a victim, a survivor, a secret third thing.

on humanity.

CW: Sexual Violence

I want to note before I get into it that I understand how this piece might land differently for people based on histories, traumas, what harm we’ve survived, what feels most authentic to us on our healing journeys. Please do not hesitate to remind me of myself and call me to accountability if I’ve written anything here that causes distress or pain.

9.24.24

My inner child’s ears perk up when she hears people talk about being a victim. Her back stiffens. She holds her breath. She braces for familiar blows. Don’t be a victim. That’s a victim mentality. You’re playing the victim.

She’s still thinking about something someone said in conversation a year and a half ago, someone very close to her. It makes sense that she became a victim because she’s so passive, this person said, referring to a public figure who has been public about the harm she experienced. My inner child heard this as her worst fear confirmed. As my adult self stammered to formulate a response – an attempt to say something, anything, to interrupt the blame and the implication that only “passive” people become victims – my inner child remembered why she did what she had to do.

Why she numbed her pain. Why she disassociated. Why she repressed her memories. Why she shamed and silenced herself. Why she chose to feel everyone else’s feelings so as not to feel her own. All in order to survive. To be a survivor, and not a victim. Because being a victim is bad, right? Being a victim means choosing to be weak, helpless, shaped and defined solely by what happened to us, right? Rather than crying out about their pain and saying, I’ve been hurt and it’s affecting me, my younger selves turned to the coping strategies that would ensure our survival. I’m so grateful to them for every choice they made with our survival in mind. I wouldn’t be here today otherwise. But maybe what we really needed was for it to be okay to be a victim of something that hurt us.

___

I experience my survival as a tightrope. Holding my breath and willing myself to find balance with each tentative step I take. Knowing that I can’t err in the direction of too much or too little of my body’s preferred coping strategies. Overconsumption, or not consuming enough. Ghosting loved ones and hiding from the world, or being too available to too many people. Doing too much, or not doing anything. Hyperfixating on fixing myself, or neglecting myself completely. Too much of any of these and I’ll topple over - and possibly hurt others on my way down. I’m keenly aware of what dangers lie on either side. Keenly aware that there are people who won’t even believe that this tightrope is real at all until they see me fall. Keenly aware that, when I fall, there will be people ready to point at me, smirking that the fall is what I get for not keeping up, not coping to just the right degree by using just the right combination of strategies to remain upright. Keenly aware that we exist in a society that does not yet know how to collectively hold and walk with survivors, how to widen that tightrope to a solid path onto which we can fully plant our feet, how to offer us grace and support when we fall. Because, at some point, even with our best efforts, we will.   

We prefer our survivors to look serene up there. Seeing sweat, hearing hard breathing, witnessing a wince – nah. We want our survivors to smile and make it look easy as they perform a daily death-defying act. To reflect back to us that it’s not really that dangerous up there. That what happened to them must not have been that bad, because look at what amazing and beautiful things they can create in spite of their pain. Look at how strong they remain. We want this from survivors so we won’t have to be met with the reality of how precariously placed we are, how much we are teetering, how hard we are working at surviving. When all that our wounded parts hear from others is that victimhood means being a powerless object of pity, we force ourselves to be survivors, at all costs, and to do it with apparent ease.   

___   

As an adult, the universe has brought me opportunities to be in dialogue with other people who’ve been harmed by gender-based violence – through my work on college campuses, as a volunteer on a crisis hotline, in unexpected conversations with Lyft drivers. When doing this work in the context of institutions, I, like others, have accepted at face value what I was told: that people who have experienced harm are not victims, but rather survivors. That the term “survivor” highlights the resilience of a person who has kept doing what they need to do in order to not die from what they’ve been through. I don’t disagree. I’m resilient AF. But there’s another side that I think this framing ignores. We often harm ourselves and others in our attempts to shoulder this label. Fragmentation of self, separation from other humans, alienation from life itself, is often at the core of the choices we must make to survive.

My younger selves were largely unconscious of these choices, believing that this was just the way it was, just who we were. These days, I’m hyper aware of them. Hyper aware of when I binge eat because I’m attempting to fill the internal abyss into which I cannot look on that day. Hyper aware of when I ignore messages from loved ones because I’m attempting to avoid what my inner child fears on that day will be an inevitable lack of attunement to my feelings. Hyper aware of when I chase the spiritual highs of meditative bliss, transcendent love, cosmic communication, because I’m attempting to shield myself from what is painful and frightening about myself, about others, about our reality on that day. Have binging and isolating and getting high (on substances and/or on spiritual awakening) kept me alive to meet the following day? Hell yes. Are they markers of my body’s will to live? Hell yes. Have they served me? Hell yes. Have they also hurt me and caused me to hurt others? Hell yes.

We survive. Hell yes. But at what cost?   

---

Before we tell people who have been hurt not to refer to themselves as victims, let’s consider this: From whom has victimhood historically been denied? In the case of gender-based violence, we might bring to mind stereotypes of the hypersexual Black woman, the submissive Asian woman, the savage Native woman, the hot-blooded Latina. These stereotypes emerged to justify the use of gender-based violence as a weapon of colonization, of enslavement, of war. This wasn’t rape in the eyes of the state, because these women were unrape-able. These stereotypes still impact both rates of and responses to sexual violence as experienced by Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color. As Oakland-based artist and activist Cat Brooks would say, “all violence is state violence.”       

In her 1994 essay entitled “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Sylvia Wynter wrote of how, in the aftermath of the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King, the public learned that the LAPD used an internal, unofficial code – “NHI” – to refer to murders in which the victim was, well, deemed by them as not human. Black people, Brown people, poor people, unhoused people, unemployed people, those who actually were or could easily be stereotyped as sex workers or participants in the drug economy, either as consumers or suppliers. Those who were not deemed as productive, contributing members to society under racial capitalism. The state became the ultimate arbiter of humanity, and our structural location was the ultimate determining factor. If someone is murdered and no human is involved, then no crime has occurred. If there is no human, there is no victim. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy are structurally left out of humanity, structurally unable to be victimized.

People who have had the experience of being both perpetrator and victim alike often tell those who are vocal and visible about being harmed that doing so must be an attempt to gain currency – monetary, social, political. We know that these forms of currency are rarely if ever actually made available to those who speak out about what happened to them. But let me say the quiet part out loud: people who accuse survivors of this are not wrong to see that there are varying degrees of humanity afforded by the state under this system. Varying degrees to which we are socialized to view each other as vulnerable. Varying degrees to which we are deemed capable of being victimized and worthy of the currency of care. They’re not wrong to see this. They’re just looking at survivors themselves as the root of this, rather than looking at the state. It is no surprise, then, that they read any attempt at saying, I’ve been hurt and I need resources, accountability, systemic change so that this doesn’t happen again, as an attempt to gain something. Only so many of us will be white enough, cis enough, straight enough, sane enough, resourced enough, to be classified as human when we are harmed, to have a chance of receiving anything at all. What people call clout chasing on the surface is a recognition of this reality, that many of us are reaching for something we may never receive when we speak out about being hurt. But it’s not money, not fame, not power. It’s our humanity. We want the currency that comes from being as human as possible in a society that, to varying degrees, dehumanizes us all. When we mock and torment survivors for wanting to be recognized as human, we have lost touch with our own humanity. And when we continue to appeal to the state to acknowledge and resource us in the aftermath of the harm that it perpetrates against and through us, we will always end up playing a losing game.  

Those LAPD officers created an acronym to describe what was and is true in practice – that they, as an arm of the state, get to determine who is and is not human.

___

But enough about the state.

A little treat of a meme for you, my fellow fans of The Office.

What about us? Those of us who love and seek to protect people, those of us who have both wounded and been wounded by others, those of us up there on that tightrope and those of us witnessing our loved ones tipping along. How can we begin to care for ourselves and each other outside of state and institutional frameworks of victim (or nah), of survivor (or nah)?   

I once heard Mariame Kaba say that no one’s first experience of violence is committing it. Something that that person experienced and/or observed early on in their life ultimately shaped them in the direction of that violent act. We know that hurt people hurt people. But what is the determining factor between a hurt person who goes on to hurt others and a hurt person who goes on to do everything in their power to not hurt others? I’m coming to believe that the first step along these paths is this: is that hurt person able to acknowledge and be with their own vulnerable, victimized parts? Are they able to accept and love their own vulnerable, victimized parts? Do they choose to do what they can to support and resource those vulnerable, victimized parts? Do they recognize that this will likely be the work of a lifetime and treat it as such? Or, is that hurt person denying themselves access to their own humanity by refusing to accept that they are vulnerable, that they were victimized?

Refusing to acknowledge that something happened to me, that I was hurt in ways that changed me forever, makes it much less likely that I will consider the harmful, lasting consequences of my hurtful behavior toward other people. This can turn into an attempt to strip other people of their humanity, by hurting them and denying them the space to acknowledge how they have been hurt.

What are the conditions of a world in which more of us would, could choose to accept and tend to our wounded parts, so as not to project our pain onto others? What kind of world supports our ability to do this? Certainly not the world that is falling away, but what about the new one that’s coming in? How do we create this new world by embodying it? How do we choose to embody a world in which hurt people can heal – and make the effort that embodying this world requires?

Our vulnerability is inextricably linked to our humanity. I choose to remain connected to this vulnerability, to hold it as my balancing pole as I walk my daily tightrope. I accept that I have been victimized, that I have not always made the healthiest choices to survive that, and that I am doing my best at my current level of self-awareness. I accept that being victimized and surviving does not mean that I abdicate my responsibility for the role that I play in our collective healing. I meet my own vulnerability and pain with love and care, because it’s the best way that I’ve learned to seed lasting violence prevention on an interpersonal level. Recognizing my own humanity has become my first and most necessary step toward becoming the safest possible person for others.

Yes, I am a victim because I was harmed. Yes, I am a survivor because I’m still here. Neither label feels accurate when I reach for a framework to describe myself. If I had to choose one word, I would say that I am a process. A process of naming, facing, holding, and re-integrating my wounded parts, and showing up in the world as a person who supports the ability of others to do the same. As I can. Some days I wobble, some days I fall. Some days my steps are slow, measured, calculated. Some days they are more confident, more resolute. Some days I dance across that thing. Every now and then, for a moment or two, I float.

___

I’ll end with this clip from a 2001 panel discussion between Toni Morrison and Frank McCourt, moderated by Juan Williams. In it, Madame G.O.A.T. Morrison responds to a question from the audience: how do you survive whole in a world where we are all victims of something? Listen closely. She says:

That's a nice, big, fat, Eastern/Western philosophical question, about: how do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually, if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born. We are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.

The attempt, the blossoming, the endurance. That spiritually compelling task. As I can. This is who and what I am. You can call me a survivor, if you choose. You can also call me that something interesting that you respect in between.