True Story

Confessions: a testimony of sorts. This should be fun.

Friends, brethren, prying eyes, etc,

I originally titled this piece “Girls Lie Too” when I started work on it; that amused me, but then I changed my mind. For one thing, lately my essays have been shape-shifting on me in the writing of them. It didn’t turn out to be about what I thought it was, when I started. For another, I thought that was sort of a clickbait title, and I’m doing my best to deliberately reject that sort of thing (trying).

I have some stories to tell y’all today. Some of them are true, even. A few years ago, I was sitting at the counter in the office of the shop where my husband (then-boyfriend) worked, having come by to eat lunch with him (I know, we’re sickenly adorable). It’s hard to beat a shop for a romantic environment; presided over by the nearly-inevitable girlie pics on the wall, grease and dirt everywhere, an overflowing ashtray on the counter. I liked the guys, though, not even excluding my boyfriend. I was sitting there joking around with the other guys (my boyfriend being temporarily detained with a customer), eating a sandwich and balancing a sparkling water on my pregnant stomach (honestly, that was handy at times), when one of the guys started talking about the News. Not being, as a rule, remotely interested in the world beyond what I can see on the horizon, I was probably just chewing my sandwich, looking at the half-naked girls adorning the walls and thinking about music, when one of the guys said something that succeeded in catching my attention. “Why are they coming forward now? Years later, when there’s no way to prove any of it? Why would they wait so long?” The speaker was one of the older mechanics from the small-engine shop, a man with an air of old-fashioned gentleness about him, particularly around women, almost a gallantry. He was my favorite one there. I listened more attentively for a moment, quickly confirming my guess, that they were talking about the latest news story about some celebrity man who had been accused by first one, then several, women of sexual assault against them. The guys were expressing their disgust over the whole affair. Not over the idea that a powerful man may have preyed on a bunch of women, every opportunity he got; no, they shrugged off that possibility as pretty much far-fetched. Their fatigue and frustration was with the way that this seemed to be almost a growing fashion; women who had grudges against guys in power and came after them with lies that were impossible to prove OR disprove, and in the court of public opinion, the second part tended to win out. That was clearly how they saw it, as fellow men.

I chewed my sandwich and thoughts alike for a minute while I listened without comment. I liked these men. I was sympathetic to their masculine burnout on these stories and their surrounding hype in the press, post MeToo era. I knew they were tired of the suspicion towards men that swirled like dust motes in the air. I was tired too. With that peculiar mixture of vulnerability and ferocity that I think most women feel when pregnant, I wanted the world to be an all-around less nasty place, too. I saw the world with a hyperawareness of what lay in wait, alternately, for a daughter OR a son (we didn’t find out beforehand, #oldschool). I know, we’re all perfectly equal now to the point of interchangeable, except of course when airing grievances, but outside of that little western, modernized fantasy bubble of make-believe, in the real world, I knew our baby would face very different challenges depending on the chromosomes “assigned at birth” (actually before, but biology doesn’t seem to be fashionable anymore).

On this occasion, first of all, I was thinking of my maybe-daughter. I was thinking also of myself and a certain boss I had when I was seventeen, and a story about him that I didn’t tell for years. I thought about the handful of older men I’d liked and trusted as a teen or even as a kid, who had asked me out (or asked for things less classy) after I turned eighteen, or twenty-one (there was a separate round at each milestone, don’t ask me why). Sure, I was an adult, but something inside me crumbled a little, then hardened, every time a man who’d known me as a child revealed himself as having just, apparently, been lying in wait for me to be “legal”. I thought of the guy there who, when I was sixteen, loomed over me while I was cleaning tack and talked to me at length about just how good he was at breaking in young horses “especially fillies”. For those of you who aren’t horsepeople, a filly is a young female horse. He wasn’t talking about horses. I thought of the time when I was eighteen, sitting in my dad’s tack room working on some paperwork after everyone else had left, and this guy we all liked from the other side of the barn came in and chatted with me for a bit, and then with exactly zero warning (or foreplay?), locked the door, drew down the shade over the glass, and started unzipping his pants. He got that far before I fully noticed what he was doing and recovered from a moment of feeling just the teensiest bit shocked, then I said “Let me stop you right there; this is not going to end the way you’re hoping. Get out.” Luckily, he did. I’m not sure what Plan B was, besides absolutely exploding with maximum crazy rage and hoping for that to be enough to make me too exhausting to rape. #lifegoals

With the exception of the filly-connoisseur, every one of those guys was someone that the decent men around me liked, maybe even respected and trusted. They didn’t do this stuff in front of other men, because obviously, actually decent other men would stop them. On most–but not all–occasions in my life, I have proven pretty capable of stopping them myself. I have been informed right here on this Substack that I have a certain Tank Girl kind of energy, I tend to push back hard and usually convince the creepers that I will, like an angry cat, put up a very respectable fight and make you wish you hadn’t touched me. But I think of those memories, and the ones I have of the times that didn’t end with the guy walking off with his tail between his legs. I think of women and girls less comfortable with male-ness, the good and bad, and just how scary some of those scenarios would be for someone younger or less prepared at the time. I had a few that turned out scary for even my psycho a$$. To say nothing of sorrowful.

These mechanics were, to a man, decent men. They Didn’t Get It. Decent men tend not to understand that not all predators are the obviously misogynistic and violent types. Other guys who Seem Normal tend to be assumed to be in the same camp; the ones who don’t want to have sexual pleasure at the expense of a woman’s; they want to have it with a woman who is enjoying herself also. Most of us, men and women, want to be wanted just as much (or more) than we want the act itself. I think men and women want this in slightly different, highly complementary ways, but deep down we both want that. Decent men don’t want to pressure or coerce a woman who doesn’t want them, let alone actually overpower and hurt her. Normal, decent men put up with all sorts of nonsense from women and more or less like them anyway. At its best it’s a thing of beauty to behold. I am personally convinced that in fact, the average, “decent” man is more deeply, vulnerably loving with a woman who has gotten to him, than most women understand. Even when they’re not in love, most men don’t really want to hurt you. Certainly not through rape. Though the glory of the West is fading, it’s given us all the gift of many generations filtering down Christian-shaped thought about men protecting women. But then, we all have a dark side. It comes out in different ways in each of us, that’s all.

I spoke up. I said, “Why is it so easy for you to believe this random man you’ve never met, who obviously, if guilty, has every reason to cover it up, but by extension, you believe these half-dozen women are all lying? What are you basing that on? Either side, I mean. Do you know something I don’t know about the man, or about some of these women? Or is it just that you think women lie about being raped more than men lie about raping women? Do we need men to back up their testimony?”

The guys were, I think, temporarily dumfounded, because I was, you know, a Cool Girl. I could take a lot of coarse masculine humor and give it right back; I was (and am) very obviously fond of men. Upon walking into the shop the first time, I saw one of the guys stiffen awkwardly, his eyes darting for a moment to the topless pic nearest him. I said “dang, nice tits” in passing, to settle him down (and they were, honestly, though I do in fact disapprove of that practice, especially now that I’m entering my Prude Era). Another time I’d walked in behind this eccentric old guy they called Hillbilly, he used to work there and stopped by now and again; Hillbilly didn’t notice I was behind him and he pointed at that same pic and said to Justus, “looks like your girlfriend, young buck!” to which Justus blushed and was starting to get mad, and I laughed and said “thank you!” and then everybody, even the young buck, started laughing. They thought, evidently, that I thought like they did, in general.

When I said my bit, they all got That Look on their face, you know the one I mean, ladies. The “uh-oh, here it comes, she’s getting the vapors” look, which made me more tired than ever. Somewhat more gently (my tone was pretty feisty for that first comment), I pointed out that in my own experience, the most genuinely painful events of my life have often made me clam up and want to hide what happened. Far from finding it automatically less credible that a woman would only pluck up the nerve to speak up years later, I found that perfectly understandable. My own worst experiences are not easy ones for me to tell (though I’m about to share a couple of them, with good reason). I could easily believe that it could take months or years or even decades, and, possibly, the solidarity of other women, for a woman to come forward after genuine mistreatment at a man’s hands, whether living with the shame of something she felt like she half-consented to, or the trauma of having been drugged or violently overtaken (and there can be tangled messes of the two combined that are almost impossible to make sense of, even inside one’s own head.) I told these guys bluntly that, speaking for myself, in the immediate aftermath of either scenario, especially when I was younger, I would literally put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger before I would willingly subject myself to a rape exam, or pursuing “justice” in the courts, discussed and photographed and speculated over all the while. I would have died first.

I led with all that so I might keep the women reading when I pivot to make a couple of points I’m actually aiming at in this piece. Let us now consider the flip side; the other side of the coin that we see with the sisterhood battle cry of “believe women”. By logical extension, just like I tried to demonstrate to those guys in the shop, when you decide to make a sweeping judgement regarding which sex to believe by default, who to think the best of, you declare in contrast that the other sex deserves to be disbelieved on principle. Which is a rather serious thing, with serious implications. Individuals lie, or tell the truth. Individuals also (tricksy beings that we humans are) blend the two in confusing ways. Two stories are told; both can’t be true. Both could, however, be kind of true in bits, distorted for manipulative purposes in other bits, and generally a tangled mess. Even when one person chooses to tell the plain truth, it isn’t always easy to know which one it is. Men prey on women and, for obvious reasons of covering one’s buttocks, they lie about it. Duh. Let me emphasize that a little harder. DUH!!! But you know what else?

Ironically, in that season, having this exchange wherein I spoke up for women making accusations years after the alleged crimes; I was living through the most hellish year of my life, brought on by the combined efforts of a man and a woman. I was closer to the man in question and more emotionally wounded by his part, but psychologically, that woman was the evil mastermind. She was 100% writing the script and running the show; she worked that man like a puppet master, and he was as helpless in her influence as a fly in a spider’s web. She was an expert at her craft, a particularly feminine art, this: reputational destruction. Girls begin learning how this works in or around kindergarten, and with varying degrees of participation (as perpetrator and/or as victim) it dogs our steps ‘til we shuffle off this mortal coil. It’s the truly aggressive woman’s weapon of choice, usually. It certainly should be; you can’t literally knock a man down and rip out his still-beating heart with your hands, for example, but a sharp, determined woman can do just that in the metaphorical sense.

There are people who do not believe that women are as violent as men. I’m not one of those people. I’ll get into that later, just noting it in passing for now. As a society, we’re very happy to talk about the need for men to restrain their potentially worst impulses; their driving sexuality, their capacity for aggression; in some particularly coddled circles, I’ve heard people say, in all seriousness, that there are whole arenas of life (especially regarding the beginning of life, savvy?) where men shouldn’t speak at all, only women.

I mentioned, humorously, in one of my recent notes, that my first “crush” I remember having, my “awakening” moment of kinda thinking, “oh, that boy is…I don’t know what he is, but feel very aware of him in a way that’s kind of nice”, you know, that feeling…anyway, my first guy to give me that feeling was Billy from Hocus Pocus. Yup, the zombie ex-boyfriend with his mouth sewed shut, raised to do his ex-girlfriend’s bidding. The ideal man of fantasy to femininity’s dark side, really; under her spell, no will of his own, with his mouth sewn shut. Actual undead part optional, though Billy sure pulled that look off, bless Doug Jones and brilliant makeup artists. (Incidentally, Doug Jones might look stranger without his monster makeup than he looks with it. Interesting, but not germane here, moving on.)

Women have their dark, twisted, ugly side too (dare I say, sinful? Fallen?). Much of it hinges on control, which looks different when a woman does it, as a rule. In the age of the internet and modern sensibilities in general, there’s probably more men engaging in “feminine” coded aggression than ever before, but they are not on our level, at least, not at the championship level. There’s a spectrum to aggression, we all know that. Most men are not so aggressive as to be unable to function in society. A few are borderline; the guy you watch a little warily out of the corner of your eye at a bar, especially if he has a pool cue in his hand. A very few are psychotic and unbelievably dangerous. Statistically speaking, when it comes to, say, the small portion of people in the world most likely to beat you down and then start biting chunks out of you (rude), they’re almost all men. But when it comes to who is most likely to decide to slowly, torturously destroy your life, aiming most at your mind and your soul; almost certainly it will be a woman. And yes, unfortunately, they do sometimes wait years. You’ve heard the jokes; how is a woman like an archaeologist? We love digging up old sh*t. There’s truth to that. This is the sin that crouches at the door of every woman’s soul, and I do mean every woman, though thankfully, general sanity, healthy relationships at critical life periods (especially inter-generational ones), and most of all, God’s work in our hearts, does drive much of this out. I’m not trying to paint with an overbroad brush here; that’s why I opened how I did. I’m not trying to throw women under the bus, like some in the manosphere circles do, implying we are somehow the worse sex. I don’t think men should open that can of worms; history and the News make it too easy to argue the case that men are decidedly worse. But then, what I am saying is, women’s evil tends to be sneakier. It doesn’t make it into the history books and the News in the same way, but it is there, and it is powerful. I have no doubt it is present in some of those stories, just, behind the scenes.

Enough lecturing, that’s not my forte. I am here on this earth to Delight and Amuse. Story time, to render my illustration.

I know a guy (a relative, actually, I didn’t just hit him up at my local supermax prison just for fun) who murdered his wife twenty years ago. She was nineteen; they had a three-week old baby. Of course, she did stab him a bunch of times first, and wanted to kill the baby. She had a plan, you see; they could exit this admittedly (at times) bleak world and all be together in Heaven. They were both so full of drugs, who knows. Evidently the evidence matched his story. She stabbed him a whole lot, right over the baby’s crib, and then he got the knife away from her and returned the favor, thoroughly. Then he called his parents, so they’d come for his daughter, and he slashed his wrists. When the paramedics got there, they rushed to the crying baby and thought that she was stabbed too, at first; she was so covered in the blood of her parents, her crib was just bathed in it.

You can just sit with that story a minute; I needed to. My mom collapsed when her dad called and told her what had happened. My dad had to carry her into the house. I went for a walk, and later, back at the house, I mimed stabbing my pillow with my clenched fist, just to see how much dedication it took to stab someone thirty-some times. I quit well before I got there, my stomach churning, unable to reconcile the image with the boy on the dirtbike I’d played with as a kid. My grandpa died a couple of months later of a heart attack. Small wonder.

Let’s play a game now, lighten the mood. Wanna pick the villain of this story? Easy, says one person. The man. He murdered her. Full stop. (This is undeniably true.) But he also saved the baby, who has lived and had her being in this world and grown to be a wonderful young woman. Ok, so maybe the wife is the villain. What a sick inversion of mother-love, to want to destroy the life you brought into the world (oops, I almost forgot, women do that all the time, though it’s considered more couth to do it with a pill, these days).

The murdered wife and mother had a J name. I’ll call her Jessica (I’m choosing pseudonyms with care here; I lingered over them like I was naming a new baby. They have meanings that matter.). The murdering relative of mine is not a J name in real life, but I’m renaming him Joshua here. Alright. Let’s look deeper.

A small problem arises with casting Jessica as the villain. I’ve read transcripts of her diaries that were read in a court hearing (not related to her death, related to deciding custody of their orphaned daughter). Let me tell you, that young woman had every reason to believe she might be the one saving her child, by taking her out of this vale of tears. She was born to drug-addled parents too. She was used by grown men throughout much of her childhood; that formative experience alone, I think, might be enough to make a woman think that she is sparing her child–especially a daughter–by choosing death.

Right, so it’s men. We’re back to men. They’re the villains here, collectively. But wait, there’s more! How, you might ask, does a young girl get raped by a conga line of grown men, anyway? Like, how does this opportunity even present itself? When I was that young, decent grownups, mainly my parents of course, kept me safely away from those kinds of situations. The opportunity was never there for such evil to befall me. Which is as it should be. Well, Jessica’s mom was desperate for drugs, you see. She wanted to feel good, to escape, you know, the way sometimes only drugs can provide. She didn’t have enough money to pay for them, but she did have something else with a very high market value. A little girl. So anyway, I assume she shot up or smoked or popped pills or whatever and had a nice little trip and eased her pain while her daughter was getting raped in the next room, or maybe she went out on the stoop, where the sounds wouldn’t harsh her buzz.

Jessica’s diaries revealed her excitement when her mom started sharing drugs with her. She wrote that she was hoping “this is something we can do together.” Well. At least her mom gave her something for the pain. The kid certainly earned her share of the respite. Wouldn’t you agree?

My hand shakes writing this story. I’ve absolutely loved the escapist bliss of a substance or two myself; I’ve sunk into it like a warm bath, too many times to count. See though, this is why I Lecture and Pontificate about letting our feelings run all amok and run us. The far, far end of that road looks like getting so hooked on the good feelings and so avoidant of the bad ones that we’d sell our kid’s bodies for a high. We do these things.

“We?” I can hear you protest (as do I). Admittedly, I have not done that. But let’s stick a pin in that thought. Right, so, Grandma was pretty bad. But still, you know, the women in this story are tragic as well as villainous. Like Medusa or something (another one of my tattoos). They were so broken. What excuse did all the men have?

Excuse? I offer no excuse for child rapists, or the murder of a girl who was barely more than a child (a girl who never really got to be a child). But, I know the murderer’s mother, too. As a matter of fact, she’s the woman I referenced earlier in this essay, the one who set out to destroy my reputation and my relationships, telling horrific lies about me. She’s the most sadistic person I have ever met. I’ve never been “broken” by a man like I was by her. She succeeded in breaking something in me, in my psyche and my soul, that took a very long time to even begin to heal. And that was his mother; that was who formed him. She told her lies about me, telling other people (including my own mother) that I was “dangerous” and “evil” after she had raised a man who stabbed his bride more than thirty times. Bit rude of her. Bit rich, really. Classic Mean Girl, writ large.

I know another guy whose wife jumped out of the car during an argument and died, underestimating just how fast thirty miles an hour really is to the human frame (especially the smaller, more breakable female frame). Having gone down a few times off of galloping horses, I would never jump out of a car at that speed, but most people live lives too buffered from the physicality of, well, physics, to know any better. She didn’t know, she just wanted out of the argument that she didn’t want to submit to being in, in the first place. You see, she’d been beating their little boy (aged five), she just couldn't seem to control her temper. She beat her husband, too. They were arguing about this unfortunate habit of hers, of beating anyone who defied her; and she was so enraged at being held accountable that she jumped out. That was meant as a “screw you”, I think. She used the tools she had at her disposal, to scare him to death and regain the upper hand. I don’t believe for a moment it was an impulsive suicide; I don’t think she had any notion of dying when she pushed open that door and threw herself out. I think it was a temper tantrum; I think it was meant to get her man back under her thumb, where he belonged. A classic sew-his-mouth-shut move, ya know. I know more than one woman who has pulled that same trick and survived, maybe even done it more than once. But it’s a gamble; like I said, I don’t recommend it. Then again, I don’t recommend trying to control men at all, for any reason. It just doesn’t seem to work out well for anyone in the long run.

I get it though. I’m a woman. It is so infuriating when men won’t submit to you; when they won’t follow the script in your head, when they keep making you feel dissed and humiliated and hurt. Those are horrible feelings. They can eat you alive. I’ve been there. Maybe some women reading this are stunned at what I’m saying and can’t relate. Good for you, you’re obviously a better woman than me. I understand the women in these stories, a little. I see glimmers, at least, of myself in them; like catching a glimpse of your reflection out of the corner of your eye, and it’s both like and unlike you. You might say, at least, that I see a family resemblance, though I’m technically related only to the men in these stories. Unless we go far back enough, of course.

Let’s play another game-within-the-game, kind of a variation on Choose the Villain. This one has two parts. I’m going to tell you two versions of a story. One of the stories is true. First, I want you to decide which one you think makes me sound worse; I mean in whichever way disgusts you more; because I sound more despicable, or more pathetic, or hateful; whichever. Then, and then only, try to decide which you think is the true one. Ready? Let’s do this. My testimony, of a sort. A very partial account of just what sort of person Jesus can save and transform into the delight you know and love today. Also, you’ll see the tie-in to the opening, and why I almost named this essay “Girls Lie Too”. Alright, I’ll quit stalling and get on with it.

Side A) When I was seventeen, I was living on my own and had an older, alcoholic boss who gradually got rather obsessed with me, not right away, but after we had worked together very well for a couple of months, with an established–I thought–friendly working relationship. I considered him a friend. I’d always been “tough” and prided myself on it; I’d had no trouble fending off men as of yet, not even that creepy guy talking to me about fillies (I told him I was too much horse for him and would cripple him. He didn’t exactly leave me alone altogether after that, but I don’t think I fit his mental image of sixteen-year-old girls in my response, either, so he wasn’t as eager to corner me.) But, I’d never had to deal with fending off a man I considered a friend, not on this level, not yet. I froze like a fawn. I tried every “soft no” in the book. He didn’t see it. Maybe he didn’t want to see it (it didn’t help that he was a bit of a drunk). Eventually, a day came when I was at home, pretty badly hurt from a spill off a horse earlier that day. I had a seriously messed up ankle and, I suspect, looking back, a mild concussion. He showed up at my apartment to “help” me, and wouldn’t stop trying to kiss me when I sat on the couch, running his hands over me. I was so tired, and in so much pain, I just gave up. I let him carry me to the bedroom and do what he wanted, and then I washed my blood out of the sheets and took a very, very long shower, staying in there long after the water ran cold. I threw away the sheets even after washing them. I shut the door to that bedroom (fortunately, it was a two-bedroom apartment and he’d chosen the one with the bigger bed, naturally, which was not my bedroom). I shut the door and never opened it again while I lived there, which was for several months. I still worked with him every day for that time. He continued to pursue me, though I got locks for my door (it was just an apartment over a barn that didn’t even have a lock, very casual), and I never let him in. Sometimes he got me alone in the barn and felt me up in a stall or whatever while I just froze and let my spirit leave me, you know. Just waited for it to be over, like I did when he was taking his pleasure with my body in that bed. He was so delusional, he even bought me flowers and chocolates for Valentine’s Day, which I think explains a lot about my long-running dislike of being bought things, especially flowers, and my hatred of that holiday to boot. (My husband, and werewolf movies, have since salvaged the holiday for me. I also quickly forgave chocolate, though I still can’t stand hothouse flowers, roadside roses excepted. They make me feel seventeen again, and I’d rather not.)

I felt such shame about it that I didn’t speak of it for years.

Anyway, Schrodinger’s rapist. Did he or didn’t he? Is there a better word for it, like “coerce”? Rape feels a bit too strong of a word, an insult to the people who have been violated with savagery. People have been raped to death. Ever read Judges, especially near the end? It gets rough out there when people do what is right in their own eyes. And what about me? Did I “consent”? It’s been twenty years, and I still don’t quite know how to answer. Good moment to flip the record.

Side B) Most of the story is the same. One big difference is that I fought back, like a wildcat. Like a “Final Girl”. But, ladies…if you’ve never actually tried to fight off a man for real, and just watched a lot of girl-power movies, I’m here to tell you…best of luck. He busted me up pretty bad (of course, I was already hurt), and then he still carried me to bed and took what he wanted. From there the story is just the same, re me limping around cleaning up after him, and all the other stuff about working together and him groping me when he could and buying me chocolate and flowers for Valentine’s Day, etc, all the same.

In both stories (one of which is true, remember) I cracked, eventually. My ankle never really recovered. It turns out that riding a bunch of racehorses and young horses every day might not be the best strategy for letting an injured joint heal; it stayed so swollen for months, I could barely force my boot over it every morning, and wrestling it off in the evening was no easier. It was agonizing when I was galloping a “tough” horse who would pull on me during training; a small-framed woman like me depends a lot on leg strength for “holding” a racehorse. A few times, my ankle gave out altogether and I got run off with a bit, and mocked by my boss for it. I took a spill off a bucking youngster once too, for the same reason, when my ankle basically collapsed, and I sustained a bad concussion that time. I gritted my teeth and persevered, longing for the day when my “real” boss in MD who’d sent me, would tell me it was time to come back. But he kept extending my time down there by another month, then another.

A day came when I came home from work, locked the door behind me (of course) and collapsed back against the wall and slid down to the floor, hyperventilating, thinking that I simply could not limp into that barn one morning more and face that man. I could not endure his hunger for me one more day, or his uninvited touch on my body a single time more. I called my dad, my voice shaking, and said that I wanted to quit, today, no notice given or anything, and come home, right now.

My parents are old school. I was brought up with a stern disdain for quitting, especially for quitting in an unprofessional manner; like half-assing a job for a long time before actually quitting, or quitting without notice, or making a scene about it. I was terribly afraid he’d tell me I had to grit it out at least long enough to give a reasonable notice and honor it, and I honestly didn’t know that I could. Once the dam broke, it broke. I broke. My mom, who was in on the conversation, did expect me to grit it out, to be professional. She was mystified and, I think, disappointed in me that I would even bring up such an idea, especially with no more explanation than “I just need to come home”. Don’t be too hard on her in your minds, readers; she was usually right about These Things, when she wanted to push me or hold me accountable. Many of my finer qualities (such as they are) can be credited to her hardassery.

My dad, though, heard something in my voice, and attended to it. I’ve mentioned here before my deep and abiding appreciation for men in possession of strong spines; fortunately for me that day, my dad is one such man. He overruled my mom’s objections and told me firmly to start packing, and that my mom was going to start driving down within the hour to help me pack everything up and come home (he had to stay to take care of horses). My mom told me later that when they got off the phone with me, he told her in no uncertain terms that it was not up for discussion and she needed to quit arguing and get ready to go get me, now. I’m grateful. I’m honestly not sure what I might have done that night, if I’d thought my parents wouldn’t welcome me home.

Now a little epilogue to each “side” of the story, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure for the ending.

Side A) I was so ashamed of my own compliance, I couldn’t get over it. I was a bit of a trainwreck in my life the next few years; I blamed what happened in that bed that night. One day, I ached to tell, so badly, that I told someone. Without really planning it, I found myself describing it in a light that made me sound better…a story where I fought back, and was a gallant loser; the incredibly Tough Chick who gave it her best shot and then gritted it out working with that man for months afterwards. I lied, in other words, years after the fact, about being violently raped. To hide my own shame, mainly. But frankly? Even though I didn’t pursue it in any sort of public way (I was still not of the mind where I wanted attention like that), I would have to say it was a kind of revenge. I was so ashamed of myself for going along with it that I hated his guts. I wanted to make him sound worse, so that I would sound better.

Side B) I took years to tell the truth of what had happened. I waited until I’d heard that he’d died, in fact. In the meanwhile, every winter, like migratory birds, some young woman (none of them as young as I’d been, but young) was sent down to SC to work with that same man, and I never said a word. I hid the truth away deep inside me, locked the door, and threw away the key. I would have let a thousand other women get raped before I would have stood up to be counted and risked being disbelieved and humiliated, accused of lying. I protected myself. It ate me up inside, and I was a bit of a trainwreck for years.

One of these stories is true. I’m not actually going to reveal which it is, for a good reason. I wrote this essay for a purpose beyond talking about men, and women, and lies, though I’ll say just a bit more about all of that. I also wrote it, in a way, to declare my loyalties, you could say. I want you, dear reader, to consider which story makes me worse in your eyes: the one where I lied about what a man did to me, and made him sound far worse than he was, and used it to garner sympathy, used it for praise (people thought I was so brave, you know). Or maybe you think it’s the one where I was a coward, and let other young women go unwarned to be exposed to a truly dangerous man, and I said nothing, to protect myself; maybe you think that story is worse. Whichever one you think makes me worse, pick that one. Consider that story true. I am the villain (game over), or one of them anyway. I was lost, and fragile, and Not Okay. I invite you to go ahead and believe the worst of me. It’s true enough. I could go on; I have dozens of stories from later years that would show just how pathetic I was at times, how murderously black my heart was at others (as I got older, my conscience hardened when it came to protecting myself).

The thing about the stories is that one is literally true, and the other is perfectly possible. I am capable of either. I am not cut from a different, special cloth than the girls who get scared and give in and don’t fight. Nor am I better, more honest, or less spiteful than the women who make up lies about ex-boyfriends or old bosses and say that they assaulted them when it isn’t true, or at least, wildly exaggerate what happened. I’m not superior to the people who look away when others are hurt; I’ve done it myself. I’ve done a lot of weak, evil things myself. I’ve been spiteful as hell. I’ve certainly felt in my heart the desire to pin a man down and rip out his still-beating heart with my claws, because he hurt my pride, basically. I’ve wanted to sew some mouths shut. I’ve craved control. I’ve screwed married men I knew perfectly well were married. I’ve been falling-down-drunk many times. I’ve told more lies than I can count, a few of them vindictive. I used to lie easily, for getting the reaction that I wanted out of people. Know that Cake song, “Satan is my motor”? My internal engines pretty much ran full-throttle on rage and lust, and a love of power. I was a daughter of the Devil himself. In certain lighting, at certain angles, certain moods…the family resemblance was striking. Not always obvious. But always there.

That’s why I’m leaving it there. An unusual approach, maybe, but I don’t want to be pigeonholed into being seen as a certain kind of sinner, one that some people find more sympathetic, and others find worse. I’m just a sinner. My nearest and dearest know the truth, or I’d tell them if they asked (the one or two who don’t already know). It doesn’t matter what the wider world thinks of me, one way or the other. To paraphrase Spurgeon, they cannot accuse me of anything worse than what I know to be true of myself. The only thing I’ve contributed towards my own salvation is my black, lost heart desperately in need of it. I brought the need, and the evil. Jesus covered the rest of the story. My people, the ones I’d sit down with in the cafeteria, you know, are the liars, the criminals, the junkies, the whores and the shameless sluts, the drunks, the losers who couldn’t keep their lives together. The guttersnipes. My people are the ones whose mistakes have cost themselves and others greatly; the people who don’t name them mistakes but sin. My family, you know. Not the ones who preen themselves and thank God publicly that they are not like these others. I would be counted amongst the ones who cannot lift their eyes, but ask with trembling lips for mercy. Count me in with them. That’s the table I belong at. For one thing, that’s where Jesus always sits.

That table doesn’t only include the visible screwups and edgy types. It’s not a subculture, a work of human preference grouping. It includes people God drew in a different way, I suspect in part to help us screwups and junkies and criminals. It includes people who have walked with God all their lives, or most of them, in trusting obedience, without the dramatic stories that sound exciting (they weren’t always exciting so much as miserable to actually live through). These people; they may barely remember (or not remember at all) a time when they didn’t believe; but they still see themselves as having been born into new life. They don’t have a story to top anyone’s, as far as dramatic sins. But to me, the fact that they can have lived such “clean” lives and yet, know how deeply they need God, know that it is all to God’s credit, to His glory, not theirs...that is beautiful, and their presence is steadying. They are the strengtheners and encouragers, so often, of the faith of others. They are not proud of their lives, like a personal accomplishment. Those people are in too deep with God for that. They’ve known him all their lives; they practically seem to breathe out grace. They invite confidence in the promises of God, because you can look at those living epistles and see what he does, faithfully, over time. Those people teach us how to pray. Those people seem to be inviting us into a depth of conversation with the God who is there; it can be hard for those who have been wandering, sometimes, not to freak out when we don’t hear His voice as clearly as we need. Cuz we’re kind of a super needy bunch, ya know. We’re kind of fragile. We have Trust Issues. The deeper the old life led us into the dark, the harder it pulls at us, I think, the rest of our lives. I have my moments where a terrible, dark anger still rises in me, and I remember the awful joy that I used to take in indulging it. Ditto my other vices. The black-hearted flesh wars with my new life with a grim intensity at times.

Don’t forget the people in the middle either, the ones who lived a long time living a reasonably respectable life “without God” (lol, where’d the air in your lungs come from, friend?). The ones who convert, much to their own surprise, later in life, out of no apparent, obviously desperate need (not like me), yet, in fact, though their lives looked pretty good, they discovered that their hearts were restless, longing for something they could not name. Called by something…or in fact, Someone. The One our hearts are made to find rest in. Nothing else will satisfy.

Jesus was born to an honorable woman, raised by an honorable man. He has always had some followers who have been faithful for life (think of Simon and Ana) and those middling types, coasting by on their own sense of self-righteousness and doing fine, they think, until they meet him (Nicodemus, anyone?). And he’s always sat at the table with the sinners and publicans. The misfits, you know. The screwups and rejects and the untouchables of every stripe. And then he brings all these people together and makes them a family.

This story is true. Amen.

Love,

St Jesalyn

---

Postscript:

I was on a roll with Christian metal working on this one, so here’s a banger for y’all who are still here with me, saints (well, that song may just be for the metalheads)

A song I’d like to especially dedicate to “the young buck”, who IS GOING TO BE NAGGED INTO READING MY WRITING FOR A CHANGE FOR THIS ONE… but also, to all of you, as a tongue-in-cheek expression of how I feel about all of you, if this makes sense. (It probably doesn’t, but focus on the lyrics of the chorus, and I suspect you’ll get the joke, although it ain’t Christian, we are, so, we can filter it). Obviously Petty’s original is always worth your time, but I swooned with delight the first time I heard Steve Earl cover this (he was another early crush of mine, lol)

Last but best…the song I want to sign off with, is about the One I really wrote this for. Also, never fails to make me look forward to being gathered and glorified with all of you one day in the New Zion. Amen, again.