autoethnography, post-traumatic stress disorder, geography, feminist methods, poetry
The Grocery Store I
To most people, grocery shopping is a mundane activity, something born out of necessity which can be done without a second thought, save for the typical minor annoyances (e.g. Did I leave my coupons at home? Should I have written a list? I forgot my reusable bags!). But for me, grocery shopping is more often than not a danger, a stage, and a place of blurred realities.
Today, I’m pushing my mini-cart up aisle six, my eyes drying out as I subconsciously prevent myself from blinking, my movements stiff and awkward as I hold my breath. I’m navigating my environment as if my life depends on it, walking in circles and avoiding aisles that feel unsafe. I'm not only triggered by the environment: the noises, the lights, the people; but also by the items on the shelves.
I’m scanning for Advil, when I see a section of colorfully boxed condoms. Without warning, my perception takes me beyond a grocery store. I am sitting in a doctor’s office, staring at a bowl of condoms on the counter and wondering why they so closely resemble a bowl of Halloween candy on a porch. A colorful triangle on the door reads “safe space”, but the office is still sterile and the pit in my stomach grows. A few minutes later, I find myself on an examining table; my feet tucked into pink padded stirrups, goose bumps lining my arms, my back sticking to crinkling, waxy paper. While the doctor prepares the speculum, the honorary female nurse fidgets and clamps her hand to her upper arm, a sign she is extremely off-put. I wonder why she should have the right to feel more uncomfortable with the situation than I do.
I wince as soon as the doctor touches me, feeling pain in my past and present bodies. I’m terrified, and a few rogue tears leak out in silent protest. Is she going to see inside of me the experiences I lived through? Is she going to tell me I am dead, rotting from the inside out like the memories that plague me? I can tell she is concerned by the way her face crumples up and how she let out little gasps, slowly shaking her head. Her eyes and her mannerisms reveal empathy, but her words reveal misunderstanding. I still hear her like she’s standing in front of me now, blocking my view of the Advil.
“You poor thing. You have a substantial amount of scarring. Honey, this may never go away. You really ought to be more careful. Were you planning on having children?”
Was I? I always saw that as an experience linked to the future, and yet she began referring to it in the past tense. Do I no longer have the option? I feel the pit in my stomach fall deeper like my organs are about to melt out and drip down from her speculum. I think back to the emblem on the door. “Safe space”. I feel embarrassed, I feel blamed. Did the scars on my body reveal to her the nightmares, the violence, I had relived over and over again? Or was I just another promiscuous college student who never took the candy from the porch bowl?
“E-excuse me miss, w-would you mind reaching that for me?”
The sweet, crackly voice of an elderly woman reaching for Metamucil on the top shelf pokes a hole in my doubled reality and my perception fades back to the grocery store. Yeah, there’s something in me I’ve been trying to get out, too, I think. My heart is racing and I’m covered in sweat. How long was I out for?
Introduction: PTSD and Autoethnography
We understand a great deal more about the neurobiology of trauma in 2018 than we understood only decades, years, or months ago. However, we have not looked comprehensively at the geography of trauma. The geography of trauma is multi-scalar and nested. It affects the body, space, place, and the self. Despite its pervasive everydayness, trauma’s effect on society and the self is difficult to unpack because it is nested throughout human history, within and between cultures, from the universal to the most deeply personal. It affects mind, body, and spirit; challenging societal worldviews and, more acutely, affecting personal geographies and ontologies. The essence of how someone navigates and perceives of their environment (i.e. their sense of place or place-making ability) is altered neurobiologically under the catalyst of violence – they take on or embody a geography of trauma.
For example, when someone encounters a trauma they cannot easily escape from, like being trapped, held down, or otherwise immobilized, their brain undergoes a chemical and behavioral shift. This change takes place deep within the primal brain, sending neurobiological chemicals into the system (e.g. cortisol, adrenaline) long after an immediate threat has passed. This state of hyperarousal is called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and is diagnosed by its symptoms which include flashbacks, insomnia, depression, and anxiety. Interestingly, “unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality” (Van der Kolk, 2012). PTSD is often considered a lifelong disorder, the effects of which ripple far beyond an inner monologue to spaces of tangible relationships and responsibilities, imposing on the lives of the person affected as well as on the lives of those they are closest to (Demers, 2009; Feczer & Bjorklund, 2009).
I would like to note instead of supporting traditional discourse around PTSD whereby a person is “diagnosed with” or “has” PTSD, I look at a person “on” PTSD: myself. I argue we must strive to better understand the direct and indirect violence within the structures a person on PTSD navigates and to push back against, challenge, or alter those structures. We can do this by first exploring how PTSD creates barriers or exacerbates issues within spatial navigation and interpersonal connections.
As you have already seen, I will reflexively analyze the lived experience of violence and PTSD from broader sociocultural experiences to the deeply personal and back again. I use feminist autoethnography to interrogate “common sense” and seemingly banal power structures informing internalized and externalized forms of oppression that lead to fundamental changes in personal geographies, particularly within the context of shared or public spaces. I choose autoethnography as a vehicle for this analysis because it directly relates the self to the cultural and the political (Hanisch, 1969). Autoethnography does not stem from one conical text, leaving room for creativity and reflexivity not found in traditional academic discourse, and particularly not found in geography (Besio & Butz, 2004).
Here, the field is not a far-away space I enter to extract information from before returning home to analyze and reflect upon – it is a space within my past and current experiences, my memory, and my body. I see my autoethnography as relating most closely to methods which provide active demonstration of the personal as political, making private life public and political through embodied affectivity and performative writing. Like Ettorre, “I see this as a reflection of how I live my own life. Along with many feminist writings on sex, gender, family, violence and rape, I want to show that these issues… are all seemingly private and personal matters but are in fact public, political issues” (Ettorre, 2016, p. 30).
I understand that by choosing to explore topics of violence and PTSD through an autoethnographic approach I open myself and my narrative to risks and to extreme vulnerability, and perhaps even danger. But, by doing so reflexively, I also open myself and my narrative to the possibility of having an effect on issues of social justice. Similarly,
“Norman Denzin contends that autoethnographic work must ‘always be interventionist’, meaning that it ‘gives notice to those who may otherwise not be allowed to tell their story or who are denied a voice to speak’. He contends further that autoethnography is comparable to ‘ecriture feminine, radical feminist discourse and critical theory’ that endeavor to produce ‘a radical form of writing’ that contravenes structures of power – ‘writing which reproduces the struggle for voice of those on the wrong side of power relationship” (Denzin, 2016, p. 6; Ettorre, 2016, p. 113).
My hope in writing this is you will not stand safely removed outside of my words. I choose to focus on palpable emotional experiences that connect to, and disconnect from, other ways of knowing and interacting with the world around and within us (Bochner, 2001; Ellis, 1997; Spry, 2001). As Jones et al. state, autoethnography is “making a text present. Demanding attention and participation. Implicating all involved. Refusing closure or categorization” (2016, p. 208). It is storytelling with the possibility, push, and invitation for change. In line with feminist theories, “my focus for autoethnography is on lifelong experiences of inequalities and their impact on the body and the production of self“ (Crawley, 2008a; Crawley et al., 2008).
I must disclose, for me, writing this paper has given rise to an inner dilemma. Phenomenologically speaking, it is difficult to be both in something and to then stand apart from it and represent it. When you have lived through an experience, it means you have lived through it and can then communicate that experience to others. The experience is over. However, in the case of PTSD, trauma is re-experienced and so is never completely lived through. It is a recurring experience that is never truly over. That being said, there are moments of clarity and reflection when it is possible to attempt to represent the experiences. I suspect, aside from the difficulty of the subject matter, this dilemma is why there are currently so few published autoethnographies on PTSD (Price 2015).
It also begs an ethical, professional, and personal question: Do we keep these experiences secret or do we attempt to represent them? In reading this autoethnography, I invite you to let your own secrets out from the shadows, as I remind you, the reader, that through digesting my words you in turn shine a light on my and many others’ unspoken secrets. You invite them out from the shadows. For those on PTSD, “the conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma” (Herman, 2015, p. 1). This is my proclamation.
The Grocery Store II
When I am overwhelmed or triggered, I focus on something around me in an effort to ground myself, in an effort to maintain my positioning in current reality. Today, I find myself staring intensely at a silver box of chopped frozen spinach. To everyone else, it is probably just that – a box of frozen spinach, but to me, it turns into a final lifeline tethering me to the present moment. I try hard to stay focused but the surrounding noises of metal carts spinning on worn down wheels, rubber doors opening and closing, the crinkling of plastic, all meld into noises from my memory until time and place start to converge. Someone opens the glass freezer door next to me and the burst of cold air breaks my grounding spinach tether, brings the past to the present – a full blown panic attack, right here in aisle nine.
I wish I felt half as comfortable in the shower
as I do under the blankets in my bed,
with three doors locked
and no fans on
for fear I won’t hear what happens next,
for fear I won't get out unscathed
and I’ll have to go to the hospital again,
just to swallow down a pile of pills
for anything he could have given me,
like the night you drove me to the emergency room
and waited for me in the parking lot,
when all I wanted was for someone to hold my hand.
The qualified case manager they needed was over 35 miles away,
and while I waited for her to arrive the doctor came in
and asked me if I had been drinking,
asked me why I didn't want to press charges
with words like fingernails digging into my spine,
my body twitching
as the room got smaller and smaller and smaller,
the sounds of hospital work like triggers
until I apologized to the nurse and ran away,
and you brought me to see the fireworks.
It was the fourth of July,
and while everyone was celebrating their independence,
I heaved puking in a parking lot on all fours beside a dumpster.
A woman walking by with her child
shot me that same look the doctor did,
as I felt the pills tearing away at everything inside of me
and I just couldn't keep it down anymore.
The grand finale and mine ended at the same time
and in the silence that followed,
everyone went home.
Meanwhile, a woman
driving somewhere on the highway
was told to turn around
because the waiting had taken too long,
and now my guilt is in her purse,
and she probably carries it around
like the leftover canisters
from someone else’s celebration
lying rotting in my gut,
and now I understand,
that victims of violence
have firework shells inside of them,
and every year,
the explosions in the sky
still remind me of his celebration.
After the fireworks and I
had simmered down to embers,
after our shells had exploded
and cooled to lifelessness;
all the energy expelled,
you drove me to the apple orchards
to watch the supermoon,
and we sat in your car in the darkness
and listened to the crickets.
A momentary peace fell over in their singsong
as I watched a part of me float away,
and I never saw her again.
What remained of me got out of the car
and gave my body to the grasses,
just to see what would happen
if I left this body open, and broken.
Would the darkness treat me better
than the lovelessness I had encountered
embodying human form?
The air becomes paste as I reach out and grab the spinach, fold it over in my hands until the lack of heat hurts my fingers. I deeply inhale – one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi – and am acutely aware that I’m still in aisle nine. I can feel concern and interest oozing off of people around me, their eyes dripping down my body. My once racing heart is now drained and heavy. I feel the effort needed for each beat, like my heart is just as confused as my mind is and it just can’t handle any more grocery store adrenaline.
I put the spinach back in the freezer despite our deep connection. My left brain tries to console my right brain and I tell myself I am safe, but I never truly believe it. To continue shopping is to give in to the violence, to endure the emotions welling up inside of me like morning sewer steam hitting my winter air body. These experiences are not hallucinations, though I see, hear, feel, and taste things that I know are not a part of the grocery store environment. I am fighting against a multiplied reality; a conjoining of objectivity flashing back and forth and merging time.
Violence Against Women
Discipline involves subjects who retain their freedom. Disciplinary power leaves room for compromise and resistance. Violence, on the other hand, is totalizing. Violence removes all possibility for freedom or resistance. I do not wish to prescribe an individual body to the concept of violence, though certainly an individual can enact and embody violence when they choose to. Here, I instead wish to extend the definition of violence as being contested, purposive, and incorporated into the landscape. Unwritten rules of conduct are inscribed on certain spaces, making them places where a person’s presence (or their perceived transgressions) may result in acts of violence. For example,
“many people live with a fear of violence, a fear of being robbed, mugged, raped, or murdered. Consequently, we may alter our behavior in response to a pervasive, albeit latent, fear of violence. We might, for example, avoid particular places at certain times of the day or night (Tyner, 2012, p. 11)”.
In other words, places are not merely disciplined spaces, constituted by social relations over time. They embody a form of power beyond the predictable command and control model typically thought of when one hears the word violence.
Many women experience this violence on a regular basis. However, the banality or everydayness of violence may work to desensitize women and minimize their response, or excuse and dismiss the violence perpetrated against them altogether. In a society where gender norms are so entrenched, acts of violence are not necessary to maintain a patriarchal systemic functioning. This is downplayed when male violence against women is simply posed as a method to maintain domination. As Tyner concedes, “acts of violence by men are not used to maintain patriarchal systems as a whole, but are used to maintain their own personal and unique understanding of gender roles and relationships” (2012, p. 42). Often, the act of victimizing women is less a function of the relationship between the man and the woman themselves. Rather, it is more a function of the man’s relationships with other men whereby they prove their masculine status to one another by acting violently against women. Taken as a whole, threatened and actual violence continually reproduces a system of male dominance.
From early on, the boys will be boys attitude perpetuates physical confrontation as a normal way for young boys to develop into men who use violence selectively and strategically. In contrast, young girls are expected to be passive, learning that feminized verbal taunts like ‘girl’, ‘sissy’, and ‘pussy’ are used to humiliate other boys, while simultaneously degrading themselves and other girls. In this way, we are brought up in a culture of silence and a politics of denial, which arise in situations where an obvious truth is not recognized (McKinney 2007). The elephant in the room is ignored socially and culturally in favor of sensationalized acts of violence, minimizing or ignoring the importance of everyday acts of violence (Zerubavel, 2006).
Furthermore, as Wright suggests, by reproducing the woman as the source of the problem (e.g. occupying spaces at night, drinking, wearing provocative clothing) we simply blame victims for provoking violence, and therefore also for not being innocent victims (Wright, 2006, p. 686). We also place blame internally when we carry our traumatic secrets with us instead of publicly sharing our experiences. By preventing someone from taking control of our narratives and thereby re-victimizing ourselves, circulation of traumatic secrets by survivors of physical and sexual violence is carried within our bodies. Such “internalized forms of oppression make us complicit with this violence, insisting that we believe we did something to provoke its outcomes” (Berry et al., 2017, p. 553). As exemplified by my grocery store narrative, this internalized oppression and hidden trauma can make even the simplest of tasks a monumental effort.
This is in part because when power is exercised it doesn’t have singular or uniform effects. It has multiple or contradictory effects. This often results in survivors holding onto a long-distance, disembodied, interpersonal violence and the emotions which follow (e.g. guilt, shame, isolation, dissociation, and fear). For example, from Steele’s novel about her experience coping with the aftermath of her rape, this theme continually emerges. “Alone with thoughts of what should have long been forgotten, I let myself be carried away into the silent screams of delirium” (Steele, 2014). She holds these memories in her body, provoking interpersonal violence and emotions or states of delirium and shame. In the case of PTSD, these traumas are relived over and over again, further entrenching the survivor in a reality passed but ever present. “You begin to feel a pressure, this relentless assault on the senses; a body in touch with a world can become a body that fears the touch of a world. The world is experienced as sensory intrusion. It is too much” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 23).
The Grocery Store III.
I’m in the check out line now, watching food in pretty packaging and clear plastic bags pass by me on the conveyor belt. People are talking, maybe to me, maybe around me, but I can’t hear what they’re saying and at this point I don’t care to. Reality swings, and I grip tightly to my cart. If I let it go I might float up into the ceiling rafters. The person in line behind me is impatient and squashes their items up against mine, covering the plastic divider. I feel their agitation creep into my personal space; their mannerisms spilling into my peripheral vision, their sighs contorting images in my mind. It’s then that a familiar shape on the belt approaches me: a simple box of farfalle shaped pasta. And that’s all it takes. I feel helium replace my spinal fluid.
Suddenly, I’m eating dinner alone in a campus dining hall. I have a mouth full of mediocre half-cooked farfalle when a male student introduces himself and sits down at my booth before asking for permission to join me. I immediately feel violated by his presence and his apparent entitlement to my space, but I chalk these feelings up to my general disdain for meaningless socializing and give him the benefit of the doubt. Shortly thereafter, the self-proclaimed alpha male begins stalking me for what would stretch from days to months to years. He learns my schedule, walks past my classrooms, follows me down the street, into the library, across the campus. He finds out where I live and gets past my locked door at night. I go into class with no texts and leave with hundreds. My battery drains, and the device I use to connect myself with friends and family becomes another conduit of oppression and violence. The fluorescent lighting feels like spotlights and my grades begin to slip. He laughs when I express my desire to be alone. I am completely terrified, and it makes me laugh, too.
Having repeatedly lost privacy and control in my most personal tangible and intangible spaces, I enter a state of hypervigilance and self-surveillance in all my environments. Constantly aware of my surroundings, I am held captive even when I am alone. While some are aware of the situation, nobody offers to step in and help me. Instead, my friends encourage me to drink. They are tired of my strange new behaviors and instead of talking to me about it they invite me to parties to drown the strangeness out of me. Eventually, I withdraw further until I stop socializing altogether.
When I finally come forward nearly two years later, I am in fear for my life. At the Women’s Center I am quiet and don’t respond when the workers in the office speak to me, their faces crinkling as they look at each other, curious. My silence often outcasts me more effectively than any sound ever could. When I am called for my appointment with an empathetic smile, I finally let out the breath I’m holding. She asks me what I need help with but I can’t get the words past my throat without feeling hands on them, can’t get them out of my mouth without feeling fingers inside of them, can’t say them without tears trying to serve as an alternate escape. Shortly thereafter, I learn he is a repeat offender, and my heart sinks. I become a number, a statistic. Worse yet, I realize this trauma inflicted on me is inflicted on others who look like me, live near me, fear him like me. It takes many more months before he finally stops appearing, though the effects of him, like a phantom limb, remain with me to this day.
Healing and Empathy
I am a different self now because trauma has changed me fundamentally. However, I am also resilient and recognize we all embody multiple selves. We are all selves in motion – continually changing. While this change ideally happens slowly or through a series of personal decisions and seemingly banal experiences, it can also happen suddenly through direct external violence, devolving into internalized violence. I recognize I am now a “new” person occupying a “new” body, and yet I still stand on all my previous selves (e.g. previous bodies, ontologies, identities) that I have lived through.
It is said that the final stage of healing is using what has happened to you to help heal other people. Disclosing of experiences you have survived can enable someone else to feel it is possible to disclose of their experiences. However, not everyone will gain that possibility in witnessing your extreme vulnerability, and that is okay, too. Some people still will push against your truth, will question you (supporting rape culture), or will never care to listen or understand. Other people’s silence or push-back should not prevent us from coming together nor from realizing the strength in ourselves and in the power of our connections with others. In the words of Gloria Allred, “Speaking out for women in and of itself is an empowering experience. There doesn’t have to be an end to that” (Grossman & Sartain, 2018).
As a woman speaking out against injustice, no matter the kind or the degree, we become a feminist killjoy, a space invader, a feminist police. We are considered to be ruining a conversation or a happy occasion with our negations. We are viewed as posing a problem when we point to a problem. Like the way Sara Ahmed describes a feminist movement, I found my entry point to feminist theory in this recognition.
“A feminist movement might be happening the moment a woman snaps, that moment when she does not take it anymore, the violence that saturates her world, a world. A feminist movement might happen in the growing connections between those who recognize something – power relations, gender violence, gender as violence – as being what they are up against, even if they have different words for what that is” (2017, p. 3).
Part of our toolkit for healing includes empathy. It includes meaningful attempts to listen and support one another emotionally, socially, and politically. Violence against women is an intersectional issue, affecting more than just the girl on the milk carton. It crosses genders, ages, races, geographies, and personal backgrounds. Violence against women is also a trans-geographical phenomenon. Therefore, destruction of institutional and cultural normalcy and acceptance of rape culture, patriarchy, and other pervasive forms of violence needs to come from places of intersectional trans-politics, from places crossing spaces of identities and geographies.
Trans-geographical practices of radical vulnerability, for example, (i.e. sharing without knowing how it will be responded to; a willingness to accept that which cannot enter the realm of translation), should be applied to every process that follows sexual assault from victim’s advocacy and legal justice to emotional healing and acceptance of the self, as should empathy and care. “A more critical engagement with the relationship between care and vulnerability reveals the enormous potential of imagining geographies of existing and evolving relationalities of care…” (Dowler & Ranjbar, 2017, p. 434). Therefore, I ask you, the reader, to take from this a reminder: the next time you hear someone say we no longer need feminism, please remember the woman in the grocery store, tortured not by her own mental and emotional delusions, but by reality.