Confessions of a libra

Alchemy | Credit: Here

[ Content warning: This piece discusses trauma and abusive of all types including sexual. Please proceed with caution, your nervous system is important. Not all men and all that. ]

03.06.25

No one tells you that surviving is the most violent part. You come back to a body that doesn’t remember how to be yours. You have to pick up your own pieces, tenderly  and with intention. That is how you return to yourself. And return you must, over and over again. For healing isn’t linear, and in that there is no shame. It just makes the journey more patient, and more you.

Choosing yourself can be hard, because emotional, physical and sexual abuse can make you disassociate. It can make one feel like their body is the unfortunate thing, the thing that has to bear the shame of violation. Well I am here to quell your mind and tell you that your body is still special. It was before abuse and it damn well is afterwards. You are no less sacred because someone saw fit to disrupt the divine. Those that succumb to dark urges like that have embroiled themselves in contracts and lessons you cannot even begin to comprehend. Always believe in The Ledger, whether you are lucky enough to see your perpetrator receive justice in this life or not.

I was once the soft thing. Laughing, playing half naked in metal tubs carelessly alive! Where presence in my body was the order of the day and not a gritting afterthought. The one that believed in the goodness of humans, humming absentmindedly unaware of any lecherous “uncles” in sight. Before the freezing, before the fawning, before the lost time. That was the girl who lived. Then  it happened. Once, twice…I lost count. I learned to navigate grown men and pretend I didn’t understand as much as I did. I couldn’t pathologise them, no but even then I learned to infantalise myself to keep safe.

Enter the girl who learned how to survive. I had to build mazes in my mind to keep from collapse. I started tracking myself around men more vigilantly, scared I was some sort of beacon. Without realising it, I began to feel that men were to be pleased, because if I didn’t do it – they would take anyway. I started thinking all men were capable of it. Not if you asked me directly, no. Back then words would have failed me. This is my hindsight now looking back at my pre-teen and teen self.

While my mind filed away the memories for safekeeping, I had become my own Big Brother. I watched myself from the inside out. I had horrible vicious dreams for years. Some I’m not even sure were pure manifestations of the trauma from this life. Dreams of being stalked and hunted in the cover of darkness. Two of them stick out to me to this day.

In one I am racing in a forest. I am frantic but I am lithe. I think I’m doing well but they catch me anyway. Two men and they each grab a leg. They drag me from that forest a long way away to this cave. God knows what happened then.

Another dream came later in my late teens and seared into my brain. It feels futuristic with historical nostalgia. We are in an underground carpark. It is the future, and women have been resubjugated. I am in row of black women dressed pretty similar to traditional African attire (short skirts, possible a bandeau situation up top), and we were all connected by chains. We have on collars on our necks and cuffs on our legs, all conjoined. We are up for auction. These dreams never left me.

That girl who learned how to survive felt like she was bumbling through the world. There was no strategy to this it was pure survival. My neighbour came to visit at the age of 14, he was only supposed to be walking to the bathroom through the kitchen that I was cleaning. He came and instead pulled up behind me and ran his hands up my thighs and listing my dress. He leaned into my neck like I was a lover and I don’t think I registered a single word that left his lips.

I froze, and I was mad at myself for freezing. I overthought it afterwards. Why didn’t I say, stop? Why didn’t I say, no I don’t like that? But my conscience had awoken the dormant memories. Suddenly it was flashes of other freezes, other times I was cornered unexpectedly and suddenly had no out. I asked for help and got chastised. I tried to unpack it with other teenagers who themselves were ill-equipped to assist me. It gnawed at me like bars on an enclosure. I knew something was terribly wrong and I couldn’t be happy until it was resolved.

I won’t say it’s a single thing that helped but rather a commitment to showing up for myself. I have explored this topic sporadically during talk therapy (I’ve never done it long because I’m an intellectualiser). In retrospect, yoga was the somatic therapy I said I was wanting from a therapist. This is not to say forgo one for the other, I am currently seeing a somatic therapist for the first time ever and just as I suspected, it works well for my intellectualising self.

When you have experienced trauma, overthinking can be a temporary bad-aid that gives the illusion of control. Yet true control, comes from mastery of both the intellect and the sensual. True control returns you to your body, so you can better commune with it. So your body isn’t only heard when it is warning you to survive. Consider trying yoga, as a way of enforcing slowness and presence back into the body.

You do not have to arrive perfect when you get to the mat. Just show up earnest, and let the tears flow when you surprise yourself with the tenderness that you are still capable. When you are assaulted you are subjected to your body being used against your will. What if I told you that reclaiming your power looks like being more intentional in your body, and even learning to sit with discomfort that you have curated.

This is why people who have been assaulted can later have rape fantasies, as a way of reclaiming control over an act that they had no control over. Just like pleasure can teach, pain and discomfort can correct. Even if yoga isn’t for you, learning how to meditate and be in your body can feel like torture to someone who is that disconnected from their body. But it is through that consistency in showing up despite that pain, that you can watch yourself grow in real time.

For a long time, I had a resistance to submission in a sexual context. It was too reminiscent of putting my trust in the wrong people. Who could trust that I would still be human by the end? It’s perfectly normal for sexual abuse victims to become hypersexual. This is one of many consequences. I wasn’t hypersexual but my discernment was a bit murky in the beginning. I made it my mission to learn quickly and work to facilitate enjoyment in my sexual relationships.

My eroticism became a strong strategy for alchemisation. I knew I wanted to feel adored, I knew I had to learn to speak up even more with men and possibly learn to command them before they commanded me. I have studied men with the accuracy of prey. For when you have been repeatedly violated by differing people, you do go through a phase where you think you must be drawing them in. Instead, I studied them. So when you read my writing and see my ability to capture men, know that in part it arose from me alchemising my pain. I became my own protection just in ways people had never banked on.

I am a cardinal sign in astrology which means I enjoy starting a new project, but don’t always have the stamina to complete it. The yoga, the meditation, the therapy and the men were not things I did all the time – but when I did them it was with intention. And it was through that intention to heal, to no longer be defined by a period of life that was full of fear and blur – that led me to being the person I am now. I feel mentally free. My brain still clocks everytime I am alone with a man and sizes him up. Checks for the exits, imagines how I could take him on and hopes that I never freeze again.

I learned to forgive myself for holding things that were never mine to hold. I shed the shame. The part of me that almost felt apologetic that it happened. That felt bad that I sometimes needed to talk about it just to process the absurdity of my human experience. I realised that my recovery was simply going to have to make some people uncomfortable. You could choose to hear my pain and paint me with a brush but I knew that I never gave the energy of someone to be pitied. Much as people tried to project that onto me. I knew that my processing wasn’t a failure (even though sometimes I did let’s be honest) because it intuitively felt right to continue bringing it up. Being forced into silence, now that was the actual sword to the heart. Consistently trying to advocate for myself for years with people who themselves had too many walls up, was a point of frustration for me. Many men and women failed me because silence is comfort. In silence, we never rock the boat. We just wear our burdens like an anchor and drown in the ocean of life.

Well I say fuck that. Let’s out the perpetrators, let’s facilitate healing across genders and creed because we should not be shoving these societal issues under the carpet. There is no amount of pretending these things aren’t happening that erases your experience. What speaking up can do though, is facilitate the right conversations and possibly heal another just from them feeling seen. I know someone exhaled in my last post when I named my trauma because they had never spoken it out loud to anyone.

I’ve been angry, on and off. Angry that no one was available when I needed them. That I even had to unpack any of this shit when I never sought the trouble that found me. But over the years without knowing it, I was already transmuting. When you listen to those feminine rage songs, like ‘The Doll People’ you can access your feelings better and use the rush of emotion to fuel your own art. I have often written my trauma down over the years. I’ve always thought I was a better scribe than orator. I wrote, I cried and I impressed myself with my ability to articulate the complex feelings existing inside of me. I channel my anger towards men righteously by choosing not to shrink in the face of them in other environments. I was regaining my dignity with every time I spoke up and told a man he was wrong.

In my years of healing, I have enjoyed dance classes. I encourage all women to do some dance at all ages because working on your sacral chakra is very healing for people with the kind of trauma I have. It helped make me feel sexy in my own body without any clinical approach. Instead of someone asking you to come back into your body, you are juggling learning moves and trying to perfect them within the hour. Once you have learnt a dance, you record yourself at the end. Sometimes you surprised yourself by seeing yourself express a kind of sensual sovereignty you have previously associated with female entertainers.

I started to feel sexy again without it feeling forced. I enjoyed my morning walks and my morning yoga. Just me, the silence and the elements. A time for me to receive love from myself and from the divine. My body became my temple because I never gave up on nourishing it. Even when I was uncertain and only guessed at the next move. You don’t have to be perfect. You only need to feel yourself worthy of trying.

You’ve never been responsible for the abuse you suffered. You are not to blame for your own silence, and you do not bare the weight of the ones that failed you. You are a victim, that does not have to remain one for the comfortability of your perpetrator or those like him (or her). You look great when you are just doing your best. You are worthy even when you’re just surviving and you’re not ready to unpack it all yet. It’s delicate. It’s precious. It’s yours to handle in anyway you see fit.

From my soul to yours, I ask that you slow down in your body. Engage with her anew. Ask questions. Give yourself lovely unhurried touches. Then journal on the experience. Get therapy if you can afford it. I previously sought free therapy through Headspace in my Youth, so if you hadn’t thought of it then please look into it. Your body is yours to reclaim. May your fire burn ever-brighter in the face of those that sought to stomp it out.