How does sexual violence change you? Can we actually quantify an impact that is ongoing? How do you measure injuries that move and change like tides, ebbing and flowing nearer and further from the shoreline of your pain? Does time truly heal all wounds and how does trauma change time? What part of our pain is born in the past, shadows our present and trails us into our future? What, if any, part of our human spirit transcends time after trauma?
Our society constantly quantifies the movement of time, always forward on the clock, the inevitable turning of the pages on our calendar – dates, anniversaries, appointments, beginnings and endings – always relating to time. As survivors of sexual violence, times and dates can concurrently be intensely significant – looming ahead and overwhelming our thinking, while at other times, lost in our attempt to outrun the immediacy of the moment with our past tracking not too far behind – the idea of time is irrelevant, intangible and inconvenient. Ultimately, however, our nature as humans causes us and those involved with us before, and particularly, those who remain involved after sexual violence, to look to time as an indicator of where we should be in our recovery.
Read more here.