It is almost universal that survivors of sexual violence feel damaged. Well-meaning people (and plenty of social media posts) flatly disagree and tell us, “You are worthy just because you are human” or “The Japanese custom of kintsugi uses gold to repair broken pottery, so what happened to you is the gold in the cracks” or other platitudes.
And yet, we don’t feel better by hearing these things; we simply feel invalidated and keep our damaged selves a secret. These supposedly kind words harm us when we are feeling most vulnerable and broken. Because the truth is that we were deeply, unrecoverably, permanently harmed. And we are NOT SORRY we don’t magically feel better when people tell us we should feel better. We get confused and sad and angry and wonder why nobody believes us when we say, “I am damaged. I am broken.”
If you are a person who tells others, “You are worthy” when they bravely admit they feel broken, or if you tell yourself, “My trauma is actually gold!” and it feels like a lie, you are creating more harm on top of harm.
What if, instead, we were all able to say, “I am damaged, and I AM STILL OK.”
Because more often than not, simply being OK is all we have the strength to do. We can’t jump ahead to turning trauma into gold until we have been OK. And even being OK takes monumental effort. Sometimes we can’t get past “I am damaged.”
And that, too, is OK.
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