After the Hearing: I Had A Bi-Partisan Healing
by Claudia Susan Gold, first time story creator on “Medium”
“If you are raped, it is not your shame.”
- Leymah Gbowee, South African Nobel Laureate
I did not know that I would have the response I did listening on the radio, and watching on the lap-top, the news of the upcoming testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford, and later, to the Senate Judiciary Hearing related to Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s questioning and testimony. I felt an intensity, as many did, that I must hear every bit of it that I could, and I let go of my to do list to listen to the reporting, hour after hour, in my car on the radio, and later viewing live on my lap-top.
On waking Friday morning in Long Beach, California, I turned on the laptop as many others and myself were waiting to see what the confirmation vote would reveal. When I heard Senator Richard Blumenthal talk with compassion for survivors of sexual assault, I felt it. It was a long moment while I tested my heart against his tone, found it true and took it in. This moment was during his motion asking for Mark Judge to testify.
Then, unexpectedly, Senator Jeff Flake asked for a time-limited FBI background check of Judge Kavanaugh. Later I watched on the lap-top the video of the activists Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher telling Senator Flake about their sexual assault experience. Midst this time — I can’t say which moment it was midst these events, I started sobbing. I did not know that I would be triggered about a rape I experienced when I was 18. I paused, remembering another time I had sobbed 21 years before.
At that time I was doing art therapy at home recommended by my therapist, about my terror of a female surgery, which I’d delayed for three years. Almost as if in cartoon boxes I drew the surgeon and in his hand an object that looked like a fish. In each frame the fish was bigger and bigger until in the last frame it was almost as big as the surgeon. Looking at these drawings, I realized the fish was the knife, the knife I had been threatened with when I was 17, while being raped. I phoned information to ask for the Sexual Assault Crisis Agency, with each word embarrassed that the operator would know that I was calling because I’d been raped.
When a woman answered the hot-line and asked me about why I was calling, I sobbed, a long sob that felt like water flowing out of long winding pipes — it was such a fulfilling release. She was silent and let me cry. Then she asked me how long ago the rape had occurred. In that frame of mind, I told her it had been ten years, but I later calculated that it had been 27. Soonafter that call, I saw someone who looked like he was the rapist while walking in Pt. Fermin Park, and I got out of the park as soon as I could only to see that a man in a car had followed me home. I hurried into my house, locked the door and hid in t the corner of my room.
I’d thought I was done dealing with the sexual assault after three counseling centers at the uuniversity counseling center, and a dream that I had stabbed the rapist over and over. But 25 years later I signed up for ten sessions of counseling at a sexual assault crisis center. During my treatment, the counselor told me that trauma is like a pie; you can’t eat all of it at once, it is too big.Your defences protect you. So different times in your life, when you’re ready, you eat another piece of the pie.
When I was sobbing after the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing closing, I recognized that I was eating another piece of the pie. The connection was the unexpected sobbing. In that uncertain moment I decided to look up, then call the National Sexual Violence Hotline RAINN. I had been posting this number, (800.656.HOPE), on social media, for people who might be triggered by the hearing, but had not anticipated at all that I would be calling. I had already had counseling. I had written an almost completed novel about sexual assault. I could joke about it in a sexual assault support group I once attended.
A woman named Olivia, with a thick accent, answered the local sexual assault hotline. As I told her my story, she reassured me that many people had been calling. {Later I read that on that Friday 3,000 people had called the hotline, more than had ever called in their history on one day}. I cried at times during the call. I told Olivia how the man who sexually assaulted me had played Russian Roulette with me — had pointed the gun at me and pulled the trigger three times. It is even hard to type these words. I cannot explain it, but while I spoke to Olivia, it was as if a bottle of soda had been turned upside down and then opened, this crying fizzed out of me, out of “nowhere” and with a sound I don’t remember ever hearing before. As it fizzed out, a part of me was aware that this was the crying that I had not gotten to express before, when I was petrified at being shot and killed. It was almost like I was watching from a little distance and hearing part of my brain release in this high pitched, repetitive cry.
After 46 years I was able to release from the terror of having the trigger pulled. I had not known that I (or my brain) was holding that trauma inside of me. Though clearly there were other key people deserving thanks in this process, especially Dr. Blasey Ford for courageously telling her story, and the activists Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher who spoke to Senator Flake telling their truth, I want to thank the senators for non-political reasons within an imperfect political process.
The sexual assault I experienced was not political, my breakthrough was non-political and Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford’s revealing of her sexual assault trauma, to me and thousands of others, is not political. When we were assaulted — the “we” meaning we too, all the men and women, boys, and girls, toddlers, elders, who have been sexually assaulted, our bodies were not Republican, or Democrat, or Non-Partisan (my affiliation) but human, connected with minds, emotions and souls. These two men, Senator Jeff Flake and Senator Richard Blumenthal, from different “sides of the aisle”, opened up a safe space for me to heal from a trauma which I had not been able to release for 46 years. I thank them. In standing up for justice, they stood up for me and so many others. They defended me, us.
That Friday afternoon, after the sobbing in my room and on the phone, while on errands, I kept getting lost while driving, ending up far from where I was supposed to be, on streets I didn’t recognize, confronting one way streets I had to navigate around. I was oddly disoriented and it took a while before I made a connection that my brain was discombobulated from being triggered and releasing, and I went home in the evening to cut my losses. That evening I recalled the words of Olivia, the sexual assault hotline counselor, “We need to educate people about sexual assault.”
Inspired by her, I write my story here, shaping my words, deleting, trying new words and changing the order, to be the most true, through a thick haze of body and soul. After writing I find that I am airing out what was previously secret; I am in a new atmosphere where I am taking in breaths of air of “this is not your shame.” Emboldened, I email Senator Blumenthal thanking him, and later leave a message of thanks for Senator Flake at his Washington office.
Sincerely,
Claudia Susan Gold
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?” `Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14