A Bound Testimony
All my life, I was told to keep quiet about my trauma, to be silent and move on. How can I move on if I cannot speak? How can I heal if I don’t know what healing looks like? Everywhere around us, we are told that healing and grief are linear paths, with a beginning and an end, but experiencing them is anything but linear. They are twisting and so emotionally complex that written or spoken language cannot fully capture their depth and power. My work has become a documentation, a memoir of my own journey and the toll that these emotions have taken in how I view my own body.
Experiencing sexual assault rewrites the way we view our physical and mental selves. My physical body became my blame. I looked at my own body with hate for what I believed it had done to me. The pressure of silence that I felt as a survivor of sexual assault turned my body into a vicious reminder, a monster always lurking in the shadows. Through my journey of breaking my silence and learning to heal, I am beginning to understand love for myself again. Through tailored garments made to my body, I create intricate pieces to adorn something I have such a tumultuous relationship with, mending a relationship so long broken.
Each piece of clothing, each frame of animation is a small piece of my history, through my feelings of anger, loss, grief, and love. Where words cannot truly describe the emotional complexity, my own image and clothing have become my new language, to provide comfort to survivors and awareness to the pressure of silence that survivors feel.
Bound
Bind her tighter and tighter,
Till the sheep’s bones break.
She never opens her eyes, afraid of what she’ll see.
So stupidly aware of her purpose,
So glaringly aware of His hunger.
There is no wolf in sheep’s clothing,
For He need not be so careful.
He prowls the pasture, kicking, biting, tasting.
Persistence and repetition,
The wolf does not stop to rest,
The wolf knows nothing of mercy.
He does not prowl in the night,
It is the light of day when He takes and steals.
Sweet innocent blood of the sheep,
Dripping down His jowls.
The sheep sees the endless hills behind Him.
Her eyes close, her mouth glued shut.
She sits in the pasture and waits,
Waiting for the slaughter of clicking teeth.
Waiting for the tearing flesh from his claws.
So glaringly aware of His hunger,
So stupidly aware of her purpose.
