Broken

This is a truth: I’m cavernous, hollowed out, a husk.  I can see it in my own eyes, someone feral, someone I don’t fully recognize.  I feel like a caged animal, and for the first time in my life, relate more to wild dogs fleeing cruelly delivered kicks and blows than to the men who so gleefully deliver them.  I too am fleeing.  My 3-month plan of becoming zen and willowy, of being transformed by this land I’ve dreamed about for 20 years, has become a waking nightmare.  It is an experience of primal fear, of adrenaline surging through my veins all day long.  Fear doesn’t sleep, and neither do I.  It is the collective fear of every trauma that’s ever happened and nearly happened at the hands of a man, and I am everywoman.  It is a fear that creates physiological responses to keep me alert, and a fear that effectively cuts me off from enjoying and experiencing the beauties that I’m still sure exist here.  Because even now I believe that, and grieve the loss of what my relationship with this country could have been.  So very much to grieve.

My sistercousin Amy asked me if anyone physically hurt me.  Hurt me?  No.  I’ve been followed, cornered, surrounded, groped, grazed, punched, prodded, grabbed, harassed, ignored, patronized, taunted, deceived, disrespected, pushed, and berated.  I have been soundly silenced.  I have spoken, and shouted, and cursed, and cried, and my voice, and all the brain and heart she carries with her, meant nothing.  Was nothing.  And the reality of my life’s work of helping others, particularly those least heard and most disenfranchised to find their own voice, hit me with all the subtlety of a landmine.  Listen with your stethoscope, and you’ll hear shrapnel.

Pop told me when I was a little girl that hate was wasted energy.  I believed him then, and I believe him now.  So do I hate India?  I hate what I’ve seen through my very narrow keyhole into the reality of women and girls and untouchable kids diving headlong into an overflowing dumpster, competing with the family of swine for the best of the rubbish.  I hate watching little girls balance giant bowls of concrete on their heads as they hike up 10 flights of stairs in the hospitalizing +110 degree heat to the men on the roof who wait.  I hate how my vulnerability is a dangerous liability, how my femininity is my weakness and their strength and their toy.  I hate that I can’t get out from under my anger at the injustice of it, that even this, my anger, gives them power undeserved, and corrupts my own heart.  That my anger is just a fledgling attempt to control a hurt that threatens to overcome me.  Not threatens: I am overcome.

I need some kind of healing, some semblance of peace.  I need to be gentled the same way those feral dogs need to be gentled, with kindness and time and hopefully lots of fresh air.  I need to sit in the tension of living in a world where this hellish month represents not the worst but the best that many women in the world could hope to expect.  I need to connect with Pop and my brothers and Uncle Jack, with my male friends and cousins, to remind myself of their goodness, and what it feels like to be treated like a human.  I need to, I know this, forgive.  But not forget; I’ll never forget.  And hopefully someday I will help to create extra little nooks where women are safe and valued and precious: extra nooks in our world, and extra nooks in our hearts.  Heaven knows we’re in desperate need of both.