The Home I Know: Identity
Chapter 21
Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.
PART V: HOME
“Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey
— and to be welcomed when she comes home.”1
~ Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
Chapter 21: Identity
“When afraid, become a new story.”2
~ Lidia Yuknavitch
~ ~ ~
Winter came. I needed hibernation and hoped the cool Seattle weather and lingering darkness would calm me down, encourage more sleep. I arose in the morning wanting to go for a walk and grab a coffee. Snow sprinkled from the sky, as I stopped by a nearby cafe, grabbed a cup filled with my favorite morning ritual, then strolled toward St. Edwards: a state park near my home.
Surprisingly, I saw a grotto standing on the ground before me. A replica of the one in Lourdes, but without the statue of Mary. The land and building, once a seminary for Catholic priests, had been repurposed into a public park for play. This place felt sacred, intentional. Like I was standing on holy ground. The empty grotto offered an invitation. The structure of it remained, just like my body, but otherwise it had been cleared out. It was time build a new world within the shell of the old.
I still struggled to regulate the symptoms. The jagged edges and coarse surfaces of my past still rubbed me the wrong way on a day-to-day basis, as I continued to activate and tighten. As I still fought, fled, fuzed, froze, and fawned from the inside out when I confronted social inequities, ignorance, and complacency. And yet, I too had been emptied of so much story. I was in a tomb now, a grotto for healing. My body belonged to a safer base, but my system still needed time to process all that it had been through. Gratitude and grief now shared equal space in my body.
How could I make meaning of my history of incest?
Meaning-making has become an important part of the healing process for individuals and communities who experience trauma and oppression. Due to my Opus Dei-influenced upbringing, I chose to avoid common statements heard in sexual abuse survivor communities that glorified suffering.
“I’m grateful for the abuse. I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t been abused.”
“The abuse happened to me, so that I could help others.”
“I’m only empathetic because I was abused.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
Survivors have the right to create meaning out of trauma however they like, but my body heaved at narratives that centered abuse as the regrettable but essential impetus for progress. No part of me could ever glorify the violence, nor accept that some loving deity or source willed me to be a victim of such horror in order to use me as a pawn for the greater good. These narratives felt like nothing short of enabling cycles of violence. To me, it smells like the patriarchy. It feels like it too. My senses are now far too attuned to this type of harm.
If abuse has such a powerful purpose, why seek to stop it?
Then I remembered the message of Father Matthew when he helped me to make sense of the moment I watched the young woman die in the car accident. I imagined what he might say to me in this moment:
“Anne, your story didn’t happen for a reason. God wept with you when you were being abused. But your pain doesn’t have to go to waste. It can be repurposed in any way that you choose.”
~ ~ ~
Raquel, a new friend I had met on a hiking app, invited me to accompany her to the Hall of Moses in Olympic National Park. The long green moss clung and swung from the tree branches like kids from their parents’ knees. Holding the tension of need and play, the very life of the moss held tight to the tree trunks in a glorious example of interdependency. The tall beings stretched high into the sky. The sun beat down in the space between, leaving an opening just for me.
I walked into the vacancy, spread out my arms with my palms open wide to receive, set my gaze to the sun, and let the heat and light flood my skin with warmth. I could feel the presence of love here, like in Lourdes, like with Father Matthew in the garden, like with Charlotte and Ruth, like with Gertrude.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” I whispered as Raquel arrived at this sacred scene.
“They’re growing from nurse logs,” she responded. “Look at their roots.”
I had been gazing so far up, I had neglected to witness the ground. I looked down to see what she saw. The dignified trees were growing from a fallen being. Dead trunks, uprooted from the earth, now rested on the ground, full of nutrients. Enough for new forms of life to grow out of them, to be sustained by them. The younger tree grew tall and strong from the body of what came before.
Incest abuse feels so much like a type of death. Survival feels so much like living a half-life. As hard as I tried to extricate my story from my body, nurse logs provided a model of complete integration. The death in me and the life in me could coexist simultaneously. Life could receive the nutrient-dense lessons of death: the holding of so much trauma, the hiding it away, and then the endless endeavor to heal. My body could gracefully carry the past, the present, and the future concurrently. This story in my body could be a nursing tree.
~~~
March 2020 arrived with Covid-19. That all-too-familiar panic pressed inside my body when I imagined what life would be like unemployed, wearing a mask across my face, isolated for days, months, years. Even more so, I felt flooded with fear, as I considered all of the people, especially children, who would now need to cohabitate with people harming them in communal pods: adult and child relatives and family friends. The escapes of school and extracurricular activities and work and friends’ houses and social services would no longer be available to them.
As the days passed by, answers arrived. My employer kept the cafe open for take-out-orders only. Together, she and I worked to collect donations for charity, as well as offer a respite for masked community members to stop in and grab a drink, engage in a quick chat with others as long as they stood on the stickers stuck onto the floor to separate them by six feet, then continued on their way. The masks felt more comforting than anything, as I could live outside with most of my face covered. My body felt so much more at home in quieter and crowdless spaces where others asked for consent before standing near me and only after sharing where they had been and with whom.
With so much space between society and me, the bodies of others and my body, I began to experience myself differently. I felt surprised to thrive in an introverted space where I didn’t need to socialize much. The makeup I masked with everyday stayed within the bathroom drawers. My long, wavy hair was no longer worth the effort to maintain. The lack of daily touch and hugs from others felt liberating.
As the pandemic protections expanded, a surprising social solidarity grew, as more people seemed to finally understand what so many of us already knew: the pain of chronic mental health conditions and the traumatization of years of oppression and isolation. I felt a little less alone. Checks from the government landed in my mailbox without exchange for labor, while subsidies for my healthcare premium made the management of my brain, body, and being much cheaper. Most importantly, while the entire world had been pushed into a state of emergency, for the first time in my adult life, I felt a new sense of safety and stability.
My brain was just beginning to find a stabler baseline. With the increase of remote work opportunities, I finally landed a full-time writing contract. I could live wherever I wanted. With winter approaching, I feared that the long, dark, and wet Seattle season would interrupt my healing process. So I began to dream.
The part of me raised in Newport Beach envisioned what it might be like to return to Southern California: to spend time in the sun and by the sea in a city built for safe outdoor living during all seasons. My body resisted the idea of moving back to Orange County because much of my family still resided in the area, my parents in that same house on Bunya St. But San Diego sounded nice and a number of old friends who I had reconnected with from high school still lived there. I called one up to ask if he might have connections for housing for six months or so. By the next day, I had a beautiful place to stay in a studio in Encinitas.
As I settled into my new home by my old ocean love, I heard that my parents sold the home on Bunya St. Suddenly, my past felt somehow complete. As if without that house, I could also release the stories, the identities, and the complexities of all who once lived there. I took the proverbial step out from behind from my parents’ knees and tossed out the mask of who I had to be in their company. I studied Queer Theory, changed my pronouns to she/they, and began to emulate the freedom of fluidity in all of my identities. I practiced being in harmony privately and publicly with the queer and courageous nature of my being. I cut my hair into a pixie and threw my makeup into the trash, refused to hide my disability, and began to identify as non-binary.
I embraced my brain with chronic mental conditions and came to call myself disabled and neurodivergent, while I leaned more deeply into a lifestyle of interdependency with supportive community. For six months, I stayed in San Diego just for fun, spending time again with the sun and the sea and reclaiming my love for where I grew up on my own terms. I began to finally feel like me, to recognize myself in the mirror. The presence of Josephine grew within me and I met her in my own reflection. I returned to Seattle, stopping by Ruth’s on the way, and set a court date.
The day finally came for me to choose my own name. I entered the courtroom and let my fingers drag along the wooden pew, conditioned by decades of touch from thousands of human beings. It absorbed me as I absorbed it. This was the closest I would get to a sense of justice from this unjust system. It wasn’t good enough. I deserved better than just leaving my past behind, letting it die with the dropping of my father’s name and become a nursing log inside my memory. I sat down.
Others scurried nervously in and settled around me. Together, we waited until our cases were called. I looked out the window to my right and saw building tiles in the shape of waves, the ocean always present, always reminding me there were reasons worth staying, worth surviving, worth living. Birds flew by to help me remember the cost of liberation and the lightness of flight.
“Josephine Anne Lauren,” the judge called me by my new name. I stood up. I had written the reason for this change on the form. “My father was abusive and I no longer want to identify with his surname.” I half hoped she would ask if I had reported him, if I had received the justice I deserved from the criminal legal system, but she didn’t inquire further. The judge congratulated me on my new name and I left the building.
Finally, I felt ready to live as an integrated being publicly and privately. I am now Josephine Anne Lauren legally, which means, “The Expansion of Favored Victory.”
Steinem, Gloria. My Life On the Road.
Strayed, “Lidia Yuknavitch Tells Us.”