
Wouldn’t want to risk ruining any important relationships, would you?