Chapter Six: Survivor
SURVIVOR was the first thing I ever published with regards to my views and experience with rape culture. And when I hit publish on Tuesday, November 24th, 2020, it felt much more reckless than it did empowering.
I had always dreamed of speaking openly about my views on healing, speaking openly about what it is that I had gone through, but was always so afraid to do it. So it was a complete surprise when SURVIVOR was met with so much love, kindness, and praise.
And I keep thinking about how that risk ended up being a pretty bad-ass mic drop. That being said, I can’t be so naïve to assume that the initial success of SURVIVOR may have been just beginners luck. But beginners luck or not, compared to Chapters Seven and Eight, SURVIVOR now seems so vanilla.
And don’t get me wrong, I love vanilla. It’s one of my favourite flavours for ice cream, and before you go ahead and label me as boring, after you’ve lived through the kind of seven+ year hell rodeo I had, simple, consistent and predicable flavours becomes incredibly comforting (and really delicious).
I wasn’t sure if I was going to record SURVIVOR or just leave it alone as a time capsule piece, but as I got deeper and deeper into what it is that I have been waiting almost a decade to say, I felt that this once reckless, now vanilla post was the perfect, final segue into the final chapters within this first season of peaches, because it’s important for me to talk about my views on healing and what that actually looks like before I attempt another mic drop.
…I don’t know that what’s coming is going to be another mic drop, to be totally honest, because I think if I was “dropping the mic” I would have just started with Chapters Seven and Eight. But, I actually don’t mind just placing the mic down on stage because I don’t want to shock you.
I want to help you.
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This is peaches; a series of essays dedicated to the things I learned while dedicating my life to never being raped again. My name is Maarika Freund, and this is:
Chapter Six: Survivor
Trigger warning: rape, sexual abuse, suicide
photo taken on Polariod film: March 2021
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Even with everything I’ve been through, I just don’t identify as “a Survivor”.
Let me immediately and necessarily digress: if you currently identify with this title, then please fully own it. Own it like it’s a coveted designer rhinestone blazer and it’s a Saturday night.
I’m not here to take away this title from you.
Plus, if you’re wearing it just right, I might sincerely ask you where you got it and how you’re able to wear it so well.
Here’s why:
There was a time that I needed to identify as a Survivor, too, in order to get to the place where I am today.
There is a certain kind of strength that you can derive from the title that’s empowering and uplifting. It’s a title that comes with a community of people who can support you and identify with what you’ve been through, dissipating the loneliness you once felt. Identifying as a Survivor is a way to keep moving forward in the face of adversity. A way to find the courage to get up in the morning while you’re working through the pain, hurt, and trauma. Identifying as a Survivor can be the life raft that keeps you from drowning. And that’s really beautiful.
So, I’m not here to convince you to stop identifying in a way that might feel really right for you.
But –
I am here to offer you another option.
One that I don’t think gets offered enough.
…Or even - at all.
It’s the option of picking up the pieces and living a life that’s better, brighter, and more magical than before the happening. A life that’s even better than before you became a Survivor.
And believe you me, it’s totally possible. Because from where I’m sitting right now, my life is way better than before the first time I was raped.
As an immediate disclaimer, it’s not going to feel great initially if you do decide to commit to your healing. It’s going to get messy. You will feel like a hot mess. If you are anything like me, you will be a hot mess.
Some immediate advice: get a registered psychotherapist. Seriously. Your friends will only be able to handle so much and you need to get all of it out of your system. The option of bottling it up is just as detrimental as it is to behave like an untamed garden hose. How do I know? I’ve done both! And I’ve driven a lot of people away doing it. If you don’t have the means to pay for therapy there are tons of programs out there to support you. I have been a part of them, so I can tell you firsthand that they exist and that I wish I had done it sooner.
It’s also my opinion that in order to truly heal, you have to fully commit to healing.
Let me put it this way: caterpillars don’t become Butterflies because they “sort of wanted to”. They build a chrysalis, became a pile of goo inside it, and recreate themselves into something new. That’s work. So is healing. A caterpillar has to go through all of that work to become a magical creature with wings. And that’s just it: the only way out is through.
On the other side of goo, as a ray of sunshine to balance out the hot mess disclaimer, I still have friends! Not everyone will peace out when you decide to commit to yourself. You might want to peace out though, but that’s something we’ll save for Chapter Seven. The friends in my life who stayed while I was in deep goo are rock solid superstars, and the new friends I have I made as a Butterfly, so I really love being around them.
But now that I am on the other side of goo, I can’t say that I enjoy it when people refer to me as “a Survivor”.
…so, why is it that I won’t identify with being a Survivor? I’ve been the caterpillar. I’ve been the goo. (I’ve been the goo a lot, actually.) Why would I throw away a title that is supposed to represent the liberation and freedom of being a Butterfly?
For three very specific reasons:
1. It is my experience, that by identifying as a Survivor, I am also identifying as a victim, which means I am handing my power over to dudes who hurt me.
2. With everything I did to reclaim my personal power, by continuing to identify as a Survivor I am allowing what happened to me to hold power over the decisions I make in my day-to-day life, keeping me from living out my greatest hopes and dreams.
3. Identifying as a Survivor keeps me held a prisoner in my past, and when I am a prisoner, I’m living in survival mode.
Let me unpack all of this for you, starting with my first point –
That it’s my opinion, that by identifying as a Survivor, I am also identifying as a victim, which means I am handing my power over to people who hurt me.
Let’s just all agree with me for a hot moment about how being a Survivor generally means that you had to go through something really traumatic. If we look at it in terms of sexual abuse, if I identify as a Survivor, then I’m agreeing that I was a victim of someone’s abuse.
The latter part of that sentence is absolutely true.
However, every time I identify as a Survivor, I’m actively bringing the aggressor into my story and agreeing to keep being a victim. And that loser –
and I’m of course referring to dude as “loser” with love and forgiveness in my heart –
that loser doesn’t get to be a part of my story on going. I don’t want to constantly agree to living the rest of my life as a victim. I’m too awesome for that.
Whether or not I have moved on from the event (I have) and whether or not I carry any resentment for dude (I don’t), doesn’t mean that one day we’ll be holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” around a campfire.
He doesn’t get to bask in ANY of my Butterfly magic, even if it’s just by association. And after everything I talked about in Chapter Three, I know he probably would love to assume that he was the great hand that helped me transform into the Butterfly I am today. But he didn’t help to shape who I am today – I moulded myself into this brilliant being by myself, and with help of people who weren’t him, many of whom were coaches and therapists I had to pay for using money I worked really hard to earn. So that loser gets no credit for how hard I had to work to become who I am today.
In the original post, I say “the incredible person I am today”. With more growth and life experience behind me, I don’t know that I’m really that incredible, and I don’t mean that as a put-down. I just mean that I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with being ordinary. And I think that there is something really extraordinary about being a consistent and dependable person. So maybe for saying that I am incredible, I don’t really know, but I do know that I like myself. And after those dudes did what they did, I spent a long time hating myself. And if he needs credit for something, dude can have credit for that. For breaking my spirit to the point where I had to walk myself to my doctors office and ask for help because I was having some really negative thoughts about whether or not my life I was one worth continuing.
Although, he’s only partially responsible for that dark period I lived through. The other piece of that puzzle is what I’m going to talk about in Chapter Seven, and it’s also something that we, as a society, never really talk about. And I think it’s time.
Who I am today, the person who feels like her life is worth living, was entirely crafted by me. I created a life that I felt was worth living through making really brave and challenging choices. It wasn’t a fluke or some woo-woo “everything is in alignment” life path experience. I had to work really hard, even when I didn’t want to. And I had to work against a lot of strong, opposing forces. It was not effortless. Choosing happiness took a lot of effort.
So dude doesn’t get to be in my story anymore. My story is my life. And just because he managed to overpower me and have sex with me against all of my wishes doesn’t mean that he’s become a part of me forever.
So for me, every time I refer to myself as a Survivor, I call not just him back, but all of the other dudes back into my story in real time, and as I’ve mentioned before, there were many, unfortunately. Calling them back gives them power they don’t deserve to have.
Can I change the past? No. Am I working on it? …I would love to. That’s, however, not how time works (if you’ve found the DeLorean please let me know), but those loser dudes don’t get to be written into the current and future chapters of the illustrious, hard-cover, single-edition print of Maarika’s Odyssey. Their chapter is eloquently named Hades, where I leave them doing a repetitive task that gets harder to accomplish over long periods of time: peeling potatoes infinitely with a small dull knife.
Hey – let’s look at it this way: French fries are AMAZING. If I was really carrying anger and resentment, would I allow someone to do a job that I actually respect? No! But in my story, they did lose their 15-minute break privileges because idle hands are the devil’s workshop. And I don’t know, maybe it’s mean, but it’s just a fantasy. In my defense, I also imagine it all happening in a parallel Universe where they don’t have to use the bathroom. So it’s not really that mean… it’s just make-believe.
What is kind of hilarious about this analogy that I created three years ago, however, is that I found out that I am allergic to potatoes. I can’t eat nightshades. So in some parallel universe where they don’t go to the bathroom, they really must be peeling the potatoes. Because every time I eat French Fries, my skin breaks out with psoriasis. And I know that it’s actually the chemical compound in potatoes that causes me to have the breakout, but as I was tidying up SURVIVOR for 2023, it all just seemed a bit eerily poetic.
Anyway, whatever they do do, shitty or not, they just don’t get to be a part of the magical Butterfly adventures I’m creating now. So, in conclusion to my first reason to not being able to identify as a Survivor, you should never give power to anyone who did anything to try and take any of your brilliant life light away. And, speaking from experience, you need all of that power to get that light back.
The second point I brought up is:
That with everything I did to reclaim my personal power, by continuing to identify as a Survivor I am allowing what happened to me hold power over the decisions I make in my day-to-day life, keeping me from living out my greatest hopes and dreams.
…and that actually includes this podcast.
The person I am now has big goals! Big dreams! A big vision for a more liberating future for all identifying women everywhere! I’m not interested in letting any of those go or losing my sense of self for that matter – because for a long time I did discard a part of myself in order to feel safe.
There is something incredible about the goo phase that will, with all sincerity, help you look forward to the healing work: when you allow yourself (and have the incredible privilege) to turn into a puddle of goo in a safe and contained chrysalis – you get to rediscover the brilliant parts of yourself that you forgot existed.
And it’s amazing.
I had locked away and hid the part of myself that was charming, vivacious, flirtatious, hilarious… whatever, you catch my drift – in order to feel safe. I hid her in the basement. And, I really like these parts of myself. But I was taught to fear them, and I was taught to see myself as bad because I was these things.
In fact, I was taught to see those character traits as validation for dude. As part of the reason why I got raped. And that’s fucked up.
After I did my shapeshifting, you bet I reclaimed that fun, lively, sometimes shit disturbing part of me and integrated it back into my “new form”. My new form that is not afraid to be an ordinary person.
This part of me is not only back, this part of me is what allows me to do the things that I’m doing now. This part of me gives me my competitive edge. This part of me that I hid away is my lifeforce. So it’s actually no surprise to me that I needed to walk into my doctor’s office and ask for help.
She allows me to do really incredible things, too (on top of all the ordinary stuff). Like be brave enough to move to Tel Aviv without ever having been to Israel before. She gives me the confidence to even talk about my political views like I’m doing in this podcast, and to be working as a choreographer and an actor again. By bringing this part of me back I get to do things differently, you know, like stand up for myself.
I refuse to live in a world that expects me to be a different person because I was raped, or to be a different person in order to not get raped. If you’ve been with me through Chapters One through Five, you’ll know that I’ve tried both those things, and they were terrible for my sense of self-worth and self-esteem. I should never have had to apologize for, and I will never again apologize for, being a charismatic woman who enjoys sex. It’s also not grounds for raping someone.
The attractiveness of my positive life force energy, for lack of a better term, should be my greatest gift to the world. Not something I hide because some sad loser decided to force himself on me one time. And I’m tired of allowing people to make me feel like a loser, or a slut, or a tease because I’m a charismatic person.
And you know what, this is one of those moments where I will say: I’m just too incredible for that bullshit.
Lastly, identifying as a Survivor keeps me held a prisoner in my past, and when I am a prisoner, I’m living in survival mode.
Do I still have my moments? Yeah, absolutely. I’m fucking human.
All I have ever wanted was to be a gentle, loving, peaceful, successful person …who you never, ever, ever mess with.
When you live in survival mode, every day that you wake up is not a bright new beginning. Instead, every day begins with a meticulous game-plan. During the hell rodeo, I didn’t roll out of bed until I thought of every worst-case scenario possible. So, if and when it happened, I could handle it to my own satisfaction. It was a powerless way of attempting to reclaim my power. I can tell you firsthand: that activity is not empowering. In fact, it’s really exhausting, and it’s the opposite of peaceful.
It’s also really challenging to recognize real love from this place.
If I wake up each morning affirming that I’m a Survivor, I’m taking myself right back into those hideous moments that I don’t want to give power to. I don’t want to remember those losers as soon as I wake up. Besides, they may have karmically ruined potatoes for me, and I’m not interested in giving them anything else! But most of all: I don’t want to spend the rest of my life waking up being afraid to get out of bed in the morning. That’s not okay for anyone. You can’t create from this place, let alone enjoy being alive.
The majority of what I hear from people who identify as Survivors is that their lives have changed forever. That the way they do anything and everything now is different.
This is true for me, too. For me to say that I don’t have relapses, that I don’t still have moments of fear when I experience growth or success, that I don’t get triggered by other people’s traumas – those would all be lies.
The big difference for me, though, is that I don’t mourn the life I had before rape anymore. And I refuse to let any of the fears I sometimes still experience define my place in the world. I don’t want to see the world from a lens where I’m constantly having to watch my back, question people’s motives, or concerned that someone is going to come in and destroy everything I’ve worked so hard to create for myself again.
I’m not interested in being “a Survivor”, living in a category that separates me from opportunity and thriving. I don’t want to be powerless in a world that has made it okay for me to become a victim.
I’ve had to cut out people from my life, even very recently, in order to create a peaceful living environment for myself. I even just finished spending years being rejected by acting agents and employers. And I spent a lot of time being completely and totally misunderstood.
I was some really hot goo for a good chunk of time.
But, even in the goo, I didn’t stop choosing to show up for myself. That’s a kind of strength I really have to give myself credit for. I do have to give myself credit for being incredible in that regard. But I wasn’t choosing to show up for myself because I saw myself as a Survivor. I chose to show up for myself because I wanted more out of life, which meant that there was still a part of me that really wanted to be alive – and so I did everything I could to survive.
So… I guess you could technically say that I’m a Survivor.
My discarding of this label is not to negate the insane amounts of life experience I have, or to disregard the necessity of having a community of people who have had similar experiences.
But what I am saying that it’s totally possible to become a Butterfly and not be able to relate to the goo anymore. There is a life beyond the goo. You can still love the goo! But you don’t have to continually bring the goo up over coffee.
When I decided that I liked myself, regardless of those terrible happenings, and regardless of anything I did that I felt was impressive or gave me an iota of social status, and that it was okay for me to end up being an ordinary person, that’s when the actual moment the “goo” phase truly ended. But it took me a while to notice it, because I was too busy living to remember that I was once a very, very, very hot mess. Who knows, I might find myself as a hot mess again someday soon. I think that’s just par for the course as a human being.
If you know someone in the goo phase and you don’t know what to do, empower them. Lift them up. Tell them what they’re good at and why they’re incredible. Chances are they’re in this rut because they forgot about what made them excited to breathe.
Traumatic events really deflate a person’s Soul. And my Soul doesn’t want to be labelled as anything. My Soul just needs the freedom of its full expression. And sometimes, my Soul’s full expression is just being ordinary and wanting a cup of vanilla ice-cream.
If you still want to use the word Survivor, then I want you to use it and I want you to be proud of it. Own it and wear that rhinestone blazer every single freaking day of your life! But, I also need you to respect that I’m not in that place anymore. It’s just not a part of who I am.
I’m Maarika Freund. And I’m finally just a person who is really, really excited to be alive.
