There’s the thing about survivors. They apologise, or they don’t apologise, or they do but they don’t reaaaaaally, and it all fucks up inside their heads, which is kind of the point.
I don’t really consider myself a survivor. Not in the sense that I’ve survived anything … important, I suppose. I haven’t survived rape. I haven’t survived abuse. I haven’t survived poverty. I haven’t survived any number of things. I suppose I’ve survived being me, but adulthood seems to be all about surving yourself, so that’s rather accounted for. This is kind of ironic since survival is something that deeply interests me personally because it implies an end to the thing or event that one has survived when in fact survivors tend to have trauma hangovers that last for months and years and decades, but they are termed survivors in any case since what is commonly called the originator point (or somesuch) has by common parlance ended, is done, is finished, goodbye.
The earliest I remember wanting to kill myself was at eight years old.
I don’t think survival – with its necessary connotations of damage – make a person stronger. I don’t think survival is something that is a good thing, is ‘character building’ as such. That kind of character strikes me as a forced understanding of how mortal and fragile happiness is, forced and a little warped by its initial circumstances. And I don’t consider myself a survivor because most days it feels as though I am not surviving at all. I am existing, I am here, but I am voiceless, and much of that is my own choice. My fear comforts me. This blog is me, myself, trying to deflect a little of that fear elsewhere. Perhaps if I can find my words worth whispering, I can also speak them at a later date. Perhaps audibly.
My intuition is a little famed among my friends, the people I speak with, those I comfort and try to advise and try to understand. Recieving compliments and comments on my intuition feels like a sham, as though they are seeing an image of something reflected in something which has again been reflected in something, and that is what they see. They see my ability to grasp things, to intuit emotions with a handful of words, to spin an understanding of their personality within a few sentences and fill in the gaps where I am frequently right, and alter it as more information is available to me. I consult this spiderweb of conjecture and personal belief and personal fact and human truth every time I speak to one of my friends, and more often than not I remember to act accordingly. This is my defense network; these are my satellites; these are my words, waiting to be shaped by yours, that they might be your right words, your right truth.
It is because of my fear of misunderstanding — a fear that I think is part and parcel of being deaf — that I understand their own misunderstandings within themselves. It is because of this, I think, that I am fascinated by survivors, fascinated by damage; it is because of this that I understand a little more of them.
I am in the process of writing damage, of creating and tuning damage to resonate a little better with myself. It is not therapy through art: my therapy is in waking dreams, in lucid alcoholic fugue, in battered Tarot cards and vanilla-flavoured tea. As I understand my friends, so can I understand myself; the better to fear my own voice.
I am alive, yet it doesn’t feel at all like surviving. It feels a little like desperation. I am aware this post reads perfectly emotional, all black-waved lines of midnight oceans and pretty pictures of thatched houses defaced with inkblots, but truth be told I am feeling very little of anything at all. This is not a defect, I think: it is part of the damage. I am protecting myself. If you do not whimper, they cannot hear you. (I can’t hear myself anyway.)
It’s been hard, lately. It’s been a hard few weeks. It shows.
