Begin, somewhere. Do it scared and messy.

I flew into Roanoke, Virginia with an internal boundary that I would not stay up until 3 in the morning with them this time - that I would not indulge in the co-remembering that always left my body shaking, mind racing, and heart aching. I am still determined to have life be about the here and now and to abandon the stains of childhood pain. I wanted this sister trip to be different. But when my sister-mom revealed another revolting layer of her childhood, my growing rage sat down, almost calmly, with popcorn in hand. An opportunity to shift the narrative that I could do nothing - that acceptance and silence were the gracious way to process pain. An opportunity to change my response to be commensurate with my values of openness, responsibility, and authenticity of expression. A recommitment to not hide, even when the faults are my own.

I’ve written and blogged about my family before throughout different phases of my personal development and healing; I’ve kept diaries and journals for most of my life. My siblings and I have tossed around the idea of writing a book over the years. I’ve persuaded myself not to pursue it with various objections, all rooted in one insecurity, fear, or concern. However, I now feel compelled to collect as much of the facts of what happened as I possibly can, and share that information. I want to interview my family members and retell what has been silenced by disjointed secrets and self-protective delusions.

A thought occurs to me that it is evil to romanticize the gory details of your loved ones trauma; however, perhaps my delight is more about gathering evidence against what has thus far received amnesty instead of justice - a fair assessment of exhibit A-Z. Perhaps it is the burgeoning hope and understanding that I am more powerful and capable of asserting my will than I was led to believe. There is a delicious aroma of reversing victimhood and allowing natural consequences to flow as they should. I have a secret wish that what I write creates difficult conversations and spurs bravery for even more difficult choices. Perhaps the traumatic details can be used as an antidote to the rose-colored glasses that keep us from protecting each other.

Even as I write, my internal narratives of goodness scream that I should find understanding, grace, forgiveness. But I’ve explored these virtues at length. I’ve attempted over and over to use them in resolving this amorphous problem handed to me by a religious conditioning that hoped to strip me of basic faculties. I have no interest in letting bygones be bygones because the harm continues. Reason and logic along with professional expertise and personal accounts are the best tools I have in sharing the true accounts of abuse. And that does not bode well for spineless enablers too weak to smell the stink and witness the filth. I want people who victimize others to not have the shelter of unwritten stories. To be exposed for their predation.

This multi-faceted anger has tendrils that reach toward every impotent character who lacked the stones to see that the most vulnerable among them were protected. The complicity of supposed good men and women is my main enemy, and the list of such individuals includes aunts, uncles, pastors, family friends - all of whom chose devotion to a misguided principle of godly authority over safety and security of a younger generation of good little Christian soldiers. I will no longer put a leash on this sense of repulsion and disgust for passive sweepings under the rug or turning of blind eyes. I wish to see every person experience perdition for their failure to act, and this undertaking is my call to arms. This is how I will fight; it will be messy and uncouth and unrehearsed.

Suddenly, it makes sense that I cannot connect with my mother, even with so many years passed since her negligence and failure to act. I cannot trust someone who continues to adhere to a belief system encouraging the abandonment of self, let alone one’s own children. She taught me how to neglect and abandon myself for the sake of goodness, for the sake of what some group of misogynists said would earn me escape from a hopeless existence. She abandoned herself long ago to the machine of faith and church, and has no offering to expunge a record of dissociated attempts of reconciliation.

The boogeyman is not just the one who comes out from under the bed to do his dark deeds; what goes “bump” in the night is powerful others shutting their door in the face of the powerless. I do not forgive my mother or her siblings who chose her fragility over truth. I do not forgive my uncles for failing to hold other men accountable for the atrocities they enact. I do not forgive the pastors who counseled my mother to stay with a pedophilic sociopath. I do not forgive the religious leaders who wrote books and led cults of inherent white nationalist leanings, instructing on and encouraging the exploitation and abuse of its own children.

Personal agency and bodily autonomy were dangerous to that system, and this project is an expression of reclamation. As much as I want my motivation to be “good” or with “pure intentions”, I have great anxiety that my writings will reveal me to be bitter or stunted or malicious. Maybe I need to root out the binary perspective entirely, release the desire for good and bad categories. I can’t quite put my finger on what my goal is here, but maybe part of it is to see if I am able to withstand the noise of all the “shoulds” of healing and simply let my heart be heard. I do want people to be more intentional with how they make decisions and investigate their own contributions to the collective suffering we all experience. I want to be strong enough to see where I’ve also refused to act and make a different choice. Right now, that different choice is to be loud about what has been kept quiet.

I know for a fact that my father sexually assaulted his children. How did the justice system, the church, his friends, his family, his wife respond? Fucking silence. The very same communities that failed to protect him as a child harbored him as a predator. It didn’t care then and it still doesn’t care. That’s the problem that needs to be fixed. So I start a conversation to create communities that give a fuck, have standards, and hold each other accountable when our stories do not align with human values.

There is no virtue or justice in silence. So buckle the fuck up.