If you’ve signed up to be part of Chapter Chats and get more information about my life than you probably care to every Friday, you likely know this: I am generally an open book. If I can stand in front of hundreds of people and say, “I was raped”, there’s really not much you can ask me that I’m not going to be willing to answer. At a recent book signing, I told the crowd, “Just so you know–this might get heavy because, well, it’s really hard for me to play at surface level conversation. I usually just–” I made a diving motion with my hand. “Jump into the deepest part of the ocean.” The audience laughed with me, but I was telling the truth. So, if you ask me what others might consider to be “too personal” of a question, I think, “Oh, wow, he must really want to know or he wouldn’t ask.” And that means you might be interested in a connection that matters–whether that connection is for five seconds or five years is really irrelevant. It takes only a second to destroy someone’s confidence–and it can take only a second to rebuild it.

In other words: ask away. It won’t scare me off; in fact, it’ll probably get you more than you bargained for.

But I am human.

And, although I actively try to transform the most painful parts of my life into a sort of stained-glass situation where the broken pieces reflect light and hope, there are foundational fears that make my constant steadiness stumble. Up until a few years ago (Haven, really), the biggest trigger was mentioning the little girl out loud. Because she’s very real to me and promises to her have literally cost me more than I care to enumerate. Talking about her out loud made me feel excruciatingly vulnerable because if someone said “but she’s not real” – it would make me spiral. So, for awhile, I could write about her. But I couldn’t talk about her. It’s still not particularly easy, and I’m likely to tear up if that’s the direction a conversation goes, but I can—and will–do it.

What I haven’t really explored publicly is what I –feel– when I write books that include a love story. I’ll talk for days about why I include love stories and I’ll chat your ear off about why intimate scenes are sometimes important for me to include. But I have never publicly stood in front of another human and explained why I feel the need to justify it.

The question: Why do you have to include the love story? Why do you have to write the intimate scene?

Most of the time, I answer that by saying a simplified version of the truth: “She is a survivor of rape. She cannot truly heal without addressing intimacy. It would be pretending that a rape survivor could heal completely without learning to trust physical touch.”

The usual follow-up: Alright, but does it have to be so graphic? Couldn’t you just say, “And they kissed and it was all the things?

And this is the question that will likely make me cry because I can’t answer truthfully without scraping against something raw and scary.

..

But I thought I’d try.

Since ECHOES is currently the one that’s just been released (Kindle version still free until 11:59pm TONIGHT), I’ll use it for this post. There are a couple of things that are important to understand contextually first, though, if you are not familiar with the premise of Echoes.

1. Soryelle is seven when a village drummer cuts the rope that ties her to a stake. Branded as a witch, the village wants her dead but, instead, Maikel saves her life and she runs into the forest that they call Kavaru. From that point until she is 19, she lives completely off-grid. The village–and Maikel–think she’s dead, killed by wild boars or maybe an injury from a cassowary or maybe she just froze to death. There are a few exceptions: some village witches know she’s alive but reveal that to no one. And a powerful man in the village also knows. He doesn’t bring her back to the village because she serves a purpose: she’s his. This means rape. So, what’s important to understand is that she’s been raped, consistently, for a decade. Control is maintained through psychological warfare: he convinces her that because her mother “fed her a baby’s heart” (based in real ideology), her very blood is poisoned. This, by extension, means she is poison. Get near anyone and her very presence endangers life. The only way to get better is to get “new blood.” New blood = rape. With no one to tell her any different, Soryelle internalizes this belief: she truly, genuinely believes that if she touches someone, they might die.
   
   
   
2. I was raped. I remember clenching my legs, afraid of walking, because I thought I might bleed again. And, for many years, I genuinely, truly believed that rape was a legitimate punishment that was warranted because who I was as a human being was tainted. Irrevocably damaged and inherently bad. The smallest things “proved” this: asking for more paper to write on even though we didn’t have money? Proof that I was selfish. I could give more examples but the bottom line is that I believed him. Deep down where it really matters, I believed him. Because the alternative was to believe that I was truly that helpless, truly that vulnerable. If it wasn’t really my fault, if I couldn’t make it stop just by being “a good girl”, then that meant someone else might also do the same thing. I could never really be safe. And, if I couldn’t be safe, then I couldn’t trust kindness. And, if I had to give up the idea that people could be kind in order to feel safe, then I really struggled to find hope. So, I internalized the abuse echoes as completely as Soryelle did.
   
   
   
   And – crucially – sometime around my late teens, after he was arrested for the final time, I made a vow to that little girl: no one would hurt her like that again. Not ever. And that little girl struggles mightily to differentiate rape from positive, loving intimacy. The advocate in me knows better. The writer in me knows better. The middle-aged woman’s brain I carry knows better. But my heart doesn’t.

ECHOES is a book with many themes. We can talk about resiliency for decades. We can talk about memory. We can talk about silence. We can talk about survival. We can talk about how she says she left her voice at the stake for a couple years at least, and we can talk about reclamation. Let’s talk about gender apartheid or child abuse–I have so many stats that can blow your mind. But there are other themes too: like is love enough? does love matter? how hard do you have to be loved before you start to question core scripts that have defined your life?

I played with those last themes in a few other books, too, like Me, especially, and The Storyteller. But none as strongly, or as clearly, as with ECHOES. What it means is that there had to be an undeniable and unshakeable emotional bond between Soryelle and Maikel. The thing I cared about the most for this book was making very certain that Soryelle knew she was loved. In real life, she would likely have pretty severe PTSD and would likely never fully recover after all she’s put through. In order for her to feel truly loved, she needed to also feel that someone truly saw her — in all her ugliness, in all her brokenness — and loved her anyway.

And here’s the thing:

Emotional bonds are the strongest. Emotional bonds can move mountains. But unless you feel at your most vulnerable with someone, unless you can truly let someone see you, there is a ceiling to any emotional bond you might have. Self-protection kicks in hard and it will guard you against giving too much, oversharing (ahem), and it will help you keep the ugliest of your truths buried. If I were to name a few of my ugliest truths, they might include things like: You could disappear and no one would care because you are forgettable. Your body is repulsive. You are not a real writer. You are selfish. People are kind to you because they don’t want to tell you the truth or because they don’t know who you really are. And, deeper than all that: “It takes two to tango” — you had someone to tell, and you didn’t, so you have no right to complain. It was your fault and you just like attention. And because the core of me hears those things on repeat, even when I’m not conscious of it, I carry great fear of breaking the promise I made to that little girl that said no one would hurt her again.

Keeping that promise means:

No committed relationship because the only voluntarily intimately committed relationship I’ve ever had was not healthy. Add that to my father’s abuse and the idea of sex almost one hundred percent of the time makes me feel like I’m betraying the promise to that little girl. It’s been more than a decade since I’ve been on a date or since I’ve had anyone think hm; I’m interested in seeing what it might be like knowing a little bit more of her. Bottom line here: It’s been long enough that the idea of intimacy makes me feel emotionally laid bare, vulnerable and scared.

Chapter 22 of ECHOES includes some pretty graphic and intense scenes of pure intimacy. And even writing just that sentence makes my stomach twist in knots, my shoulders lift to my ears, and every guard I have around my heart stand at attention. Because the voice deep inside screams that, by depicting positive, healthy, consensual sex, I am betraying a little girl whose whole world was ripped from beneath her by rape. There’s a massive burn on my heart that screams that by writing that chapter, I betray the teenage Tiffini who made bruises on her skin with hairbrushes and only ate on the weekends because of things her dad would say. The names I would be called. How, in the one consensual relationship I did have, I’d find myself dissociating because I didn’t feel seen; I felt like it wouldn’t have mattered who I was, as long as my body was beneath him.

And also… I know better.

I know how powerful it can be to feel something touch that makes you forget the world. I’m not just saying that to give hope. I’m not just saying it because I want to believe it’s true. I know it is true. I have also experienced a kiss that felt so completely and utterly different that it made me forget and, for just a moment, feel like I was someone I wasn’t. It felt so different that the little girl didn’t recognize it as fire and did not start sounding fire alarms in my head. I cannot bold, italicize, underline, enlarge or otherwise emphasize the magnitude of that because it meant I felt safe. Fear did come, but not until after I could breathe again. I remember asking, “This is going to sound… but is it me you want?” I couldn’t have verbalized at the time why I asked that. I was all of 20 and no one knew anything. It probably sounded coy to him, but my whole interiority was turned upside down. I had just experienced something that made me second guess my father’s voice for the first time–and only–time in my life. It made me seriously question the you are incapable of giving OR receiving physical pleasure because you are inherently bad, broken, damaged, different. It made me wonder if maybe I could be “enough” for someone to love.

Clearly, I didn’t trust it enough because every time the kiss ended, and I could breathe, I heard things like, “See? You ARE what I said you were. You’re not really a good girl. You just proved it and he’ll figure it out soon enough.” On the heels of THAT came the little girl. And, when she showed up, I shut down, hiding behind walls. Even if that meant losing what had been the most important relationship I’d ever known. When someone raises their eyebrows or side-eyes me and says something joking like, “That shows a whole different side of you,” my heart hurts. Because you know what I hear in comments like those? I hear:

“You’re supposed to be a good girl” (and good girls would never).
“I’m shocked” (this is especially dangerous for me if I believed that the person liked me before reading).
“Wouldn’t you be ashamed of that if your girls read it?” (actually, no, because I want them to have a reference for what I imagine positive, healthy, uplifting touch should be. But what I -hear- in this question is, ‘you’re not setting a good example and therefore you’re not a good mom.‘)

So…does it have to be so graphic? Couldn’t you say, “And they kissed and it was fantastic?“

I spend nearly 4K words on this night. I don’t just say “they kissed.” And it’s because it was going to be their one and only night. Maikel had exactly one chance to make her second guess every lie she’d learned to trust as truth over the last twelve years. Every kiss, every touch mattered. No, one night isn’t enough to undo twelve years of rape. But it can be enough to plant a seed that asks, “What if…?” There’s a couple of moments in the 4K words that her abuser’s voice breaks the fog; she actively chooses to fight it:

“[her abuser’s] voice whispers through the heavy haze in my mind. I protest, my nails digging into Maikel’s lower back, my head knocking against his arm. His voice, talk to me, I think frantically, but can’t think to ask.“

So, “nails digging into Maikel’s lower back, my head knocking against his arm” isn’t gratuitous; it is her body actively fighting to stay in a place where touch does something different than what she’s used to. It reads as sex. But, for the rape survivor, it shows how every touch has to be redefined. Healing means being vulnerable. Writing this post makes me all kinds of nervous and vulnerable. As I’m writing sentences, I’m debating whether or not to disable comments and, every time I think I might, I hear my dad screaming “coward.” It is a constant mental battle. Every time Maikel’s kiss makes her forget that she’s poisoned, she has to stay in that passion-induced fog because if she comes up from it she’s going to have to defend “digging her nails into his skin” or “running them over his backside and up around his neck.”

And here’s where it gets really messy.

“…my fingers move, stretching through her hair, curling against her scalp, pulling her head close. She tries to meet me halfway, pushing her elbow against the ground to rise up, pressing her torso into me, kissing me back. I angle my head, increasing the pressure […] pressing hard against her until she lies back down in the grass.”

He does this twice. She pushes herself up; he pushes her down. To be very clear, Maikel is my favorite male character: he is a very good guy. He saved her life. To him, it’s pure passion. And he’s bringing a little bit of his bias and his small control issues into the grass. But he’s not doing it to hurt her. He reads passion.

Soon thereafter, she starts to panic but instead of stopping him, she asks him to hold her hand. Which is probably me in a nutshell. If you can give me some anchor, something that I can at least pretend means, that you’re seeing me — that what you’re feeling isn’t just biology but also emotional — then I can stay with you longer. Even if you do something unintentionally that makes violent memories scream. Look back at the first quote: she is trying to stay in the moment but she needs something from him in order to do so: “…talk to me, I think frantically, but can’t think to ask.” I had to get her to the point where she “couldn’t think to ask” in order to also show that trusting him with her whole self also costs her.

If the 4K words were reduced to 500, I would have missed how hard she fought to get closer to Maikel and, without showing that, I would have missed showing what she was gaining in that grass. Because it was a lot more than Maikel’s body.

Every time I do intimacy scene, I feel exposed and not in a good way. Exposed as in scared. Exposed as in fearing that the scene is proof that I am a “wh***e”. Illogical? Absolutely. But the lies that abuse tricks you into thinking are rarely logical: they are manipulative tools used to make me feel so dirty and so ashamed that I do not think I am deserving of being “wanted”, seen, or capable of pleasure. I cried after Chapter 22. I almost edited the 4K down to 1-ish or so. Because wouldn’t that be “more respectable”? Shouldn’t a “real writer” be able to say “more with less”?

I kept it in the book because it is true.

The power of being loved matters.

You want to know another one of those deep fears, one I’ve never verbalized?

There’s a very, very deep fear that says that if I feel physical pleasure of any kind–not sexual, even; a long bath or cold air blowing in my face-–then I am invalidating or somehow saying that the pain of rape “doesn’t matter as much anymore.” Because how can I enjoy touch if touch is the thing that nearly broke me?

I don’t normally write “empowered” women. It’s not that I’m opposed–obviously, I love hearing stories of women who experienced trauma and then stood out for not doing the expected thing. But statistically they stand out because they are the exception. What brings me the greatest hope is not the idea of “healing” all the way because, truth be told, I don’t want the little girl to go away because, if she did, would that mean I forgot the pain that we went through? No. What brings me the greatest hope is that I do believe that love like Maikel and Soryelle’s is real. Despite the divorce rates, despite the statistics on cheating, despite all of the cultural craziness that surrounds relationships — I do believe that two people can truly love one another to choose to stay. It’s not about sex. It’s about commitment because commitment means that you have seen me truly bared — in all senses of the word, emotionally and physically — you have read this post and know the deepest fears that have kept me from going on a single date in over a decade, much less anything else — and you are not horrified away.

So… yes, there’s one chapter with an extended intimate night. I still want to justify it by saying, “But they only get one night” because “girls like me” don’t deserve things like that. Except… that’s exactly the sort of lie I’m trying to counter with Maikel and Soryelle. I want a survivor to read it and think, “That almost feels like what I felt when [this non-abusive person I love] touched me.” But Maikel doesn’t see her differently the following morning. He simply loves her–same as he did before. He still shows up. He doesn’t recoil from her after having witnessed the marks on her body made by abuse. He doesn’t walk away or manipulate or get angry because she needs to go slow. He is just Maikel.

Love isn’t sex. And touch doesn’t have to be sexual to be radically positive. I am a hugger – I love hugs because they tell me someone isn’t afraid of me being in physically close proximity. A hug can say, “I missed you.” It can say, “Happy to see you.” It can say, “You’re my friend.” And if one of those things makes my eye twitch because kindness just thrust a spear into a “no one cares about you” lie, then I have a memory that I can pull out and replay when the voice inside gets loud again.

I think the next time someone questions me about including this, I’ll talk about intimacy.

Did you know that the word “intimacy” originally had nothing to do with romance? In fact, in its original form it means “the innermost,” “the deepest within,” or “most inward.” See, it comes from the Latin word intimus which means the deepest within. From there, you get to intimare which means to make known. Only after the 17th century does intimacy as a word show up and even then it means close familiarity or close personal knowledge.

Today, I can say, “I had an intimate conversation” and what I’m really saying is that I shared something in that conversation that mattered, that showed another person something about my interiority that I wouldn’t necessarily share with anyone else. Similarly, physical intimacy is creating a “deep familiarity” with someone – it’s choosing to reveal something about yourself that you don’t share with others normally. Kind of like how Soryelle needs Maikel to hold her hand and talk to her in order to keep her enveloped in the present. It’s showing both how much she’s fighting to gain ground and also how much ground she has already gained–because if she hadn’t gained any, I guarantee you she wouldn’t have also said, “Closer.”

Most of my female characters do not look like Katniss from the Hunger Games. Their strength… and their triumphs… are often much more subtle.

But subtle does not mean absent.

Also, in case you’re curious about the entire chapter, the book is still free until 11:59PM tonight on Kindle…