Yesterday, I was given the gift of perspective.
Some friends have been kind enough to let me stay at their cabin for the month of April. It’s beautiful—on a lake, in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know if I’ve ever known such peace. The ice on lake is melting. The robins are back.
I go for walks in the evenings before dinner and scare the deer with my footsteps on the gravel road, their tails flashing white as they retreat into the brush. I learned what a red-winged blackbird’s song sounds like a couple days ago and realized that not only was the one above me trying to tell me something—he was talking shit about me with a dozen other blackbirds across the rolling farmland. I’m still trying to figure out what they’re saying. When I do, I’ll get back to you.
Anyway. As one does in a cabin in the woods, I’ve been pondering. I’ve been settling into my body, integrating, and trying to figure out what the hell actually happened in my life—as opposed to what other people told me was happening.
Last night, before bed, I had this sort of vision. I pulled out from inside my life and saw it from above—like the view of a landscape from an airplane. I saw woods, and bogs, and winding roads. And I realized those places, those tough moments, were just part of a whole. While I was in them, it was like being trapped in a haunted house where every moment was terrifying. I walked through it in fits and starts, keeping my children close, but inside I was trying to predict when the clowns would jump out of the corners or when the undead woman in the white dress would come at me with the bloody knife.
I was breathing carefully. I was memorizing patterns. I was just trying to get through it.
The only difference is: the haunted house was real.
But from above—it sucked, yes. But it wasn’t everything. It was just part of the whole. And I got a little, tiny bit angry.
It is very easy to label what happened. And I admit: I took on the label of abuse like a life vest after I was finally able to get away. It was comforting. It gave shape to the experience. It made it real—after years of being told, or telling myself, that it wasn’t.
But I thought back to another time, another bog. I was walking home when a man grabbed me from behind, threw me to the ground, and shoved a gun in my face less than a block from my apartment. My parents came to town that weekend from the quiet place they lived—where this supposedly never happened. My mother said, in awe, “This is the kind of thing that makes men crazy and live on the street.”
Her words weren’t prophetic, thank God. I didn’t end up living on the street in that particular way. But her label didn’t help. It didn’t describe the experience. And even calling it a “mugging” now flattens what happened.
I experienced the fear and helplessness of being on the wrong end of a gun held by a teenager who had no other way to survive. I experienced the consequences of having the mistaken identity of someone who had resources I didn’t have.
The haunted house I lived through years later was far more complex than anything the word abuse could hold. Sure—some parts of it meet the definition. But the lived experience of terror, hypervigilance, disassociation, and strategy—it went far beyond that.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the label abuse was created and defined by institutions largely built by men—men trying to name the mistreatment of women, children, and sometimes other men. I think it came from an honest place. I think they were trying to apply the logic of Linnaeus to something wild and bleeding. But that’s the problem.
Labels like this imply there’s a method. A system. That if you name it correctly, if you follow the steps, if you do the right paperwork or tell the right story, everything will be okay.
That’s not how it works when you’ve just left the haunted house.
These labels, and the protocols attached to them, were built by people who mostly have not walked through the wild. In fact, a lot of the time, those people helped build the haunted house—whether they knew it or not.
And I’m sure, from their perspective, it all looks very different. If it was so bad, I should’ve spoken up. If it really hurt, I should’ve named it. If the person running the haunted house didn’t know, how could they be responsible?
Something that terrified me can be perceived as an honest mistake. I know that. I know people—experts, even—can look at every part of my life and chalk it all up to miscommunication, bad luck, unfortunate timing. They can slice it up and explain it away.
That’s fine.
They can keep justifying their systems. They can preserve the illusion that everything makes sense, that every haunted house is really just a poorly lit hallway.
But they—and the systems they operate in—do not get to name my terror.
They do not get to name my pain.
That forest. That murk. That thing that, from above, has no real name—they’ll never know it. They’ll know their name for it. But they’ll never know me.
This is an ancient story. It just keeps changing names.
I lived the story. I made it through the wild.
They’ll never understand, and their expertise—fought for, published, defended—means nothing.