Asexual Trauma

Over at Queer Libido there is an amazing post about why Alok does not feel comfortable identifying as asexual. Alok is a South Asian man, and because of the tendency to emasculate and desexualize Asian men, he does not feel comfortable terming himself “asexual” without an exploration of the fact that it was trauma and colonialization that acted on his body to put him in the position he is in now (very brief summary, please read the article itself as it’s fantastic). As is my odd tendency when reading things from men of color, I found myself nodding along at many of his comments. I have no desire to co-opt his feelings or his narrative, and I deeply don’t want to play the oppression olympics, but his identification of trauma as an important part of sexual identity and his desire to look at a journey rather than a “born this way” mentality felt so important and personal to me.

As someone who never presented as feminine until I reached halfway through high school, I was never viewed as sexual. I never viewed myself as sexual. As someone who at an early age got into her first relationship and had sexuality forced down her throat, I often saw sexuality as invasive, as taking away my autonomy. Guilt has figured heavily into my sexual repertoire: I owe someone my sexuality, I owe the world my sexuality and my body. My partners have often reminded me of this fact, doing everything from telling me what clothes I could wear to guilting me into sex.

Clearly my experience of the violence and trauma of sexuality is very different from Alok’s, as my experience is that of a white woman (someone whose sexuality is deemed compulsory) rather than a brown man (someone whose sexuality is denied). However Alok’s experience of wanting to recognize his own trauma, the violence that he feels when it comes to sexuality, the distance he feels from being allowed to be a sexual subject, all these things feel familiar and important. Each of us feels that we have had our autonomy taken from us in some way, him by his race and me by my gender.

It seems intensely important to me to recognize that actively accepting the role society has created for you is not compulsory. If society bills you as sexless, you do not have to acquiesce to asexuality even if you don’t find yourself strongly pulled towards sexuality. Identities are political and they don’t appear in a vacuum. The trauma that we experience out of our oppressions plays a clear role in how we feel towards our sexuality and our bodies, but it can also play a role in how we feel comfortable identifying. As an example, I have always felt uncomfortable with the fact that the most obvious identities I have are heterosexual, monogamous, and cis, because these are the roles that society demands I have. I have spent time asking myself whether I want to publicly identify myself with these things because they have been used to damage so many women.

While Alok’s experience is one of being forcibly de-sexualized, and so he feels uncomfortable embracing that, mine is one of being forcibly sexualized. Each of these experiences can leave you feel as if you have no space to act, no connection to the body that is being acted on, no intimacy with yourself. Each of them can be traumatic. Alok asks that we openly acknowledge our trauma when speaking of our sexual identities. As I mentioned in a previous post, our histories are an important part of our identities today, and we cannot ignore that. The politics and traumas involved in those histories are part of that, and I want to be open about the fact that my body has been a site of sexual violence and mental health violence, often at my own hands. These are part of what I react to when I say I am asexual. These are part of reclaiming my body.

As Alok says “The dilemma of this brown queer body is its inability to see itself through its own eyes. The mirror becomes a site it which we view what white people have always told us about ourselves. Regardless or not of the status of my libido, I’m not sure I will ever feel comfortable identifying as asexual because it seems like I am betraying my people. ”

This dilemma is true for any person with oppressions. There is no right answer when it comes to sex. There is no certainty about whether we are the actor or the object of our sexuality. Perhaps this is the problem with labels, with identity politics, with trying to be a part of a community based on a sex drive. But perhaps this is the place we can begin to be open and vulnerable, to see ourselves as both the site of others’ violence and our own reclamations. Maybe this recognition could be the beginning of a sexuality more complex and more empathetic than any of us has seen before.

I don’t know how we can proceed from recognizing that bodies are one of the most common sites of trauma, but I know that we need to start there.

Childhood Surgery and Mental Health

When I was about five years old, I underwent a major invasive surgery. I don’t talk about it often because it wasn’t exactly dinner table appropriate: I had problems when I was a child with UTIs because my urine would reverse along my urinary tract if I didn’t pee. Yup, refluxing urine. Sexy. It had the potential to give me serious bladder infections throughout my life, and wasn’t responding to antibiotics, so in order to keep me from being in pain often and really fucking up my urinary tract, the doctor reimplanted my ureter to a better location so my urine would stay in my fucking bladder and out of my god damn kidneys.

Lovely right?

Now at the time it seemed like it was just an unpleasant experience. It happened and it hurt and I was utterly miserable for about four days of my life. I remember not really eating or sleeping at all. I remember puking a lot the first day because they couldn’t get my pain meds right. I remember peeing a lot of blood. That’s about it. I moved on. I continued my life and I didn’t think about it very often except that every time I drove past the Children’s Hospital in my city I shuddered and told my parents to get me away from the “Dreaded Hospital”.

Until a few months ago when my therapist asked if there was any trauma in my past. I shook my head, sure that my childhood was normal and safe. She pushed a bit, asking about violence or loss or surgery. Surgery? Surgery counts as trauma? Yes, apparently it does, and often leads to PTSD in children (particularly invasive surgeries such as the one I had and surgeries that require multi-day stays at the hospital).

I’ve spent some time poking around the interwebs looking for more information about surgery and trauma, about what sorts of effects surgery can have, about why surgery is considered a trauma, and I’ve been having a really hard time finding much qualitative information that might shed some light on the connections between my severe dissocciative tendencies, my depression, my anxiety, and my surgery.

As someone whose natural impulse about things is to learn about them, to get information, to explore them from every angle, having an event in my past that I cannot research is unsettling to say the least. But more than that, I find it worrisome that the only resources I can find for parents of kids who are going to be going through surgery seem to be geared either at sudden and extreme accidents or towards cancer.

It seems to me that once again mental health concerns are being ignored, even in a situation where someone is already receiving medical care and should be under close supervision of doctors. Why is there not a mental health professional involved every time someone goes under the knife? It’s a scary proposition, even if you’re prepped and feel fairly comfortable. In addition, based upon my own experiences, I would hazard a guess that even if a child does not show immediate signs of PTSD after a surgery, there is a possibility that it could affect their mental health in years to come. Having someone around to teach them strong coping skills and help them process the experience could save the medical industry lots of money in the future (imagine if they hadn’t had to provide me 3 years of eating disorder treatment. Huzzah!) and potentially lessen a great deal of emotional pain for people who have internalized lots of fear and anxiety without realizing it.

It’s becoming more and more clear with research into neuroscience and neuropsychology that the experiences that we have as children deeply affect our brains. Even a limited amount of isolation can affect a brain for years into the future. Surgery can be isolating, it can be painful, it can force a child to deal with mortality, it can be overwhelming, and it can be confusing. These things can change the brain.

Typically a kid is coddled a bit after something like surgery, so you might not see the effects right away: they would be supported, they would have their needs taken care of, they’d have mom and dad around. This means they’re not going to be in a high stress environment where they might need coping skills. It’s only when they’re put into a situation that requires coping skills, or even a situation that feels remotely like their surgery experience that those effects might begin to pop up.

This is pure conjecture on my part, because as I said before I couldn’t find much by way of information, but I suspect that having something like this in one’s past would significantly increase one’s susceptibility to mental illness in the future, as well as potentially create some intense anxieties or fears that aren’t totally rational. Imagine that I’ve been seeing mental health professionals for over five years talking about anxieties and depression, and never once did they think to ask me whether I’d undergone any sort of serious medical experience. It took until this year for someone to even consider that having that trauma in my past might be related or might help me understand. 3

Why are mental health and physical health so bifurcated? Especially given the research that we’re finding that suggests that our brain is deeply connected with all sorts of other body systems, and that we rely on the same chemicals and hormones for all sorts of things, why on earth aren’t we integrating our treatment of mental and physical health? Why aren’t we sharing medical records between our mental health care providers and our physical health care providers?

It’s hard to express how frustrated I am about this, as it feels like an important element of my own health has been hidden from me, as if a doctor had found a gene that put me at a severe risk for cancer and neglected to mention it to me (I do recognize that when I was 5 the research on neuropsychology was nowhere what it is today, so it’s not as if I’m holding a grudge, but rather just feeling confused and hurt that with more information I perhaps could have avoided some of the shit that has been in my life in the past three years). I never thought that this could be an important element of my mental health, but the moment it was mentioned it clicked into place.

The feeling I feel when I am bored, when I feel useless, when I feel alone, is the same feeling I get when I think of my surgery. It’s hard to explain the sense that comes over me when I remember those days because it’s so visceral as to be nonverbal. That says something to me about its importance in grounding many of my other emotions and experiences of emotions. I feel as if I’m wavering away from myself when I think about it, but I can see my body stilling, the panic bubbling through my chest. My teeth clench. I lose the sense of my whole body. I remember the dark, the night, lying in bed unable to sleep with no one there, no one to speak to, nothing to do. It feels like it won’t ever end, it goes on forever because I can’t do anything. It hurts. I remember how much it hurt. I remember trying desperately to stay awake when they were putting me under, a bit confused about what was happening, but knowing that I wanted to keep talking to the people around me. I don’t want to go to sleep, I don’t want to go to sleep, but now hurts and I just have to sit in it because there’s no way out.

When I think about that, it’s hard not to see just how badly that experience hurt me, how it told me that my body was probably broken, how it told me that there was something wrong with me and that the only way to be safe was to always keep my mind safe and perfect.

I just wish I had known that I could think about it or talk about it or process it earlier. I wish I hadn’t kept it tucked away for 17 years. I wish someone had helped me. I don’t know that there’s a taboo around surgery, but I certainly think there’s a silence around it. I wish there were more people talking about their experiences, more ways I could find some sense of community or solidarity.

If anyone has more resources about these connections I’d love to see them, but until then I simply want to say that if anyone else wants to talk or needs support I’d love to hear from them.