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It's December, which on Poetry Twitter means getting bombarded with tweet threads of everything people have been publishing this year, sometimes audaciously mentioned as "for awards consideration".
Lord, give me the confidence to assume that judges are browsing my Twitter profile, checking if I'm eligible for their prizes.
I'll be honest, I've posted similar in the past. Never with the galling hint appended, but still taking joy in what I've done that year. "It's important to celebrate yourself", the boosters say. "After all, no one else will."
There's truth to that. But I first published something not-in-my-high-school-lit-mag in 2017, and now, five years later, not in the eye of the pandemic but in its anguishing long tail, a certain tiredness has come over me. I was remarkably lucky this year. I published a lot of work. I didn't send that much out. But I can't bring myself to compose the tweet, to send it out, agonize who interacts with it (or didn't) and how.
Maybe it's the winter days, sunset coming now before 4:30. Maybe it's the deflating manuscript rejections from publishers whose opinions matter to me, maybe that the days collapse into each other such that any given month is difficult to distinguish from the next. But I find it harder and harder to get up for self-promotion. It's tacky. It's probably necessary. It has the faint whiff of competitive capitalism. Most importantly, I feel like the most important thing to happen to me this year, that I should talk about publicly but won't, wasn't to do at all with writing, but was nevertheless deeply and intensely personal.
In October I started going to therapy to deal with being sexually assaulted by my girlfriend just after I turned fourteen. She was older. She wanted sex. She decided it was time for me to lose my virginity. I had to fight her off. After that, the aftermath. Rumours spread about me. The sum of it almost unbearable. Talking has always helped. Decades ago a few close friends listened to me as I choked through the details, and were the voices and support I needed as I navigated my teens. As I became a young adult, I thought I was good. Everything dealt with. All healed up. I met the love of my life. Graduated from university. I started a career. We built a home. I'd only allow myself to mention that high school was unhappy. On Facebook a few years ago, I was asked if I wanted to attend a mini-reunion. 20 years. A smaller group. Good people. I said I wouldn't be going. I didn't say why.
I've tried to pinpoint when all this became a problem again. I think it was during the beginning of the #MeToo movement, with stories of awful sexual assaults splashed across the media. I'd read articles and my chest would tighten. At the worst times, I could feel her weight on my hips.
What happened has haunted me for decades now. I can see a couple of reasons. The first around gender and expectation and shame. _Isn't this what I should want?_ Teenage boys are supposed to want sex. The guidance of an experienced girlfriend. But it all felt wrong. I knew that instinctively. _I didn't want this._ Not with her. And for the next four years, rumours got around. _Deformed_. _Crooked_. None of this true, but that didn't matter. Rumours are there with a purpose. They're meant to humiliate. To silence. When you're fourteen years old, trying to navigate the resultant shame is devastating.
The second reason one of degrees. You try to be a good friend. You hear things. One of my friends was roofied at a party and raped. Another confessed her own to me quietly. Said to me sadly: _he wouldn't stop_. A high school acquaintance raped by a customer in her father's shop, a pair of scissors pressed against her throat. I kept telling myself: why am I holding on to one night in a dark basement? Having to fight someone off as she straddles me, laughs at my protests, pulls off my belt? That same voice: _that's nothing; what happened to you wasn't rape_. And it wasn't. But it was sexual assault. I was fourteen. It was formative. As my therapist reminds me: "she knew exactly what she was doing."
More than a quarter of a century later I'm left navigating a brief period in the middle of the 90s, trying to heal, wanting to eventually discuss what happened with my family, knowing the intense pain and sadness, for everyone, that will come of this. I'm past 40. What will the back half of my life look like? And I remind myself that I met and married my great love, that my friends and family have always supported me, that if I reach out, if I ask for help, I have people who will love and listen unconditionally. I think about where I'm at as the poets list their publications for the year. Maybe I'll do that next year. But for now, my worst problems reopened, I'm happy just to know I'm taking steps, that I'm trying my hardest to come to some sort of shaky peace.