Positive Achievement = Healthy Self-Esteem - A Love Story

(aka: "the one I almost called 'A Slut's Odyssey'")

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"Positive Achievement" is a piece I originally thought was pretty hilarious, until I asked a dear friend of mine (who I've known since high school and who now teaches twelfth grade English Lit) to give it a looksee and let me know what she thought.

And then I woke up to an email from her that began with "Hi Andi! Thanks for the light morning reading.  There really is nothing like a good cry and a bit of almost puking before I go teach the teenagers.  Keep in mind I can't read David Sedaris, because his writing makes me super depressed. I lean more towards the Marx Brothers for comedy.  I don't think I laughed once, but it may be because I feel like I know too much."

Then she compared me to Chuck Palahniuk and suggested that the piece's humour "only makes it harsher.  Rather than lending lightness, it drops a Juvenalian satirical edge on the work.  I find it quite appropriate and relevant to your situation."

I felt sincerely and extremely bad that I'd upset her (particularly since I'd pitched it with "ya gotta read this hilarious thing I just wrote"), but the idea of her choking back tears and vomit simultaneously, coupled with my disciple-level admiration for the genius of Palahniuk, tickled my ego enough that a tiny voice in my head still chimed in with "that means it's good, right?" before resetting in guilt. (I love you Sarah!! I'm sorry, I'm sorry!! LOL)

The motivation for this piece came when I read Alice Sebold's memoir Lucky, in which she describes how her life has been shaped and impacted by her experience of being raped in college.  One of the ideas she writes about is the heavily gendered, social construct of "virginity" and how the concepts of "giving it away" differ from "losing it" or  "having it taken." Particularly for girls and women conditioned with cultural values that emphasize the importance of "sexual purity," rape creates a losing cognitive ouroboros (i.e.: "my body is no longer pure even though my mind and heart are.)

Sebold writes about the necessary processing she went through for herself following her rape.  When rape is our first sexual experience do we get to decide that it doesn't actually count?  I decided to explore this idea for myself, and this is the piece that came to be.

It was impossible to write about my own experiences without touching on stigma, labelling and shame, although I will say that in my own life I had been negatively labelled long before my first non-consensual sexual experiences.

My introduction to the family services/child protection systems at age six instigated what would become an encyclopedia's worth of documentation and diagnoses in a file that would grow with me through the next thirteen years of my life.  But the most palpable labels and stigma really began for me when I entered foster care, at the preadolescent age that coincided, unsurprisingly, with the onset of my problematic drug and alcohol use (I am nothing if not breathtakingly textbook, it turns out).  By the time inappropriate sexual contact by others began happening in my life, my own capacity to live up to the negative labels I’d for years been branded with was long and more than well-groomed. Ever the high-achiever, I met and even surpassed every negative expectation I’d been seeded with.

There is probably a chicken/egg, nature/nurture debate (or punchline) somewhere in all this, though I'm not entirely sure what it is.  The best I've come up with so far, in relation to this piece, is "where the fucking hell was SlutWalk thirty years ago, when I needed it? I was so ahead of my time... " (I love you Heather Jarvis and Sonya Barnett!!!)

And so these pieces of my own story are humble offerings for anyone who has ever experienced shaming stigma because of all the incalculable circumstances within the "shouldn't have happened but did" and "needed to happen but didn't" universes.

We invariably end up internalizing external poisons we never deserved, and part of our healing must include their thorough extraction and extermination.  Positive Achievement was written as part of my own healing.  In this time of #MeToo revelations, I can't help but remain heartened by the larger conversations and social shifts happening regarding gendered violence and women's sexuality.