I couldn’t listen to it.
My conversation with Penn Jillette dropped into the podosphere last week. It was a long conversation about what I went through from 2018 to 2022. Heavy things. And I talked a lot.
I tried, but I couldn’t listen to it.
I’ve been telling these stories for a couple of years now and every time I do, I feel divided. To talk about my own life feels selfish. Indulgent. I don’t want to be that guy, who pawns your time to buy sympathy. And there’s a deformed social contract around what happened to me, an unspoken agreement that I should remain the guilty monster they imagined. They burned me at the stake. I’m dead, and I should remain in the grave of the banished.
So to speak at all is a violation of their terms.
Talking about this shit is a tangled proposition. And, much of the time it doesn’t feel particularly rewarding. When I share the absurd details of what she said to the police, I’m in a distortion field. Like, that I ejaculated five times during the rape, or when I apparently cackled while violating her, or the deeply twisted idea that I forced my accuser to lick my cum off the filthy floor. Yeah, it’s pretty nutty, and that’s not all of it.
I feel ashamed. Not because any of it’s true. It’s not. But because these stories create images in the mind of a listener of me doing extraordinarily violent things to a mother of three. It naturally raises questions about my character. Could he. Did he. It’s so gross, it’s too dark, and I should never talk about it again.
But I do. But I must.
It’s all make believe. I have a responsibility to tell my story, not just to reveal the ugly process I went through, but what I did to survive. At the same time, I want to acknowledge the plight of actual survivors of sexual violence. The wrongfully accused and real survivors have more in common than people imagine. Neither gets to stop carrying it. Neither gets to be believed without a fight. The difference is in the direction of the lie.
So I sit with these competing feelings every time I open my mouth. The embarrassment of the telling. The focus on me. The fear of being misread. The need, despite all of that, to say what actually happened.
I still don’t know if I’m doing it right.
And now, it’s an old story. Time makes everything less important. Like slowly walking away from a crash, the wreckage grows smaller and eventually falls off the edge of the horizon. The audience yawns. Roll the credits.
What about about Salman Rushdie losing his eye to a knife attack? He continued to write. Something was taken, but the impulse to write remained. Whatever it is, you learn to compose without it. The eye. The hand. The career. The audience. You find out what you can still do with what remains. You find out what you need to do, and keep doing that thing.
Malevolence of the kind I was put through can’t be forgotten. And I’m not the least interested in forgiving any of them, because to release something the people who did this never acknowledged taking puts it upon me to make amends. Fuck em all.
Without the recollection of those who survive such attacks, the world moves on. I know pain isn’t sustainable. Trauma has a shelf life. The ugly memories flatten, and decompose. But, the pain becomes tolerable the more we write, speak up, and speak out. All I’ve ever wanted is for other’s to listen.
I still don’t know if I’m doing it right.
I’m not sure that question ever goes away.
I’ll keep trying.
