“And who asks the question: Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action?”
– from ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’ by Audre Lorde
The local paper included a review of W. S.’s new book. It took me twenty-four hours to calm down enough to read it. I don’t like how I feel when I am triggered by his name. I don’t like being reminded that he lives on ‘my’ island even though, by this time, he has as much right to it as I do. I resent his entitlement to be right, to have a voice, to be the cause of my voice being silenced. Triggers do need to be reacted to; they need to be dealt with. This is my work, not his.
When I wrote my Berry St. Essay in 2016, I mentioned that W. S. called me a ‘new puritan’ at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly some 25 years ago in response to the work some of us were doing to name ministerial sexual misconduct as unethical professional behavior. He said this as we were passing each other in a crowded hall. It was not personal. He did not know me. He may have been saying it to someone near me, but my ear happened to be close enough to catch a whisper – so close it sounded like a hiss, a poisonous snake’s threat for standing dangerously close. I only knew who he was because he had been President of the UUA and had campaigned at my home church before I became a minister. I don’t remember if he still was president because I don’t remember what year this happened. All two dozen or so GA’s I’ve attended have blended into each other as if they happened in the same large convention center totally unattached to time or place. I do know it was during the time that I was known as an active member of MSUU, that one year we considered picketing the Service of the Living Tradition because a proudly public misconductor was preaching, that I had spoken publicly at workshops on the subject. I did not know that W. S. was a good friend of that minister and this was before I heard rumors about his own possible unethical behavior. I did know that many of our male colleagues felt entitled to their sexualized behavior leaking into their professional lives and that they resented us calling them out on it. Some of my MSUU colleagues heard others call us ‘new puritans’. We heard it as an insult, as name-calling. We imagined they thought that our call for ethical professional behavior was motivated by sexual repression or a need to control the morals of others, rather than a call to end systemic abuse by the powerful against the vulnerable. I really don’t know what they thought because I know no one who flung this term around who will admit they said it, let alone explain what they meant by it.
After I delivered the essay, W. S.’s name trended on social media for a few hours. He is still very well known in our circles. Me, not so much. He emailed me saying that he did not say it and could we talk. This was more respectful than some others who were trashing me behind my back, so I accepted. I am from the same small town on an island where he lives, and I had long been critical of neighbors who crossed the street to avoid acknowledging another with whom they had a long-standing disagreement. I felt that meeting with him was the only other choice. I gained new respect for the avoidance strategy after we met.
We met at a coffee shop two blocks from my apartment with a third colleague who was to witness the meeting, since he could not trust me. I agreed not to repeat what we talked about and will not do so. Safe to say we remembered things differently, that he wanted to tell his side of the story and I agreed that he could write a footnote, assuming that such a note would be brief. He wrote an unusually long footnote which I included in the copy of the Essay posted on the UUMA website. Skinner Press added it to the electronic record of the Essay as well. The Berry St. Essay committee was not happy that I agreed to this without their permission. Another person who was named in the essay told me he was inspired to ask me to change what I wrote about him, which would have betrayed the memories of many people, so I refused. That person threatened to sue me for defamation, which set off a more disturbing string of events, becoming its own story to be told another day. Crossing the street to avoid having to acknowledge W. S.’s existence for the rest of my life would have saved me a lot of trouble.
But the bigger trouble was that I had PTSD when I heard W. S. call us new puritans. Ironically, the symptoms of PTSD allowed me to both know for certain that it was W. S. who insulted me, and to be an unreliable witness. Since so many of us have had to live with and manage the scar tissue formed by the wounds that PTSD helped us survive, I would like to explain this irony in more detail.
I was shocked that W. S. whispered his insult to me because he did not know me. In our circle, he was powerful, and I was not. Since I was raped years before, I had worked very hard to be safely invisible. For a decade I succeeded. Becoming a minister was part of the healing journey, it required I learn to manage being seen. But it was still new to me. I felt threatened by being unexpectedly seen by a man of power. I could not put any of this into words. The trauma response was purely physical. Every time I saw him for the next 25 years, my vagal nerve system, whose job is to scream Danger, went into high alert. Let me give an example. It’s in the early 2000’s and I am walking on Beacon Street to the parking lot from the State House where I was lobbying for marriage equality. I see him walking in the opposite direction – he would soon be passing me. Response to danger is triggered. My brain and voice freeze. I cannot remember his name. The name of the Peanuts cartoonist pops into my mind – Charles Schulz. I was pretty sure that is not it. My legs go to full on flight, I walk quickly to pass him. The good girl in me is confused. It is rude not to say hello. I nod at him with a grunted hello. He responds with a perfunctory nod. I walk as fast as I can to my car without actually running. That would look too weird.
I suffered from PTSD for 40 years and can tell you from experience, I would not have reacted this way every time I saw him if I had not felt threatened by him in the first place. That original name calling event so many years ago was lodged in the visual and sensory motor portions of my brain as if it had happened that morning. But here is why I am, like many people suffering from PTSD, such an unreliable witness. Those clear and present memories never made it to the part of my brain that placed them into a story. Part of putting moments in a story is placing them in time. That moment was instead, a timeless fragment. And people do not believe timeless fragments. They want a date, a place, and a narrative. Otherwise, it is not true.
This is the story. It may not be the kind of story someone who did not suffer from PTSD would tell. But it is my story. It is the truth. On behalf of others who suffer from such wounds, I ask that you believe me. If you don’t, it is still healing to put the fragments of my life into a narrative. It has allowed me to survive yet another trigger without flailing out defensively at someone from whom I probably don’t need to protect myself from. Someday maybe I can pass that man on the street and remember his name, knowing that my response to him can no longer alter my aura, my ideas, my dreams. Knowing that I have moved beyond those blessedly temporary and reactive actions.
What presses your buttons? What stories are they calling you to tell?