What to do with the memory of your worst?

Trigger Warnings for rape discussion and description of severe mental illness symptoms

[EDITS:

- 2 Feb 2012: I have, for the time being, made "And You Thought I Was Sweet" invited readers only, to allow further consideration of the long-term future of the "confession" piece, and how best to deal with the valid criticisms that have been raised concerning its actual versus intended effects. Those links will therefore not work any more.

- 3 Feb 2012: Okay, I figure when I start getting anonymous commenters equating depression with merely "feeling sad" and sending hatred at my friends, it's time to close comments - hate me all you want, but that's where it stops.

- 13 Feb 2012: I have now re-opened AYTIWS with a heavily redrafted version of the original post that, while remaining truthful, I hope addresses the concerns raised by some people regarding its impact, and also explaining clearly why I believe depression played a part in the violent thoughts I had

- 17 Mar 2012: Added the passage concerning Kitty Stryker's reference to this post, and made some minor edits to polish the presentation of my thoughts and make them clearer.
]

Renee @ Womanist Musings cross-posted my piece discussing some of the issues around the existence of abuse within the BDSM community and how we (fail to) deal with it.

A couple of commenters whose names I don't recognise arrived and dragged out the "but he's a rapist!" claim, albeit here the claim was more accurately worded. They were, of course, referring to this post, in which I recount a terrible episode of my depression in which I did, indeed, come close to assaulting and raping a woman. On the plus side, I did not commit any such crime and nobody would have been any the wiser had I not chosen four years later to write publicly about the experience and mental state that I was in, and what the consequences were.

I've made no secret of the existence of that post, and I have made several posts during the history of A Femanist View in which I have linked to it, and to this post, in which a regular commenter interviewed me by email concerning that, and some of the other more disturbing writings on And You Thought I Was Sweet? AYTIWS is[was] searchable by Google, so presumably if you put the right terms in, you can find[could have found] it. I want[ed] it to be findable, because its primary purpose is to say that it is possible to choose not to rape, and to encourage men who feel like they might be going down a path that leads to rape, to choose a different path, and to seek medical help if they need it. I clearly did need it in 2004, but I hadn't got it, and was at that stage still undiagnosed with depression.

And that brings me to the crux of this post. That period, and the period in August 2007, were the times when I suffered most from depression. Except that in 2007, I knew I had depression and I knew that I could get treatment. In 2004, I didn't. So 2004 was when I was at my worst in that respect. And the things that I contemplated doing at that time were the worst I've ever been in that sense, too. These things are a part of my past and a part of the memories that led me to where I am now. I can't change them, or say that they don't exist, because they do. If someone asked me specifically, "I can change time so that you were never in that mental state, and those things never happened, should I?" then I would accept with barely a moment's thought, but such magical cures for our pasts are few and far between, except in fairy tales and movies. The only thing over which I have power, is what effect they have on the present day. How I deal with them, and how I use them. To be absolutely clear on this: we are talking about one of my most painful memories, from a period of great suffering in my life. A memory that within half an hour if it being formed, caused great turmoil and grief, even though no real harm had been done to anyone. The memory of me, at my worst.

One option, perhaps it would have been the best, certainly it seems like the safest, would have been to bury the memory forever, and shut down anything that threatened to bring it to light. This is what I call the "Bluebeard" option, after the fairy tale in which the title character has a secret door behind which are the beheaded corpses of his previous wives; when his new wife (the heroine of the tale) discovers them, he promises to add her to them (her family arrive in the nick of time to save her).

But Bluebearding my emotions was part of what led me to that day and the burden of those memories in the first place. I resolved instead to let it be a huge warning marker for myself, to help keep me from straying into such dark territory again.

In 2008, once I had got into the knack of blogging, and with "extreme pornography" censorship on the horizon, and a host of other reasons, the story was brought to mind and I thought I could see some good that could come from it. I believed that the fact that I had after all not raped anyone, even though I had been so close to doing so, and the fact that (had I been aware of them), there were better and healthier paths to follow such as treatment for mental health issues, meant that my story could be used as an example to say, "Look! Men can choose not to rape. If you think you might be in a space similar to mine, you can choose to get help instead of being a rapist." I decided that it would not be a secret, but hopefully a tool to help prevent rape.

One person who seems to get what I was trying to do is Kitty Stryker, the consent culture campaigner, who in a post about her own incident involving not being alert to a partner's withdrawal of consent, referenced this post and wrote:

It’s not a sexy story, it’s a terrifying one. It was hard to read, incredibly hard, not just because of the story but because I realized- this guy is talking about it… but he’s not the only one who’s been there.

What makes me sad is that now those links to his posts are gone. Why? Because people used his honesty to tear him apart, as we do to people who express their darkness. It’s extremely vulnerable to say “I have thought/done some fucked up things”. I hope he allows these posts to be public again soon, because I think they’re a HUGELY important part of the puzzle, and how can we talk openly about consent unless we talk openly about when consent is ignored/ broken, or betrayed?

I chose the much riskier path, in part because I believed (and still believe) that by staying silent, I would be allowing others to believe that the ways I was thinking are okay for people to think, and possibly act on, while speaking means that I can talk about what makes these thoughts and how they can be resisted and maybe even prevented from taking root. If we don't or can't talk openly about this, then we can't fix the causes of them.

I knew at the time I posted the original account, that there was a strong chance that people would see it and judge me based solely on that one piece of writing. I decided that the hoped-for benefit outweighed the feared cost. It also meant that I would face head-on the memories I bear and deal with how to integrate them into my understanding of myself. Partly, I've done this by remembering that depression made me literally "not myself" at the time, and partly by recognising how the form of my destructive urges reflected parts of who I am; and more recently by accepting (on the advice of a friend who's a trained counsellor) that maybe porn wasn't the explanation for my choice not to rape, and maybe there was still some part of me deep down that just refused to let me cross that boundary. And I cope with the memory by knowing that I have all the tools and more that I could possibly need, to avoid ever going to a place like that again - among them, the things I have learned and continue to learn from feminism. By being open about this, I seem to have benefited in terms of my own emotional balance from a "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" effect. That, in turn, has benefits for those close to me emotionally. The memories also provide a very powerful spur for me to work hard to fight rape culture and hopefully play a part in bringing it to an end, because I've seen how it worked on my own mind to produce the thoughts that I spoke about, and i want no one else to walk that path.

More generally, though, I don't know whether my decision was really the best course. Maybe for the majority of people, it would have been better to keep quiet, keep it to myself, make it a secret. Maybe putting the story out there was a mistake. I don't know, and I've done the best I can. I know at least one blogger has vowed to make sure that the text of the original post remains available online even if I delete that post, so I can't go back on the decision now. But every time someone (like that blogger with the vow) brings up this episode of my past as an attempt to discredit me or say that my thoughts and ideas have no value, or no place in the feminist blogosphere, I wonder if I would have done better to be silent.

How do you deal with these moments in your past when you were not yourself, when you were at your worst ebb and thinking and acting in the worst ways that you ever have done? If you have some incident like mine that you know messes with your own head, and will certainly be a source of judgement and will disturb others, then what do you do with it? In every relationship I've had, I've had to ask myself what the appropriate time is to bring up this matter, because it's out there on the internet, and sooner or later she (or, potentially, he) would find it themselves. How much does this person trust me, that I won't ruin everything? How much do I trust them not to use it to hurt me? How do I broach the subject and open a conversation? If I decide not to tell my partner, to what extent will keeping a secret like this poison my relationship with her, and how much damage might it do if she finds out some other way? Of course, I kind of have that issue anyway as soon as I let on that I have this blog, because of those links back to the other one - it's always possible she'll find out before I tell her, I recall that SNS had read that post before we got to the point where I wanted to talk about it, and made up her own mind about what it meant before she decided to meet me.

In the end, I still believe that it is best that people can find this information if they choose to look. For I hope obvious reasons, I view the post as very personal and very painful, so I don't want to encourage people to look particularly, but it's there for those who need it or who want to know, and can use it to help combat rape and rape culture. For these reasons, I was quite upset that someone chose to copy-paste a large chunk into comments at Womanist Musings, but they had their motivations.

If people are going to judge me for it, then they can make up their own minds about what, if anything, it means about the person I am today and whether or not they want to interact with me, or what amount of credence they want to give to the things I choose to say about life, sex, politics and all the rest of the stuff that I post here. If they don't want me around them, or don't want me posting at their blog, or whatever, then I can understand that and accept it. In the end, I can't (and probably wouldn't if I could) stop people bringing it up, if they think it will win them an argument (or, if they just want to shut me up or hurt me). I made my decision, now I make decisions on how I deal with the consequences of that decision, and so life goes on.