Validation and Fear

I’m currently sitting on a collection of essays exploring the emotions and themes I experienced after being raped two-ish years ago, and how those evolved over time. I’ve previously published Self-blame and Anger.

This post has my two favourites (two-for-one!): Validation and Fear.

Validation

When I write, I can often feel who each line is for. It used to be more subconscious, but after months of scrutinising my own work, I’ve developed a small itch that flares whenever I sneak in a plea or jab.

“This line is because I desperately wish [x] knew how I felt about [y].”

“This line is so people know that I know that I can be wrong about things.”

“This line is so he knows that I know that he totally knew what he was doing.”

“This line is so she’ll finally get why this hurt me so much.”

It’s not that I think any of these people are reading. It’s just, my little heart carries so many monologues that I will never get to say to those I wish to. And it carries many anxieties. And both of these things leak out. Also, I swear to god, AI did not write that first sentence. I actually, from my own mind, produced an “it’s not [x], it’s [y].” You have to believe me.

The validation-seeking impulses that come after abuse and trauma are truly maddening. And, to some extent, completely necessary. My therapist often has to remind me that I’m not an automaton capable of an entirely self-enclosed system. Humans are social and that is okay. When bad things happen to you, of course you need other people to see and affirm them. What could be more human? What even is reality, if not what we and the people around us see and know?

But validation-seeking after abuse is often met with the very opposite of validation, perhaps especially-so with sexual abuse. I cannot tell you how many “no worries if not!” texts I’ve sent where I was, in fact, nauseous with worry. How many tiny feelers I’ve stuck out, to people I know and to strangers on the internet: do you think this is bad too? Do you think the way I feel makes sense? Do you see what I see? Do you? Do you? Please, do you?

After I was raped, I hated how epistemically self-reliant I had to be during a time when I just needed rest. The incentives were so horrifying across the board, on all sides, that so many of the opinions and information coming my way were utterly disorienting at best and totally destructive at worst. Even within my own mind, I had to battle a brain that was trying desperately to close for business and dissociate. And so, when I was sad or spent, my brain asked me if I was crazy. Because normally, I could compromise with people. And find a way to see what they were seeing. Normally, we could meet somewhere. But suddenly, the meeting points I was being presented with were too gross and scary to even contemplate. And if I was going to stake my claim, really stake it, then I had to accept that some people would never agree with me. Not even a little. Some people would forever think I was a manipulative, over-emotional bitch, or something in between.

There was a period of time when my therapist said I was constantly on the hunt for proof that I was crazy.

“What’s the worst thing about being crazy?” she asked. If I’m crazy, then what’s even the point of anything? If I can’t trust my own self, if I don’t make any sense, if my morals are all whack and I’m just raring to stir up trouble, then why would I have anything worth saying? Or for that matter, doing?

When you face abuse, it is very human to want other people to affirm how bad it is. In fact, maybe you can’t heal without other people. Maybe that’s simply not how humans work. But how many others? And who, exactly? I knew how lucky I was to have a handful of exceptional people around, but I couldn’t shake the fear that it wasn’t enough. I needed more to understand. They all needed to get it. I wouldn’t be safe otherwise. Either all eight billion of us had to agree on the gravity of what happened to me, or I had to find proof once and for all that I was nuts.

I set myself up to be hurt so often by putting my reality in the hands of the entire world. Sometimes in sneaky ways, unbeknownst to myself. Subtly checking, with apparently casual questions or embarrassed self-deprecation: am I making sense? Do you think I’m crazy? And putting so, so much stock in the answer, whatever I perceived it to be. But, as my therapist has carefully pointed out over time: checking whether you’re crazy with people who have a lot to lose if you aren’t crazy doesn’t help at all. And checking whether you’re right, with people who don’t have the capacity to even begin to understand what you’re saying, helps just as little. It just makes you angrier and more desperate, until you’ve calmed down enough to check again. And again. And again.

When I write, I am trying to write from a place where I believe myself. I’m trying to write for me, right now, and for me two years ago, and for me five years ago, and for my stunning partner who’s heard it all, and for my sister, and for my dear friends, for Sarah, whose writing always soothes something deeply sad that continues to rest in me. I want to soothe me. And I’m trying not to let all my little unsaids leak through so often. But they do. It’s okay. There is a part of me that still wants that universal validation so badly. I can’t even write a more interesting sentence on how badly I want it - I want everyone to believe me, him to believe me, her to see how much I honestly tried, him to see everything he doesn’t understand and all the ways he’s so horrifically wrong. But if nothing else, the past two years have taught me that I can bear those wants. I can grieve for them. I can make my own choices and stand by them, under immense pressure. I can make many mistakes, and I can stand those too, and I can keep trying. And if I have to scream, or report, or write, I will. And when I can’t, I will bear it.

Fear

I have never experienced prolonged, catastrophe-facing fear. The kind where your building is on fire, or you’re being chased, or you’re in some kind of warzone and you have to get out. Most of my experience with fear is existential. An accumulated sense that things will never quite be safe, calm, okay, or right. Mostly, a fear that things can become too much and there’s no way to call a timeout.

Perhaps this is a privileged fear, from a childhood where, much of the time, I could find a teacher to tell (I was a major snitch). But later, when things became too much, I was absolutely affronted to discover that continued escalation was possible. I stopped eating for a time, as a teenager. I think I was semi-subconsciously trying to signal that I couldn’t manage the circumstances any longer. Unfortunately, the worse my mental health clearly became, the more volatile home was. Eventually, I gave up and recovered.

And then, in the last couple of years, I felt this exact fear returning. An old wound getting jabbed over and over, opening into something the same, but new, and deeper. My brain had sort of broken. I was the complainant in a police investigation and a workplace investigation at the same time, and I was so scared. I reached the limits of my emotional resources several times over, but there was no timeout.

One random night in Oxford, at about 3am, I taxied my way to urgent care with no particular symptoms beyond having felt inexplicably twitchy for the last six hours. Like a constant, low-grade allergic reaction. I suspected it was psychological, because I also felt like I wanted to bang my head against a wall.

When I was placed on a bed and asked by a doctor what was wrong, I told her that I really didn’t know what to do anymore and everything was just too overwhelming. And I already had a therapist, and a caseworker, and I had support, and my partner was the world’s only angel, but I was still too exhausted and too scared to cope properly. And sometimes I was totally hyperactive, and sometimes I would fall asleep at 7pm and wake up at 10am, and I was not actively suicidal but I really didn’t want to exist anymore. And I needed to sleep tonight, but I couldn’t. And I felt completely stuck, and I didn’t know if I was supposed to quit. Was I supposed to leave? I needed a job, right? I only had so much in savings, and if I left the UK now, what about my case? Would the police even care to continue if I wasn’t a permanent resident anymore? How would that even work? Shouldn’t I see the workplace investigation through? What was I even doing? Did I make everything harder than it needed to be? And how could I do job interviews, work tests, in this state, hm? Hm??

Anyways, the doctor told me to please go home and book a GP appointment. I asked if I could have some clonazepam for the road. She said no. Fair play.

Something about this state of affairs really rattled me, psychologically. I was doing what I was supposed to do. I was expressing myself, I was reporting, I was telling people, I was seeking help. But it was only sometimes working. Often, it was utterly failing. And there was no timeout. I found this difficult to accept, and I still do. It really scares me that there is no cap on how many things can go wrong at once. Even when some of those things seem so within other peoples’ control.

In those moments, I would comfort myself by thinking about all the objectively worse situations other people endure. All things considered, I was very well-resourced. Enough to taxi to urgent care with no true medical emergency to speak of. And enough to taxi back to my room, with my nice bed.

These thoughts would both give me a sense of perspective and make me more petrified. Because if I was at my limit, what about the people in poverty, or war zones, or inescapably abusive situations? What about grief and loss? What about disaster?

I still spend a lot of time these days thinking about suffering. About what it means to be in pain, to want something different, to ask for help. About what it means to reach some kind of limit, to feel hopeless and stuck, but to find that you’re still around anyways and said limit is not recognised by the universe.

These days, I still feel a lot of low-to-medium-grade, ever-present fear that something is going to go wrong. No matter how much I write about my experiences, or do therapy, or snuggle my fiancé. I remind myself how lucky I am, and I feel lots of other things too, but I’m scared that I’ve missed something and it’s all going to be gone soon. And then I feel shame.

When we talk about trauma and PTSD, specifically in the context of rape or abuse, I hear very little sufficient sympathy for the fear that comes with it. I often hear disdain. No one seems to find it incomprehensible when a veteran hides from fireworks. But in my case, and for many other victims, one day things were kind of normal, and the next day, I woke up and I’d been raped. And not long after, I woke up and a bunch of people at my work were reading a document about my rape, that I hadn’t written and wasn’t allowed to see. My brain couldn’t really figure out the cause of it all, so it simply took to fearing normalcy and loss of control. It feared upsetting others, it feared being unable to express itself, remaining unheard. It feared not having information, not having a choice. It feared what others might do if I wasn’t constantly tracking and predicting and placating and over-explaining and researching and planning and regulating. What else could my brain do? What about that is so sneer-worthy, so undeserving of understanding and effort? Of justice? I think about all the worse things that happen.

A lot of us are afraid, of a lot of things. And a lot of us are trying extremely hard to move forward anyways. Or we’re running as fast as we can to catch up, because even if you’ve reached your limit, the nice doctor at urgent care will be mildly confused by your presence, and she won’t give you a single benzo. And much, much worse things happen than that.

In the worst moments, it’s completely unbearable, and it feels like it’s always happening, and that’s really scary. But once things are truly different and better, for long enough, once you actually have the time and safety to think your most true thoughts, it can often change. There are a lot of things worth being afraid of, and a lot of horrifying things that humans are empirically capable of healing from. If they can have enough time and help to do so.