Ouroborous
Content warning: this story contains mention of rape, medical trauma, and self-harm.
Let me begin by saying that this is a story both unique and ubiquitous. It is one of many stories that contribute to why I struggle to trust men. The way these kinds of stories sit together in a wider framework is also why I don't trust the state to keep us safe. We have all seen, for example, the rhetoric around the way the state frames survivors of rape/sexual assault as victims; or, if an incident is reported, treated with as much distrust as perpetrators in the name of proof. We are much more complex than either of these flattenings, which leave little room for considerations of gender, sexuality, class, race, ability, among many other intersections that may make up our identities. I'd ask you to suspend judgement through this retelling and remember that the ingrained finger-pointing of rape culture can feel like a behemoth against the logic of consent we hold in our bones.
What I'm really interested in is the idiosyncratic shape of trauma. How memory creates hoops to jump through or the way conversations with friends become choral during the act of sharing. One story is never just that – an isolated incident – but a stone thrown in a pond that ripples outwards. Different shaped stones splash into the same pond, which isn’t a pond, but a pool, then a lake, then a delta that meets the sea. To speak plainly, I’ve been thinking about rape, specifically mine, and the persistence of trauma. Through reading, listening, and speaking amongst similar narratives, I’m now writing this down. I’m ready to try and give this nebulous trauma a tangible form – a permanence to contrast the way it intangibly repeats within me.
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Do you know the ancient symbol of the ouroboros? From the ancient Greek meaning ‘tail eating’, the ouroboros has appeared in various iterations throughout history, most commonly as a serpent devouring its own tail. Stretching back as far as ancient Egypt, this symbol has been interpreted in many ways, often as the infinite cycle of death and rebirth. A particularly famous depiction was found in a third century text, The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, accompanied by the Greek phrase, ἓν τὸ πᾶν, or ‘The All is One’. The author was an alchemist in Alexandria, one of four women credited with the ability to produce the philosopher’s stone – a mythical substance believed to have the power to transform base metals into silver and gold. The ouroboros made a home in Gnosticism, Hinduism, Norse mythology, and Jungian psychology, spreading its universal appeal of opposing forces existing harmoniously.
Transformation is a key concept of alchemy. Several of its processes are defined by the changing of one thing into another, an act both mystical yet quantifiable to those that hold the secret. While the beginning materials and desired outcome are certain, the instructions were written in cryptic language varying between alchemists. The symbol of the ouroboros became lodged in my brain, despite not being able to remember when I first learned of it. Throughout my subconscious search for understanding, I’ve found several examples speaking to the idea of change as constant, and time repeating in loops; whether in relation to political demands, how writers and artists speak to each other from the archives to the present day, or imperceptible personal shifts only notable after space and reflection.
This cyclical nature of time speaks closely to how I have experienced the trauma loop. I go for long stretches without thinking about what happened. Then, a character on a TV show will allude to assault or, worse, be assaulted; or I’m in bed with a partner, and my mind skips to that evening like a scratched vinyl. Then I see assault everywhere, because it is everywhere, as if I’m a radio tuned into a specific frequency. I wonder, is the experience I refer to the head or the tail of the ouroboros? Or is it neither? Simply one scale on the whole snake to be shed. Despite my attempts to speak plainly, it is easy to lapse into the metaphorical. It might be the English Lit degree at play, but I suspect it’s a trauma trick to keep me from telling you (or myself) what actually happened. Have you noticed how I haven’t done that yet?
In her essay, Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes, ‘the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is to resist such metaphoric thinking.’ She examines the ways in which cancer and tuberculosis have been described using militaristic and moralistic metaphors in classic literature and public parlance, removing illness from being understood as something that simply happens to the body. This metaphoric thinking shapes the way we treat people who live with illnesses, often, Sontag writes, by victim-blaming, but also attempts to ground the inexplicable – sometimes people just get sick. A few years after the rape, I was diagnosed with endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, cyclothymia, and fibromyalgia. The latter is a nebulous disease diagnosed through a process of elimination. It causes pain all over the body and extreme tiredness. New studies have indicated that it could be autoimmune in origin, but little is known about its underlying causes, with most medical information indicating a physically or emotionally stressful situation as the trigger.
Before this collection of diagnoses, I was unwell in my relationship with him – at the time only (only?) mentally (or, so I thought). I was commuting a three-hour round trip to a job in which I was both unhappy and unsupported. I dreaded my desk so much I used to cry every morning, in the toilets at lunch, and when I came home. Around this time, I had headaches, inflamed joints, suicidal thoughts, and felt sick all the time. I only realised how often I mentioned the last symptom because he made a tally chart on a whiteboard of how many times a day I said it. But don’t worry, it was a joke.
He was into the gym. Like, into the gym. After getting fed up with me complaining (I wonder how many times women have stated a fact and been perceived as complaining. I mean, that is hysteria in a nutshell, right?), he suggested I change my diet and do more exercise. So I changed. Hard. I wanted both to please him and to try to stop feeling like the ‘weak one’ in our relationship. Looking back, I was the fittest and lightest I’ll ever be. I was also weighing myself upwards of three times a day and still couldn’t stop crying. So I quit my job and found another one. I was doing my best to perform the perfect girlfriend. I was always ready for sex, baked for his friends, and wore thigh high stockings to hide the fresh scars. About a year or so later, he dumped me in a public park, so I “wouldn’t make a scene”.
*
Despite the neat circle of the ouroboros’ metaphor, trauma seldom allows you to come out the other side of the loop reborn again. It’s more of a repetition, a recurring dream that’s fact, one that your mind manipulates you into completing with each retelling. In her book-length lyric essay Tender Points, Amy Berkowitz describes her rape at the hands of a male doctor when she was a ten-year-old girl; he told her he was performing a ‘medical exam’. In one fragment, she portrays herself as Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf as her rapist: ‘the wolf is continually interrupting my walk through the forest: emerging from behind the same tree again and again to block my path. Imagine it repeating like a GIF.’ As a result of recalling this trauma she had suppressed, the following day her body awakes inflamed with the very physical pain of remembering, which results in subsequent diagnoses of vulvodynia and fibromyalgia. Her mind and body replay the incident ‘like a GIF’, defined by website builders Wix as, ‘a series of images or soundless video that will loop continuously and doesn't require anyone to press play’.
Berkowitz’s narrative continues to play with metaphors, despite finding many of them inadequate. In another fragment, she compares the non-restorative sleep of fibromyalgia to Sarah Winchester’s architecturally anomalous mansion. Until her death, Winchester (widow of her husband’s rifle fortune) used the money to continually expand the property, which grew to comprise 160 rooms across 24,000 feet, containing a completely sealed room, trap doors, and staircases that lead to nowhere. Sources say she did so to accommodate the spirits of those slain by her husband’s guns, but others claim it was a hobby to keep her occupied after her husband and infant daughter died. Berkowitz writes, ‘What vigil is my sympathetic nervous system keeping? [...] It’s building secret passages inside my body to route the past around the present and keep trauma out of sight, like servants in a smoothly running household.’ I’d extend this metaphor to say that fibromyalgia is the body as a house with a poorly set up alarm system. After successfully identifying an intruder once, the system now operates on a hairline trigger, regardless of whether the perceived threat is a paper bag or a body trying to break in. The symptoms of trauma and the way our bodies can repeat or manifest them into illness creates an internal blueprint, albeit one with fragile foundations. While we are not solely defined by the worst that has happened to us, a triggering event can initially land us in a completely sealed room even if we do have the coping mechanisms to chisel a way out.
Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House, is also engaged in a reconstruction project – or, as she calls it, resurrection – of her toxic relationship with a charismatic, manipulative woman. Setting a thematic tone, the opening quote comes from French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, ‘Memory itself is a form of architecture.’ Machado’s opening fragment, “Dream House as Not Metaphor,” then exemplifies the duplicitous nature of memory/trauma. Grounding the House as a physical structure reminds us that while it exists, it doesn’t bear any of the markers of the abusive relationship that played out within its walls. She writes, ‘I bring this up because it is important to remember that the Dream House is real. It is as real as the book you are holding in your hands, though significantly less terrifying.’ So to replicate the gaslighting she endured in this place, she engages in series of playful acts to wrong-foot the reader, shaping the Dream House into several false senses of security through familiar genres, such as self-help best seller, murder mystery, and romance novel.
In a particularly poignant use of literary trope, the Choose Your Own Adventure section fools the reader into the illusion of choice by offering several non-inflammatory options to prevent Machado’s then-partner from being angry. Spoiler alert – all of the options end the same way, but one page not listed among the options reads, ‘You shouldn't be on this page. There’s no way to get here from the choices given to you. You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me.’ Machado pre-empts an oft-asked question of domestic abuse victims: why didn’t you just leave? And, even if someone has the material circumstances to safely leave the abuse cycle, it doesn’t mean that the cycle leaves the individual, that they won’t blame themselves for it, or that it won’t continue to spin out in future relationships.
In these works, both authors are engaged in undoing and remaking their worlds as survivors of trauma within a wider context of shame, disbelief of the female-coded voice, and queerness. They indicate that memory is non-linear and messy, particularly when trauma is involved. While the mind sets traps to avoid the unthinkable, both of these accounts’ success lies in their reconstructions. One of memoir’s characteristics is the ability for the writer to, as Machado says, ‘re-create the past [and…] summon meaning from events that have long been dormant’ into the order they choose. There is no time limit or official taking notes whilst scrutinising your behaviour. While not everyone, including some of the subjects of such recollections, will believe these accounts, what matters is that they/we are the ones telling their/our stories. As Berkowitz says, ‘All I have to do is tell you. All you have to do is believe what I tell you’ – two opposing halves of a communicative loop. Through building something from a disruptive, destructive event, a transformation takes place. I see Berkowitz and Machado engaged in individual kinds of alchemical art, their respective writing process as personal mystery that will have revealed things to them, enabling the transformation of memoir into a unique literary form. And so, in their vein, I’ll now reconstruct the thing I have otherwise been avoiding.
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I’m in my early twenties and I work in an unsavoury profession that pretends it’s not, with unsavoury people who pretend they’re not. A profession that’s indiscriminately populated by older men who pretend that long, boozy lunch meetings and award ceremonies somehow constitute work. Never mind that, to the young women they work with, these men are near-identical, especially when their wedding bands catch the low bar-light as they raise their hands to wave across more wine. This generosity is loaded and time sensitive, as amongst them there will always be one who chances a remark so overtly sexist it lands like a child falling over – a pause to register the shock, before deciding whether to cry or carry on. While these other young women and I exchange glances, we always carry on.
It is most likely after one of these events (flag 1, intoxication) that I text my ex (flag 2, intention) to continue one of the several casual hook ups I’ve fallen into with women; but also with men who look just like him (flag 3, promiscuity), who all look like the men I work for, only twenty years younger. The booze fizz flattens as I’m bundled into the door with a, ‘Shh!’ His friend is staying in the lounge in the flat where I used to live and he doesn’t want to wake him. Read: he doesn’t want his friend to know I’m here, that I’ve returned. That I'm inching closer to biting my own tail, gleefully smiling as I sink my teeth in thinking: this is fine, this is what I want. I tell myself this even as he pushes my head away as I lean in to kiss him because kissing is only for people who are in relationships. Or something like that. I can’t remember what he said, but it’s not the first time he says it or pushes my jaw.
In the fragments not blotted out by red wine, I remember being on all fours, crying, and the door shutting softly behind me. The next morning I’m sore and when I wipe after peeing, there’s blood on the tissue.
*
One of my favourite films is The Matrix. My recent ex and I used to watch the franchise often and one of many tender memories I have is unbraiding her hair while a car chase sprawls across a highway. A few months earlier, we started dating and one conversation caused everything to spill out. I’d aired a secret that I couldn’t swallow back up. When she told me the word I knew this act was - that I had told him it was, the experience I had tried to forget - I felt as if I had been given a very delicate vase to hold but all I wanted to do was drop it from a great height to see it shatter. My mood shifted to sudden fury with no real provocation. I drank too much, too often, then cried with hangover anxiety, my body tense all the time.
Much like Neo, I found that once someone had given me the option of the red pill, I couldn’t return to the Matrix without knowing it for what it is – an artifice. The person I was before, the life I had, no longer existed. This transformation was involuntary, making me both stronger and weaker while I tried to balance these opposing internal states. Not only this, but now all of the people within the Matrix could suddenly morph into an Agent Smith or one of his goons – a villainous, faceless, force of evil. For me, that hairline trigger was always scanning for this potential shift, for the possibility of harm. While my ex granted me a place of refuge, as did embracing my queerness, I didn’t realise the heaviness of trauma. Even now, as I only engage in intimacy with other queer people, my body – the loop – repeats.
When Neo sees a black cat then another identical one follows it, he bemusedly says, “déjà vu”. Trinity is instantly alarmed, replying “Déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.” This glitch repeats within me, even if the parameters of the situation are not identical. If a violation can happen once at the hands of someone you trusted, who changed the parameters of the situation while it was unfolding, what’s to say it couldn’t happen again, and again, and again?
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While this is the end of the essay, it is not the end of my trauma loop. This fragmentary attempt to create order through various metaphoric lenses could be another act of avoidance. It could be an attempt to intellectualise my body as a site for chronic illness in lieu of being physically in control of it. I can’t rewrite the past or individually change the architecture of the world, so for now I must continue to follow the loop to its end and hope to be reborn in a body that’s a little stronger each cycle.
