Always smash the necklace
I’ve been rewatching Buffy again, this time with more inner conflict. I know Joss Whedon was a trash human doing terrible things.
But there isn’t another show with a female superhero who smashes thinly veiled pedophiles for me (I call them TVPs, and if you disagree, go and watch Killed by Death, and if you’re not a survivor, pretend you’ve spent most of your adult life dealing with what a guy like this did to you, and savour the ontological power of a little blonde woman who looks like a child snapping his neck with an audible click). I have leaned very heavily on this show as part of healing from my childhood.
Also, post my childhood, relying on those who harm you for fundamental sustenance is normal.
My experience of being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse is that you start your life under a rock. And your first job is to crawl out from under the rock, and your second job is to rest and recover the parts of yourself that got smashed by the rock, in a culture that forbids rest and recuperation, and your third job is to find healing in a culture that likes to stay sick.
In my experience, the logical path seldom works, most doctors don’t know how to treat you, almost all counsellors are practically useless, there isn’t a simple basic course in surviving trauma that makes everything better and there’s an excess of confusing information that makes things worse. The only sexual partners you’ll attract are further abusers, and you’ll be at the bottom end of the housing market, perpetually sharing houses with narcissists who regulate themselves by deliberately dysregulating you.
So you’re looking through the trash to find help. You’re developing complex systems for finding things that work in a culture that doesn’t want to find things that work, and looking around for anomalous healing, paths you can follow, things that don’t follow the normal pattern, black swans.
Hope.
And hope is imperfect. When I started out at AA, hope was up the front of every meeting, sometimes a on banner, sometimes a in a graffiti-style pencil drawing. One women’s meeting had it poorly painted on a lump of wood. ‘And if people don’t get the message,’ said my second sponsor, cheerfully, ‘We can bash them over the head with it.’
The episode I watched was The Wish today. Actually, I watched about 5 episodes, with The Wish as the most recent. One of my favourites. A metaphor I’ve used over and over as part of my healing. It’s hardly a surprise that the person who encoded the most stuff about healing from childhood sexual assault comes third generation from the TV and movie industry. I’ve heard the rumours swirling around about Hollywood, you have too. You don’t deliberately populate a show with the most obvious pedophile metaphor (the image below was a choice) without some knowledge of what you’re depicting.
And it’s hardly a surprise that the person writing and directing this powerful stuff is himself unhealed, a perpetrator, a bully whose accusers don’t directly name what was done. When people do that, it’s usually bad. Especially if there are a lot of them.
Also this is an episode I’ve used like a crowbar to crack the rock that people put on top of me, again and again. Because there’s a moment where you have an opportunity to change things, where things might be better but could be worse, where there’s no going back, where you don’t know the outcome and the voice of negativity is saying, ‘You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this?’
And you say, ‘Because it has to be,’ and you smash the necklace. In terror, in doubt. With all your hope you smash the necklace the demon uses to bind your world in misery.
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And suddenly things are better, and the sun is shining and people are smiling, and everyone assumes you knew this would happen, or people don’t notice the enormous amount of work you did to get here, or the risk you took, and you get no recognition and no thanks and no accolades, because that’s part of every milimetre of progress when you’re healing from childhood sexual abuse.
But you know.
And Buffy, in some way, knows. In a world where you’re walking a sad and a horrifying path alone, there’s one TV show in all the world that’s with you at 3AM when nothing else is.
I call myself a survivor. I call a lot of people survivors — the addicts, the lost folks, the fuckups. I walk beside them and they beside me. You know who I don’t call a survivor? People who go on to perpetuate abuse against others. People who go on to be pedophiles themselves, systematic abusers, people who can’t be left alone in a room with a teenage girl.
Those people I call victims.
There are two lines from the TV show in this article. The ones in quote marks. They’re the two best bits of writing in here. They’re clean, they’re clear, they’re emotive.
I can’t write like that.
I can’t make a show that changes millions of people’s lives and I’m not a script doctor. And I didn’t write the Avengers or Toy Story or any of it.
On the other hand, there’s nothing more common or more boring than a remarkably talented abuser who hides his abuse behind his talents. It’s one of the standard templates for abuse. There’s nothing more common than someone who is a public golden child and a private villain. It’s a standard template for villains.
And if you’ve been abused, and you didn’t heal, and you’re being not a normal person who screws up but a systemic abuser, a problem and if multiple people are in therapy getting over what you’ve done to them and if you’ve walked away scott free?
You’re a victim.
And I’m not giving you advice because you didn’t give me any, you just came up alongside me with wise understanding and revolutionary ideas and hinted at a better way. So might I suggest you look at the most obvious thing and smash the necklace. Step past your fears and smash the necklace. Get to the jumping-off point and smash the necklace.
Get to the next world.
I bet it’s better.
