Moving Forward

Apr 21

I’m realizing (again, yet deeper this time) that for me, justice means creation, love, human connection. It means getting to move on, to move forward, to start somewhere, to play, to begin anew, to be honest about my life, to be honest about my past, honest about my present, honest about my hopes and dreams for the future.

photo of singer-songwriter Alice Celeste (Nicole Sylvia Javorsky) wearing a cape she made and getting ready to share her album, A wildflower grows from the cracks in the sidewalk

Dearest Doodle Soupsters,

Last time I popped over here to deliver a doodle soup, I asked, How do I move forward?

There’s this phrase that keeps coming back to me … start somewhere.

A while back, in 2022 to be exact, I even did an EP of improvised songs called starting somewhere. The same year, there was an edition of this very newsletter called Starting Somewhere.

I started that edition like this —

I've had days when it took all my strength and willpower just to get through, just to get out of bed in the morning, just to eat something, just to get dressed, just to breathe in and out. There were multitudes of social media posts, therapists, acquaintances, and sometimes even friends who made it sound so easy. They'd say, "Choose life." They'd say, "It'll get better." They'd say, "Oh, you can't really believe that, right? You know that's not true." They'd say, "Why don't you try meditation?" They'd say, "Have you tried yoga?" They'd say, "Don't you want to feel better?"

I ended that edition like this —

I want to keep letting life unfold. I want to keep finding awe and wonder in the uncertainty of what the future will bring. And I want to keep reminding myself that fear, frustration, disappointment, and sadness are emotions to be felt, not avoided. I do not need to be devoid of fear to make progress. I only need to accept myself and make one brave choice at a time. I want to keep trying starting where I am. You have to start somewhere to go anywhere, right?

This week, I spent more time socializing. I attended a beautiful, profound, and empowering performance by my friend Brooke. I did a whole impromptu photo shoot to prep materials for my new album, A wildflower grows from the cracks in the sidewalk, coming out next month. (more on that in a sec!) I invited people to my upcoming release show, Songs in the Garden by the Sea.

I feel fear all the time. But feeling the fear and doing it anyway — it’s exhilarating! It doesn't take away the discomfort of putting myself out there, of being out in public where I can get overstimulated or start having flashbacks, etc. Yet, I get data in real time that I’m doing this, I’m okay, I’m doing this.

In 2020/2021, I hit my burnout point with ptsd. I was so sleep deprived. Constant flashbacks. Nightmares. I really struggled not only to work, but to just get through the day. An echo of all the times in my life I hit that point.

An incomplete list of punctuations …

age 14, when I was hospitalized for malnutrition & anorexia, after years of suffering in silence, dealing with the impact of the sexual abuse I experienced as a young child from first a family member, then a teacher at school, and then a classmate who was also being abused by the teacher.
age 17, suicide attempt, left college before I could finish my first semester.
age 20, suicide attempt after a year of sexual assault by someone I called a friend. (This is when I realized I was going to die if I didn’t fight for my life. After another unhelpful treatment program for anorexia, I kept fighting, finally found the right help. I took a leap of faith, letting go of unhealthy coping mechanisms while working really, really hard to build emotion regulation, mindfulness, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness skills in a DBT program. To say it was uncomfortable would be an understatement. I kept going because I wanted to know what it was like to really live.)

I finally put something into words today … I took another step toward believing myself … toward moving forward …

My family (biological) has made it pretty clear that they will protect my abusers over me. There’s a part of me that keeps waiting for someone to fight for my well-being, to protect me. And then, I remember that I have a family. It’s just not the one I was born with.

My efforts to protect and stand up for myself may be relatively new, but what some have failed to understand is just because I was suffering in silence doesn’t mean I wasn’t suffering. This isn’t new for me. Ever since I was a little, little kid, I’ve had to pretend that I wasn’t scared, that I wasn't sad, that I wasn’t angry, that I wasn’t confused. I had to keep such an ugly, dark secret that wasn't even about me. And keeping that secret weighed on me. It still does. And keeping that secret only deepened the shame that lived within me.

I don’t like the word victim. I like the word survivor better. But when it comes to protection, sometimes it’s vital to name who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. Especially when your perpetrator has a tendency to play the victim to avoid accountability and manipulate others. So here’s the reality — it’s really common for sexual abuse survivors to repeatedly become victims of sexual abuse until they heal, break that cycle, name what happened, place themselves as the victim and survivor of a crime rather than just feeling ashamed for what someone else did to them.

An article in Girls Globe explains the phenomenon —

In a society where the subject of rape is still taboo, the idea of even one attack is hard to grasp. The idea of multiple attacks seems far beyond probability.
This makes it unimaginably hard for the considerable number of victims who do undergo multiple sexual assaults.
It’s not an unusual phenomenon. A little known fact is that being sexually assaulted puts you at a much higher risk of being assaulted again in the future, as does childhood sexual abuse.
Sometimes referred to as revictimization, it is not exclusive to sexual assault. Victims of domestic violence are more likely to undergo it a second time. Even robberies and burglaries …

Revictimization is well-known to researchers, organizations that support survivors of violence and abuse, and government health agencies. In fact, a meta-analytic review of research articles on revictimization found that the average prevalence of sexual revictimization across studies was 47.9%, meaning that nearly half of child sexual abuse survivors experience sexual assault later on.

I only learned the name for this pretty recently, but on a personal level, I’ve lived it.

When you can’t name what happened to you in the past, when you have zero support to process what happened, when you’re still keeping the perpetrator’s secret out of shame and confusion, it’s unfortunately really easy for another perpetrator to take advantage of that.

For years, the thought would pop up in my brain — what was that? Or, a memory would pop up, something more benign that related to the traumatic memory … I’d immediately move away from it. Years of starving myself, panic attacks, alternating between drowning in depression/self-hatred and running-running-running-doing-a-million-things-so-I-don’t-go-there.

I finally found my way out of that cycle. I finally found support. This is everything. The fundamentals of safety and well-being. The ground floor. Solid ground to build from. But before I found my current therapist when I was 20, I was stuck in cycles of revictimization. Dulled alarm. I couldn’t remember really much of anything from childhood — I was that dissociated. When I was sexually assaulted again from 19-20 years old, I couldn’t name what was happened to me. I thought about telling someone, but I thought I’d be blamed. I could barely even think about it. My brain was so blocked. So much practice denying what was done to me. So many times I tried to get help and was shut down before I could really get the words out.

Sometimes, words aren’t just words. Sometimes, expression is a matter of dire consequence when it comes to one’s well-being. And sometimes, the words won’t just come out. You need safety. You need love. You need support.

I needed that.

And now, I have safety, love, and support. I do. And still, over the past few years, I’ve felt this heavy weight of expectation from my family (biological) that I just get over it, that I forgive, that I pretend that my reality isn’t real, that protecting my abusers comes before protecting myself, that I be silent.

As the article in Girls Globe put it,

Despite the relative devastation of each crime, we’re far more likely to offer sympathy to repeat victims of a burglary. It is easier to imagine being appalled when someone, once again, comes home to a broken window.

With sexual abuse, but also especially with transgressions of a family member, many families don’t give survivors the support and love they (we) deserve. So now that I’ve found that support, how could I be expected to be silent AGAIN? That can’t be a valid expectation of me.

And yet, over the past year, I’ve really struggled to believe myself. How could I have these experiences and this is how my family (biological) treats me? How could this be true? Believing myself means deep grief already. But it’s taken on a more present moment grief as it’s become more and more clear that believing myself means losing my family (biological).

I’ve been adding “(biological)” because family doesn't have to mean who you’re born with.

I’ve been asking, what does justice mean to me?

And again and again, a little deeper each time, I realize that justice to me means creation, love, human connection. It means getting to move on, to move forward, to start somewhere, to play, to begin anew, to be honest about my life, to be honest about my past, honest about my present, honest about my hopes and dreams for the future.

In my trauma state, yeah, I have an urge to fix things, to control. Yet, by nature, at my core, I’m a creator, not a fixer. I love telling stories. I’m happy to interview and learn about the fixers of the world, the people tirelessly trying to change, repair, and restructure unjust systems. I love telling their stories when I write articles as a journalist. But that’s because of my curiosity, my yearning to support and encourage others, to root people on, to amplify people’s voices and hard work, to tell human stories.

I am drawn to …

gaze up at the sky
paint, draw, collage, sculpt, sketch, play, experiment, make beautiful/simple/complex things with my hands
learn instruments like piano, guitar, ukulele
to tell stories and express emotion with my voice, with written words, hybrid forms, brushstrokes, marks and gestures on paper
create events and spaces for vulnerable artistic expression and human connection
experience art, witness and support others
teach students, support their learning process, their joy in art and music
sea foam bubbles grazing my palms
intertwining, winding, swaying tree branches
faces, the look in a person’s eyes, facial expressions
ripples in water, in flesh
vibrations in my throat, guitar strings, overlapping
something overlapping, intertwined
books, especially dreamy novels like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
thin places
the ethereal and the earthly, where they overlap
intersection points
paths crossing
constellations
webs

What’s justice to me?

Getting to honor my past through art-making, storytelling, human connection. Getting to honor my present through play, time in nature, feeling, seeing, listening, tasting, sensing, being here now, experimentation, human connection, art-making, joyfulness, not having to take myself too seriously. Getting to honor my future through believing in myself, putting myself out there, asking for and accepting others’ support, taking risks, going for it, taking myself seriously, leaps of faith.

What’s justice to me?

Connection. Knowing that grief, pain, injustice, and heartbreak of all sorts is all too common also means that we can feel these things in community. I can free myself with these doodle soups, also knowing that there are people who value what I create, what I share. And this makes it all the more meaningful. A door to something beautiful opens within the abyss of despair. I reach my hand through the portal and I feel your hand grab mine, and we embrace. There. In the space between.

At the top of this edition, I referenced Brooke Leialoha’s show. Just absorbing everything she shared, it freed me. Again, the ties that bind, the chains, the tangled webs of my mind loosened … a step further. Toward moving on. Toward moving forward. And watching her performance, I experienced firsthand the power of art.

The next day, I did my impromptu photo shoot for my new album coming out next month. I’d been working on making a cape to wear for the release show which I’m doing the same day as the album comes out (Sat. May 24). I decided to take photos and videos with the cape so I could use them on Spotify, on social media, etc. Plus, this album and show is really important to me — it feels like an embodiment of something I’ve trying to create for a while. It’s all about the intersection between healing, existential questions, and a mystical connection to nature.

Anyway, so I gathered up my guitar, the cape, a cellphone stand. I drew a heart, a butterfly, sun, in gold on my face, throat. I played. I laughed. I felt so enthralled by all this. Prancing around in my cape. The joy of knowing I got to use my sewing machine, creating a piece of clothing (something I haven’t done in quite a while) and now, here I am wearing it in public, creating these images of me in it, to promote this album I’ve been working on for the past two years or so.