I’m at that point again where I’m exhausted, and I feel like I’m screaming for help but I’m probably not. And there are people I love who I am so much more worried about than I am about myself, and there are communities in peril and there is so much pressure to continue with business as usual and I can’t seem to continue with business as usual and I also can’t seem to fully figure out how to not. How to just not. I don’t know.
Today is the third anniversary of #concussion2014, and I marked it in my calendar to remind myself of this random, out-of-nowhere injury. What’s striking for me as I reflect this year is that I wasn’t even choosing to take a risk.
I spend a lot of my time talking about risk, the importance of choosing risk, and the ways in which we can negotiate risk. In sexual activity, in friendships, in activism. We have many opportunities to step into risk and to manage risks for ourselves and each other.
But I wasn’t taking any particular risks that day. I was simply pursuing pleasure – I was taking risks only insofar as daily life is risky. Or, in the way that daily life used to be risky. Until this year, as my life in 2017 laughs at my life in 2014. As I sit inside my apartment in Charlottesville still wondering about the risks of walking alone to the grocery store, still wondering about being recognized by white supremacists or confronted or followed home. But then, why hold myself back from the simple pleasures of life now, just because I am aware of the presence of risk right now, when even back in 2014 I incurred severe consequences for everyday activity without being prepared for risk at all?
I was just swimming in a pond. Not swimming alone. Not swimming at night. Not swimming under the influence. Just swimming. Then an unleashed dog jumped off the dock and landed on my head. Boom. Concussion. Two months medical leave.
Most of the other traumas I had incurred up to that point were in the context of something I already knew to be risky: being alone in a room with a heterosexual boy/man. I had made those choices. I was not to blame for what happened in those rooms, but I knew there were risks, just as I now know there are risks in walking alone in Charlottesville. Even if I feel strongly that neither risk is just – it is not just to live in a world in which I fear being alone in a room with a man who claims to love me, and it is not just to live in a world in which I fear being alone on the streets of a city who claims to care. But I know the injustice, and I know the risk, and I get to make choices within those contexts.
I don’t know. It just sucks. I think I’m writing about it now because I am trying to get myself to leave my apartment to go get groceries. Or I’m writing about it now because trauma triggers trauma, and my head hurts. Or because when I’m on edge and angry and ready to yell at people, I find myself wanting to yell at people who are in public places with their dogs off leash. Yelling at those people is quite socially unacceptable, particularly in Charlottesville. Even when directed at entitled white men. I really want to, though.
I don’t know. It just sucks. Maybe some things just suck.
