One thing I didn’t expect was the anger. First came love. Flooding everything afterward, the anger came.
I made it to southern California, a surprising haven for me. Most of the people I know in the midwest and east coast tend to generalize SoCal with broad, unfair strokes tainting it with the superficiality of Hollywood. For me, though, SoCal has always been a place for family, healing fun, and roomfuls of laughter.
When I got to LA, my family here immediately greeted me in typical Filipino fashion: a big party with lots of food and plenty of loving attention. After so many days in hotel rooms, other people’s apartments, and every kind of mode of transportation – to be surrounded by love gave me a sense of relief. A relaxing that I didn’t know I needed.
What I didn’t expect to find today was the anger. An uncomfortable realization of how angry I am at the world for not caring about the people and things I care about. In almost a childlike way, obstinate with no reason, I feel stubbornly inflexible about wanting others to care about sexual violence, communities, and healing. After meeting so many contributors, and reflecting upon how many survivors of rape and sexual violence are already in my life, I felt nauseatingly angry. It came in waves. They were powerful and unrelenting.
I’m tired. And that’s when I’m easily overcome by unmanageable anger. It happens late at night, like now, when I find no solace in the stars or the mystery of life. The anger comes when I am in the company of survivors who have worked nearly their entire lives learning how to love themselves and others again, and in their company, realize how few people truly do that kind of work – survivor or not – and how necessary that process is to undertake. I grew angry in the reality that the world has ignored the voices of so many, turned its back on the vulnerable, and forgotten about the ones who didn’t survive at all. The simple unfairness got to me tonight.
I think I’m reacting out of love. I genuinely love the contributors that I have met and spent time with face to face. I’ve poured over their work for years and now, meeting them in person, has generated a warm connection to each person that I meet. In getting to know them, I realize that most of them have been raped and/or abused, and the realization comes in waves again – very different than editing their work on the page – that pierces my heart with an acute sense of injustice and confusion.
How can this kind of trauma exist? How did they live through it? Even after all this time, I still can’t fathom the strength to move beyond the unimaginable pain and betrayal some of the contributors have experienced. I knew all these things before through their literary writing, but not with my heart. To hear them read their work puts the anthology in a new level of meaning and existence. It is a living, breathing entity; a collection of hearts and souls and thoughts and tears. It is a living book of stories.
Realizing that I am loved and safe with my family here frees me to feel what comes. What came today was the anger. The anger that rape exists. It is in existence. Right now, as I type this, someone is being raped. And that’s another person who would need to read the anthology, and that enrages me. I must be the only writer in the world who wishes no one wanted or needed to read her book. I must be the only writer in the world who actively works to make her own work irrelevant because that would mean the end of sexual violence. I must be the only writer in the world who wishes her book wasn’t needed in the way that it is.
The anger comes.
How do you know you love someone? For me, today, I know I love someone when I feel anger at the injustice of their suffering and pain. I do not take on other’s trauma or process, but I love the people I am meeting on this book tour. I love them. And that love leads me to a place of deep reflection and sadness. Although the book is about hope, I had to rake out the trauma. Sometimes I think it is trapped inside me.
The anger comes.