Unraveling is not the end- On making repairs as transformation

How is your body this week? How are you taking care? Mine is hurting in different ways. Mostly I have been trying not to feel too much. Mostly I have been forcing myself to use my hands. To reclaim my attention. To mend socks.

I watched “The Souvenir” (2019) this week, starring Tilda Swinton and her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne, and found myself haunted by the portrayal of innocence/shelteredness deformed into denial, then recognition.

The main character Julia, a young film student who doesn’t know herself yet, is in love with a heroin addict and it is unclear how much she understands. He steals from her and then gets angry at her for being upset. He gives her an STI and refuses to acknowledge his role in her physical suffering. She kisses is bloody knuckles after he smashes her mirror.

I can’t stop thinking about this movie, because I was Julia in another life. I kissed bloody knuckles. I knelt before someone who was deranged and violent with their own fossilized grief, and in my kneeling felt a loss of self that I mistook for holy.

After one incident they travel to Venice and Julia has a special suit tailored—which we know is important because a whole scene is dedicated to the drafting and measuring of this garment. Then we see her wearing it in a grimly baroque hotel room, looking both elegant and miserable, unrecognizable to herself. The next scene, we see the hem of her long pigeon colored skirts scraping the filthy stairs of an opera house. We hear the fabric rasping against concrete like the scabbed mouth of a ghost - fantasy unraveling as it meets reality.

I never left the man who I knelt in front of. His bloodied knuckles scribbled threats on our walls until I made myself so small I couldn’t be touched.

How does anyone leave? In mythology, sometimes women turn their abusers into animals, but mostly they transform themselves. A tree, a seal pelt, a knife to one’s opera of hair.

What I’m feeling this week, is that I don’t know how to experience this moment without feeling like a victim. How to get my bearings. How to reassemble. How to put on my seal pelt. Cut off my hair and turn it into an emergency exit.

What I’m feeling this week, is the reminder that I have everything I need to transform myself into someone who is not a victim but a person who is learning how to meet this moment.

It is ok to not know. To be vaporous for a while. To be becoming.

So what am I doing?

I am mending socks. I am listening to survivor stories. Going to parent groups where we talk about repair and resilience.

Mending socks is a way of remembering that we have the tools we need. That new forms are waiting to be born.

That the unraveling of a garment isn’t the tragic ending, symbolic or not. It is the beginning. We stitch ourselves into something new. It looks like grief. It looks like survival. It looks like stepping into a future more beautiful because of the love it took to mend it, to make it new.

But it also looks like honesty. To repair we have to name what was broken. We have to look at the broken mirror. Then pick up our thread, today it is a color I call Sertraline Blue, and then we begin.