We Will Not Go Quietly - Centre Against Sexual Assault

ANNE-MARIE C.
A HEALING JOURNEY
What words can encapsulate who
I am, who I have become given
the circumstances...? I came on
Earth once more. I so wanted to.
Deep inside, I found a source of
contentment, of being OK. All I need
is to walk that way again, and again,
and again...
For Anne-Marie’s full story see:
http://notgoquietly.tumblr.com
11
When we let life unfold its deep crevices,
when we dare to sit through these,
then life naturally takes us back out.
–
If you had asked the little girl I was to describe her idea of a heroine, the
image she’d have painted would have been of a woman, a ‘real’ one, strong
and feminine, elegant, someone who had battled to overcome something big,
able to say things that mattered to her, able to stand behind these, someone
one could approach and conide in, a woman who had travelled and seen the
world - a genuine heroine!
Recently, in the dark of the enwrapping night, I realised that I, the adult
woman, had become that heroine.
How did I, as a child, come to distinguish and free myself from the prison
walls I was entrapped in? Who to trust when the very people who are
supposed to give you love keep on hurting you day in, day out? Which
direction do you turn when even your own body is feeling ever so heavy, tight,
clogged, in pain? Can you trust in the messages it is giving you at all? If so,
what words are there to say what aches so much?
So many questions. I suppose what led me all the way has been the very
body I felt so tightly conined in. It’s a paradox, isn’t it. And yet... when the
body you’re in aches so much for no physical reason, when every day is a
struggle to live, when your parents are the ones inlicting so much aching, if
even in your bones you don’t feel safe, then there’s got to be something that
leads the way: the pain! That feeling of heightened tenderness where the
wounds are irst inscribed in the lesh, a kind of open bleeding.