telling your story is worth doing
“The line was, the end of the song, ‘You were an evil man most of the time, but on our best days we were partners in crime.’ And it was true, and that’s what makes the whole thing complicated. It’s like, if your abuser could be – and this is true for many people, and I won’t say they’re lucky, because nobody’s lucky to survive abuse, well, they’re lucky to survive, but not lucky to have been abused – but if you can have a monochromatically evil person antagonizing you, then it’s very easy just to say 'that was a shitty person who treated me shitty, not my friend who couldn’t stop himself from ruining everybody’s life,’ you know.
….You know a person doesn’t get like that by himself. It’s a wishy-washy liberal way of thinking, but unfortunately it’s also true. That you don’t just wake up one morning and go, 'You know, I’m going to suck at marriage and fatherhood. I’m just going to become abusive.’ That happens to you because you came from a place where that happened to you.”
– John Darnielle, interview with Marc Maron
I just re-listened to this interview, which I first listened to 2 ½ years ago.
I can’t possibly overstate how important it was to me to hear this. It was the first time I had ever heard somebody say that your abuser can be somebody you have affection for and that that doesn’t make either the abuse or the affection any less genuine. At age 32, I had never heard anyone say that you can call it abuse even if your abuser wasn’t 100% horrible to you all the time. Hearing this was like being given permission to say that I was abused without the burden of feeling like I would be called upon to justify every time I had a friendly conversation about politics with my mother (as an adult); without the burden of feeling that I had to recast it in some evil light that she took me to the science museum and the library. It was when I began to feel free to start knowing the truth; to feel free to identify my experience with that of others without feeling that I had to asterisk it or that I was appropriating. It was terrifying. It was important to me then to hear it, and it’s important to me now to say that hearing it changed my life.
(The quote is 27:28 into the interview; from there it just gets realer. CWs re: abuse and drugs apply.)
Talk about your life. To the extent that it feels safe, talk vulnerably and openly. I suspect the fear of being classified as an “oversharer” or “professional victim” looms as large for many as it does for me, and the risk of getting dismissed or mocked is real. But also real is the possibility that someone will hear you who needs to hear what you have to say, and that the specific way in which you say it, solely by virtue of being you and having lived your life, will get through to that person when others didn’t.
snoopywithmusic