Assignment 3--Statement of purpose (Ray)

Ray

I'm writing not so much specifically about sexual assault at the age of 5, though that's part of it, but about the profoundly awful effects the event has had on my life, what it's cost me, how it's limited me, how it's separated me from other people, and most of all how it caused me to hate my own guts without even knowing it. To pick a specific time for this assignment it will be primarily age 5, when the event happened.

PERSONS: Father, mother, Greg Birdwell (friend in kindergarten).

Father and mother (or Mammy and Pappy Yokum, if you will) were all but useless. Even if I'd known how to describe what had happened, I probably wouldn't have. A 5-year-old may not consciously know much, but gut instincts told me to clam up as much as possible about matters of my own personal misery, especially whatever this was.

Greg Birdwell, like so many "men" or boys that might have been more in my life had a I thought myself worthy of them, didn't come to my attention until recently, looking back. I realize now he was the first boy that might have been a good friend and maybe my first crush. I remember before the terror I was telling him about some accident I'd had. His eyes widened and he brought his head to his forehead in a classic theatrical gesture-this from a 5-year-old! "Don't tell me you cut your foot again!" he said, a bit aghast.

"No, this time I stuck my thumb in a fan." I remember thinking he looked really cute right then.

Had I had more time to attach to him before my psychic calamity he might have been of some help after it, not in any overt way, just by being a friend. But his family moved out of town, and I lost him.

WORKS: Energy became displaced and wasted on avoidance behaviors, suppression, withdrawal.

BODY: Frequent illnesses such as colds, sore throats, every childhood disease known to medicine except whooping cough. Some headaches.

SOCIETY: Became about as withdrawn as 5-year-old legitimately can. Virtually became the word alone. That day inside the bathroom, the rest of the world seemed very far away and at the same time threatening and near. (Now, as I recall it, I'm reminded of those well-lit but seemingly hermetically sealed rooms in Stanley Kubrick's films, particularly the bathroom in The Shining-not just empty but surreally empty, impossibly empty. After that thing had happened and the creature that attacked had left, I don't remember how long I was "out," by which I mean not literally unconscious but out of my body. The first thing I recall of the "afterlife" is getting up off the floor, and going to the sink and trying to stop crying so I could go back to the classroom. I had every intention of finishing out the school day as if nothing had happened, but first I had to stop crying and rinse my face to get the redness out so no one would know anything had happened. No sooner had I calmed down and stopped the waterworks than they came again, and I had to calm myself down over again. As I looked in the long horizontal mirror above the sinks, the sense of aloneness hit me. There seemed to be no help anywhere, inside the room, outside the room. One would think I'd be anxious to get home, and yet, strangely, I don't even remember the thought of home even occurring to me, neither home literally and not in the sense of "refuge," either. I remember now how this sense of "aloneness" felt. It felt like me. "Alone" was me. This is when I became convinced, completely nonverbally, that I had to be alone, and alone was what I was always be. And, of course, there was no one there, no mother, no father, no nun, no priest, no nothing, to tell me otherwise. Silence, secrecy, and aloneness became inextricable parts of me, right then and there.

As an adult, that same unmistakable feeling has come back to me again and again, whenever I'm having a particularly strong bout of dissociation, detachment, disembodiment-lots of words for the same grotesque feeling.

Afterwards, society, such as I was able to perceive it, consisted of hostile, usually (but not always) older boys and constantly bitchy girls. Malevolence seemed to be around every corner. I became afraid of just about everyone and everything, everyone I didn't know and even people I did. There was enough teasing and bullying going on at almost all times in the school anyway, and I was always dreading something even worse that I couldn't describe, couldn't picture, but monstrous and imminent.

This also was the beginning of what grew to become utter and complete hatred and contempt of every aspect of the Catholic Church, and, later, of all religions everywhere.

EVENTS: A fog appeared between me and everything else. Something seemed to have moved me physically and mentally somewhere else. It's hard to be more specific than that. Feelings of floating, falling, and trapdoors opening underneath me began to make their appearances and have never entirely gone away. It was a sensation of floating and falling at the same time. At times when I was stressed or felt exceptionally scared or threatened would come the trapdoor opening, sort of like being on a roller coaster and "losing your stomach," except that it wasn't the least bit fun.

I didn't feel at the time that I was being tested by life, exactly, but if I had I would have felt I'd failed.

DREAMS: I don't recall any.

IMAGES: The poster of the angel in the bathroom where it happened, the floor, and most of all the smooth, cold, light-yellow brick walls. At one point, when I was face first against the wall, I noticed the walls were wet. I wondered why, then realized I was crying and my tears were running down the walls.

Up above all the action in the bathroom, on the wall next to a ironically dirty window, there was a poster of a smug angel, with the caption: "Cleanliness is next to godliness." If you're not clean, you're bad, no matter how you got dirty. I had disliked that damned poster before but grew to despise it.

ROADS TAKEN/ROADS NOT TAKEN: I made an unconscious decision, one about which I feel I really had no choice, to withdraw from everything and everybody, to turn off as many feelings as I could, to block off memory. The decision that panic thrust upon me that day has severely limited the roads I was able to take in all my years since.

One more event I want to tell.

A year or so later, in first grade, during recess after lunch, I was walking on the asphalt playground, minding my own business. Suddenly an older, blond boy came out of nowhere, ran into me, and knocked me over. He hit the ground too, a couple of feet away. I wasn't hurt or scratched, just had the wind knocked out of me. I sat up and looked over to where the older guy (seventh or eighth grade, perhaps?) was crouched. "Oops, sorry!" he said. "Are you all right?"

I noticed he was really cute. Again, some part of me wondered why that seemed so interesting. And then he smiled at me-not one of the sneering, jackass-like grins I was accustomed to getting from practically all the bullying snots in school, but a genuine, nice smile that practically radiated.

I said something like, "Yeah, I'm okay. Thanks." I don't remember exactly what. But I do remember wishing he'd do the whole thing over again, or talk to me some more, or-something. But of course he didn't.

He stood up, and I stood up. He ran off somewhere else.

I was alone again, and I stayed that way.