I am being chased. No. That’s not quite right. Hunted. A slower pace. I know he is looking for me. I move carefully, slowly, aware of each soft sound I make as I step on to the grassy ground outside my home. I walk crouched down, so my head does not attract the attention of the hunter. I see him. He cannot see me, but he knows I am near. I imagine that he can smell my fear, and I experience a thrill so intense that my body shivers. It’s similar, I think, to the thrill of the chase that he is feeling.
I hate him. I hate that I feel these feelings because of him. I feel so alive, aware of minute details that normally I would miss. Every sense is sharpened. I smell things I normally wouldn’t notice. I feel the slightest change in wind on my skin, the almost imperceptible touch of a mosquito landing on my arm. I see individual leaves tremble as a squirrel swiftly runs across a branch. I’m only really alive like this when I am in the midst of this fear.
I creep beside a stack of wooden boards. The grass is long and it brushes against my knees. I crouch down further and look down hill. I see him at the house down the road. My friends are there. He is yelling at them, demanding that they tell him where I am. If they don’t tell, he says fiercely with teeth clenched in anger, he will hurt them. Kill them. I can’t actually hear his words or see his face but I know what he is saying. I know how he looks. I’ve seen it all before.
I look away. I hope they will be safe, but I cannot bring myself to stand up and accept my punishment in the vague hope that he might spare them. They know what he is capable of now, they will never be safe again either. I cannot save them.
He is still focused on my friends. I move out to the road and begin putting cardboard boxes and rocks and branches on the road. A feeble attempt to block his passage closer to me. It’s a dream. Nothing I do really makes sense and I know that when I awake I will hate myself for not taking control in this dream.
Flash to my bedroom. It’s no good trying to hide, he has found me. He grabs me and pushes me on to the bed. He is too close. I smell his scent. Odour. Sweat, anger, cruelty, hatred – they all have odours. Not scents. Scents are saved for things like lilac blossoms, sweet with a bit of a bite, or the overwhelming sweetness of a peony bloom. I hold on to the memory of those scents, hoping to be less aware of what he is doing to my body. Not to me. He can’t touch ME. But he doesn’t know that. He thinks he has all the power now but he doesn’t know that he can’t change how I feel or what I think.
I keep reminding myself that I am not 4 anymore, I am an adult. I SHOULD be able to stop him. I SHOULD have control. I SHOULD be able to escape. My anger builds. Shame overwhelms me.
He presses hard against my body. I struggle to move away. I try to kick but my legs are pinned down by his legs. I try to punch and push him away but he pins my arms over my head against the headboard with one strong hand grasping both my wrists. He needs the other hand to guide himself as he forces his way further into my body. I check out.
He is gone now. I hate myself. I’m so ashamed of not being able to stop him, of not protecting myself. The dream has ended but the feelings stay with me.
The book I read before going to sleep was about a retired military man who has to rescue a mom and her 4 year old twin girls. One of the twins comes up with a plan – all by herself – to run away as they are being moved to a new location – a cabin in the woods. She then proceeds to run into the woods in the dark, marking her path with small rock piles as she goes. She finds her way through the woods and comes out at another cabin. At this point she cannot tell them what’s going on, she only raises her shirt so they can read what her mom was able to write on her back – the phone number and name of the military man.
This part of the book angers me immensely. The author clearly does not know anything about 4 year old girls. The book character has lived in the city all her life, has never been camping or had any wilderness training. She is 4, too young to know how to read – and her mom did not tell her what she wrote on her back. Too young and inexperienced to know how to take care of most of her basic needs. And yet, the author makes her a heroine by hiking through the dark woods and basically rescuing not just herself, but her twin sister, her mom, and the military man’s niece.
Bullshit. I call bullshit.
I was angry when I went to bed because of this part of the book. I felt cheated, lied to, betrayed. A four year old child cannot and should not ever have to feel they need to rescue and protect the adults around them. That is NEVER a child’s responsibility. All of these feelings came out in my dream. That’s how I process a lot of my feelings. Dreams give me enough distance from my reality so I can gain better a understanding of the feelings I can’t always name.
The author may think she is pretty smart to give so much power to her imaginary character – but in fact the author just denied every adult reader who has been put into the position of having to fend for themselves and take responsibility and ownership of someone else’s abuses toward them.
This book re-traumatized me. And the hatred and anger I feel toward this author comes out in my actions for the next four days. I snap at people I love for no reason. I clam up in silence when my husband comments on how nice my legs look in the skirt I’m wearing. It feels so invasive, so dangerous that he has noticed my body and wants to be closer to it. But when I try to explain what has happened to me because of this book and how my dreams have shown me what went wrong, he interrupts me abruptly and starts talking about something entirely unrelated. Again my voice and feelings are dismissed and ignored – I am not his problem.
But I am not a PROBLEM that needs to be solved. I am a human being who deserves to be heard and seen. I deserve to feel safe, no matter where I am or who I am with or what I am doing. I am not four anymore. I am not eight. I am not thirteen. I am 58 years old. WHY am I STILL having to fight to be seen and heard without being threatened or ignored or shut down?
My voice matters. I write because it is the one place where my voice cannot be shut down. I may be ignored by many, especially if I post my writing online, but I don’t care about that because my writing is for me.
My message, however, is for others like me. You know who you are, and I trust that you will find me and my words, and that you will know what to do with them. I hope you will take my words to heart. I hope you will find the hope in your own life. I hope you will find your own ways to speak up and speak out against the monsters disguised as humans who would stifle our voices, ignore our feelings, and simply use our bodies and our strength for their own purposes.
We must stop fighting for what already belongs to us. That is what they want. It’s a distraction that serves their purposes. What we need to do is simply CLAIM what already belongs to us.
We have the ability to truly change the world for ourselves and for others. Because we are not four anymore. We are capable wise human beings with voices and messages that matter.
We have ALL the power, and we have the choice to use it.
