There’s a quote in Frank Herbert’s “Dune” that talks about the line a (specific) woman must walk between sexuality and innocence for “as long as the powers of her youth endure”, holding these attributes in tension.
And that when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the place-between, once occupied by tension, is now a well-spring of wisdom and resourcefulness.
I’ve always considered this in terms of how young women don’t ‘own’ their sexual attractiveness; how it is thrust upon them by others as a result of genetics, youth, and culture. How innocence and youth itself is often fetishized, again by others, so that there isn’t even refuge or protection in innocence.
The demanding, coveting gazes of those who want to possess you, your body, without any regard for the person.
Who feel entitled to push their desire on you, make you responsible somehow for their emotions and feelings, when all you’ve done is have the temerity to exist and meet their standard of attractiveness.
I spent a lifetime erasing my sexual attractiveness after the horror that was developing Cs in middle school. I did it by hiding myself – behind baggy clothes, behind fat, behind hostile resting face.
And I discovered that it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter what I did, there was always someone who coveted, who found me attractive, who desired me. I had no control over it, I couldn’t erase it.
And even if you make yourself physically repulsive, there are those that are attracted to having power over another, or who simply don’t care, or whatever.
I subconsciously thought if I stayed overweight, that anyone I dated would be dating me for myself.
That their love and regard would be ‘real’, that I could trust them. What I actually ended up with was someone who found me to be their ideal body type. I unintentionally self-selected for someone who wanted the body I hated.
I cannot express to you how much your body feels like a prison.
How great the space between what others believed me to be, wanted from me, projected on to me, and my sense of self and self-awareness.
The space between feeling and acting was created by my father
…the space that analyzed his mood, how he was likely to respond, what was safe – and was honed by the disconnect between what men wanted from me as a ‘woman’ and my still-sense of myself as a girl. (I. was. 12.)
I wondered at the un-selfconscious joy of those around me
…marveled at how they seemed to lack any self-awareness that they might be wrong; they just…responded. They weren’t constantly thinking and analyzing and wondering. Those (usually popular) people were just doing and being as if they belonged completely to the world.
While I felt distant, disconnected. Alien and alone.
As I get older, as I married, as I become a mother, the deluge has lessened, affording me a kind of psychic space. Not from my (now ex-)husband – I’ve written before about his constant, physical harassment of me; his seeming entitlement to my body – but from society at large. For the 5 years I was a stay-at-home parent, I largely spent my days with other women, all of us focused on figuring out how to endure this time in our lives.
I went from a goth-adjacent “I don’t know you, I don’t know what you want from me, I don’t trust you, don’t even step to me” to someone my friends consider to be ‘charming’ and a people-person ‘who can talk to anyone’.
Being a woman in the world with a baby was like having a shield.
And I was so without my own support system, that I was having to cobble one from the random people in my life, and my need was so acute that I overwrote the programming of decades. I also wanted for my son that experience of utter belonging to and in the world, of being accepted by everyone, of positive engagement and interaction that is every child’s birthright.
And I discovered in my transition to this charismatic ‘people-person’, that the sense of separateness was still there: that this was the space of self-awareness.
The pain and adversity of my early life, the need to protect myself, accelerated a natural process. Because we all experience pain and adversity, we all will need to cope or protect ourselves, we all feel anguish and deep sorrow. We all will lose what is dear to us. We will all fail.
We are all alone.
And yet. We are created through our relationships with others. We live in a society, and that means we have obligations to and for each other. We love and are loved. We give and we also receive. How else could it be so?
The nature of humanity is reciprocity.
To give and never receive, to receive and never give, these are actions that erode the humanity of our selves and others.
It is more than interesting that the forbidden apple of the Bible is the knowledge of good and evil.
And Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden. Just as the tension of self-awareness can steal from us our sense of belonging.
In the story, they eat the apple and gain the knowledge of good and evil, and are cast out. In our lives, however, we experience evil…thus gaining the knowledge of it. We then feel cast out from a ‘normal’ society where most people living happy, unreflecting lives.
While we are left.
Feeling broken and alone.
The agony of this is almost unendurable. It is a core, existential pain. From it flowers the certainty of our unworthiness and failure. And even moreso our undeservingness, because we don’t or can’t immediately pick ourselves up, fueled by an endless inner resolve to overcome.
The truth is that we are not alone.
We exist as a part of the tapestry of the human experience, in context of our culture and society, as a part of our community, within which we have created our own families.
There are things that we owe to each other as human beings.
Things that we are in fact entitled to: dignity, respect, agency, love, support. The problem we run into is that we are not necessarily owed this by any one person. No one person, aside from our parents in our childhood, is responsible. Just as we are not responsible to any one person…unless we have made ourselves responsible for them, such as our children.
The process of society is the process of creating relationships.
And within the context of those relationships, we mutually determine what we owe each other and to what we are owed. It is the social contract.
And we have agency in creating these relationships.
We can choose who we want in their lives, we don’t have to wait to be chosen. We can choose who we do not want in our lives, and we don’t have to wait for a ‘good reason’.
Where victims of trauma run into issues is believing that certain relationships will meet their needs.
And so they rush to create these relationships – these friendships, these partnerships, these marriages – believing that the form of the relationship itself will be healing. They don’t realize that the form of the relationship creates a structure for an existing relationship between people, it simply formalizes it and their commitment to each other.
They open themselves wide in an attempt to jump-start intimacy
…without understanding that trust, the currency of relationships, has to be built, it cannot be given. (This includes our relationship with our self.)
We know this.
We know that someone can have a child, and not meet the needs of that child. Their dynamic exists in the form of the parent-child relationship, without having the relationship. Not only is that ‘relationship’ not healing for the child, it is tremendously damaging.
And yet we go out into the world, attempting to re-create the relationship we were denied.
Adult child victims of abuse go out into the world still desperately needing unconditional love; we go with a deep emptiness, and inconsistent or non-existent self-concept. And that space. That tension between stimulus and action, where we seem to perpetually exist.
No one else can validate us into self-worth, self-love, self-respect.
At most, they can provide a mirror. But what happens is that victims of abuse need so much that they inevitably exhaust people with healthy boundaries. Adults have boundaries for a reason.
It gives others the opportunity to build trust and show us who they are.
People with healthy boundaries and self-concept will naturally not be attracted to those who need a parent-proxy. Parenting, by its very nature, at the stage where our self-concept and self-worth is most created, is a relationship with no boundaries and the parent has total power over the child.
That’s why abusive relationships, cults, toxic authoritarian organizations, model an unhealthy version of this dynamic.
And yet. We need people. People need us. As automated and independent and self-sustaining as society believes itself to be, we see the reality of our existence and interdependence as soon as the machine breaks down. A hurricane, a tornado, a strike, having a child, getting sick or injured or in an accident.
We are connected to each other by roads and bridges, powerlines and data lines…and by relationships and our obligations to each other.
We are connected by both the forms and structures of our relationships, our lives, our society; as well as by the innate humanity of being human.
There’s another line from “Dune” that has stayed with me – respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality; this is profound thinking if you understand how unstable ‘the truth’ really is’ – and it is here that we transform.
Because it is the fruit of evil that catalyzes the tension-space within us, the separateness, the processing-self. It is here that we become our most human selves, it is here that we synthesize and re-synthesize truth.
It is here that we become wise
…and, ultimately, it is here that we begin to understand the true nature of ourselves and the world, that we are truly connected to each other.
That our separateness is the beginning of belonging.
It is here we learn to forgive ourselves our humanity.