blackgirldangerous:

by The Lady Ms. Vagina Jenkins

1.

I do have visible scars. Up and down the outside of my thighs. They are brown, like me. Just in different shades. Some Carolina-clay-colored, others more of a deep pecan.  Most people who notice them nowadays are kinky. They think of them as beautiful.

I’m still trying. (To think of them as beautiful, I mean.)

2.

I got woken up in the night a lot when I was a kid. My momma screaming over me in bed.  Her crying in the TV room. Us running from some man with a small body but a loud voice.

As an adult I protect my sleep. Nothing fucks with my sleep. I sleep better alone. I lock the door. I cocoon my whole body and head in at least 3 layers of blankets. You don’t play when it comes to sleep.

3.

I’ve been crazy for more than half my life. These scars are my evidence. Evidence that I survived. Evidence of moments of weakness.  Evidence that my mind can’t be trusted to not harm my body.  Evidence that I’m still here.

“Are you still cutting yourself?” my momma asked me the second time somebody took me to the crazy hospital.

I answered, yeah, real quiet and sheepish.

“Well, I can’t do shit for ya.”

4.

Remember that Twilight Zone episode where the guy was henpecked (at work, at home) and all he wanted to do was read? I feel that dude so hard, except all I want is some soft time. It takes so much armor to be in the world. Soft time is when there’s quiet and jammy pants and no one bossing you.

5.

Being crazy, for me. Feels a lot like being black. So I suppose I should be used to it.  Mostly around the idea that at any time someone could think you need locked up. And there you go, back in the nuthouse.

It’s happened to me 3 times.  I’m supposed to be thankful that folks felt invested enough in me to want to get me help, I suppose.  But mostly I think, I wish people would have left me alone.

The nuthouse for poor people isn’t like it is in the movies. In North Carolina, in Georgia, public mental health care facilities are about getting you on enough drugs that you are quiet and present some semblance of submission. There is TV, but no books. Shitty, gelatinous “food,” cigarette breaks, too much time in a day and drugs, lots of drugs.  This isn’t therapy. This is punishment for being so outrageous as to have been crazy and poor.

I do not trust them. I am never there voluntarily. I do not trust white men with my black woman’s body, heart or mind. They don’t make eye contact with me. They use language like “we’ll see if this works” like I’m some modern Tuskegee experiment.

I learned to stop talking about being crazy. To lock the bathroom when I’m cutting. To isolate myself when I’m feeling Some Kind Of Way. To put on my Everything Is OK face in public. To Go Along to Get Along.

When you’re crazy. People think you can’t manage your own life. And they need to do it for you.  I can’t stand being managed.

I get managed enough at work. In Love.  By friends. By family.

Seems like the only time somebody’s not trying to manage me is when I’m by my damned self. They call it “social isolation.”  I call it taking a god damned moment to enjoy my own damned company and make my own damned decisions. For my own god damned self.

6.

There are 5 stairs to get into my front door. Then 7 steps. Then 7 stairs. At my last place there were 3 stairs and then 12 steps to get to my bedroom.

3 is a good number. The Holy Trinity. 3 strikes and you’re out. Ménage à trois. A good number.

When I perform, before I go on, I knock on wood. 3 sets of 3. Right hand. Then left hand. Then both hands together.

I count things a lot. When they are not in groups of 3, or easily divisible by 3, it’s bothersome.

The 5 stairs, 7 steps, 7 stairs here bothers me. I always do an extra shuffle-ball-change at the top of the stairs to somehow make it even. I don’t know why this works, but it does.

At the last place I thought the 3 stairs and 12 steps were lucky. But it turned out they weren’t so lucky, after all. That bothers me too. Except there’s no shuffle-ball-change-ing the past.

7.

The Georgia Regional Medical Center Mental Health Inpatient Unit is on Panthersville, Rd. in Decatur. The car I was living in and tried to kill myself in is in the Wal-Mart parking lot on Johnson Ferry Rd. in Marietta GA.  They give me a bus token and point me toward the road where the bus picks up the newly un-crazy (medicated? rehabilitated?) people.

It takes 3 conveyances (2 buses and a train) and about 2 hours to get from point A to point B.

8.

They say black folks (and I suppose all sorts of folks of color, really) are supposed to be a communal people. That family, chosen family and friends are the things that sustain us. They also say that we are STRONG. Especially us women.  We are STRONG BLACK WOMEN.  It’s a thing, for reals, I promise you.

Except I am not that thing.

I am weak. And vulnerable.  People confuse and scare me.  I’ve struggled my whole life with crazy, with feeling not black enough because of my crazy.  With feeling like I don’t live up to that thing. That being a STRONG BLACK WOMAN.  A FIERCE QUEER.

I need gentleness and quiet. To be respected and loved like you would love a skittish cat with a long tail if you were siting in a rocking chair.

I am a soft thing. But soft things are not invisible. We may not be loud, but we exist. We are here.

9.

I am here.

The Lady Ms. Vagina Jenkins makes performance art rooted in various African-American vernacular dance traditions (from the cakewalk to shake dancing), with 50s/60s striptease movement vocabulary and heavily influenced by mid century showgirl chic. She has performed all over the world, in places great and small. www.VaginaJenkins.com

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So, after two years, I started shaving my legs again (which you can read more about here, TW for assault), and just now in the shower I shaved over a mosquito bite and I seem to have sprung a leak. The blood just isn’t stopping. And it’s been a long time since I’ve had a cut like this and I’m just thinking a lot about back when I was all kinds of lost in the world of self-injury.

And then the hot water stopped, so I had to get out of the shower.

Thirteen and a Half

written nine years and four months later, as I remember it

I was prone on my back and moaning for show. We had been lying on my mother’s bed on a weekend, watching City of Angels as he pressured me for the last time. It was in the first half of December; we had sex a second time on the 21^st , a last ditch effort to keep him in my firstlove life, and that was the last I heard of him for nearly a year.

He moved his body against and into mine. The ending credits rolled on the screen, flickering light over the curtain-drawn room. I was increasingly horrified, and turning stiff as if the trauma was already setting in. He had been at me, nagging, for the past six months daily. His name was Nathan, Nate. Dating since we were twelve, he had eventually had enough of the making out in the living room in front of my mom (the floor, the couch, wherever), and shoving his short fingers up my skirt. His pinky fingers bent outwards in opposite directions.

He stopped and my attention snapped back to our tiny bodies. He was holding himself up on his left hand, and jerking his dick harder with the right. There was no excitement for either of us, but he was determined to get as much out of this coming of age as possible. So, it continued: jerking it harder, pushing his semi erect penis into my frozen—cold and unmoving—body, thrusting, willing it to be good somehow, and jerking it again.

The spirits of young and growing women must have been watching, as they granted me what I now know to be a small miracle—my year-older virgin sister came home with her boyfriend. They were fourteen; she was a cheerleader and more like my mother, he was a small time drug dealer, and evidently someone to try and impress. Her arrival home was an excuse to get Nate off me and dressed. I didn’t anticipate the hallway conversation to consist of his babyswagger flaunting our v-cards.

I felt arid, dry, cracked, cold, stricken and scared. I don’t remember what my sister yelled at me, but the rage? disappointment? fear? love? hurt? on her face swept up the last of my innocence, and I hardened, tough around myself and hollered right back, shrouded in self-righteousness and autonomy. That night, my abusive mother only had one word for me, ‘disappointed,’ but it was her lack of care or love that still wakes me up with nightmares.

I went into the small room I shared with my sister and my brother, turned on my lamp (the one that spun and left dancing dolphins of light on my walls and ceiling) and sobbed and cried. It was the last time I prayed.

——-

The next time I heard from him was two weeks later, December 21^st, 2002. He was frank, and wanted me to come over and have sex. This isn’t usually a part of the story I tell, but I went to his grandparents house where he was living, and this time I was on top, and it was much better. I went with the intention of getting him back as a boyfriend, but he never called me again. That’s when my self injury started.

My cutting was never very deep. I only have a few scars left from those years, but I always had several new wounds. My average was between 20-40 cuts a day. All over my body, to dull the pain, but to feel alive, too. Every time I moved, there was feeling. Any feeling that wasn’t rage was good in those days.

Months pass. I let myself have crushes on new people. One day, my mother sits me down, and tells me we’re moving in with her newish boyfriend, John. She doesn’t ask. She tells. John is Nate’s father. John is also the best boyfriend my mom has had since the divorce. This is still true to this day.

So we pack our things, move into a bigger house, all together. Nate’s bedroom was next to mine and wood paneled. Mine was at the very end of the long narrow hallway, with a full closet, room for a queen size bed, desk, two tables, dresser and a TV. It was the biggest room. I also got the computer in my room because I was the best student. So, naturally, as any 13 to 14 year old, I survived on hot pockets and rarely left my room. I made collages of Victoria’s Secret models and covered my walls. For a long time, Nate and I would never be in the same room together, and the awkward dance through the house seemed to never end.

At this point, two important things happened nearly simultaneously. My rage became mostly uncontrollable, and Nate started sexually abusing me in my home: in the living room, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in my bedroom. I used my fights with my mom as a way to get out of the house; One day I packed a bag and a box and I never went back. I lived with my uncle, afterwards.

I worked hard the rest of high school, never letting up on my goal to get away and when I was 18, I moved away to the furthest college that would take me. When I graduated last year, I still wasn’t ready to go home, for many reasons.

This year, I finally told my mom the things that were happening under her nose. This year, I told my dad the beginnings of my sexual violence history. This year, I am returning home, to tell the truth behind my rage, and to tell my uncle what he saved me from.

It’s going to be hard work—talking about sexual violence to a family that doesn’t talk about sex—and it’s not just this one story. It’s a decade of stories. But 2500 miles doesn’t protect me any better than an honest and truthful life can, so it’s worth a shot.