Grounding ; Rape
I was alone in the garage when a whiff of cheap cologne hit me and my whole body spasmed as my heart exploded and shards of the dust settled at the bottom of my suddenly hollow self. I swore I smelled him, the monster who defiled me almost twenty years ago. I ran to shut the garage door, ran inside slamming the door and fumbling to lock it behind me. There was no way he was here, it’s been almost twenty years. I am thousands of miles away from where it happened. There was no way in hell. My body melted into a lump of yuck on the floor, eyes shut tight, grasping to my shirt trying to calm myself down. I breathed deeply, feeling all the senses in my body, the blood pulsing into my fingers as my toes unrolled itself into a stretch allowing the life to reenter my body, inflating me like I was a deflated balloon animal just seconds ago. I felt the cold of the floor come through my t-shirt, the soles of my feet feeling the grooves in the hardwood floor. I lay my face on the ground to feel the cold, to feel something that told me I was home. That told me I was safe. I was grounding. I spent the next few days grounding several times a day. The smell of my memory had lodged itself in my nostrils, refusing to be washed out no matter what I tried. I smelled coffee grounds in a little cup I carried with me to fight it. It was incessant like a scab that wouldn’t heal.
I talked to my therapist and we delved into the fact that writing about it and talking about it was activating memories I had buried in a neat little box far in my mind years ago. Yet here the dirt is being uncovered with every word on pages, every conversations being had, every memory being unraveled. The treatment plan-more grounding. More feelings are feelings, feelings are not facts. I believed in all of this, it has worked on most everything else, but why is it when we talk about rape and the rapist, grounding seems futile? It keeps haunting me and digging me out of the ground, uprooting me.
Yet I trust in my therapist and I keep grounding. The idea of other trauma processing exercises just doesn’t seem like something I wanted to uncover. I will nurse the wounds and lightly tuck the trauma back into its neat little box to uncover at a different time when I’m ready for it. I’ve unpacked and discarded this cloak of disgust one thread at a time over almost twenty years. Will I ever entirely be rid of it? It seems to be reproducing and outgrowing its box the longer it has stayed buried. Every time I take a peek, it seems as though that cloak has grown a yard.
I insist on sharing, I insist on story telling, I insist on advocacy so others who have had the same experience can heal and grow with me. The strength I pull from my purpose for this cloak supersedes my fear of it deep within me. I will keep grounding though as much grounding I have been doing, I may have melded with the ground. I will not stop, perhaps I will soon gain the courage to open up these wounds and shred this cloak into pieces never to scare me onto the cold of the floor again. For now, I keep moving, I keep telling, I keep growing, I keep grounding.