Writings

Here is why I will always #believesurvivors

“Binge,” a traditionally negative word that means to do something in excess, has become positive. Imagine if we were to treat binge-drinking or binge-eating the same way. Statements such as “My plans for the weekend are to binge drink” or “I was binge-drinking for two weeks straight” would never be socially acceptable; if anything, it would signal that there’s a problem at hand, a person in need of an intervention. Yet, the same does not apply for binge-watching. Why?

In acknowledging and addressing my inner child’s fears, I learned the importance of extending compassion to myself. When you start to see that it’s a child within you that is hurt or scared, you stop criticizing or bullying yourself. You start to think: if I saw a scared child standing in front of me, I would not yell at her or put her down for being scared. I would exercise compassion, and in that way, I learned to be compassionate with my inner child. When she felt sad or scared or overwhelmed, I took her into my arms and held her instead of yelling at her or telling her to suck it up.

Repeatedly hearing that I don’t fit into what others imagine survivors to be, I realized that we all have a survivor in mind. This survivor is visibly traumatized; has low self-esteem; doesn’t recognize, differentiate, or express their feelings; experiences depression and anxiety; demonstrates their trauma through their body (eating disorders, illnesses, disconnection); has a lower capacity for intimacy; is hypersexual or not sexual at all. We think this survivor to be all survivors because this imagining has been popularized, mythologized, so that we start to believe that sexual trauma is uncommon, only happening in certain places with certain people.

The reality is entirely different.

One of the biggest things survivors of child sexual abuse (CSA) struggle with is disclosure. We might blame ourselves for not asking for help when the abuse was happening, feel shame for living with the secret (or “letting it happen” to us), fear that we will be ostracized, unloved, unaccepted, and blamed if we disclose at all. In fact, disclosure is dangerous and the feeling of safety required to disclose is often nonexistent, especially while the abuse is happening.

One of the very first things I did as I started the healing process was reach back to my past. This was no small task for me. For years, I had actively rejected the past, refusing to even think about it. It was incredibly easy to do: because I moved to America at the age of nine, leaving behind nearly everyone from my childhood, I was able to cut off communication with those who had either hurt me or failed to protect me. In America, where I continued to experience abuse from new perpetrators, I found it easy to focus on other things instead, namely school and television. At school, I was encouraged to think ahead to the future, to higher education and careers. No one asked me to look back or consider the past. When not in school, I lived in the fictive realities I read about or watched on television. I spent hours on the phone with my best friend analyzing the TV shows we watched. These conversations made it easy to reject the present and the past.

“Ohhhh, she likes it!” I hear my friend say as I take a bite of the pineapple, sprinkled with a mixture of chili powder, salt, and lime.

Growing up in rural Bangladesh, I got to see class play out in stark ways: the women who cleaned our home and helped out in the kitchen always sat on the floor, never on the beds or the chairs, even when they engaged in conversation with my aunts. This rule applied to children, too. A few of the maids brought their children to work with them, and they too sat on the floor while we, the children, were made to sit on the bed. When we had guests over, the maids remained invisible, working in the kitchen. Everyone maintained a language barrier: the women who worked for us always referred to my family using the formal apni while all the adults around me used the highly informal tui form to convey hierarchy and power differences.

Growing up in a Bangladeshi community, we were taught not to refer to adults by their names. Everyone is an aunt, uncle, bhai (brother), or apa (sister). In that way, names got lost. Yet, not all names. When I think about my dad’s male friends, all the “uncles”, I realize that I know their names: Amullo, Alon, Habib, and so on. When I think of the women, though, I realize I don’t know their names. They are all chachi, aunt, or they are Habib-chachi or Alon-chachi. Sometimes they are defined by their children, as in Jibon’s mom, never as Shely.

The first time I returned to Bangladesh, nine years had passed and I’d done little to stay connected to the homeland…The second impression was one of awe and reverence.

What’s most wonderful about this garden, this rich, abundant source of homegrown, pesticide-free herbs and vegetables, is that it’s confined within the 19 by 9 feet plot in our backyard. And like my father, almost every other Bengali family in this (and most likely other) city has one exactly like it. A garden that isn’t limited in variety merely for spatial reason: if the gardener can dream it, it can be actualized.