22/10/17
Pat takes pic of me and the burn claims it
I’ve been reading about semiotic mythologies for my thesis and it made me think about the current chat about assault online atm, post Weinstein blow-up.
I thought I was handling the traumatising content of my newsfeed pretty well, until yesterday it just hit me in my chest and I couldn’t understand where so much sadness had come from. I thought about what had happened to me and the way we spoke about it afterwards, and kind of eradicated the awful truth with ambiguous words and I didn’t really talk about it until years later. Over time the careful myth we had constructed sort of fell apart and the ugliness is all that I have left now.
I think about the way these myths exist everywhere, the way it takes a community to uphold and maintain them. When women experience assault, it is usually her own community that downplays and disavows her until all that’s left is the grey area. That’s something people don’t like talking about… that we’re all complicit in this thing. Working in a criminal law firm I’ve seen the extent that men will go to in order to obscure each other’s violent acts. I’ve seen how easy it is to alter a truth so subtly that it becomes unrecognisable. I think about those women that have been pushed into silence, that have been pushed into accepting a story that was never their own. I think about the gentle violence that is allowing this silence to continue. It makes me so sad.
That Nowhere Feeling 