The far side of survival

Myths, milestones, and why I’m never moving on

Making it past a milestone reveals a no man’s land beyond.

In 2016, at some point during the immediate aftermath of being raped, I read somewhere that it takes on average seven years for all the cells in your body to be renewed. There is something to be said for being in your early twenties with the decade stretching out ahead, the trial-and-error playground of possibility not yet met. So with this milestone in mind I held out through many dark times for my “seven years on” when, I reasoned, there would be no part of my body I could say that he had touched.

Back then I had a mantra — suicide or success. I dug out an old journal entry where I wrote:

Suicide, or success, with my hair dyed dark red.

Suicide, or success, in an apartment of my own.

Suicide, or success, having read a hundred books from now.

Suicide, or success, getting tattooed in Seoul.

Suicide, or success, with a body that’s healthy and strong.

At the beginning of this month, I made it to “seven years on.” My hair is still a natural plain brunette. My skin is scarred but no tattoos. I do rent — nowhere near to owning — an apartment of my own. I’ve read more books but I haven’t read a hundred. My body does feel healthy although it doesn’t feel so strong.

But I am better at surviving than I ever was before.

Survival is a thinking, doing, living, breathing movement — not the same as moving on.

The single biggest challenge of survival has been knowing how to reconcile the desire for trauma to be voiced, heard and seen, with the desire for trauma to be lifted, purged and released.

I now know that making space for both realities to be true in moderation has kept me from being torn between extremes. Once upon a time, moving on felt like forgetting, while living with it felt like dragging something screaming, bleeding from the past through every moment in my present.

Nowadays, I hold what happened closely to my chest, not too tight and not to loose. I honour my own pain in ways that no one else ever could. But I no longer hold it close in isolation. I had my time of solely turning inward, and when I was ready, began connecting all the dots — little lights left on by other people— finding my way to a wider purpose that has truly helped me heal.

Finding other survivors, and learning from educators and activists in sexual assault prevention and survivor-victim support has been transformative, and in doing so has helped reveal the potential for transformative power in me.

I credit myself for finding strength, hope, courage, healing — not the man who raped me. But it is because of the community I have found that I feel connected to a broader reimagining of what survival could really be.

Nevertheless, now that I’ve passed the milestone I held out for I can’t help but feel something of a loss. Coinciding with the approaching end of my twenties, pressing “adult” responsibilites, a new diagnosis for my mental health, a new understanding of my sexuality, and new relationship dynamics to contend with, I’ve been feeling a general sense of ending. It seems silly to have hinged so much of my survival on an arbitrary moment in time. But now it’s been and gone, I feel a piece of myself gone with it.

How will I learn to navigate the next stretch of time before me? When I next feel suicidal, will I still hold on? Have I been putting off feeling the full scope of all these feelings for seven years until now? Will things I thought I’d healed begin again to fracture?

Everytime I’ve (tentatively) Googled what I read about all the cells in the body renewing after seven years, mercifully the results led me to the same page with the same information. Today, seeing it was the last day of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and wanting to acknowledge somehow the milestone I’d created, I Google searched once more. This time a flood of results came up denying that it’s true. While the average time it takes for cells in the body to renew might be seven, some cells can take up to 10, or even 70 years to renew. Some take as little as 14 days. Some, in the brain, may stay the same for a lifetime.

All this time I’ve been wondering how I’ll carry on. Myth or milestone, I’m grateful for seven years. I was glad to mark the occasion (with a cold-water ocean swim and Daisy’s name drawn in the sand), but now I know that at some point impossible to determine I have learnt to move beyond.

Even when I haven’t felt it, I have been ready for what’s to come.